Improve SEO With Local City Pages
The ultimate goal of every small business owner is that their website appears on top of search engine results for the terms and keywords that are related to the products or services they provide.
But what if you are a small business owner that services a specific geographic area? How do you optimize your website for ranking on particular towns or cities? – SEO City or town pages are the solution.
What Are SEO City Pages?
City pages are webpages on your website targeting specific cities, towns, zip codes, or other geographical areas. They are optimized with relevant content to that particular city or town to increase organic website visitors and generate more leads, customers, and revenue from local markets.
When customers are looking for a local company, they usually do a local search as follows: Service they need + the town or city. The following image illustrates how SEO city pages are displayed organically, for free on search results.
Are City Pages Good for SEO?
SEO city pages are an incredibly effective SEO technique that can assist with reaching potential customers in your local marketplace organically. City pages are not only good for SEO, but they are also an excellent way to tailor content and offerings to specific target markets.
With local SEO like city pages, you’ll be able to reach people that live near your business or service area.
Related: How to Display Review Stars on Search Results
Are SEO City Pages Penalized?
No, but the city or town pages have to unique and provide useful information to the end-user. The Panda algorithm update recently released by Google includes a penalty system for websites that contain poor or duplicate content.
How to Avoid Penalties on your city pages?
Create unique content for each town or city webpage. Do not copy ‘n’ paste duplicates with the name of the city changed in the copy – it will most likely earn you a penalty.
Duplicate content provides a bad user experience and is a spammy way of handling web content. When this happens, webpages incur high bounce rates, web traffic losses, and the possibility of being flagged as a spam site.
Benefits of city pages for SEO
First off, the main bonus to a well-written set of SEO city pages is that your website ranking will get a boost. Add to that the fact that you will be attracting more local web traffic, and delivering the right message to the right audience. SEO town pages will also save you money in that you won’t have the cost of maintaining multiple domains.
How to Create City Pages to Improve SEO
Your SEO city pages have to be unique and provide useful information relevant to the city, town, county, or geographical area. For example, Home and Garden Lawn Care in Joliet, Illinois, provides only certain services for customers in Naperville, Illinois.
We created a local “Lawn Care Services in Naperville, IL” page with specific services, offers, and dates available. Tailored web content provides excellent user experience, and helps your business deliver the right message to the right audience.
Related: Small Business SEO Fundamentals
Your SEO city pages have to feel unique, and kind of look as if they are written with some actual knowledge of the city or town. It also has to offer something unique to both human and search engine crawlers.
Think things like photos from the town, city logo, special place, or unique aspect of that community get spelled out somewhere in the content.
The idea is to create a new page about a different town that looks, sounds and feels different from the other ones already on your website. But this will take some extra effort on your part, but it will be worth it.
SEO City Pages Guide
Here’s a short list of tips, okay, these are more like cheats that you can use to give your city pages the flavor they need to cut through all the other internet traffic and bring you success.
1. Dedicate one web page for each city
For example, if you service a region that encompasses a half dozen different communities, build your SEO town pages for just those locations. Filling your website with a few hundred city pages – with many, for places you never have been to, nor could service with your product if you could – is a terrible idea.
2. Optimize pages for both, search engines and users
Search engines are fond of URLs. But they much prefer shorter ones so each time you add a new city page to your website, optimize it for both, search engines and site users.
Related: How To Optimize Images For SEO
Use precise title tags, meta descriptions, headers, content, and photos. Keep your keywords relevant to that specific page.
Check our small business website optimization article for detailed instructions to fully optimize your city pages and gain more traffic, more exposure, and more local traffic organically.
3. Link your city web pages internally and externally
Inter link your city pages
Internal linking will help you a bundle here, but you have to have something logical to link a new city page to, try using new blog posts that relate to the new city or cities and link to those. The search engines will be okay with that and visitors will enjoy the navigational extras – is all about user experience.
External linking
Search engines have clearly stated that referrals from other websites play an important role when it comes to search engine rankings. There are some smart ways to get backlinks and help your city pages gain authority.
The easiest way is to ask local business websites to link to your local city pages as referral or collaboration if they add value to the end-user or are somehow within the same industry or niche.
Another way is to add your city pages to local web directories, business listings like the YellowPages or publish informative content (blog posts) on local news websites like The Patch or similar websites and link back to your city pages.
Be creative and professional when asking for referrals and backlinks to your site.
4. Add links of your city pages to your navigation menus
Be sure to include your city pages in the main navigation or footer section of your website. For example, add a navigation menu list on your footer labeled as “Our Service Area” or “Areas We Serve” and add your list of city pages links.
Make sure to link all your city pages to some other relevant pages and avoid having orphan pages. Orphan pages are web pages with no links pointing to them.
5. Feature testimonials or reviews from local clients
If you use testimonials from people who live in each of the communities you have an SEO city page for, this will help your SEO and attract customers from that local area. Remember that this counts towards your requirement of unique content on your city pages to please the search engine crawlers.
Before and after pictures are also a great way to improve SERP’s and conversions. Make sure to include photographs of projects in your city pages.
6. Add Schema.org structured data for each individual city page
Structured data is a great way to help search engine crawlers understand the content within your webpage. Schema.org offers a wide range of structured data items and properties that can help your SEO game and get you on top of search results for towns or cities you service, eg. LocalBusiness schema, events, Restaurant, Place.
In the following code example, we added structured data to one of our city pages in Joliet, Illinois, where we are targeting users looking for SEO services.
The address property for the LocalBusiness schema allows our Joliet city webpage to be featured on top of search engine results when people located in the city of Joliet are searching for terms like “SEO services near me.”
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type" : "LocalBusiness",
"@id" : "https://inovawebdesign.com/#website",
"name" : "Inova Web Design",
"logo" : "https://inovawebdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/inova-avatar.jpg",
"telephone" : "(312) 771-9111",
"email" : "info@inovawebdesign.com",
"url" : "https://inovawebdesign.com",
"image" : "https://inovawebdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/inova-web-design.jpg",
"priceRange" : "$$ - $$$$",
"description" : "We are a digital agency that provides professional web design, web development, SEO, and marketing services. We help businesses and organizations of all sizes to improve their online digital experience.",
"address" : {
"@type" : "PostalAddress",
"addressLocality" : "Joliet",
"addressRegion" : "IL",
"postalCode" : "60435"
},
"areaServed": {
"@type": "City",
"name": "Joliet"
},
"hasOfferCatalog": {
"@type": "OfferCatalog",
"name": "SEO",
"itemListElement": [
{
"@type": "OfferCatalog",
"name": "Technical SEO",
"itemListElement": [
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "Marketing"
}
},
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "On Page SEO"
}
},
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "Google Adwords"
}
},
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "Social Media Ads"
}
},
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "PPC"
}
},
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "Search Engine Optimization"
}
}
]
},
{
"@type": "OfferCatalog",
"name": "Web Design",
"itemListElement": [
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "Wordpress Web Design"
}
},
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "Web Development"
}
},
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "Web Design"
}
}
]
}
]
}
}
</script>
The more information you provide, the better. We have written a helpful article on how to add structured data to any website to help your business rank high on search results.
You Can’t Go Wrong With A Bigger Net
Remember, adding unique city pages to your website can improve website rankings, visitors, and if done correctly, improve conversions.