Small Business SEO - Service Area Location Pages

Now that we have the minimum viable pages we need for our website, we can turn our attention to optimizing our service areas and our locations. It’s important to note that Google does a lot of localization, and tries to give users and searchers results that are relevant for what they are searching for near where they are.

In order to get your website to appear across a broader service area, we have to create relevance for those locations where our users are searching.

Just like we did with our important pages, the first thing we want to do is start a document and list out the cities we want to do service in sorted by priority. These are going to be the city-specific landing pages that we are going to create.

One way to think about these pages is to Envision them as a mini homepage for a specific city. We’re going to create content and a message that talks directly to that market and shows our experience and knowledge of their needs in their area. So let’s get started. Here are some tips to help you get started with these service area location pages.

• These pages need to be unique and compelling, so start by warming up the market. How well-equipped are you to provide service in the city you’re targeting? How well do you know the market? What challenges exist that you can help them overcome in their specific city? What clients or work have you done in this market? Open up with an introduction that connects you with the service in that market. This is a great opportunity to add uniqueness and value to these individual pages.
• Collect some market-specific images. If you’ve done work in this area, highlighting that is valuable.
• Create a “boilerplate” of content of your services that you can customize. Similar to what you did on your homepage, you’re going to highlight each main service with a headline, an image, and a short description all tailored to that city. It’s also not a bad idea to link back to the main service page if they want more info about a specific service. This could be individual panels or in a grid just like we described on the homepage, with content customized specifically to this market.
• If you have it, include examples of work from this city. This could be use cases, reviews, or testimonials that add to the social proof of positive outcomes from providing service in this market.
• Highlight your entire service area on a map so your user can see the full area you serve. If getting or creating a map is difficult, you could do this with content and highlight your service area by their cities and counties, but a visual is always preferred.
• Give these pages a specific SEO title and description for that city. This could be as simple as < Service Offered> in <City Name> by <Company Name>. You might take a snippet from your initial paragraph and utilize that as the description to encourage users to click on your website in the search results. Users want to know that you provide the service they need in their market.

Once you have all of these pages created, you might want to create a main “service areas” page that acts as a collection or a list of all your service areas. This will give you an opportunity to showcase your service area, and easily add this service area page to your navigation or your footer so people can easily see where you operate. These internal links will also help Google find and index these pages faster. Any page that you create for a specific purpose should be interlinked within the website so your users can find it, and Google can find it and index it.