How to Create City Pages?

First, let me explain what city pages are. City pages are unique pages of content on your website dedicated to a specific geographical area. Many services business will benefit from city pages. Services businesses that have one location, but they may serve a whole county or even state. It’s impossible to show up in many cities with only an optimized home page. As a result, city pages are crucial.

There are many different opinions about city pages and how to optimize them. Furthermore, depending upon the size of the city, and industry you are trying to rank will often determine how unique your content needs to be. I have two businesses: Five Star SEO and a content creation business that focuses on photography and video. I built a very successful video and photography business by mastering what it takes to rank in multiple cities/towns. Also, with my company Five Star SEO I have the honor of helping many types of businesses rank in various towns by creating these city pages. I often can be found on different SEO groups, from photography to general SEO groups. It’s in my opinion that there is a lot of inadequate information. I’m saying this strictly from my experiences of success and failures with SEO and creating city pages.

Depending Upon Your Industry and Target Areas Will Determine Your City Pages Strategy

You will find that depending upon the size of the city you are trying to rank for and the industry you are in will determine how complex the successful process will be. For instance, if you are an addiction treatment center trying to rank in large cities or states like New York, Dallas, and LA you will find that to be more difficult than if you are trying to rank for smaller sub-sections within those big cities. Furthermore, if you are a Psychic, you will have an easier time to ranking in these small cities in various area. This is because addiction treatment is a massive industry, and they pour a lot of money into their SEO and other digital marketing efforts. Where psychics usually don’t have that type of budget, and as a result, the keyword difficulty is easier.

Do You Need to Have Original Content for GEO Pages?

The matter of if you need to have original content for city pages is where I feel where most of the misinformation comes from. Most of my city pages ranking in the top three are duplicate content. These are orphan pages; these aren’t attached to any of the main menu options or any other part of my website. Sometimes I’ll throw in something personal to that town or city; however, for the most part, it’s the same content repurposed over and over. I have duplicated this strategy with numerous clients. However, depending on the industry and keyword phrase, there are times when more will have to go into it all.

I will use addiction treatment centers as an example since I have experience in getting one ranking high on top of Google. Also, it’s a highly competitive industry. I have this particular treatment center ranking in the top three of many of the areas within the major cities and with some key phrases in the largest cities in the United States. When I target the sub-cites / towns, I use duplicate content and rank in the top five the next day. Often in the top three. However, for various reasons, which I will go over, there are many more variables in ranking in the top five in major cities compared to less populated areas.

When You Can Use Duplicate Content and When You Need Original Content

First, there is more competition in these larger cities since they get the most action. As a result, more muscle is put behind these cities. Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of money in the addiction treatment center, and only so many people suffer from addiction. Everyone is going after the same people, which makes this process much harder than ranking a psychic in a small town. As a result, other things come into play, and here they are.

Domain Authority – “Domain authority” is an SEO concept that refers to the “strength” of a given domain. The more popular the website, its domain authority will be higher.
Keyword Difficulty – (Keyword difficulty is a metric that measures the effort it would take for your content to rank on the first page of Google for a particular keyword. In other words, if a keyword is difficult, it would require a lot of time and attention on your part to see results.)
No Internal or Outside Duplicate Content – Internal duplicate content is when one domain creates duplicate content throughout multiple internal URLs (on the same website. External duplicate content occurs when two or more different domains have the exact or similar page copy indexed by the search engines.

Getting Deeper with City Pages by Auditing Who Is on Top

The above is one of the many things that simultaneously make SEO frustrating and fun. If you have a low domain authority of twelve, it’ll be challenging to outrank a website that has a domain authority of forty. Furthermore, in industries with large marketing budgets, many businesses are going after the same thing that you may be, and they may have a considerable advantage.

One of the ways to overcome this is by writing original authentic content and auditing the pages you are trying to outrank. You can do this by searching the key phrase you know people are searching for through your keyword research. A strategy also, depending upon your domain authority in comparison to your competitor is to not go after the key phrases with the most volume. The reason for this is because you simply might not have a chance. A wiser philosophy would be to be to go after long tail key phrases. Websites like MOZ and SEMrush, through a paid subscription, have abilities for you to do your keyword research. There are some free websites, such as WordStream. If you are serious about SEO, for one hundred dollars a month, I would recommend a paid subscription through SEMrush.

After The SEO Audit

Once you see who is ranking on top, visit the ranking page and do an audit. First, copy and paste the whole page and paste the words in a word counting website such as Word Counter. That’s the first step; jot that down. If you determined that the primary key phrase you want to rank for is New Jersey Addiction Treatment, then see how often the website that is coming up first uses those words and that phrase.

Write down how may words they have on the page.
Jot down how many times they are using the word New Jersey
Write down how many times they are using the word addiction.
The same with Addiction and Treatment
Then see how many times they are using New Jersey Addiction Treatment and also NJ Addiction Treatment
Write down how many images they have on their page.

From there, if they have a thousand words, write fifteen hundred words. Within the content, add the words and phrases that you did the audit on (in the bullet points above) and add more than they did.

Your SEO Audits Are Similar Regardless of the Keyword Difficulty

Audit the same way as I mentioned with the addiction treatment center. The only difference is that you should be able to get away with similar content. Only change the name of the city or town. If you are a photographer and going after a phrase and city, you probably can get away with five hundred to seven hundred and fifty words. You are better off adding more words than you need. As a result, you’ll stay ranking high because it will be harder for someone to knock you off the top.

If you are trying to rank in a whole state or city, you will probably need to have content written only for that particular page. As a result, you will have an honest shot of showing up in the top three.

Your domain authority will become less critical in less popular towns than in larger cities or an entire state.

Why City Pages Are Important

City pages are important because it’s unlikely your business can survive attracting potential clients for only your town. Especially if it’s a small town. As a result, you need to cast a wide net, and city pages are the way to accomplish that task.