Creating multiple pages for many different locations/cities

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Michael Martinez: The search engines only want to promote local pages for businesses that have a physical presence in those communities. They have implied that it is a bit misleading to append a community name to an otherwise generic landing page. So, to address your specific question, I would say it makes sense to create a general purpose "Here is what we do) site and a single "local" page that explains where you are located and calls out some of the local businesses (by trade or industry if not by name) that you have helped. In other words, use the local page to highlight how you have helped the local community. Leave all the generic "this is what we do" detail for those more general purpose pages that people can find from everywhere else.
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  David Gaskin: Thanks Michael Martinez. That helps to clarify things. It sounds like you`re suggesting being more `organic` about how I include my locality on my website. I will experiment with this. I`m drawn to the possibility of receiving national exposure (in favor of a locale-specific site). I`ll be interested to see how ramping up my citation game and adding some local modifiers to my website will affect my local SEO. Thanks.
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  Michael Martinez: You still need to do all the local SEO stuff. I am just suggesting how you can have two pages.
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  Schieler Dayne: To address your question, here is what my company does.We create a city hallway page for the business to create an index, we then stick that page under locations and link out to content that we have written for every city under the hallway page from locations. We have used this strategy with multibillion dollar companies and with local services who want their presence known in every city for certain topics or keyphrases. One company was a cell phone repair company that now accepts phone repairs from all over the country because of this approach.
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  Michael Martinez: Okay, if you`re doing this at scale then you need to create as much unique content for each local business listing as possible. Your clients need to be a Yelp or TripAdvisor or Zillow in their niche. Every page needs as much distinctive, useful, locally relevant content as possible. I`ve worked with companies that use the "link to internal generic resources" approach and I know that it can work well, but requires a lot of attention and tweaking. Not my cup of tea. I hate being tied to a database, but that`s a matter of individual preference, not some secret SEO knowledge.
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  Schieler Dayne: Michael Martinez - we only use Google maps and embed it into every article per city. We also do 100 spins per city with different long tail keyphrases as well.For the cell phone company I mentioned we did things like:iPhone 8 Repair in ChicagoiPhone 8 Battery Repair in ChicagoiPhone 8 Screen Repair in ChicagoWe used the same text roughly on every page, added google maps for the city that we created and embedded it.Worked very well and took a local company that was making 200-300k a year to a multibillion dollar repair and insurance company.Has worked on over 100 client sites in 2017-2018!
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  Michael Martinez: Schieler Dayne While I am sure your client was happy with the result, I think you`re moving beyond the scope of this group.
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  Schieler Dayne: Michael Martinez - oh? My apologies. I was just trying to answer the individuals question based on my personal experience with what I believe him to have been asking.
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  Michael Martinez: Schieler Dayne Content spinning does not exactly fall within the scope of this group.
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  Schieler Dayne: Michael Martinez - I could see that. It’s a pretty advanced practice and a Grey Hat area.
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  Michael Martinez: Schieler Dayne Well, let`s just leave it at that. Jim wants us to stay on focus. Thanks for the input.
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  Schieler Dayne: Michael Martinez - deal! Enjoy your weekend guys
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  David Gaskin: Hey thanks for your comment! I think I get what you`re saying. So basically you post links to locale-specific articles you`ve written (e.g: Chicago iPhone repair)?
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  Schieler Dayne: David Gaskin - for the sake of simplicity, yes and we use a location hallway page. As I discussed with Micheal though, any form of spun content is Grey Hat Technique so I would make sure all articles or content are 100% original 🙂