Is it worth it having different cities in your footer, each with a separate page?

[EcommerceSite]

I have been looking at the website of local web design companies and every single one in my area has a footer with links to a separate page for that local city. This seems like a bad idea to me, but everyone in the local pack has it. Does it work?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi MrSem,

Thanks for re-launching this conversation with new questions, which are good ones. My advice here, numbered for clarity:

1. You should only have one "Contact" page on the site, listing all 5 of your locations. You should also have a unique page for each location. These are typically called "location landing pages", "local landing pages" or "city landing pages" - not "contact pages". The contact page should feature the basic contact info of each branch. The landing pages should feature much more than this. They should each be a unique resource of information about that branch, including NAP, driving directions, a map, reviews, special offers, customized CTAs, proofs of community involvement and anything else you can think of that might interest, inform and persuade customers as to the desirability of choosing your company. If you're listing a toll free number, be sure you're designating it as such and that it is the unique LOCAL number you're most closely associating with each branch of your business.

2. If the number of locations you have is beginning to create navigational concerns, you may be reaching the point where you need to consider a store locator widget. Typically, I don't see these being implemented for a business with just 5 locations. More like 10+. For major brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, store locators are an essential medium for helping consumers find the branch nearest them. For your business, with 5 locations, the function simply may not be necessary. You can list all of your location in high level navigation without clutter, and you can also put them in the footer, on the contact page, etc. This shouldn't take up too much room, and should provide good UX for your users.

Does this help answer your questions? Please, let me know if you have others.

[MrSem]

I'd like to rekindle this discussion two years later.

What if you basically just have a contact page for each location that has the exact same form, but it has a different phone number, address, and embedded map (all with schema markup.)  ?

Let's say you have 5 locations but expect to grow to 15 eventually.  I don't think it's good to junk up your primary navigation dropdown with a list of all these cities.  Seems you could list all the cities (separated by commas in the footer.  OR, what about just a "locations" link in the footer?  The main contact page has a toll free number so there's no need to drive people to the location contact pages, but I would expect it can help local seo a bit to have them indexed?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi! If you don't yet have the clients in place to create this type of content, then you don't really yet have a reason to create it. While you're building up your client base in the other cities, some other ideas might be finding opportunities to network in these other cities. Perhaps attending Chamber of Commerce meetings, hosting or attending workshops in these other cities or finding other opportunities for building relationships within these communities that you can then write about. Until then, your pages would by necessity be blank and you don't want blank pages on your site.

If you're talking about a retail business, it's the same thing. The fact that customers in cities B, C and D drive to city A to shop isn't really a compelling reason to develop content. Your other customers will not be interested in this. You have to discover whether you have some more real/interesting connection between the business and the other communities. For example a retail toy store might host a gaming event in city B, sponsor a little league team in city C, etc. Finding ways to become locally involved where your customers live builds relationships that you can then showcase on your website/blog.

[EcommerceSite]

What you are saying about displaying projects in different cities makes a ton of sense. All they do is replicate content with the cities changed out. However, what about for a new business that has yet to build any clients? What if it is something like a retail store with one location? I am referencing suburban areas were it would be about 10 cities maybe less.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

Good topic! It's my personal feeling that Google's doorway pages update will mainly affect thin, duplicate content that doesn't have a very good reason for existing. I think the scenario you are describing could well fall under that heading if your competitors are taking a weak approach to the task of developing city landing pages. Some thoughts:

1. I can see the sense, if you have many clients, in breaking them up via city onto different showcase pages, but I would like to see more than just images on these pages. Project descriptions, customer testimonials, maybe even some unique content about the most powerful industries in that city could go far toward making these pages of value to human users, showing them your company's good work with neighboring businesses they recognize.

2. I think you need to do a gut check to draw a line about where you might be going overboard on this. If you are a boutique agency located in 1 city and taking clients in 9 other nearby cities, I could see it as a reasonable goal to create 10 really excellent pages with unique, interesting content on them. But, if you are a virtual business and want to create 50, 100, 5,000 pages like this to cover every city in the state or country (and I've seen this approach!) I find it less reasonable to imagine that the content is going to be unique and valuable to human users. Not saying that it's impossible, if you have big resources - just that it's less likely. So, you need to see what feels right to you; Google isn't giving us a cutoff point to work with about this. It's up to each of us to see what feels authentic and what feels like an obvious, painful grab for the SERPs, right?

3. I would not recommend putting these links in the footer, regardless of the strength of the pages. I would recommend including them in your main navigation menu. Even if the pages are great, it's my belief that Google expects spammy stuff in footers and you don't want to be accidentally lumped in with that crowd. If your pages are super, show them off in your menu with pride and leave the footer for your physical NAP, contact us link, copyright and other basics like that.

This would be my take on how to approach this. I get that you're seeing your competitors' doing things a certain way, and maybe they've all produced fantastic content for those footer-linked city pages, but if there's any chance that they haven't, you doing a better job could wind up being a competitive advantage.

[EcommerceSite]

That was before the doorway page update. I am wondering if that changed anything.

[EcommerceSite]

I never had any intention of doing it, I was just surprised that so many other people still did it. There was not one single site that didn't do it.

[TheWebMastercom]

You need to be really careful doing this.  Whilst that used to be pretty much the industry standard, Google recently updated its guidelines to do with Doorway pages.  I am not sure that these new algorithm changes have been implemented but it is exactly this method that it will affect.

So, until we know what is up with that you will need to proceed with a bit of caution, and at least ensure that all content on those location pages are completely unique.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html

[Alick300]

Hi Niners52,

I am quoting a very detailed answer on this by a moz staff Miriam Ellis. It is third consecutive day when I referring Miriam Ellis post but she really answered very well. Please check this

To begin with, it's important to understand that Google will typically see any local business as most relevant to its city of location. So, if you're located in San Francisco (i.e. have a dedicated local area code phone number and street address there) your prime location and best opportunity for achieving high visibility will be for searches that include the phrase 'san francisco' or performed by san francisco-based users.

You are in a very common situation in which you operate in a wide service radius. The typical process involves creating city landing pages for each of your main service locations, and though you typically will not be able to locally outrank competitors who are physically located in those service cities, you can strive for secondary organic rankings for these geo terms.

To make this manageable, make a list of your 10 most important service cities/towns. Develop unique, non-duplicate content for each of these 10 cities. Create a section in your main site menu labeled 'Cities We Serve' or something along those lines and begin listing the pages in this menu. If you don't feel you can create useful, creative copy, hire a copywriter for this important task. Then, move onto your next 10 most important service cities. Build it in manageable chunks and do your absolute best job on every page.

Beyond this, linkbuilding to the pages would be next steps.

Hope this gives you a plan of action that makes sense! "

You can read full post here @ http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/how-to-optimize-for-multiple-cities-on-website

Thanks

Thanks