I have seen this on a few websites, will adding a tab for our locations that has a map of the U.S. push our page up in rankings? What we wanted to do was add a map, then if you click on a state on the map you will find ten cities or so in each state listed along with our contact info. On our current website we have about 15 locations nationwide listed and we get quote requests from those cities. Our thinking is if we have all 50 states listed we will get more quote requests. Right now if I Google "auto glass, san diego" one of our sites comes up on the first page because San Diego is a keyword, but if I type in auto glass in any other city in California we do not come up very high at all. Any other tips on how to get quote requests from all over the country?
Many sites have tried this without success. The problem is called duplicate content where all the text on the page is the same but the city name has been changed. It fun programming, but doesn't work for SEO.
Well said! If you actually have locations in these cities then a quick fix would be to make sure that you're listed on Google Maps for those locations - you can submit individual branches to Google Local here: http://www.google.com/local/add/analyticsSplashPage. You'll then appear on the map for "auto glass somecaliforniancity". If you can't do that, then the best way to get it to work would be to genuinely have unique content for each location - maybe get one of your people on the ground to create a unique page of info about the locality and the specific challenges with dealing with auto glass in that area. Then you'll have more chance of appearing against "auto glass somecaliforniancity".
Problem is that in most of the places we do not have an actual location, we just book the job and find a sub-contractor to fulfill the job for us. Some of our other competitors just have a big long list of cities that they service on the bottom of one of their webpages, but I think that looks cheesy. What is the best solution to show up in city specific searches nationwide?
Having cookie cutter pages where you fill in the city/state are called doorway pages. Their sole purpose is SEO and they provide no useful additional content for user than what could have been provided by a single city/state agnostic page. Such pages are actually a violation of Google's webmaster guidelines. While they are not likely to get you penalized, if a Quality Rater at Google stumbles on to them or a Googler discovers them during the course of a manual review, they are likely to get flagged as spam so that they don't show up in the SERPs. As carleisenstein stated, IF you want to do this then you need to provide unique content specific to each city and/or state that you plan to have a page for. And by unique content I mean 3-4 paragraphs... not 2 sentences. You'll also want to pay special attention to how you interlink these pages on your site. The link text you use can drastically affect which keyword phrases you rank for... You may want to link from some sections of the site to these pages using "<city> service" and using "service in <city>, <state>" in others for example. You may be able to rank for many of the targeted phrases by simply optimizing on-page and on-site SEO, but you'll likely want to build some external backlinks to at least some of the pages where the market is more competitive.