HI All

Apologies upfront for the length of this post.

We provide a service throughout the UK that is very location specific. We can provide this service practically anywhere in the UK.

The idea is that we can be found whenever a customer types in ‘Service name X’ (where X is the place) .

How would you good people recommend building a Search engine friendly site that reaches customers at their location?

A little background.....

We currently run a huge wordpress website of 35,000 pages, mostly landing pages where each landing page refers to a place in the UK. Content written in an attempt to keep the duplicity of content down. However there still remains a lot of duplicate content. The company that developed the site was an SEO company who went ahead with this technique as it was the best solution they could offer given the above scenario. The site has been live for just over 2 years and its doing ok but nothing remarkable. On the whole it is growing very steadily.

Before this site was built, I built a simple website with 200 pages offering the same service but to less places (hence 200 pages) but it performs better than the larger site. New pages launched on this smaller site seem to reach a higher rank quicker than those of the larger site despite having a similar premise.

To improve the larger site, we’re looking at beginning a blogging campaign, and greatly improve our social media strategy. Despite these things, I do believe that immense streamlining is needed to help the larger site improve.

Since the launch of the larger site, I’ve come to appreciate the whole duplicate content thing and thus believe that it is this that is holding us back.

Whenever we contact the company that built the site, we get the simple instruction to 'Reduce the Duplicate content' which is great but they built the thing and it doesnt really help us in understanding the issues directly.

We certainly dont mind starting again here as the site is our main source of revenue and we simply want to get it right. its certainly been quite a learning curve.

Any thoughts or advice here would be most appreciated.

Thanks again

Ste

That doesn't surprise me at all. 200 pages vs 35k pages of essentially the same information will nearly always perform better.

 

In simplistic terms the more you dilute content across pages the less value each page may have. Conversely if you combine say 10 low value pages into 1 page that one page would theoretically have the combined value of the 10 (or more) - thus the single page has more value and is more likely to have a higher ranking in search engine results.

@@BlueDreamer

 

Thanks for your reply. it makes sense to me. Having a clearout of this mass of pages is definitely on the cards.

 

The problem is, how else do you reach out to people in their varying locations in the right way?

That's an age old problem!

 

Do you have regional offices? If you do one way would be to provide a page for each office with useful information like address, telephone, map, maybe a list of key staff, and the services that office provides. Round that off with a list of key areas that office serves.

Hi,

 

I've some experience in this area, certainly a trim back would be advisable. Here's a few things you could look into;

 

1. Clearly identify the landing pages under a generic section called something like 'coverage'.
2. Group towns by County (e.g. Surrey) or council (e.g. Kensington and Chelsea)
3. Create unique landing pages with the sub towns in the group, try to keep the towns to majors rather than 'all'. For example in Surrey you'd cover Guildford, Chertsey etc and not smaller villages.

There will be times where a city / large town page will be required as they often have sub regions (Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol etc). You can also help identify the information with Microdata as for example it can help identify for example 'web design' as a service rather than a subject.

@Bluedrreamer

Hi

Well we don’t have any regional offices as we’re strictly online, We do of course have a business address at the 1 location.

It would be helpful I know to have other locations. Google likes that on their maps/business setup.

@@BrowserBugs

HI

We’re definitely going to have a cull of landing pages. Maybe as drastic as removing around 20,000 pages.

We do have a section called Areas Covered which breaks down into County pages and those County pages have a list of its towns and villages at the bottom. It is difficult to create ultimately unique content because of the service we provide and because of the multitude of pages.

The 35,000 odd of landing pages cover each place in the UK. We have considered trimming this right back to the 2,500 or so of large villages/Towns and Cities which may be a better configuration to go with. It will be more manageable too.

I wish I could write 35,000 unique landing pages!

btw, what is Microdata?

Thanks Again

Steve

Microdata is essentially adding additional meaning to semantic markup by defining properties inside the page, sort of like a blueprint with context of a web page, see schema.org. Web pages can have properties such as navigation, copyright holder, business information, geo information, reviews, main content of the page, lists, business types and more.

 

In addition I have found it helps get around naturally keyword heavy content, for example if your company is called 'bobs shoe repairs ltd' and you offer 'shoe repairs' your content might be considered a little heavy for the term 'shoe repairs', but if 'bobs shoe repairs ltd' was marked as the business legal name and 'shoe repair' was marked as a service then clarity has been added so the crawlers know you're not just flooding the term 'shoe repairs', in theory discounting the term 'shoe repairs' from the words 'bobs shoe repairs' leaving your keyword density a little more realistic. It goes beyond this but safe to say it's extensive.

 

Google will only use a few types under your serp listing that they have confirmed, however they don't discount the rest.

 

Edit: Forgot to say pm me if you want an example.

Edited July 1, 201511 yr by BrowserBugs