I have been working with a number of similar businesses in different cities that deliver services locally. (Lets call them plumbers, but they aren't. ) I have set up campaigns for each plumber using place names plus the usual array of keywords for their service. Most people who are searching for the service will enter a place name plus the service. e.g. 'Plumber My Home Town'. Now some of them got together and decided that it would be a good idea to set up a site covering the whole country and sending sales leads back to each of them according to the locations specified by the searcher. The agregated site would also be promoted using adwords as well as the usual SEO/PageRank stuff. They have now approached me for advice. I can see the following pros and cons to this strategy 1) The agregated site would provide a useful source of site relevant inbound links to their individual sites and therefore improve PageRank. 2) They are probably not going to get much new traffic, as most people looking for the service would specify a location and get their individual adwords ad anyway. 3) It may have some benefit in providing an additional ad on the same page of results that could also lead people to their site. 4) The additional ad will be competing with their main website ad if the same location specific keywords are used. 5) There may be some advantage in displacing competitors. 6) Could provide additional value if we can get good rankings in the organic search results. If such a scenario is set up, should it only use generic country wide keywords such as 'plumber' or should it also have location specific keywords that include the ones already used by the partners for their individual sites? Any thoughts or suggested strategies?
Be careful about double serving here... I think it would be worthwhile to have this more general site to grab a little extra traffic; couldn't hurt. However, maybe consider scaling your advertising area for the local websites to just those cities. From there you could cover the rest of the area with the more general website and direct to the closest local "plumber". This approach would allow you to reuse most of your keywords (withe the exception of the local ones). I wonder how cost effective this would work out to be in the end though...