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Currently working local SEO strategies? Mentioning street names of neighbourhoods? Would it be penalised as a ‘Doorway page’?
I've been considering doing more local SEO for one of my clients in a home services industry. They only operate in one city. There are plenty of mentions of that city throughout the website including in their service pages. There is also a page titled 'Areas' which lists the different neighbourhoods in the city.
I am considering making a separate page for each neighbourhood. It won't add anything to the UX and usefulness of the site, but neither would it worsen it. A few of the current top ranking businesses do this. Not necessarily duplicated doorway pages with lots of spammy links but with 'unique' or rather rephrased content. They currently do most of the following, I'm planning on doing the same and adding the street names as well:
- A title with the neighbourhood name
- A photo of the neighbourhood
- Two sentences about the area (e.g. "lovely diverse mix of businesses and homes", history etc) also mentioning post codes / zip codes (different for every page)
- A sentence mentioning a few services, they have a lot of different services in this industry btw (different for every page)
- Street names, e.g. 'we provide our services from street A, avenue B, road C all the way to street D, avenue E and road F (different for every page)'
- Reviews with schema, also mentioning neighbourhood / postcode (different for every page)
- Contact details and CTA sentence (same for every page)
That's it. No long duplicated paragraphs or lists of services or multiple pages of 'area 1 + service 1', 'area 1 + service 2' and so on. From my understanding, those are the things that are penalised.
I guess my questions are:
- Is this worth my time doing? i.e. will it help my client rank significantly higher?
- Could it still be penalised as a doorway page and these other businesses are doing well despite this?
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1 Reply
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Answers:
* If you do it programmatically it’s worth doing, otherwise probably not (considering, we’re talking about 150-200 pages). It is also important to check if there are mentions of neighborhoods in GSC (search long-tail with regex).
* If the business is serving that area, there will be no penalization. Use their Google Business profile to post about every page you add (if you add it eventually). -
I did this and Google refused to index the city pages. I assume they were too similar in google’s eyes.
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