Increasing Site Traffic By Targeting Geographic Areas

A number of my clients provide services either nationally of locally. Often their most popular keyphrases are those that include a geographic identifier such as “Cambridge SEO Services“.

To enable targeting of each geographic area be it a town or city with any number of service offerings, I am trialling system that dynamically generates a landing page for each area and service, using a database of UK locations matched with service templates.

I have seen similar, more basic, systems in place else where, it will be interesting to see how this fairs, and I will be monitoring it closely. If it goes well the the beauty of the system is that it is quite easy to transpose to different clients.

At the moment I have only added one county Cambridgeshire, under SEO Services.

Any thoughts?

Marc Levy
I have had great success targeting many small locations – all part of the long-tail. Plus many internet users still prefer to take the services of someone local – even if they never meet face to face with you.
I guess it’s a trust thing, people seem to relate more to people from their locale.
David Hopkins
You want to make sure you don’t target too many geographic areas at the same time.I once worked on a site that had over 1,000 pages targetted towards geographic terms. Not only were all of the pages sandboxed, the entire URL wouldn’t rank for anything other than its own name. After removing all the geographically targetted pages, the site shot up to page 5 – 7 of Google and after a bit of work happily resides above the fold for its main keyword on Google.
If you are targetting lots of loactions try and use different text or a custom paragraph builder.

Gary
Hi David,
Firstly welcome to Phoenixrealm.OK, I released about 1,800 pages, being about 450 areas each with and index and 3 service area pages. You are right they are all sandboxed at the moment, even a link from Phoenix did not help them. Will monitor things further before I release any more pages.
I had a good look around your web design site, very impressive.
I was particularly interested in the farm shop site.
I like the menu system can you share what technique you are using? Also the shopping cart system is different to most off the shelf systems, can you share any details there as well?
Cheers,
Gary.

David Hopkins
If you reduce the ammount of geographically targetted pages to 50 you might be able to get some rankings, but it may be worth changing the URL if the pages are sandboxed. However, you might find that their rankigns slip a bit after a while as Google notices something is up. Alternativly you could write lots of paragraphs and pull them out randomly on each page. I can’t really see this causing any problems as it would require lots of reg. ex. to identify it. Personally I am not a fan of geographically targeted pages, I think its more important to show people you are reputable with content targeted for people rather than search engines.
Thanks for your kind comments. Although MD still does client web design, I no longer work on clients sites . The menu is a custom JS solutions I threw together using Mootools and the sound is provided by a flash to JavaScript API called Soundmanger2. Depending on the structure of the site, it can be added to a site in abotu 10 minutes. To create something similar would take a couple of hours.
The shopping cart system is also another Mootools script I put together. I also used it on the more advanced JS engine on the PureDevilment website. Its not a good idea to give clients JavaScript unless they are specifically paying for it I have learnt my lesson
christelle
it’s true we should optimize for geographic locations, but how to optimize when there are very low searches for a specific country? For instance in cases where you have only 10 or even just 1 search for ‘countryname shopping’?
christelle
but what to do when there are very so searches (eg only 1-10) for country related terms? For instance 1-10 searches for countryname shopping?