For service area businesses, the areas/counties/cities you serve can be critical pieces to your local organic and paid search traffic puzzle.
If you are not seeing queries in your Google Search Console for your cities served or queries including “near me,” you are likely missing out on local traffic that your competitors are happily converting.
How you structure your site and the pages you create for local keyword optimization plays a major role in the overall outcome of your local search optimization efforts.
In general, it is first recommended you have one main website for all cities. If you have separate websites for each city, you will want to combine them first.
It’s also recommended to have one page per area (county or city) you serve, and one page for each service.
Example Service Based Business
You serve 3 cities, and have 4 services. You should have a total of 7 pages built. The URLs for these pages should look something like:
Cities
- /city-one
- /city-two
- /city-three
Services
- /service-one
- /service-two
- /service-three
- /service-four
You could also have a main “locations served” and an “all services” page. Although these would be optional, because usually you can fit this info into your “about us” page, a contact page, or even your homepage.
What should be included on these pages?
These pages should have unique and useful content on each. Useful is the most important thing to focus on.
You must give users the best possible experience you can on these pages. They cannot be just duplicated pages with a few words changed here and there. Spend time on them. Lots of time if you have to. The more effort you put into making these pages useful, the better the outcome will be in the long-term.
Example structure for a city/county/area page
- Overview of service(s) offered in the area
- Testimonials of customers from the area
- Photo gallery of work from the area
- Estimate or contact form
- Other info including map, video, case study, any high-profile clients from the area etc.
Example structure for a service page
- Overview of service
- Photo gallery of services rendered
- More in-depth service explanation with FAQ links
- Testimonials of customers of that particular service
- Estimate or contact form
These are by no means the only way you can structure your pages. The examples represent one example, and your mileage may vary depending on the size of the area served, and the service offered etc. Of course in the end, this is marketing. You should use your knowledge and best judgement to appeal to your customers wants and needs.
Where should I link to these pages?
Now that you have unique and valuable pages for your potential clients to visit, you can move on to internal linking to these pages. The more prominently you link to your newly created area pages, the more search engines will perceive the pages as important. In effect, you will providing “link juice”, or spreading your domain authority to these pages.
The more link juice you send to these pages, there is a greater chance your pages will appear in search results.
If you have room in your main “above the fold” navigation, place a link to the main /locations page you created. If you are only serving one city, or have room for 2-3 very important locations, add links to those cities served in your navigation.
Similarly, you should also consider linking directly to each service page somewhere above the fold.
It’s also recommended to link to these pages from within the body of other content, where it naturally makes sense. Internal linking is an often overlooked, yet very low hanging fruit for higher rankings. Find closely related blog posts, articles, FAQs, photo galleries, etc and link from the body content from those pages to your newly created city and service pages. Just add one or two per article as you don’t want to over do it.
How have you set up your city and service pages? Let us know in the comments below.
