Question on Localizing Search Results

12 replies
I own and operate a local service biz and I am having great luck getting first page Google generic listings. For one of my main keywords I have dominated 1st page with 6 of the 10 results.

A lot of my results are related to my blog with all the articles I have in there but I am only showing up for my main city.

I need to make sure that I show up when someone searches my keyword with any of the 25 ish cities I service
.
I have seen that others will use a list of their cities serviced at the bottom of the page. If I was to do this at the bottom of each of the several informational post I have made it would look too junkie.

How do I do this with out looking spammy?
What can I do to achieve this?
#localizing #question #results #search
  • Profile picture of the author absolutelee
    You might want to consider cloning your web page and then optimizing it for the new city. According to how competitive the new city is for your business, a little backlinking should do the trick.
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    • Profile picture of the author deckman
      It would be a lot of cloning to capture all the pages.
      Is there a way to maybe put something like "we serve the following cities: ....." as a footer at the bottom that would get indexed with the page?
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      • Profile picture of the author Silent Warrior
        I totally agree with the idea of cloning for local domination. You can build your clones on subdomains.

        If you use WordPress multisite you can create a template and batch create sites for your chosen cities.
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        • Profile picture of the author deckman
          Yes this is a WP platform. If I was to build subdomains and just chang out the city name wouldnt this be dup content in the big "G's" eyes?

          Originally Posted by Silent Warrior View Post

          I totally agree with the idea of cloning for local domination. You can build your clones on subdomains.

          If you use WordPress multisite you can create a template and batch create sites for your chosen cities.
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      • Profile picture of the author Alston
        Originally Posted by deckman View Post

        It would be a lot of cloning to capture all the pages.
        Is there a way to maybe put something like "we serve the following cities: ....." as a footer at the bottom that would get indexed with the page?
        That's what I would do and have done. If it is below the fold it won't turn your visitors off and Google will read it.

        I think it will help, not hurt, your SEO efforts. A lot of sites have common menus and a small amount of wording such as a slogan or guarantee on every page. If not overdone, I doubt that there would be a duplicate content penalty if the rest of the page has unique content.
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        • Profile picture of the author deckman
          Originally Posted by tpw View Post

          It is tough. Google doesn't want us to have a local listing for any city where we do not have a physical location.

          Cloning the website as sub-domains is helpful, but not a guarantee of desired results.

          If you can clone the site on sub-domains, and have a local address and phone number of each sub-domain, then you stand a much better chance of success.

          As a service provider, I imagine you only have one location, and it would not make sense financially to put a physical location in every town.

          But with a rented mailbox and a forwarding telephone number to place on your sub-domains, your chances of success are greatly increased.
          Originally Posted by Alston View Post

          That's what I would do and have done. If it is below the fold it won't turn your visitors off and Google will read it.

          I think it will help, not hurt, your SEO efforts. A lot of sites have common menus and a small amount of wording such as a slogan or guarantee on every page. If not overdone, I doubt that there would be a duplicate content penalty if the rest of the page has unique content.
          This is my thinking as I have seen other service companies accomplish it this way but I am just not real sure how to.
          Below the fold would be the way but want to keep it at the very bottom of the page with it turning up on every page and with google still tying it together.
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  • Profile picture of the author tpw
    It is tough. Google doesn't want us to have a local listing for any city where we do not have a physical location.

    Cloning the website as sub-domains is helpful, but not a guarantee of desired results.

    If you can clone the site on sub-domains, and have a local address and phone number of each sub-domain, then you stand a much better chance of success.

    As a service provider, I imagine you only have one location, and it would not make sense financially to put a physical location in every town.

    But with a rented mailbox and a forwarding telephone number to place on your sub-domains, your chances of success are greatly increased.
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    Bill Platt, Oklahoma USA, PlattPublishing.com
    Publish Coloring Books for Profit (WSOTD 7-30-2015)
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    • Profile picture of the author deckman
      Originally Posted by tpw View Post

      It is tough. Google doesn't want us to have a local listing for any city where we do not have a physical location.

      Cloning the website as sub-domains is helpful, but not a guarantee of desired results.

      If you can clone the site on sub-domains, and have a local address and phone number of each sub-domain, then you stand a much better chance of success.

      As a service provider, I imagine you only have one location, and it would not make sense financially to put a physical location in every town.

      But with a rented mailbox and a forwarding telephone number to place on your sub-domains, your chances of success are greatly increased.
      Thanks for trying to help here. Even though it would be nice to have a GP for every city I am not trying for that. I am shooting for generic listings. If they were to type in...dallas then I got it covered but if they were trying to search for ....plano (which I do service) they would probably get some different results.
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      • Profile picture of the author tpw
        Originally Posted by deckman View Post

        Thanks for trying to help here. Even though it would be nice to have a GP for every city I am not trying for that. I am shooting for generic listings. If they were to type in...dallas then I got it covered but if they were trying to search for ....plano (which I do service) they would probably get some different results.

        In that case, your regular SEO guides will apply.

        If I were in your shoes, I would list each city name at the bottom of your page, AND I would build links to your website with a variety of local data in your links.

        Mix those links up, and direct them to your main site. I have had good success doing targeting 2 major metropolitan cities and my home town equally to advertise my services in these three localities.
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        Bill Platt, Oklahoma USA, PlattPublishing.com
        Publish Coloring Books for Profit (WSOTD 7-30-2015)
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        • Profile picture of the author brandon2664
          You could backlink your main page like "carpet cleaning miami" "carpet cleaning south beach" etc.. or you could just clone page 30 times and change the city names, but the pages will be duplicate content and their rankings will suffer. I am in the same boat as you and I think your best bet is sitting down and writing unique content for each city. It will take a long time, but it is really the only way to do it. I have just started doing it myself. I have tried all the shortcuts myself and they are really not paying off.
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  • Profile picture of the author jgant
    Bill, I like your thinking. I'll have to consider the subdomain approach.

    I do 3 things on my local business websites (I'm an affiliate for local businesses) that target numerous towns:

    1. In the footer state "X business serving Town A, Town B, Town C ..."

    2. Create a separate page for each location targeting location and main keywords. The content I place is writing in-depth descriptions of getting to the locations. If you don't have physical locations in all the towns, you could write case studies how you help businesses in those locations.

    3. Place a listing of the towns in the sidebar linking to each town's dedicated web page.

    That's about it. I do pretty well ranking for several towns. I could do more and it's an ongoing effort. For every town, there's all the other keywords to combine with it.

    On the plus side, ranking for many towns, especially smaller towns isn't terribly hard.
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  • Profile picture of the author ibacklinkpro
    No,no,no don't clone. Cloning works for the moment, but it is obvious duplication and creaes SPAM, I guarantee to you that Google will penalize this behavior in the near future. The easiest thing to do is to do IP lookups and list the cities you are servicing at the page of your footer based on the location of your visitor... so instead of having a huge list of 25 cities at the bottom, You could say we service CityA, CityB, CityC amount 23 others. If those are the 3 closest to which you service. If the visitor is not within 50 miles of any of those cities you could just rotate 3 random cities each time. That way Google bot sees all of that stuff, and as each page would have different cities on each page for Google bot, then they would spider all of those cities. This would take me only a few hours in PHP to do.

    The best option is to create backlinks with those cities in the title of the anchor text, for example:
    <a href="http yoursite com" title="your city, state">keyword</a>

    Just keep rotating the cities in the title and you will see your site ranking for that stuff soon enough
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