Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Rick Molenaar on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 09/12/2013).

I want to win for queries like "keyword + city", What should I do?

In our industry there`s quite a lot search volume in queries like "keyword + city". As a e-commerce website and with delivery in the whole country, we want a piece of that traffic.

We can for example create high quality landingpages for each city with quality content about both the keyword and city and nice images about the city. We can add some USP`s like cheaper than all local stores in "city" and guaranteed fastest delivery in "city".

How will Google see this? We made a very relevant page for the query. However, we aren`t a local business and people are likely to be looking for that with the query. What do you guys think?
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YOUR ANSWERS

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

  • Justin Y: I think conquest pages are good for targeting local traffic/local modified queries if you're targeting cities in your own state. I don't think they'll be very affective outside of your surrounding area though when you consider users that are logged into gmail or ones that are being detected by either their IP or ISP. Google probably isn't the concern, but local results and personalization is.

    I suspect you'll have to put in a lot of effort and drive traffic to these pages to gain any traction too.
  • Ranu Jain: Hi Rick,

    I completely agree with Justin here.

    If you have a product page say "XYZ Newyork", most likely the people in Newyork will look for that page and it makes sense too. ;

    Why do you want to rank these geographic location based pages rank globally? It will take lot of efforts with hardly any result. ;

    Even if it is not a local business, optimize those pages based on their locations. For eg: try to get relevant links from Newyork based directories or blogs. This will help in ranking faster. ;
  • Rick Molenaar: Thanks +Ranu Jain +Justin Y

    I might have been a bit unclear but I meant to rank in both global "keyword + city" query results and local results.

    +Justin Y Our main market is in the Netherlands. Do you still think that it's best to target only one state in such a small country?
  • Justin Y: Generally I prefer a proximity of 50mi but the distance can vary depending the state, city, country etc. There are situations where the closest city is 20mi+ away, then you'd have to extend your reach beyond 50mi etc to target a few more cities where you know customers will drive to find a better deal.

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 09/12/2013).

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