Same page for different locations

[westportclan]

How would you go about optimising pages that held the same content, but for different locations. For example, if you operate 5 computer repair shops in different suburbs of the city, but want a page optimised for each location. Ideally, from a human point of view, the content would be exactly the same on each of the 5 pages as the services are exactly the same at each location, but from Google's point of view, this would be duplicate content and frowned upon. What is the solution here? If i merge all five pages into one, it will simply rank poorly for all five?

[TryBPO]

I might go with one main domain and then subpages for each location. Each such page should have 100% unique content. Perhaps the staff could write something up on why their location is unique with some pictures. You could then optimize that page for keyword density, bolding, and H tags.

This has worked for us in the past, but is by no means fool proof -- sometimes what you do for one location works and for the others not so much. However, using separate pages allows you to focus more effort (i.e. link building) on the under performing pages, whereas combining them makes it difficult to properly optimize for each individual location.

Originally Posted by westportclan

How would you go about optimising pages that held the same content, but for different locations. For example, if you operate 5 computer repair shops in different suburbs of the city, but want a page optimised for each location. Ideally, from a human point of view, the content would be exactly the same on each of the 5 pages as the services are exactly the same at each location, but from Google's point of view, this would be duplicate content and frowned upon. What is the solution here? If i merge all five pages into one, it will simply rank poorly for all five?

[C Rebecca]

This is very common practice when you are optimizing websites for local niches.

Though it is not advised to promote websites with duplicate content...

What you can do is, create a main website and link back all your websites for different locations. This will boost your main website for different location specific keywords.