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The-Complete-Guide-to-Creating-City-Pages-For-SEO

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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www.crowdcontent.com
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