How To Lay Out A Multiple Town & City Based Local Website

January 3, 2018

I wanted to address a topic we get asked fairly frequently, and that is how you set out a website to rank in multiple towns and cities. Most I see most people do is to build a town or city money page and duplicate that whilst changing any reference to the city in the first page for the name of another town or city. Then, carrying out the process multiple times to produce a website created in record time that is relevant for all towns and cities across the nation. Whilst this might sound like a good idea, it is actually one of the worst things you can do, and I will explain why.

Basically, you do need to be careful that you don’t turn your site in to a doorway site. OK, what is a “doorway” site? Well, it is a site that has multiple pages that are created specifically to rank for a specific phrase or set of phrases. The pages usually consist of duplicate content and from Google’s perspective, these pages offer little to no value to anyone other than the webmaster, and Google hates doorway pages. You can read more about doorway pages from Google itself.

As I said, Doorway or Gateway pages as they are also known, are against Googles quality guidelines, and if you are simply creating multiple pages that are only optimized to rank for different towns and or cities, then that could be seen by Google as doorway pages. The screenshot above is an example of a site that Google doesn’t particularly like because it is using doorway pages.

If you adopt doorway pages as a strategy to quickly build out your site and be relevant for numerous towns and neighborhoods, your site will most likely get a Panda penalty. Now that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to rank, it just means your quality score will be lower than a site that isn’t hit in the same way with a low-quality Panda score (all things being equal). Some sites that use doorway pages are ranking, but those sites tend to have massive authority and a natural looking backlink profile (mrrooter.com is an example of such a site).

How Do You Set Up A Site For Multiple Towns & Cities Then?

It’s OK to set up pages on a site for different cities, but they need to be completely unique and appear natural if you want to avoid damaging the Panda quality score on your site (all sites are assessed under the Panda algorithm and all sites receive a Panda quality score. Sites that violate the Panda algorithm receive a poor quality score which affects rank position).

If you build a brand-new site based on doorway pages, then you are simply not going to rank that site in those cities.

The best way in my mind to build a site that has a page for each town or city is to give that city page a reason why it should be on the site. If it is a page that offers no value to the site other than adding a different address for a particular city, then that is effectively a doorway page.

The other issue is that if you have multiple town pages, you will want them to rank, and we all know that if a phrase has any competition, that page is going to need some kind of SEO done so that backlink power can get that page to ranked in Google. The only way you can get that to happen is if you carry out individual SEO campaigns for each page and or you structure your site very effectively so that you pass on SEO link juice from 2 or 3 main pages of your site on which you carry out your main SEO campaigns.

What you should do then is this. Let’s say you have a 5 city / town site, you could link from the home page directly to a page / post for each city / town. At the top of the fold for that town / city page you can have the contact details and your embedded Google map together with all the sales bullet points. Then under that, you can have an article about plumbing or plumbing tips (for a plumber site for example). You could also introduce your plumber from that town and write about him. Include testimonials about him from customers. Write any tips he might have. Make the page about him and how good he is for your company. Make it personal, and include local data, but don’t make it spammy. Do that, and you will have a much higher converting page because it will come across more interesting and real than a boring “We are the best” sales pitch which the visitor has seen dozens of times before. Also, by creating unique pages like that, you will become relevant for the town you want to ranking in and for the phrase you want to rank for, and you won’t have any Panda penalty issues to contend with.

If you have a 100 city / town site, it is a little bit more complex, but still simple enough. Basically, you do the same. It will be a fair amount of work to get content for all of those pages, but it will be worth it. Don’t try and short cut essential steps, and the content is an essential part of the process, and quality is key.

With the 100 cities pages, there will be too many to link to from the home page, so don’t try doing that. Instead, you would have to add 1 or 2 splitter pages between the home page and the town / city pages, and that would look like this: –