City Pages as Local Marketing

Using City Pages to Increase Local Search Results

The biggest search engine trend of the past few years (and one of the biggest web trends in general) is the move towards more localized searches. This presents a challenge for many businesses as they are typically marketed for the specific city that they are in and not, for example, for other cities surrounding the business. For businesses in major cities, the predicament is how to market their website for the suburbs. For those businesses outside major city centers, the question becomes one of marketing in the surrounding area. As a worthwhile strategy, “City Pages” are ideal for those businesses who want to market their website or business in a number of cities.

Take a look at any search query you perform with Google and in the left margin you will see your location. Google determines this based upon your IP address, which can often change depending upon your provider. Recent changes in Google’s search algorithms have placed a greater value on this location in determining the search results for any query. The concept is fairly simple to understand: rather than receiving results for a search for a “dentist” from all across the country, Google will use your IP location in order to provide a list of “local” results. For the end-user, this is great and replaces a lot of the weeding a user had to perform in order to get to a quality, relevant result.

For the business owner, however, it can be quite frustrating because you could hypothetically have a high search ranking for one town and in the next city over be nowhere on the search results. One way to combat this is to develop city pages for specific geographic locations you want to market. Understanding city pages though requires a little understanding of what actually gets indexed on your website.

A handful of code snippets have a great deal of value in terms of indexing your site. A webpage’s title, header (H1 & H2), and content all have top billing. Typically and even if a site has good SEO, most businesses only market to the main city that they are located within. What this means, then, is that specific city develops a strong relevancy to the business and website. But what about the surrounding cities? This is where the concept of city pages comes in handy.

With city pages, a developer creates custom pages on the backend which are suited towards an individual city and there is ultimately no limit to the number one can create. What changes from page to page is the specific city listed and the content, so as to avoid the nasty problem of duplicate content. When in place, city pages typically have a high success rate and drive your search engine visibility through the roof for a particular region.

City pages can be great supplements to a general marketing campaign. Be advised, however, that if they are not implemented properly than you do run the risk of being penalized for duplicate content.