One of the problems some local business owners face is they are located near a city where they provide service and yet their website does not rank in Google for search terms that include that city name.
For example, if you’re a home inspector working out of your home office in Vancouver, Washington, your site may appear on the first page of Google (in the the Places listings) for “home inspection Vancouver” because that’s the address published on your website. However, you might want to see if you can develop some business in Portland, which is the nearest metropolitan city, only 15 minutes away. Counting on your Google Place page to rank in Portland is usually pretty challenging and what we try to do in this case is create a targeted “doorway page” (also referred to as a “city page”) to target searches for “home inspection Portland.”
At face value, the sort of content you’d have on this page would be very similar to what is on your home page, so we need to differentiate it to give it the best chance of ranking well in Google.
To make your “Portland home inspection” page stand out, consider providing content like:
- Statistics on the number of home inspections that occur each year in Portland,
- Some case studies/testimonials of your work from Portland customers,
- Typical problems you see in Portland that you don’t normally see in other areas
Craftsman style homes are popular in Portland. Is there something about these homes you commonly see being a problem? Do floor joists rot out more often than other styles of homes? Are craftsman’s the most well-constructed homes you’ve ever seen? Include your opinion and anything you feel would be helpful to someone in Portland looking for a home inspector.
Once you’ve got your page written, optimize titles and headers, and then promote it with a well-written press release. This is a service we can perform for you or we can consult with you on a monthly basis to help you increase traffic. Just call 503-890-6663 to get started.
Watch the video below for some background and another example using the “home security” niche.
Video Transcription – How To Rank Your Website In Different Cities
Hi, it’s Mike Munter here and one of the challenges many local business owners have is they are ranking well in perhaps, their own city; but for neighboring cities where they still provide their service, they don’t seem to rank as well.
One of the ways to attempt to overcome this is to target cities using what we call “doorway pages.” Sometimes these are called “city pages.” Basically what you’re going to do with pages like this is you’re going to setup pages on your website that include your main keyword and your city.
So, let’s just say you’re in the business of providing home security. So, what you would do is you would name your city page “home security – and then the city name,” if that’s the keyword that you’re targeting.
3 Attributes Of A Great Doorway Page
The attributes of a doorway page to make to make them really good and to stand out and give them the best chance of ranking for that keyword, is they obviously need to be:
1. Keyword Rich
Keyword rich – and so you’re going to make sure you include the keyword in the title, the headers, and within the body content of the page.
2. Unique
The next thing is that those pages need to be Unique. You can’t just copy the “home security Portland” page to the “home security Tuscaloosa” page to the “home security Oakland, California” page. The content on each page has got to be unique, otherwise Google’s going to look at it and say, “Okay, well I’ve got a 100 pages here that are all basically the same content,” and you’re going to find that you’re probably not going to rank that well.
3. Quality
Now the last thing and often the hardest this is the Quality. And here’s where you usually need to do a little bit of research and really dig down and try to come up with a system for improving the content of each one of your city pages.
And I’m going to give some examples using this home security client, as a way to create your own city pages and obviously if you need help or ideas you can give me a call.
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Ideas To Build Your City Page Template
In building out pages for “home security,” you have to think about, “Okay, what kind of information – if someone’s considering a home security system – would they be looking for?”
- Well, one of the things is crime statistics. That can easily be researched. The FBI puts out annual crime reports that you can get that information.
- Ways to save money, perhaps on your home owner’s insurance. Many people don’t even know that if you invest in a security system, you’ll save money [on homeowner’s insurance premium], so you take it a step further. You try to find out, “what do average homeowner premiums cost in the city of Portland?” “How much potentially could someone potentially save?” Is it 5%, 20%, what’s the range? And then site your source for that, so that you’re providing the consumer who finds your “home security Portland” page with the best information and another reason why they should buy your home security system.
- Let’s see. The next thing you could do is give information about the local installer who might be putting it in, the type of service that you can expect to get.
- The next thing you could do if you’re able to do it and this gets a little bit more expensive, but you could have a crime map and on this map you could include recent crimes in the last year, actually their location. This could include violent crimes, it could include burglaries and robberies and motor vehicle thefts. You can take it and get as detailed as you want.
The key is researching the information, finding it, and then presenting it to the consumer. And so, what you have here is you have, for let’s say “Portland,” for example, you have a page which is very unique, very quality, and it’s going to talk about “home security” and it’s going to give pertinent stats and information that’s relevant to people in Portland.
So, when you create your page for, let’s say, Oakland, California, you can still pull in crime stats, homeowner’s insurance, etc. And that information is going to be unique from the Portland page.
Wrap-Up
And this is just one way we use to increase traffic to your website by targeting specific cities that you’re really not ranking that well in as an attempt to try to gain some business from them. If you have any questions about this, you can give me a call at 503-890-6663.