How to target multiple locations with your website

Posted on 2 January 2020

Many companies we deal with in Southampton, Bournemouth and across the New Forest are dealing with customers in multiple locations.

Often what we see is their homepage is setup to try and rank for many of these. The trouble with this setup is that you’re diluting your page with your locations. This is where you might be trying to rank for Southampton, Lymington, Totton, Bournemouth, Romsey and so on…

Having all these in the descriptions and the content just makes the relevance of each location less and less. If you’re trying to rank for multiple locations then you’ve come to the right place.

Separate locations into pages

One method which can help in ranking for multiple locations. Such as Southampton and Hampshire is to have a dedicated page for these. We do this ourselves and it works well. What might work for getting ranked for your service in one area might not work in another. This is where having multiple pages allows you to be more diverse. This allows your content to be unique which is essential for not being treated by Google and Bing as a site that’s full of duplicate content.

How do you differentiate your local pages?

Let’s say John has setup a plumbing business in Southampton. He wants to expand on areas he’s being found for without having duplicate content. His home page might have the title – Plumbing Southampton | John’s Plumbing Services and the description and content will also follow suit with references to plumbing, Southampton and other simlair keywords and phrases.

With the new Portsmouth webpage that is being built, John needs to make sure that his content differs from the homepage this could include doing the following…

Showing reviews only from customers in Portsmouth
Showing images of Portsmouth and work that has been completed in Portsmouth
Writing up from scratch about the services he provides in Portsmouth and the smaller in and around Portsmouth he services
Making sure to write the description from scratch and checking it’s very different from that of his homepage which is search engine optimised for Southampton
Showing different contact information such as a portsmouth office address, a local portsmouth phone number and maybe even a different email address like portsmouth@

Should John have a home page that’s not location specific and then seperate URLs for Southampton and Portsmouth?

Depending on how well the homepage is ranking for Southampton. Pages that don’t get much traffic can hinder more than anything. If its expected that /southampton and /portsmouth will get a lot of traffic but this generic home page wont pick up much from search enginee then it’s best to have some kind of location attached to the homepage. If John’s plumbing business was getting a lot of hits for just the name of the business it would be arguable to exclude locations from the homepage and just link to these seperate pages. This is where Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) can be of assistance.

Are more backlinks required for the new page?

The short answer is Yes! You’ve got domain authority and page authority. Two SEO factors that make a huge difference to how a site ranks. A domain Authority is built up by backlinks as is a page authority. If your website has a lot of high quality backlinks then well done! You might find that your websites new page isn’t ranking as well but has a higher domain authority than competitors but what about page authority? The page authority does carry a lot of weight with how an individual page ranks. However this isn’t the only factor. You’ve also got the following…

Social presence
Meta details (Description/Tags)
Mobile usability (Really important today!)
Page title
Load time
Content (Keyword Density, Relevance, Engagement)
Navigation

These are just a few of the many factors that need to be taken into account when trying to rank a page. That concludes our backlinks post and if you’ve got any questions or feel there is anything to add – please don’t hesitate to get in touch.