Service-Area Pages

Service-Area Pages

If you don’t have a physical location in certain cities but travel to those cities to service your customers, you can create service-area pages. If you have multiple service-areas try as hard as you can to use unique copy on each service-area page.Why do I recommend this? Because we don’t want Google and other search engines to consider these “doorway pages” or “low-quality pages”. Otherwise, they may not rank well at all.

Are Service-Area Pages Considered Doorway Pages?

Here’s what Google has to say about Doorway Pages:

Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.

Here are some examples of doorways:

  • Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
  • Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
  • Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311?hl=en

A Google employee has also publicly warned that city pages could be considered doorway pages.
Reference: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-city-landing-pages-doorway-pages-28670.html

Personally, I believe they are ok to have as long as they are not basically copies of each other with the city name swapped out.

What Content to Include on Service-Area Pages

Each service-area page can include:

  • You can’t embed a Google My Business listing of the business because there is no physical business location here. But you can embed a Google Map of the city or county.
  • Reviews from customers in this city
  • Photos from employees or jobs in this city
  • Other businesses in this city that you partner with
  • Your favorite places in this city
  • Known landmarks
  • Use this awesome questionnaire to come up with ideas for city-specific topics you can write about on each service-area page

References:
https://whitespark.ca/blog/rank-in-cities-with-no-physical-address/

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/30/16-ways-to-create-unique-local-content-for-cities-where-you-want-to-rank/

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2016/09/30/template-for-creating-knockout-city-page-content-for-local-seo/