Are City Page Strategies Helping or Hurting Your SEO Rank?
City pages have been used to develop local search engine results for companies across all business models. However, as these pages help drive traffic to businesses with physical locations, do city pages really help SEO rank for home service companies?
Over time, search engines like Google have developed tighter restrictions on SEO. In the past, meta tag and keyword stuffing provided web crawlers with SEO results. City page development has been considered part of same tactics. With Google Panda (and Penguin) development, sites that used these tactics without developing unique content, are now receiving lower rank and search results.
We’ll take a look at city pages and how strong SEO strategies can alleviate the pressure of creating individual pages per city and still produce quality local SEO rankings.
Google Panda
Google Panda, once known as “Farmer”, is the algorithm update that Google uses to assess the quality of websites. Panda was developed to help those that create unique and high-quality content. Panda then assigns rank, based on overall site quality, when search queries are conducted.
Content Matters
Panda searches for “content farms” – sites that may produce redundant content or multiple pages that may have duplicated content. The biggest mistake developers make, is copying all the developed content onto multiple city pages and only swapping out city name information.
Panda sees this as lack of authority, trustworthiness and as spam.
Unduplicated information will always be favored in SEO rankings. If a competing business takes the time to call out unique keyword phrases, regional terminology, or provide local knowledge, they will rank above your specific city page.
Less is More
When creating city pages, select ideal areas, or higher populated areas. Build your content up on these pages. Smaller areas won’t need an individual page in order to rank if you create a single page with a list of counties or cities. Search queries are intuitive enough to find your keyword SEO from your single page list and apply these to your services on your pillar pages.
Use SEO tags of locations on images. Creating these content pieces will help boost your search results without keyword stuffing on a city page.
SEO in marketing is continually evolving and RCG Contractor Marketing works continuously on improving SEO and content development for home services companies. We can help your team review your website development, search engine rank, and build strategies so that your business stands out when it comes to content. Read more about our team and services here.
