Hi, I'm doing some work for a company which is a nationwide franchise, but which will do best by using local geographical locations as keywords eg. "hairdressers manchester". The way this has been handled in terms of their website is to have a landing page for every single town - so they're at several thousand towns and adding more all the time. However, I have two problems with how to optimise this set up. 1. For each town/area, in SEO terms they're up against companies which are exclusive to those to areas, and have a whole site dedicated to hairdressing in manchester 2. My feeling is that the best results would be gained by optimising each town/area individually, doing keyword research to find out where there are gaps in the competition etc. But with so many towns to target, this makes the scope of the project enormous. Other nationwide but localised businesses/franchises must have the same sort of problem - I wondered if anyone had any experience with this and could make any recommendations? Thanks!
ok, one of the biggest things that i think seem to be making an appearing. footer text, if you have a number of areas in your footer, you can be ranked for them demographics with less work. I would also keep your individual pages, but on your home page pick out 5 or 6 regions you feel your looking to target
Content is king. I have handled this by including a paragraph of content related to the geographic area. 100-250 words may well be enough. "Manchester, a city and metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England with a population of nearly half a million people is perhaps best known for its University, and soccer. A growing appreciation of culture, arts and entertainment, a stable population base, and a strong local economy conducive to business makes Manchester an attractive location for small business owners, such as hair salons..." Follow the drill, and work some of your keywords in there.
That would constitue as not being relevant to your keywords, google will eventually figure this out. my method, describing as, we operate in the following areas, in the footer, is good stuff
willybfriendly - good results with this method? Broadly i'd agree with the 'content is king' ethos but with several thousand towns to deal with its a considerable time investment to get all that content in...
There are no shortcuts. Top rankings mean being best in class. Best in class means work. Work means time. Of course, you could simply scrape content. Might work for a while.
Note that if you have several thousand pages whose content is almost identical except you're substituting different state and city names, that what you are creating are doorway pages which are a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
How so? If Manchester is one of my keywords, then a brief statement about Manchester is relevant. If hairdressing is one of my keywords, then I should be looking at things related to hairdressing, such as hair salon, hair cuts, etc. Footer text is so 90's. I am not seeing a lot of evidence that it remains effective.