How to Target Multiple Cities Without Hurting Your SEO

You’ve seen it too many times.

Keywords targeting a particular city.

“Plumber in Vaxjo.”

“Blossom shop in Stockholm.”

“Best pizza in Vaxjo.”

Which makes you think: If you can rank for a keyword that target multiple cities, will that help your SEO?

Enter, local SEO.

We’ll investigate here how it can really hurt you and figure out how to do it right so it helps you instead.

Let’s dive in!

Why Is Local SEO Important?

If local SEO can potentially “hurt” you, why do it at all?

Here are two valid justifications.

Local SEO Attracts Foot Traffic

Envision going away for an inaccessible cousin’s wedding.

On the night before the big day, you’re in your hotel room, carving a giant cheese pizza.

You get your telephone and Google… what?

“Pizza?”

I don’t think so.

I bet you Google a location-specific keyword, like “best pizza in Louisville.”

When you get the results, you don’t say “Ah, incredible info,” and proceed to sleep.

You get your phone and order the pizza.

Or you get up, take a taxi, and dine out at that spectacular pizzeria.

And you’re not the only one doing this.

In fact, over 50% of local searches result in an actual store visit.

And you’re not the one out of many people who’s doing a local search, either.

Almost 46% of Google searches have local intent.

That is immense!

So, whenever you’re considering skipping local SEO, reconsider.

It could actually be your pass to getting that irregular out-on-vacation dude to check out your pizza place.

Local SEO Ranks You Higher on Google

We’re all well-educated on the SEO KPIs you should be tracking to rank on Google.

Two of these are:

Clicks to your site.

Keyword ranking increases.

With local SEO, you hit these two birds with one stone.

City Pages: Good or Bad for SEO?

In the past, in the dark ages of SEO, city pages were used to stuff in local keywords to increase higher rankings on Google.

For instance, you’d make a page and write content on flower delivery.

Then, you’d duplicate your content onto several different pages, every one with a different city in the keyword.

So, a page for “flower delivery in Louisville,” “flower delivery in Newark,” and “flower delivery in Shelbyville,” each with precisely the same content.

It didn’t take long for Google to see this spammy strategy.

When it revealed its Panda Update, it made sure to flag and penalize sites doing it.

So indeed, city pages can hurt your SEO and punish your site.

But not if you do them right.

Which brings us to…

Make Your Most Important City Pages Unique

If you need to drill down all the cities in a region, simply show them on the page – you don’t bother with an individual page for every city to rank in most cases.

As far as making the pages extraordinary, write unique content for every region or city.

Which implies, it’s up to you.

You can simply list all the cities you serve on one page.

Or you can go ahead and create individual pages for each city.

When you take this step, however, ensure the content on each page is remarkable.

And no, I don’t mean simply changing “hand-wrestling” to “arm-wrestling.”

You have to do extra research on your targeted location, then go ahead and write specific and helpful information for readers in the area.

For instance:

If you’re a handyman, talk about the issue of hard water in the area.

If you’re a florist, clarify how you grow your plants in the local atmosphere.

If you’re into real estate, talk about communities in the area.

We at CodeLedge, are Sweden’s best Digital Marketing & Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services provider. We are the experts at creating a successful Digital Marketing strategy and making a website fast and easy to load. Feel free to talk with us at hi@codeledge.net or get a quote from here.