Calling all offliners/SEO consultants - what would you do?

12 replies
Hi all,

This question goes out to anyone who runs their own SEO business helping offline businesses rank in the SERPs:

How do you approach optimized landing pages with your clients?

What I mean is, let's say one of your clients is a landscape gardening business who is based locally in a particular city and typically deals with customers in that city, but also wants to target other cities immediately around their area - would you just optimize the homepage for these city related keywords and just link-build for the homepage (i.e. and try to get the homepage ranked for all of the city related keywords)? or would you create separate landing pages for each city being targeted?

Thanks for any advice!

Steve.
#calling #consultants #offliners or seo
  • Profile picture of the author Headfirst
    Charge by the number of keywords you're optimizing for.

    For example, if they want

    Construction Springfield, IL
    Roofing Springfield, IL
    Paving Springfield, IL

    Charge them one rate.

    If they want to do the same keywords and target capital city and shelbyville then charge accordingly, at least triple the base rate.
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    • Profile picture of the author StevieJK
      Thanks for the advice.

      But my question is not really about pricing or anthing, I just wondered what other SEO consultant did in terms of using optimized landing pages or not? i.e. would you create a separate landing page for each city being targeted or just try and optimize the homepage for all cities?

      Cheers,
      Steve.
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  • Profile picture of the author nasuryono
    You should take full advantage using Geo Targetting. Put the script on the page headline.

    This way, you only need to use one page and the city name will change depending on where it is accessed from.

    -Andrew
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  • Profile picture of the author zoltzz
    I don't know if this will work or not, someone who is more knowledge can correct me if I'm wrong.

    I was just thinking if this will work:

    have permalink setting adjusted to /%category%/%postname%/

    name each city you want to target in category and write the title of your post minus the city name.

    But then again, the title in the post needs to be SEO optimized for the main city you want to target.
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  • Profile picture of the author StevieJK
    Thanks all.

    But I just want to know generally what your approaches are with SEO clients - do you use separate landing pages to target different areas or just optimize the homepage for all of them?
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  • Profile picture of the author Russell Hall
    Hi Stevie,
    firstly, yes you should of course be setting up your home page to rank for the major city KWP that you're targeting.

    But don't stop with that. I would add extra juice by setting up some articles (posts) that heavily emphasized major city KWP and cross link to he home page. Also,.. set up your .htaccess file to refer external referrers (searches from those article posts you set up) to redirect to the home page.

    Then for the other regional city areas you are targettng you should set up posts or pages (or both) that target the specific KWP's for those geographic areas. Place a Google embedded map for each city on each page and then cross link them all together and reference it back to the homepage.
    You should also create an RSS feed for those articles and submit the feed to feedburner and RSS directories.

    Bear in mind that Google ranks pages and NOT websites. Therefore you should be looking at getting each page with geo-targeted KWP's ranked individually and in most cases and niches for offline it's not too hard to get GP1.
    Then cross referencing (inter-linking) these pages together will add extra power and relevance to each individual page and in turn your site in general.

    Hope that helps (I know it will if you do it )

    Best regards,
    Russell Hall
    Signature

    Mvlti svnt vocati, pavci vero electi - Many are called [but] few are chosen

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    • Profile picture of the author Xebekn
      Originally Posted by Russell Hall View Post

      Hi Stevie,
      firstly, yes you should of course be setting up your home page to rank for the major city KWP that you're targeting.

      But don't stop with that. I would add extra juice by setting up some articles (posts) that heavily emphasized major city KWP and cross link to he home page. Also,.. set up your .htaccess file to refer external referrers (searches from those article posts you set up) to redirect to the home page.

      Then for the other regional city areas you are targettng you should set up posts or pages (or both) that target the specific KWP's for those geographic areas. Place a Google embedded map for each city on each page and then cross link them all together and reference it back to the homepage.
      You should also create an RSS feed for those articles and submit the feed to feedburner and RSS directories.

      Bear in mind that Google ranks pages and NOT websites. Therefore you should be looking at getting each page with geo-targeted KWP's ranked individually and in most cases and niches for offline it's not too hard to get GP1.
      Then cross referencing (inter-linking) these pages together will add extra power and relevance to each individual page and in turn your site in general.

      Hope that helps (I know it will if you do it )

      Best regards,
      Russell Hall
      What do you mean by "posts"? Blogs? Or article submissions to other sites?

      I'm also confused a bit on the "external referrers" and where are they coming from?
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  • Profile picture of the author Taruru
    good question, i'm in an almost similar quagmire...
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  • Profile picture of the author StevieJK
    Thanks all.

    So the general concensus is that you would create separate landing pages to target different cities for a client's website?
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    • Profile picture of the author Paul Ashbrook
      I use seperate landing pages for different cities for client's websites - this approach works and gets results in Google.

      You can link to the city pages from the home page by having some text that says "...the areas that we cover are city1, city2 and city3".
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      • Profile picture of the author StevieJK
        Thanks Paul.

        Yeah, I think optimized landing pages are the way to go and will get the best results.

        Thanks!
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  • Profile picture of the author indolesman
    I would create a different page for each city.
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