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City names in URLs
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Hey guys. When targeting a specific keyword that mentions a city (eg. Dover Used Cars) would it be a good practice to include that city in the URL when creating additional pages (eg. placethatsellsusedcars.com/dover-used-fords)?
Thanks!
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Hi Anton, Is your business local or virtual? If local, then yes, city landing pages are extremely common and typically contain the city name in the URL of the landing page. However, it is key with these types of pages to be sure that you are creating unique, high quality content that will be of value to the user. Do not simply duplicate content and change out city keywords across multiple pages. That would be spammy. City landing pages work well for service radius businesses like plumbers, landscapers and general contractors, because the staff travel to clients in a number of cities. They are not as good of a fit for brick-and-mortar businesses like dentists, restaurants or retail shops, because in such cases, all clients come from their locations to the locale of a business. If a brick and mortar business wants to write about cities other than its city of location, it has to discover a valid reason for doing so. For example, a doctor located in City A might have hospital privileges in City B and give seminars in City C, giving a good reason for him to publish content about his involvement in these other cities. But, to simply create pages for cities in which he has no involvement, just because he hopes patients living in those cities might travel to him, doesn't really make sense So, what you do with your city landing pages is a case-by-case situation. One rule covers all scenarios - always build unique, quality content on the pages with the goal of helping users.
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Is this for a national site? if so, you will need to further segment the URL placethatsellsusedcars.com/used-fords/de/dover or if you have multiple pages for the same city, you can furthe segment the URLS by zip code - placethatsellsusedcars.com/used-fords/de/dover-11010. Most importantly is that you provide user value on every page and the pages don't seem like duplicates to each other. Google frowns on directory sites and you need to provide much more value then just a directory of links.
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Keywords in the URL is part of the algorithms, so I would suggest it if it is not used in a spammy way, which you are not.
I might suggest these URL's: placethatsellsusedcars.com/dover/used-fords or placethatsellsusedcars.com/used-fords/dover
I suggest this because it will benefit your website's architecture. It will give you website a good flow and organization. Use the one makes most sense for your website. Be sure that the /dover or /used-ford pages have links to all of the next level pages.
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