How to Create City Pages?

First, I’d like to clarify the concept of city pages. These are individualized website pages that focus on specific geographical areas and contain unique content. City pages can greatly benefit service-based businesses, especially those with a single location but a broader service area encompassing an entire county or even state. Relying solely on an optimized home page makes it difficult to appear in multiple cities, making city pages essential for success.

There are many different opinions about city pages and how to optimize them. The size of a city and the industry targeted dictate the level of uniqueness required for content. I operate two businesses: RTS Website Design, providing SEO and marketing services and RTS Data Recovery providing hard drive data recovery services nationwide. My proficiency in ranking in multiple cities and towns has propelled my SEO and Data Recovery business to great success. Additionally, through RTS Website Design’ SEO and marketing services, I have assisted numerous businesses in achieving rankings across various towns by developing city pages. Engaging with different SEO groups, I have observed a plethora of inadequate information. My perspective stems from personal experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in SEO and city page creation.

Depending Upon Your Specific Industry and Target Areas Will Determine Your Approach City Pages Strategy

The complexity of the ranking process depends on the size of the city and the industry. For example, ranking as a plumber in large cities like emergency drain cleaning in Long Beach, Anaheim, and Santa Ana is more challenging than ranking in smaller sub-sections within those cities. On the other hand, psychics may find it easier to rank in smaller cities due to lower competition and sometimes budget constraints compared to the highly competitive residential and commercial plumbing industry.

Do You Need to Have Original Content for GEO Pages?

The question of whether original content is necessary for city pages is where I believe much of the confusion arises. Most of my top-ranking city pages contain duplicate content. These pages are standalone, not linked to any main menu options or other parts of my website. Occasionally, I include some personal touches related to the specific town or city, but for the most part, it’s recycled content. I have applied this approach with many clients. However, depending on the industry and keyword, there are instances where more effort may be required.

Using hydrojet plumbing as an example, I have expertise in achieving high Google rankings in a competitive industry. I have successfully positioned a specific hydrojet plumber in Long Beach, CA among the top three results in numerous areas within major cities, as well as for key phrases in the largest Southern California cities. By targeting smaller towns and using duplicate content, I consistently achieve top five rankings, often reaching the top three. However, there are significantly more factors to consider when aiming for top five rankings in major cities compared to less populated areas, which I will discuss further.

When You Can Use Duplicate Content Verses When You Need Original Content

First, larger cities experience increased competition due to their high activity levels, leading to greater focus and investment in these areas. Additionally, emergency drain cleaning services offer significant financial opportunities, while the demand for a master plumber providing gas line repair is limited. This results in fierce competition for the same clientele, making it more challenging than promoting a psychic in a small town. Consequently, various other factors become influential in this context.

Domain Authority – “Domain authority” is an SEO concept that refers to the “strength” of a given domain. The more popular the website, its domain authority will be higher.

Determining the Difficulty of Keywords

The concept of keyword difficulty involves assessing the level of effort needed for your content to achieve a first-page ranking on Google for a specific keyword. Put simply, if a keyword is deemed difficult, it will demand significant time and attention from you in order to yield results. Furthermore, avoiding both internal and external duplicate content is crucial. Internal duplication refers to the repetition of content across multiple URLs within the same website domain, while external duplication arises when two or more distinct domains feature identical or similar page copy indexed by search engines.

Delving Further with City Pages by Auditing Who Is on Top

SEO can be both exasperating and enjoyable, with the former stemming from the difficulty of surpassing websites with higher domain authorities. In highly competitive industries, businesses with larger marketing budgets may hold a significant edge when pursuing similar goals.

One effective method for overcoming this challenge is to create original, high-quality content and conduct thorough audits of the pages you want to surpass in search rankings. To achieve this, you can utilize keyword research to identify popular search terms and tailor your content accordingly. It’s also important to consider your domain authority in relation to your competitors when selecting key phrases to target. Instead of focusing solely on high-volume keywords, it may be more strategic to pursue longer-tail key phrases for better results.

Platforms like MOZ and SEMrush offer comprehensive keyword research tools through paid subscriptions, while free options like WordStream are also available. If you are committed to improving your SEO performance, investing in a paid subscription from SEMrush for around $100 per month would be a worthwhile recommendation.

After The SEO Audit

After identifying the top-ranked website, go to the ranking page and conduct an audit. Begin by copying and pasting the entire page into a word counting tool like Word Counter. This initial step is crucial; make sure to note it down. If you have established that the main keyword you aim to rank for is emergency drain cleaning and hydrojet plumbing, then analyze how frequently the first-ranking website utilizes these word.

• Write down how may words they have on the page.
• Jot down how many times they are using the word, key phase emergency drain cleaning.
• Write down how many times they are using the word hydrojet plumbing.
• The same with sewer cleaning and repair and other plumbing services proved like, water heater installation and repair.
• Then see how many times they are using emergency drain cleaning and also emergency drain cleaning long Beach, CA.
• Write down how many images they have on their page.

From there, if they have a thousand words, write fifteen hundred words. Within the content, add the words and phrases that you did the audit on (in the bullet points above) and add more than they did.

Your SEO Audits Are Similar Regardless of the Keyword Difficulty

Audit the same way as I mentioned with the emergency drain cleaning. The only difference is that you should be able to get away with similar content. Only change the name of the city or town. If you are a photographer and going after a phrase and city, you probably can get away with five hundred to seven hundred and fifty words. You are better off adding more words than you need. As a result, you’ll stay ranking high because it will be harder for someone to knock you off the top.

If you are trying to rank in a whole state or city, you will probably need to have content written only for that particular page. As a result, you will have an honest shot of showing up in the top three.

Your domain authority will become less critical in less popular towns than in larger cities or an entire state.

Why City Pages Are Important

City pages are important because it’s unlikely your business can survive attracting potential clients for only your town. Especially if it’s a small town. As a result, you need to cast a wide net, and city pages are the way to accomplish that task.

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