Hi Mark!

Thanks for asking this good question. While there is no limit to how big a website can be, I think you can see from the general response here that most members would encourage you to stick to manually developing quality pages rather than automating hundreds of thousands of pages, solely for ranking purposes. I second this advice.

Now, I would like to clarify your business model. Are you a physical, actual business that customers come to, either to buy paintball equipment or to play paintball in a gallery? Or, is your business virtual, with no in person transactions? I'm not quite understanding this from your description.

If the former, I would certainly encourage you to develop a very strong, unique page for each of your physical locations. If you have 10 locations (with unique street addresses and phone numbers), then that would be 10 pages. If you've got 20 locations, that would be 20 pages, etc. But don't approach these with a 'just switch out the city name in the title tags' mindset. Make these pages as exceptional as possible. Tell stories, show off testimonials, share pictures and  videos, entertain, educate, inspire. These city landing pages will be intimately linked into your whole Local SEM campaign, provided they each represent a business location with a unique dedicated street address and unique local area code phone number.

But, if you are considering simply building a page for every city in the UK, I just can't see justification for doing so. Ask yourself - what is the value?

There are business models (such as carpet cleaners, chimney sweeps, general contractors, etc.) that go to their clients' locations to serve and for which I would be advising that they create city landing pages for each of their service cities, but this would be extremely regional...not statewide or national or International. A carpet cleaner might serve 15 different towns and cities in his region, and I would encourage him to start gathering project notes and testimonials, videos and photos to begin developing a body of content important enough for him to start creating strong, interesting and unique pages for each of these cities. But I've also had local business owners tell me they want to cover every city in California, for instance, because they think it will help them to do so, and I discourage this.

Even if the business is virtual and doesn't have any in-person transactions with clients or physical locations, I would still discourage this blanketing-the-whole-nation-with-pages approach. A national retailer needs to build up its brand so that it becomes known and visible organically for its products rather than your theoretical approach of targeting every city in the nation. In short order, the mindset behind that approach just doesn't make good horse sense.

And, as others have stated, adding thousands of thin, potentially duplicate pages to any site could definitely have a very negative effect on rankings.

My advice is to make the time to start developing a content strategy for cities in which you have a legitimate presence. If budget means you can't hire a copywriter to help you with this and to speed up the work, accept that this project deserves all the time you can give it and that a slow development of exceptional pages is better than a fast automation of poor quality pages.

Hope this helps!

Hi TechWyse,

I want to be sure I am understanding your question correctly. Are you saying that the business has no usable address whatsoever? Not even a home address? Please clarify.

It is totally possible to build citations for service area businesses (like carpet cleaners, landscapers, contractors, etc.), but they do need to have a physical address in order to participate. This work typically goes like this:

1. You create a Google Places Listing for the business and be sure to pick the 'hide address' function during creation. Google does not want service radius businesses to display their addresses on their Google Places/Google+ Local pages.

2. You can then build a variety of citations in other local business indexes. There are two approaches here. Even though Google doesn't want service radius businesses to show their address on Google's products, there is nothing to prevent you from listing that address on other listings, like Yelp, Merchant Circle, Best of the Web, etc. Alternatively, if the client does not want his street address to appear anywhere on these directories, he can stick to publishing his listing only at those directories which allow you to hide your address. Here is Phil Rozek's helpful list of such resources:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/08/13/can-you-rank-well-in-local-google-without-revealing-your-street-address-anywhere/

Important To Understand

It is perfectly fine, at this point, for service radius businesses to use their home address as their physical address, provided that the address is not being used by any other business. For example, if a husband had an accounting business and a wife had a pet grooming business, both operating out of the home, they could not both use the same address nor the same telephone number. So, both phone and address must be dedicated and unique to avoid problems.

Also, at this point, it is a violation of Google's guidelines to use anything other than a real physical address as a business location. No P.O. boxes, no virtual offices. Despite the fact that Google requires the hiding of the physical address in their system, the address is still entered in the back end dashboard and must be a real location.

Hope these pointers help, and if I've in any way misunderstood your client's business model, please feel free to provide further details.

Great discussion here, guys!

Just thought I'd pop in to add my 2 cents.

Having a phone number in the title tag will not 'hurt' the business in any way, and is a not uncommon practice in Local SEO. The only possible negative to doing this would be that you would have less characters to devote to words as they are being devoted to the digits of the phone number. So, that's about the only downside of doing this. Just remember, the client should be putting a unique title tag on every page, so some of his pages might have a phone number in the title tag, but don't use it on every page. Be creative, varied and informative in each tag and you should not expect any negative outcomes.

Hi Mr. Partyman,

In my opinion, because you are already established with your first business at the street address, the best thing to do would be to get a Suite A, just for the second business.

As Sanket has pointed out, it's critical that each business has its own phone number, business name and Google categories, as well as its own address, so be sure you are making these totally distinct.

Hope this helps!

My pleasure, Jake, and good luck with the changes.

Hi Jake, Ideally, if I were building a local business website from scratch, I would set up the page URLs like this: website.com/city-services Your example of what you want to change the names to look fine, too, so long as you are going to 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones. If you don't, you will lose any links and citations you may have built or achieved for those pages. Also, if this is going to affect the URLs linked from, say, Google+ Local to pages on the website, you'll to change the URLs in Google+ (or other directories) to the new URLs to avoid confusion. All this said, I'm on the same page with what Matt said about this. It's possible for pages with totally lousy URLs to do just fine, in my experience, but if you have a choice, it's nice to write them nicely.

Hi Tyler,

That's great that you're aware of Linda's forum (I'm a mod there, too:))!  I recommend writing your title tags in a more natural manner than the example you've given above. I'd go with something more like that:

Contact Moe's Italian Pizza In Springfield, IN At (XXX) XXX-XXXX

If you've found that 'gourmet' is a vital keyword for the page, you could work that in instead of the phone number, but I always try to put the phone number in the title tag of the contact page. See how my example reads naturally? Like a human would speak? In my opinion, this is the optimum way to go. Rand agrees with this method, too. I recommend you watch his WhiteBoard Friday from earlier in the year in which he talks about naturalness in title tags:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday

Also, be careful about repeating keywords, as covered in Linda's thread which SEO5 has smartly linked to.

Hope this helps!

Hi Martin, Thanks for the further explanation of your business model. You are right - Local SEO is not the right match for you, so the tool isn't helpful.

Hi Martin,
You've received some very good replies here from members. I'll just add that if you are branching into competitive analysis of local competitors, you might like to check out 51 Blocks' competitive analysis tool, which is free:

http://www.51blocks.com/online-marketing-tools/free-local-analysis/