Ok. looking for some expert feedback here. I have a client who is always asking for new ideas and ways to convert more customers (who isn’t right?)
So what is unique about this instance is that this is a service based organization that does business in a bunch of towns in our state, so for starters we built an easy way to plugin lots of city and state names and have a template do all the heavy lifting to generate a unique page URL with some boiler plate content that then fills in the city and state name for each of the towns they specify on their sites back end…you can see what I mean here:
Not a bad start, so to take this to the next level what we plan on doing is taking each of their service lines and using that as the driver for the service area listing. This means that there will be roughly 12 separate service areas that have overview pages like above with singular pages like above but instead of just service area it will be “water-heater-service” and then “allenstown” so we end up with something like this:
If we do this all the way and create all the service line area divisions we will be basically adding roughly 1000 new pages to the website that will all be location and service line specific with forms to generate leads.
Will this lead to the positive impact we are looking to create in terms of reach for our clients website or are we going to simply create a lot of content that isn’t unique enough on it’s own so it’s all going to be ignored by search engines?
I am of the mind set that this is a sound strategy that is going to produce lots of opportunities for people to find our client’s site when they are searching for common terms like “Auburn NH Water Heater Service” because the majority of the needs of my clients target audience all primarily revolve around location and service type and the few single service pages we have now just don’t seem to be cutting it.
So thoughts and comments about if our strategy is sound here or not. Looking forward to hearing some feedback on this.
I think your strategy is ok, really going to help you in local search optimization. I want to emphasize that local search is going to be a great key for you to drive more traffic to your site. But apart from that you should work on a generic keyword that will help you to better you ranking in Google search not only local but all.
Like you have to put your effort to optimize both of the keywords separately:
For Local Search Optimization: water heater service in Allens town
And for broader aspect: water heater service
So you have to spend more time and effort to make your strategy work and drive some traffic for you.
Thanks for the reply. We definitely have been working hard on expanding on the content that touches on the more general parts of the market in terms of the products offerings for my client. That is what we have been using the blog posts for mostly, to create more information that points, links and optimizes for the varions product lines they have without building a bunch of duplicate service type pages that would just get stale fast and not have much long lasting impact for the site. Make sense?
The strategy in itself is “correct”, but at the same time, it has an inherent risk. It sounds pretty artificial in the sense that the content is created for no other reason than seo, and sounds essentially as nothing more than spinning. If Google decide it is spin ( and there is no arbitration ), you could be looking at a “standard” 50 place penalty for possibly your entire site.
Personally, I ditched the idea of spinning before Penguin.
I think this approach would have worked better a couple of years ago. Google is taking strides to not reward low quality content like this. It make work for awhile, particularly if there is little competition, but long term it is a poor approach. As mentioned by benbob the content does not provide valuable unique content to users, but is created solely with a focus on SEO, and it is those types of pages that Google is attacking these days.
I think your strategy of creating pages to target the different services and service areas is right, but I believe for it to be a truly successful long term approach the content on each page needs to be unique and useful for each user, not boilerplate text with a few words switched out on each page.
This is pretty much what Google have been trying to kill, one of the other designers here did some research around it recently, creating websites in different business sectors with different kind of automated copy based around geo-targeting SEO. With some websites it worked extremely well for the SEO, mostly those in fairly uncompetitive keyword areas, in other websites it really dumped them down the Google listings. Webmast Tools has a useful feature where you can see how many pages on your website have been ignored by Google, it doesn’t tell you which ones but if you have a thousand pages and several hundred are getting ignored it’s fair to assume Google doesn’t like what you’re doing. SEO is about far more than just on-page content, even in highly competitive keyword arenas you can find 6 page websites in the top places; they are driven by great keyword density and lots of quality backlinks.
I agree with lots of people.Your strategy is awesome.keep it up .Local search is it’s own unique entity as no one can control everything that appears on their local listing, but business owners can take steps to ensure that what gets listed is a good representation of the company.