If our business has regional offices or service centres, and we want to target searches for related product-plus-place combinations, should we write full-length articles about ‘Blue Widgets in Leicestershire’ or whatever?
When it comes to search engine optimisation, the answer is no. Articles like that are commonplace, but fortunately they don’t seem to work. If the search engines are truly attempting to promote pages which provide a good user experience, they shouldn’t work either. Who wants to read a contrived article about ‘Blue Widgets in Leicestershire’ when they’re just trying to locate details of a Blue Widget supplier in Leicestershire?
A separate page about each office is a good idea for SEO, but these should give the information that visitors would appreciate: location, opening hours, services provided, contact methods, unique photos, a map and perhaps local connections or testimonials. That’s plenty of content to make a page which will score in SEO terms.
Linking to background articles is fine, but don’t reproduce those articles in full on the page, loosely reworked to mention the location, as some businesses do. However, do remember that many people will land on the site at these pages, so always include links to your major sales and marketing collateral.
Finally – as ever – we should check the pages that are currently ranking in the search engines for these local queries. What are they doing, and can we do it better?