The Complete Guide to Creating City Pages For SEO How to Create Engaging City Pages at Scale That Will Delight Visitors, Drive Traffic and Get You More Business. www.crowdcontent.com 1 Introduction With nearly half of all searches on Google now showing local intent, it’s more important than ever for businesses that rely on local traffic to have an effective local SEO program. Many local SEO practitioners focus on managing Google My Business profiles and optimizing listings to appear in Google’s local pack (the local results and map section featured on many Google searches), and with good reason. Depending on the industry, the local pack can capture a huge portion of search traffic. But it doesn’t capture all of the traffic, and in many industries, the lion’s share of searchers may click on results outside the local pack. It really depends on searcher intent, how significant the purchase decision is and where the searcher is in the buying journey. In situations where the local pack isn’t the best way for searchers to get the information they need, city pages come into play. In all too many instances, they’re one of the best ways for companies to get that information to searchers and are one of the best ways to rank for valuable locally focused keywords in Google. City pages can be extremely valuable to searchers and customers, but done poorly, they can be flagged as gateway pages by Google and can get your site penalized. We’ve written thousands of high-quality city pages that have generated significant results for our clients over the years, and this ebook draws on that experience to help you create city pages that will delight your visitors. Eric Hoppe Director of Marketing, Crowd Content www.crowdcontent.com 2 Table of Contents Introduction 02 The Complete Guide to Creating City Pages For SEO 04 Location Is an Absolute Game Changer 06 What Is Local SEO? 07 What Are City Pages, and Why Are They Critical to Local SEO Success 09 What Makes a Great City Page? 13 What Makes a Bad City Page? 23 How Can You Create Great City Pages at Scale? 24 What Data Can You Include to Make City Page Content Stand Out? 29 Conclusion 30 Examples of Awesome High-Performing City Pages 31 What Is the Local Pack? The Old-School Method for City Pages, and Why It Won’t Work Today Poor City Pages Can Be Labeled as Doorway Pages by Google, Which Is Bad for Rankings Google’s Doorway Page Penalty Isn’t the Only Reason Doorway Pages Don’t Work An Opportunity Exists for Brands Willing to Put Effort Into City Pages 9 More Characteristics of Strong City Pages, Along with Tips from the Experts Develop a Repeatable Process Identify Resources and Create a Schedule Understand Your Options for Outsourcing 10 Steps to Successfully Scale City Page Content Creation www.crowdcontent.com 07 10 10 12 12 14 24 25 27 28 3 The Complete Guide to Creating City Pages For SEO A large company recently came to Crowd Content looking for help in driving traffic and revenue. Its business model let users shop for services in hundreds of cities around the world, and knowing the power of local search, the brand wanted to launch high-performing city pages for all those markets. Crowd Content began executing on the project in September 2017, delivering high-quality content at scale with stellar results, including: 91% growth in indexed keywords 399% growth in Top 3 ranked keywords www.crowdcontent.com 4 The Complete Guide to Creating City Pages For SEO 132% Increase in Organic Traffic And now we’re going to share: • How we accomplished those results • Why we did it • How you can put city pages to work for your own brand www.crowdcontent.com 5 Location Is an Absolute Game Changer If you look at the lists of marketing predictions for 2017 and 2018, experts almost unilaterally advised that marketers focus on local marketing in coming years. Local marketing fundamentally refers to anything that targets customers interested in a specific location. That can encompass a wide variety of activities, which we’ll discuss in more depth later. This ebook is going to primarily focus on local SEO — just one of many local marketing tactics. It’s important because it lets you preach to the right choir — not just the consumers who are interested in your service, product or message, but the people who are geographically positioned to do something about that interest. Consider the example of GreenPal, which lets you find lawn care professionals in your area. The main site is well optimized for broad keywords around lawn care, but this might not help searchers find them if they’re looking for lawn care services in their area. That’s why Your GreenPal has created city pages for all areas they service. The company’s city pages help them provide valuable information to searchers from each city, as well as rank for valuable local search terms. Just look at the value Your GreenPal’s city page for Houston, Texas, is delivering to them each month: Creating city pages also lets the company optimize each page well for that area. Companies that try to overload their main site or service pages with too many locations run the risk of making those pages less effective overall. This can also make it difficult for visitors to find the right info to make a local sale. City pages are critical for businesses serving multiple locations for just these reasons. Whether you’re a local company with one or a few locations, a larger chain with locations all over the map or a business that serves multiple markets but doesn’t have physical locations in each, we’re going to show you how to put SEO and local marketing to work in a comprehensive city pages campaign that drives traffic and conversions in revenue-rewarding ways. www.crowdcontent.com 6 What Is Local SEO? Local SEO (search engine optimization) involves numerous strategies to get your pages ranking high for local searches or searches performed by local users. That means whether someone is looking for a “dentist in Denver” or just searching dental providers from a mobile device in the Dallas area, they’re more likely to see your pages or online profiles. Good local SEO involves a holistic approach that includes but isn’t limited to: • The right keyword strategies • Making use of business directories such as Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, Yelp, Foursquare, Superpages and others • Boosting rankings on search engines like Google • Localized content on your pages • Making use of online reviews and testimonials While local SEO can be done for any service that lets users find local businesses, many SEOs focusing on local SEO will prioritize ranking in Google’s “local pack” — the local results and map shown on many local searches. What Is the Local Pack? It’s important that businesses manage their overall local SEO - a comprehensive strategy is a strong strategy. And, one of the most critical elements of local SEO is ranking in the local pack. The local pack is the list of businesses at the top of Google’s search results for a local search; most often they are aligned with a map. Currently, Google only shows three businesses by default, and it really pays to show up there. You can check out SEMrush’s guide to getting into the pack for more information. www.crowdcontent.com 7 What Is Local SEO? Being listed in these results is a combination of the factors listed above and is its own field of SEO. These results are also entirely dependent on your business having a physical location to be placed on the map that’s tied to a Google My Business account. If you don’t have a physical location in an area, you can’t get ranked in the local pack. SEMrush’s Meri Chobanyan explains the local pack’s importance like this: “A full 93% of searchers with local intent see Google’s three-pack and get to search results snippets later. Google knows where your business is and how far it is from the user Googling your product/service. So, go for the local pack, and you should be good to go!” When you create city pages, you’re trying to rank for the organic results beneath this local pack where a lot of clicks still go (unless the search queries you’re targeting do not contain the local pack). www.crowdcontent.com 8 What Are City Pages, and Why Are They Critical to Local SEO Success? City pages are a type of local landing page. Local landing pages provide localized content on your site, which boosts your rank for local searches and ensures a quality place for geographically relevant traffic to go. Local landers can be organized by country, state, county, town or even neighborhood in some cases, and many SEOs will also create landing pages at these levels. By far, city pages are the most popular and most valuable type of local landing page, largely due to the huge amount of search traffic for city-based services. The Types of Local Landing Pages Good city pages promote goods and services offered in a specific city or neighborhood and convey how your service relates to that specific market. Done right, city pages provide an opportunity to rank organically for high-value keywords in every market you service. But, doesn’t Google My Business do this for you? Why invest in content for my site? Most local businesses rely heavily on Google My Business to get found locally, and while that works great for brands that serve a single market, it’s limiting when you serve dozens or even hundreds of cities — especially if you don’t have a physical location in every area. As noted previously, you can only create one Google My Business listing per physical location. That certainly doesn’t help you get found in a highly local market if you don’t have a storefront there. To get around this, some businesses have tried to create GMB profiles for cities where they have a P.O box or an employee’s home address. Google is very clear this is not allowed. It’s very difficult to get these listings approved in the first place, and it’s also certain bogus pages will be removed if Google finds them. Consider this example: An HVAC service company serving several suburbs may only have one physical address. Perhaps it’s located in Lafayette, Louisiana, but it also serves smaller surrounding towns such as Youngsville and Broussard. The company can’t have multiple Google My Business listings without multiple physical locations, but it can create city pages for targeted hyperlocal marketing in those smaller towns. In larger cities, it’s likely your competitors also won’t have physical locations in every specific market they want to target. That means they won’t have a Google My Business page for every area either, and they’ll likely rely on city pages to capture local organic traffic. If you’re not leveraging this local marketing tool, you’re going to lose out to competition that is taking this approach. www.crowdcontent.com 9 What Are City Pages, and Why Are They Critical to Local SEO Success? The Old-School Method for City Pages, and Why It Won’t Work Today The old-school method for creating city pages was to write one page and use that as a foundation to create cookie-cutter pages for all the other locations. It usually involved a programmer creating a process that allowed automatic swapping of content bits or integration of a few tailored elements such as titles, H1 headers and locations or a bit of body content where the location name was included. And while this used to work and does speed up the city page process, it doesn’t work anymore. The result of an automated approach to city pages is content that: • Isn’t unique • Doesn’t offer real value to local visitors • Gets your pages penalized in Google Poor City Pages Can Be Labeled as Doorway Pages by Google, Which Is Bad for Rankings Google doesn’t like what it calls doorway or gateway pages, and the search engine has repeatedly announced that it will penalize such pages. Here’s what Google’s Brian White had to say about doorway pages in 2015: Over time, we’ve seen sites try to maximize their “search footprint” without adding clear, unique value. These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof. To improve the quality of search results for our users, we’ll soon launch a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change Brian White, Search Quality Program Manager, Google Google followed through on announcements like these, sending so-called doorway pages plummeting in search rankings or removing them completely from results. Why doesn’t Google like doorway pages? Because they don’t provide much value for the user. In short, a doorway page is something created solely to capture traffic and satisfy search engines, which runs contrary to Google’s mission to serve results that best solve searcher intent www.crowdcontent.com 10 What Are City Pages, and Why Are They Critical to Local SEO Success? Google is pretty clear about what it considers to be doorway pages. Here are some characteristics that could lead Google to brand your city pages as doorway or gateway pages instead of relevant, helpful content: • You have multiple city pages on your site (or on other domains) that exist solely to point to a single page — in other words, your city pages shouldn’t all point to the exact same page on your website • The city pages themselves don’t provide anything relevant or useful for the reader and exist solely to act as a funnel, directing people to portions of your site that are useful or relevant • The city pages duplicate content, including products and locations, that exist on other pages of your site, and they do so solely for the purpose of driving additional search traffic • The pages aren’t part of the overall functional hierarchy of the website (i.e., they don’t exist in conjunction with all other pages in a seamless, logical manner) In short, Google doesn’t like pages that don’t provide anything of value to the user. And it definitely doesn’t like pages designed solely to rank for keywords without being relevant and integrated with the rest of your site. Want to be sure you’re city pages aren’t seen as doorway pages? Ask yourself these questions from Google: • Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience? • Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific? • Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic? • Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality? • Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines? www.crowdcontent.com 11 What Are City Pages, and Why Are They Critical to Local SEO Success? Google’s Doorway Page Penalty Isn’t the Only Reason Doorway Pages Don’t Work Cutting corners on city pages can easily result in inadvertently creating doorway pages, which can also lead to other problems. Here are just a few common issues with creating city pages using the old-school approach: • They don’t result in strong SEO. They’re thin and often use duplicate content, which means they don’t provide content that matches the intent of the user who searches for the relevant search terms. Google doesn’t like that, which isn’t going to help you with search results. • Google’s Panda algorithm update specifically goes after thin content like this, making the pages even more unviable. • Rankbrain, which is an important ranking signal with Google, scores pages based on metrics such as organic click-through rates and user time on page. If your city page content is thin or programmatic, it’s not going to provide much value for users, which results in poor user interaction with the page and site — and a lower Rankbrain score. • The Pigeon update puts an emphasis on pages that have local or neighborhood terms used organically and relevantly. That’s not something that can be easily achieved programmatically. • Today’s web users have high expectations when it comes to content, and they’re unlikely to stick around if they see thin or automated content on your pages. An Opportunity Exists for Brands Willing to Put Effort Into City Pages Google rewards sites that provide great localized content that’s useful to the reader, so there’s a massive opportunity for you to rank well if your competitors don’t create strong city-specific landing pages. Even if they do, you can still leverage this opportunity by creating better city pages than the competition. According to Think With Google, at least a third of all mobile searches have local intent. When you combine mobile and desktop, reports from 2012 forward consistently show that up to half of all search activity is related to local intent. The bottom line is this: Without localized content on your pages, you’re missing out on some serious search engine action, a lot of page traffic and plenty of conversions and sales. www.crowdcontent.com 12 What Makes a Great City Page? A good city page communicates how your goods and services meet the needs of the visitor or solves a problem for the consumer — sure, that’s Content Marketing 101, right? But great city pages go beyond that by connecting the product and content to the relevant location or city. What does that mean? It means creating a unique page that accomplishes some or all of the following: • Describes how you operate in the city or neighborhood • Includes how long you’ve been active in the area • Discusses common challenges that people in that city or area would face (relevant to your industry or products) • Demonstrates how your goods or services solve those challenges How you communicate the relevant information can be broken into many possible elements. City pages, like other online content, should be broken into scannable content chunks with subheadings, short paragraphs and bulleted lists. Add in videos, graphics and other media to make the page more dynamic and you’ll improve user experience, and with it your interaction stats such as time on page and bounce rate. Some elements you might want to consider for your city pages include: Written content that includes local keywords, neighborhoods, sights and information Meta descriptions that include some of the information above (including local keywords) to boost organic click-through rates A URL structure that fits your site but also clearly defines the location (ex: bestpestcontrol.com/ dallastx and bestpestcontrol.com/austintx) Reviews from local customers Staff quotes or interviews Images featuring places or things local visitors will recognize or that will resonate with them Videos featuring local places or things or illustrating unique elements of how you serve the area Maps showing the service area Local contact information Dynamic content such as reviews or MLS feeds, if available You can’t always include all these elements, and you may have other pieces you want on your pages, but a healthy mix that makes sense for your business ensures better performance on your city page. www.crowdcontent.com 13 What Makes a Great City Page? 9 More Characteristics of Strong City Pages, Along with Tips from the Experts Still not sure what makes a city page stand out from the pack? Check out these nine common characteristics of high-performing city pages, along with some tips from people who are getting the job done right in local SEO. 1. Great city pages contain quality content Keith Swiderski, Director of Digital Customer Experience with the Avis Budget Group, makes sure the brand has city pages for almost every city in North America. He concentrates on around 300 of those pages that are high priority by creating rich content and making frequent updates. Swiderski says, “Your page needs words if you’re going to rank. It doesn’t matter how structurally perfect it is.” He says it might sound like common sense, but he’s worked with website owners before who want to know why they aren’t ranking only to discover they don’t have much in the way of content. A good city page has to have relevant content about the city. It’s not just about putting in a bunch of keywords with some text around it. You actually have to write some relevant content, and you have to keep that content fresh. Keith Swiderski, Director of Digital Customer Experience, Avis Budget Group It’s not enough to just create the pages and forget them, either. Swiderski notes that a regular cycle of creating fresh, relevant content is critical. “That’s the goal. Once you finish, you start over. And often, by the time you start over, things have changed. Google’s changed their algorithm, people change the way they search, and you want to write different content anyway.” GreenPal co-founder Gene Caballero agrees on the importance of content: “Writing specific content for each city takes time but works really well.” So well, in fact, that GreenPal’s data shows that 40 percent of its traffic comes from those city pages. 2. Relevant city pages match your industry The content on your page should align with your industry as well as the intent of the visitor. If you’re providing reader-centric content that’s relevant to your products, services, keywords and location, that should happen organically, but you can use your industry to further inform your content choices. For example, an HVAC company doesn’t just have to talk about its line of services; it could tie city page content into the industry and location by including content about the area’s climate or common local building code challenges impacting HVAC installation or service. Aligning content with your industry is a great way to: • Enrich your content • Help you come up with ideas for unique content • Create more useful and relevant content • Position your brand as a leader in the niche www.crowdcontent.com 14 What Makes a Great City Page? And all those things boost user experience, which leads to better interaction metrics and Google rankings. Check out the list below for some overarching content topics that work for a variety of industries to see how you can come up with a number of topics to bolster your city pages. Example Topics For City Pages By Industry Real estate: schools, climate, crime rates, amenities (shopping, dining, parks, libraries, attractions), cost of living, housing costs and market Rehab: type of care offered, costs, health insurance, local policies, climate, local amenities, rehab statistics, types of addictions, overlapping concerns such as mental health Plumbing: DIY options for minor problems, common plumbing problems, plumbing emergencies, eco-friendly, saving on water bill, safe/clean water Pest Control: pests common to the area, dangers, prevention, removal, eco-friendly treatments, safe for pets/children, products and services offered Lawn Care: services offered, climate, tips for caring for lawns, types of flowers/trees/plants, options for lawns, offseason services, post-storm cleanup Dental: types of services offered, dental hygiene tips, products, insurance Travel: packages, how to save money, best vacation destinations, travel insurance, attractions HVAC: climate, building code, local challenges or requirements, troubleshooting, repairs versus replacements, saving money on utilities, maintenance www.crowdcontent.com 15 What Makes a Great City Page? 3. High-performing city pages have a strong CTA Before you can write a high-performing call-to-action that kicks the reader into gear to make contact, sign up for your mailing list or purchase a product or service, you have to know what you want them to do. Your CTA also has to be relevant to the location people are searching in. Even if you have a general contact form, be sure you’re clear that the inquiry is based on their location. Gene from GreenPal points out that it isn’t always enough to tailor your pages by city. “In addition to creating landing pages for large metros like Atlanta, we also create them for Marietta, Alpharetta, Decatur . . .“ (suburbs and smaller towns just outside of Atlanta). That gets you more keyword coverage in the search engines for these locations, and it also helps match the page to the user’s intent. The call to action should follow through on that intent, providing assurance to the reader that they are in the right place and taking action that will align them with a local product or service. GreenPal says creating pages for sublocations in metro areas has improved business 10 percent, so it’s worth taking time to get the page — and the CTA — correct. And whatever you do, don’t leave the CTA out. You did a ton of work to create a city page that ranks well and drives traffic; don’t drop the ball once visitors arrive on the site. Your Green Pal’s CTA mentions the geo they’re targeting with the city page. www.crowdcontent.com 16 What Makes a Great City Page? 4. Value-adding city pages are part of site navigation City pages should be standalone pages for visitors from the targeted location, and they should also be part of your overall site’s navigation. That means if you have a “locations” or “where do we operate” page, you might include the city page links there. Budget.com’s locations page lets visitors browse by state, and then city, to find information unique to their region. Alternatively, you might use a zip code search function to let users find the page for their area directly on your site. You might also consider a more visual approach and let users select their location on a map. In short: Users need to be able to get to your city page from elsewhere on your site, and they need to get to other pages on your site from your city page — and the navigation should be fairly easy No city page should ever live outside of your site’s navigation. Once on your city pages, visitors should find it obvious what steps to take next. If your page isn’t integrated properly into your site, then you can lose the visitor even if they’re interested in what you have to offer. That’s because it’s not always as easy as clicking a single CTA link to get the job done. Swiderski uses the Avis example to illustrate this concept. Within an individual city, Avis may have multiple locations, and user intent to rent a car is not always the same. “When someone searches for a city,” he says, “we don’t know what their actual intent is. Do they want to fly into that city? Or do they need to rent a car because their car is in the shop?” We want to make sure our city pages are ranked as high as they can and have relevant information as well as lists of all locations, so the customer can figure out where to go from there Keith Swiderski, Director of Digital Customer Experience, Avis Budget Group www.crowdcontent.com 17 What Makes a Great City Page? And that’s the type of functionality every city page should have: Pull the local search user in, and then provide them with the right tools they need to make and act on a decision. 5. City pages that show up in search engines are SEO-friendly SEO-friendly pages take both keyword research and user intent into account. To do that, you have to optimize your pages for relevant searcher intent in the area by understanding how keywords and intents go together. Perform keyword research Begin by conducting some keyword research to find out how people are searching for your niche, services and products within the local area. A number of keyword research tools let you find keywords for each city page. Here are a few we’ve found particularly useful. • SEM Rush’s Keyword Magic • Moz’s Keyword Explorer • LSIGraph.com • Google’s Keyword Planner • SEO Powersuite You can read more about keyword strategies for local marketing in this article about LSI keywords. Most experts recommend doing keyword research on your topics, not for each city. “You get down to a pretty low level of volume if you get too granular,” says Swiderski. Instead, follow a formulaic approach that links the overall keywords, the intent behind them and the location, as we describe below. Understand the intent behind keywords Keywords help you understand exactly what content should be included on each page. Sales data drives cities that we focus on. Keywords will drive what we should focus on ranking for in that city. . . . We’ll have the keyword for all local searches, and then we’ll have the cities, and we’ll marry the two together. Same basket of maybe 30 keywords for each city. Only difference being the name of the city. Keith Swiderski, Director of Digital Customer Experience, Avis Budget Group Once you have a list of keywords, you can use them and what you know about your market to understand the intent behind the searches — why people are searching for those things and coming to your page. Likely you’ll find a few major intent groups under which multiple keywords can be sorted. www.crowdcontent.com 18 What Makes a Great City Page? For example, common intents behind searches that bring people to an HVAC page might include: • The need for an emergency repair (keywords might include repair AC, broken air conditioner, etc.) • Research on replacing an older unit (keywords might include replacing AC, new HVAC unit, HVAC installation, etc.) • Desire for routine maintenance (keywords might include HVAC maintenance or AC service) The intent can inform the content on your city pages. Ideally, your city pages should cover all of the semantically related intents and serve as pillar pages that satisfy all searcher intent for that location. You can break the intents up into sections on the page, for example, and provide instructions or a CTA for each in your city page template (more on templates in the section on creating city pages at scale). Note: While your pillar page should cover your semantically related intents, you may also choose to create more detailed pages for each intent group. Create keyword formulae Once you have intent groups and matching keyword lists, you’ll need to update the keyword terms to fit each city so you can integrate them into content. Begin by choosing one keyword from each intent group to act as its primary keyword. If you have three intent groups, you’ll have three primary keywords for your page. Other keywords from your research can be peppered into your city pages in a natural fashion, but remember not to keyword stuff. You don’t have to use every keyword you find in research in every page. If you’re writing to solve intent, Google will pick up on that and associate semantically related keywords with your content. Use your primary keywords to create a formula that makes it easy to customize them for each city; you can provide this formula to content creators so your city pages all follow the same keywording rules. Typically, you’ll want to include the keyword, a grammatically correct stop word and the target location. Let’s look at some examples. Local Keyword Formulae Examples The formulae: Keyword + “in” + Target Location gets you key phrases such as · Emergency plumber in Dallas · HVAC repair in Seattle · Real estate agent in Orlando The formulae: Keyword + “near” + Target Location gets you key phrases such as · Pest control services near Denver · Pizza delivery near Roanoke · Alcohol rehab near Kansas City Why put all the effort into creating local keywords? Because, a huge amount of traffic has local intent. www.crowdcontent.com 19 What Makes a Great City Page? I’d say that if you’re a local business or targeting local customers, using specific local keywords is an essential part of your keyword strategy. It’s hard to give an estimate of how much traffic actually gets attracted by local keywords, but if you just think about the fact that almost half of all searches on the web have a local intent, you get the drill. As in, if we say ‘bicycle repair’ has a 720 search volume in Florida, 360 searches would have a local intent. Meri Chobanyan, Content Producer, SEMrush Where do the keywords go? Choose one intent group to be your “primary intent” — the intent that is most important in terms of traffic potential, conversion or revenue. Often, it’s an intent that overarches all others. You’ll give it the highest priority among SEO elements, which means the primary keyword for that intent should go: • In the page title • In the meta description • In the H1 header • In the first paragraph or section • In at least one H2 header • In the first image name and alt text For all other intent groups, most companies will want to create a section that answers that searcher intent specifically. The primary keyword for that intent group should go: • In subheadings for that section • In the first paragraph of that section • In the page meta description if possible • In any images (name and alt text) associated with that section User Experience Trumps Keyword Placement While you do want to place your keywords in the places identified above, be sure to not force them in if it results in content that sounds unnatural or obtrusive to your visitors. If you need to, use or change stop words, add punctuation or use a synonym to ensure your copy reads well. Remember, Google is getting really good at identifying pages based on topical relevance. Although your pages should be guided by your keyword research, you should focus more on ensuring the copy captures the intent communicated in those keywords. Consider the example keyword from above - “Pest control services near Denver”. You could likely include this keyword in many places we listed above, but if you included it everywhere, it might stick out. Consider using variants like: • Pest control services in Denver • Denver pest control services • Pest control services, near Denver www.crowdcontent.com 20 What Makes a Great City Page? 6. Well-targeted city pages link to local sources One way to make your site seem hyperlocal and improve value for visitors while potentially boosting your own page rank is to link to local sources. Choose high-quality, authoritative sources that actually provide some value to the user. Examples might include: • Chamber of Commerce sites • Community boards • Municipal websites • High-ranking local organization pages You might also link to high-quality pages for local attractions, shopping or dining if those links fit well with your content and intent and don’t create competition for your services. Some evidence exists that linking to sites with high authority can improve your rankings on its own, but the increased value to the user and the fact that you’re aligning yourself with locally relevant, authoritative content is likely to improve your page performance and interaction rates. And that drives more conversions and improves your search rankings thanks to RankBrain. For some best practices on linking, check out Search Engine Watch’s guide. 7. Robust city pages include neighborhoods and nearby towns Give some thought to how you’ll integrate neighborhoods and towns into your city pages. Some companies integrate related keywords into the overall content, while others treat the smaller locations as topic cluster items. You might even create a pillar page for the city and link out to smaller, more in-depth pages for the towns or neighborhoods. Remember to keep your needs and searcher intents in mind. If you’re serving hundreds of metro areas, creating neighborhood pages for each may not be possible or something you can do at scale. In this case, you might be best served by including neighborhood info on your city page. If you’re a company serving a few large cities in one state, it may be more feasible to create neighborhood pages. By including information about neighborhoods in your city page’s content, you’ll also benefit with search rankings since names of neighborhoods are often semantically related keywords. This naturally makes your page more relevant in the the search engine’s eyes and can boost your rankings. 8. The best city pages have fresh content Google rewards pages that regularly update their content via the Freshness Algorithm, so city pages are never a one-and-done proposition. While you can’t always regularly update content across all your pages, consider keeping your most important digital assets as fresh as possible as Avis does. The company has a list of 300 pages they’re constantly refreshing in sequence, and doing the same might work well for your business. www.crowdcontent.com 21 What Makes a Great City Page? There are other factors that can influence how you schedule your content refreshes: 1. Seasonality - if your pages need seasonal information, be sure to add it regularly 2. Industry changes - if something significant changes in your industry, you might need to update all of your pages 3. City changes - if something changes how you operate in a city, you’ll want to update your pages 4. SEO performance - if you’re finding that several pages aren’t quite ranking as high as you’d like, consider prioritizing refreshing and improving their content Integrating dynamic content that is updated automatically or via programmed applications will keep your city pages fresh. Things like data feeds (MLS listings, new job postings, etc.) and user-generated reviews and content can also work wonders. Reviews help your pages stay fresh. GreenPal leverages its customers to ensure fresh content. “One of the unique things my co-founder and I do is Reviews Saturdays. We spend an hour each Saturday reaching out to customers that week who we know had a good experience and ask them if they would leave a review for us on one of the major review sites.” While GreenPal concentrates on actual review sites (such as Yelp or Google), you can also ask for content for your own pages. There are many tools available that will let you automate review gathering, which you can then post to specific city pages. GreenPal offers small tokens of appreciation for customer feedback, such as company T-shirts or lowcost pet items. This is a great tactic to encourage users to leave reviews for you, which also serve as fresh content. In addition to helping your pages stay fresh, reviews also build trust and help your conversion rate. 9. City pages need to be long enough to get the job done You might get a lot of advice about exactly how many words city pages should be, but as with most things in the world of digital marketing, the rules about length aren’t set in stone. Yes, Google does favor longer pages, but in most cases, you need to consider other factors too. • What is the competitive landscape of city pages in your niche? How long are your competitor’s city pages? • Have you solved or written about all intents you discovered in your keyword research process? You want semantically complete content, and if you discover six major intents, your content may be longer than if you discover three intents. • Does the length contribute to a positive user experience? Does the content flow with an enjoyable reading view, or is it a wall of text? Lean toward providing a better user experience instead of squeezing more text in for its own sake or meeting a word count target. Google looks at user interaction data, and poor interaction can hurt you more than having a shorter page does. As with any online marketing, testing is critical to success. Consider running tests with shorter and longer pages to see which perform better (both in terms of SEO and conversions) to help you understand what your city page word counts should look like. www.crowdcontent.com 22 What Makes a Bad City Page? You know what makes a good city page, but where can you go wrong? Common SEO and content mistakes hurt user experience and page performance, potentially pushing your page down in the rankings and undoing all the hard work you put into your local marketing. Here’s a checklist of commonly seen things you don’t want to do when creating city pages — to scale or otherwise: • Create thin pages that act as doorways, simply directing visitors to other content on your site • Create pages for a location where you don’t offer services • Create pages without including content that enhances user experience and makes your services relevant locally • Publish city pages without local information • Stuff the pages with too many keywords • Create too many city pages (in most cases, you don’t need one for every tiny town or neighborhood serviced) • Publish a mobile version of your city pages without links or proper navigation • Use P.O. boxes or other address trickery to make it look like you have an office in an area where you don’t www.crowdcontent.com 23 How Can You Create Great City Pages at Scale? Many businesses serve a few local markets, and creating a couple of great city pages for a handful of locations may not be a tall task. But start scaling up to dozens or even hundreds of locations, and things get more difficult. We’ve seen all of the scenarios, and as the number of pages clients need to create goes up, so does the challenge of generating truly useful city pages. We’ve reached back into our years of experience creating thousands of city pages to provide you with these useful tips and step-by-step process guide to help you create local marketing at scale. Develop a repeatable process First, determine what cities and areas you’ll cover. Only select areas where you actually provide service, and avoid the temptation to hit every city or tiny town. Instead, choose areas that offer the best potential for your business. Remember that there’s not a rule here: Avis does city pages different from GreenPal, for example, but both are seeing success because they pay attention to their market, analyze performance of pages and make changes accordingly. Once you know what areas you need to cover, you know your scale and can begin creating a repeatable process so multiple people can create city page content for you at the same time. If only one person understands how to write your city pages, you won’t be able to scale up quickly. Use spreadsheets and templates to manage the process. If you have a list of cities and have done your keyword research, then you know what keywords you need to rank for and what intent you want to answer with your pages. Begin by making a template that every city page will follow. Each page has to have unique content, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be formatted along the same guidelines. City Page Outline Example Page title including primary keyword 1 Meta description including primary keyword 1 (and any other primary keywords that can be naturally worked in) H1 including primary keyword 1 and focusing on primary intent Short intro Content focusing on primary intent H2 header focusing on 2nd intent, followed by relevant content Include appropriate keywords Include at least one local link H2 header focusing on 3rd intent, followed by relevant content Include appropriate keywords Include at least one local link www.crowdcontent.com 24 How Can You Create Great City Pages at Scale? While every city page will follow the same format — so all intents are in order and pages may be formatted similarly — the written content may be very different. Some other things to include in your template instructions are: • Word counts for each element or section • Topics to cover • Topics to avoid • Suggestions for links or types of links • Any other writing instructions you may want to provide Here’s an example of a basic template that an HVAC company might use for city pages. Typically, the most important thing to customize is the written text: the meta description, URL and body content. Depending on the size of the project, you may want to organize everything in a spreadsheet, with each city occupying one row and each element you plan on customizing in its own column. The benefit of a spreadsheet is that you can track all your work throughout the city pages project in one location. Identify Resources and Create a Schedule Creating city pages requires more work than just writing, and understanding the time involved in your project helps you understand what resources you’ll need and what schedule might be realistic given the resources you choose to work with. www.crowdcontent.com 25 How Can You Create Great City Pages at Scale? Some elements of city page work include : • Research • Writing • SEO • Design • Development work • Publishing If you already have a design and development team in place, they won’t have to design the page repeatedly, because you’ll likely work with a single template and drop the unique copy in each page. But you’ll need to conduct keyword research, put instructions together for the content and then have all the pages written and edited. Since you want high-quality pages with relevant links and local information, the content creators will also have to do at least a little research for each page. Let’s look at a hypothetical to understand how you might determine resource needs. Time Required to Write Content For a City Page Research: 15 minutes per page Writing: 45 minutes for 450-500-word page Editing: 20 minutes for a 450-500-word page That’s a total of 80 minutes per page just to get the content created — and those numbers are assuming you have people handling the content who know what they are doing and are fairly quick. Now, imagine that you need 20 city pages. That’s 26 hours’ worth of work. Conceivably, you could have this work performed by one or a couple of people on your team; in conjunction with their other duties, they may take a few weeks to get everything done. But what if you need 500 pages? That’s 667 hours’ worth of work or one full-time staffer working on the project — and only the project — for 16 weeks. And even a good writer probably won’t deliver the best copy if they’ve written hundreds of similar pages; it’s simply too easy for someone to burn out on the topic or begin to repeat themselves. www.crowdcontent.com 26 How Can You Create Great City Pages at Scale? Plus, inputting city pages a few at a time through the development step could cost you more dev time and expense. It’s often easier to handle programmatic bits of a project in larger batches. For most companies, that’s an untenable use of staff time and is usually too long of a turnaround time for your marketing plans. You could throw staffers at the problem, but you’d need more than four full-time employees working nonstop on the project for four weeks to get it done. If your internal resources don’t align with your schedule needs — or you want to create content at large scales — outsourcing may be the better option. Understand your options for outsourcing You can outsource or crowdsource almost any task these days, but we’re going to look specifically at outsourcing the research, writing and SEO components of a city page project. There are countless freelancers and vendors you can work with on this type of project (too many to go into), but these are some considerations you’ll want to keep in mind when evaluating vendors: • Experience. First, consider the experience of the vendor itself. Has the company completed large city page projects before? While many companies offer web content creation services, not all of them understand the specific requirements related to local marketing — and few web content companies are well-versed in projects of scale. Second, consider the experience of the workforce that will be used. Does the vendor source high-quality writers and editors who know the ropes of web marketing, or will copy be created by people with little experience or grasp of grammar? • Cost. The total cost of content projects surprises a lot of people, even after they agree to a per word or per piece price they’re actually happy with. The reason is that we don’t always consider the true scale of a project, so make sure you run the numbers and understand the true cost when you’re deciding on a vendor. A city page project with 300 pages at 600 words each is 180,000 words total. But don’t just count the cost of the words and choose the provider with the best rate. Consider the potential expense if the cut-rate provider doesn’t provide quality content and you have to spend your time and resources fixing it. • Capacity. Not every outsource option is a good fit for large-scale projects. A single freelancer might be able to provide high-quality, affordable content if all you need is one post a week. If you need 500 pages, remember, it would take one person at least 16 weeks, and the content may not end up being all high-quality. Look for a vendor that has access to hundreds of qualified writers who can turn your job around quickly. • Project Management. When you outsource, you can choose to do as much or as little of the work yourself as you want, and that includes managing the workflow of your project. Experienced project managers can help you turn raw information into viable templates and instructions for writers. They can also babysit the content as it flows through the process from research and keywording to writing, editing and delivery. The right project management team can deliver publish-ready content, so you don’t even have to look at all of the pages yourself. At Crowd Content we have hundreds of experienced city page writers available at varied price points, and we can generally scale up to match any project’s needs. We also offer project management, which includes building a team of writers, assigning work, editing and QA and delivering content back in the client’s chosen format. www.crowdcontent.com 27 How Can You Create Great City Pages at Scale? 10 steps to successfully scale city page content creation If you make the decision to outsource a large number of city pages, you’ll need to follow some steps to help ensure success. Here are 10 steps we recommend following when you’re working on dozens or hundreds of city pages with freelance teams. 1. Finalize a template for your city pages and identify the elements that need to be customized. Create instructions for each customizable element. For example, you might tell writers that body content requires three paragraphs of around 50 words each and they must reference the provided data and neighborhood info. 2. Prepare a spreadsheet that lists all locations, customizable fields and links to any data or resources you can provide workers. 3. Create a style guide and creative brief that all writers must follow, or work with a project management team if you’re outsourcing to a company that provides these services. 4. Send your spreadsheet to whoever you’ve outsourced the content to. 5. Have the outsource team create a test batch of city pages that you’ll review (at Crowd Content, we call this the calibration round). Typically, 5-10 pages should suffice. Review the pages you get back and pass on your feedback to the content provider. You (or the project management team) should also update the style guide and brief with any findings. 6. Once you’re happy, have the provider write the rest of your pages on an agreed-upon schedule. 7. As the content comes back, ensure you’re doing a quality review on it. If it needs revisions, be sure they’re made quickly. If you find significant areas that require revisions, you might want to update the style guide and brief and touch base with your provider. Continued calibration helps your content get better. 8. Specify what format you want the content delivered in. Word docs and text files are common formats, but they can become tedious to work with when creating large numbers of pages. Many clients want their existing spreadsheets populated with the new content, and they use the completed spreadsheet to create their pages. 9. Take your completed content to your development team and have them create your pages for you. 10. Manually review (and update as needed) the city pages once they’re live. If you follow this process, you can create large numbers of quality city pages in relatively short amounts of time. www.crowdcontent.com 28 What Data Can You Include to Make City Page Content Stand Out? You can’t always find a writer personally familiar with the city where you need content. That means your content creation team has to do a fair amount of research to ensure the finished product reads as if someone from the area wrote it — which is what you want. We’ve listed below some data sources we’ve found to be useful in creating locally relevant content. Data Sources For City Page Content TripAdvisor Read information and reviews about cities, neighborhoods, attractions, shopping and dining Yelp Check out what real residents are saying about services and establishments around the area City Hall and Chamber of Commerce Sites Area Vibes Livability Discover local laws or codes of importance and general information about the area See housing, education, climate, amenity, cost of living and other information down to neighborhood levels Check livability scores for cities and find statistics and other information Zillow Get information about housing, schools, amenities and other characteristics of an area Trulia Much like Zillow Nerd Wallet’s Cost of Living Calculator Check the cost of living of any area and compare it with other cities Bureau of Labor and Statistics Find out about the job market and the average wages for specific positions in each location Census Data Delve into all types of demographic data for an area City Data Get access to census-type demographic data in a potentially easier-toaccess format Local News Local online newspapers or magazines: Reference local stories or trending topics in your pages Local TV Local television news sites: Find out more about the location you’re writing about and what may be important to the people there via local news stories www.crowdcontent.com 29 Conclusion Wrapping It All Up The bottom line is that if you sell products or provide services to specific cities and you want potential customers to find you in Google, then you should have a city pages project planned for the near future. When done right, you’ll realize awesome returns — but don’t forget that doing them wrong can create problems. If you’re trying to create city pages at scale for hundreds of locations, you’ll need experienced professionals to get the job done — and that’s where we come in. Contact us to learn how you can leverage our extensive experience with high-volume city page projects to get your brand seen by the local consumers you’re targeting. www.crowdcontent.com 30 Examples of Awesome High-Performing City Pages Want to get a good look at high-performing city pages before you start creating yours? Here are some of our favorites. www.handy.com/services/home-cleaning/new-york This is a user-friendly page packed with tons of easy-to-access information. It includes a great variety of information including information on Handy’s cleaning services in NYC, local reviews, examples of successful cleaning projects, and some descriptive text that relates Handy to NYC. Plus, note that the url tells you exactly what you’ll find here: home cleaning in New York city. This page alone ranks for 328 keywords in Google’s US index, with an estimated monthly traffic value of $11,400. www.crowdcontent.com 31 www.youmoveme.com/us/locations/san-diego-movers This page isn’t long or complex, but it provides value to the user and it ranks for a whopping 129 keywords. That’s some stellar SEO work. www.crowdcontent.com 32 www.rehabs.com/local/chicago-il Here’s another SEO powerhouse. As of the writing of this book, it was the top-ranking page for “rehabs Chicago,” but it doesn’t stop there. It ranks for 80 keywords — with 22 of those getting first page placement. www.crowdcontent.com 33 www.avis.com/en/locations/us/il/chicago/ord Avis’ Chicago city page does a great job conveying information customers will need to find the location, as well as answering common questions and considerations unique to renting cars in Chicago. They’ve done such a good job that this page ranks for 878 keywords in Google’s US index, and enjoys monthly traffic valued at $7,700. www.crowdcontent.com 34 www.crowdcontent.com www.crowdcontent.com 35
