Thank you for purchasing a license for the geo page generator. We’ve tried to lay it out so that it’s fairly self-explanatory. However, if this is your first time using it or if you’re looking for a more detailed explanation on something, we’ve created this guide for you to let you know how different parts of the generator work.
Topics Covered
Creating a Base Page – Your Master Geo Page
Inserting City Names into Your Geo Pages – Use the <City> Tag
Balancing the Length of Your Paragraphs
Targeting Cities and Regions with Your Geo Pages
Creating Your List of Cities to Target
How to Find the Best Places to Target
Turning Off the Country (Nation) Level in URLs
Turning Off the State / Province Level in URLs
Adding Keywords to Your Geo Page URLs
How to Add Phone Numbers, Addresses, Links, Images, and Other Content
How to Add Tables to Geo Pages
How to Add Bold Text and Italics
Using the Quality Checklist to Check Your Work and Make Sure Everything is Good
How to Launch (Publish) Your Geo Pages
How to Do Bulk Updates to Your Pages After They Are Published
How to Get the Most from Your Geo Pages
How to Use Any Remaining Geo Pages to Help You in the Future
Let Us Know If Something is Unclear
Creating a Base Page – Your Master Geo Page
To use the geo page generator, you first need one page of written content that you would like to turn into your many geo pages. A geo page is a geographic landing page that people find using a search engine. It tells them you offer the service they are searching for in their geographic area. To make your base geo page, you can grab an existing page from your website that talks about your service in the context of a city that you serve. If you don’t have an existing page to use as your base or master geo page, you can create one. This is what we normally do as we can perfectly craft a new page for both our target audience and search engines. If you’re not sure what to say on your master geo page, just type out your response to these seven questions. You’ll quickly have the content you need. If you would rather have us create a search engine friendly master geo page for you, we can do that for an additional fee.
Your base page of content will become your master geo page. You will need to paraphrase this page twice, but you’ll need to do a few things with it. You’ll need to make sure to use the name of a city on your master geo page in 5 specific places:
- Once in the header
- Once in the first sentence
- Once in the main body
- Once in the last paragraph
- Once in one of your sub-headings.
Creating a Keyword Focus
The city name is used in these 5 places listed above to clearly signal to search engines what your page is all about. Search engines figure this out by narrowing in on a page’s keyword focus. For your geo pages, your keyword focus will typically be one, two, or three words followed by the name of the city you are targeting. So if you offer carpet cleaning services in Boston, the keyword focus of one of your geo pages would be “carpet cleaning in Boston”. You would need all of these keywords to appear with the city name in each of the 5 places mentioned above. Doing this will clearly communicate to search engines what each of your geo pages is all about so that they can show each of your pages to the specific searches you are targeting in specific geographic areas.
How to Insert City Names into Your Geo Pages – Use the <City> Tag
Each time you use the name of a city on your master page, you’ll need to replace it with the tag “<City>” (without quotation marks). The geo page generator will then substitute “<City>” with the name of each city, region, or country that you direct it to on the city list on tab 2 of the geo page generator Excel workbook. To generate up to 50 pages, you’ll need to have a least 7 paragraphs on your master page. On the tab 1 worksheet of the geo page generator Excel workbook, you’ll see “Column 1” (in column I of Excel). Column 1 provides you with spaces (empty cells) to type or paste each of your paragraphs into. On the left of each space, it will indicate where to place each of your paragraphs (they are labeled Paragraphs 1, 2, 3, etc.).
How to Insert Sub Headings
Above each paragraph spot is a gray space for you to put a sub heading (section heading). You don’t have to use these gray heading spaces. The generator will only activate them individually as you choose to type sub headings into them.
You’ll notice that to the left of the area where you enter your paragraphs, it will read “Space for Heading” on the same row where space is reserved for a sub heading. Once you type a heading into one of the gray spaces above a paragraph spot, you’ll notice that the phrase “Space for Heading” will change to “H2 Heading” automatically. You can click on “H2 Heading” to reveal a drop down menu. On the menu you can change the heading to an H3 Heading, an H4 Heading, and so one. Google seems to have a preference for how they like headings to be used. We’ve programmed the generator to follow this preference. Here’s how it works: you should only have one H1 heading – that is the main title/heading for the whole page. You can then have as many H2 headings as you like. If you have sub headings which naturally fall under an H2 heading, you would make that sub heading an H3, and if you have a heading that falls under the H3 heading, then you can label it as an H4 heading, and so on. Most of the time, however, most of your headings will end up being H2 headings.
Try to Balance the Length of Your Paragraphs
As you create your paragraphs, try to balance them if you can so that they are roughly the same length. The key thing is to make sure that no paragraphs are too short. A paragraph that is too short would be one that is substantially shorter than the rest. If you need to have a short paragraph, either lump it together with another paragraph in one of the paragraph cells on tab 1 (see the example below) or create more than 7 paragraphs for your master page.
Paraphrasing
Once you have entered 7 or more paragraphs into Column 1 on tab 1, you’ll need to paraphrase each of your paragraphs two times. The generator will guide you through this process and will show you what to do by providing colored blocks to type in and indicate where to paraphrase. Essentially, each one of your paragraphs needs to be paraphrased twice: once into Column 2 and once into Column 3. The paraphrase of each paragraph needs to say essentially the same thing that the original paragraph said, except in different words. Each one of the finished geo pages the generator creates needs to be quite a bit different from all your other geo pages – and from all the pages on your website. Google has officially said that each page needs to be at least 30% different, but we’ve learned through experiments that it’s actually quite a bit higher than this. So make sure you do a good job paraphrasing so that all your geo pages will rank without any problem.
If you don’t do a good job paraphrasing, Google will view some of your geo pages as duplicate content and not display them in search results. To help prevent this from happening to you, we’ve built a paraphrasing quality checker into tab 3 on the generator. It will tell you if any of your paragraphs are not paraphrased well enough. You’ll want each of your paragraphs to score over 90% on this quality checker (you’ll find it at the end of the quality review report on tab 3).
If you’d like some tips and ideas on how to make paraphrasing faster or easier, we’ve assembled our best tips here (there are quite a few of them). If you don’t have the time or inclination to do the paraphrasing, we can do it for you for an additional charge.
Once all the paraphrasing is done and you tell the generator to generate your geo pages, it creates them by grabbing your paragraphs sequentially in a randomized fashion that is mathematically controlled to make each of your geo pages as different as possible. When anyone reads through the resulting geo pages, it will look as though a human wrote each one of the hundreds of geo pages even though a machine assemble all of them. Each geo page will flow as you laid it out from Paragraph 1 to Paragraph 2 to Paragraph 3 and so on. However, the generator will somewhat randomly grab one of the three paragraphs you’ve created for “Paragraph 1” in tab 1, randomly grab one of your three “Paragraph 2” paragraphs, randomly grab one of your three “Paragraph 3” paragraphs, and so on. Nothing is actually purely random, though. Every step is carefully mathematically guided to produce the best results.
How to Target Cities and Regions with Your Geo Pages
Once your paragraphs in Column 1 of tab 1 are paraphrased into Columns 2 and 3, you can move on to tab “2. City List & Extra Content”. Click on the tab with this name near the bottom left corner of the workbook. This tab allows you to add hyperlinks, images, tables, bold text, or other elements to your paragraphs. We’ll show you how to do all this a little further below.
Once you open tab “2. City List & Extra Content”, you’ll see the beginning of a city list in the green column on the left. You can delete the sample country, state, and city that are on the list. These are put there as an example only. If you look at the third item on the list, it’s the city of San Francisco. If you follow that row across the page, you’ll see how the geo page regional hierarchy works. In the column to the right of the targeted city list, you’ll see that San Francisco is part of a state, California. This state is part of a country, the United States. As you move further to the right, you’ll see in the “Geo Page URL” column where a sample URL (webpage address) has been generated. In it you can see a domain name (the base part of a website address), a country level, a state level, and finally a city level. Each hierarchical level in the URL is separated by a “/” (forward slash). Search engines love a nicely organized URL structure like this. It really helps them make sense of all your pages and understand the relationships between them. If you are going to be targeting cities in a number of states or provinces, it’s best to have a country page and then link to all your state or province pages from the country page. In the examples we provide on tab 2, you’ll see we have the United States and California listed as cities (this is how you create pages for them, but you’ll notice in the URL structure, that the geo page generator understands that one of these is a country and the other is a state within that country).
If you use a country level page, use it to link to all your state or province pages that are located within the country. Then for each state or province page you create, use it to link to your city pages that are located within that state or province. If you only serve one state or province, you’ll for sure want to create a state or province page to link to all the city pages you create for the cities, towns, communities, or regions that you choose to target within that state or province. Search engines reward this kind of structure. It is a bit more work, but it’s worth it.
Because it’s so easy to forget to link to state or province geo pages from a country page or link to city pages from state or province pages (and because it’s a lot more work), the geo page generator will automatically add these links for you to the bottom of your country, state, and province geo pages. If you use the bulk update feature discussed further below to update your country, state, or province pages as you launch your city geo pages, it will automatically add all the links for pages that didn’t exist when you first published your country, state, or province geo pages.
To learn more about what a good geo page URL structure looks like, click here.
Creating Your List of Cities to Target
Create a list of all the cities, towns, communities, or regions you’d like to target. Then add to the list all the states or provinces those cities and communities are located in. Lastly, if you are targeting a number of states or provinces, add the name of the country or countries to the list that you’re creating. Now enter your list into the green column labeled “Targeted City for Landing Page”. You’ll notice that we provide you with spots for 10% more pages than you thought you were getting. We do this for a couple of reasons:
- If your paraphrasing isn’t quite good enough, Google may not recognize some of your pages as being unique enough to rank in search results on their own. In our experience, out of a batch of hundreds of pages, we’ll occasionally have one or two pages that aren’t recognized by Google (they won’t show up in search results, and in Google Analytics you’ll see you have zero organic visitors to them even though organic visitors are finding your other geo pages). In these odd cases, we simply remove the city name from the spot on the list that isn’t working, move it to one of your extra empty slots, and refresh the page using the new body content that the generator created for the empty slot you just filled (the combination of paragraphs and headings used for every single geo page slot is uniquely different).
- It’s normal to think you only need a certain number of geo pages, but then when you add pages for states or provinces and a few extra important cities or communities you forgot about, you always end up needing more. So we always provide you with 10% more to help you out. If you really need a lot more pages, you can always buy the next size of generator (and yes, it will come with 10% more pages too).
How to Find the Best Places to Target
One of the best ways to identify perfect places to target with geo pages is to use Google’s suggestions when you type into the Google Search bar. You’ll notice that when you begin to type a search term into Google, on Google.com, it tries to guess what you are looking for by offering search suggestions as you type. In the example below, we type “lawn care” into Google followed by the beginning of a city name. In this case we’re looking for a city that begins with the word “New”. So we type in this word, but as we do, Google shows us that people are searching for “lawn care” in all of the cities below that begin with the word “new”.
We actually prefer using the search bar built into the top right corner of the Firefox browser because it returns a log more suggested searches.
You can use this suggested search feature to identify every community in your service area that has people searching for your service. For example, if you provide lawn care services in greater Toronto, you could type the phrase “lawn care” into Google followed by the beginning of the name of every significant community in Toronto. For example let’s try for Mississauga (population 700,000), Etobicoke (population 350,000), and Rexdale (population 100,000). You’ll notice that in each case, Google is showing us relevant suggestions before we finish typing the name of each community.
The fact that Google is making these suggestions means that people are actually searching for each of these search terms on a regular basis. So it would make sense for a lawn care company in Toronto to create geo pages for communities all the way down to 100,000 people. In rural areas, we find that sometimes it makes sense to target communities down to 10,000 people in size.
This suggested search feature is perfect for finding out what search terms people are using in connection with areas that you serve. It allows you to fully cover the topic you are looking to create pages for now plus identify many more topics you can re-use the geo page generator for to reach out to many more potential customers in the future. Continuing with the lawn care theme, below is a good example from Seattle.
Google shows us here that people in Seattle are not only looking for lawn care services but they are also looking for lawn care tips, organic lawn care, and fall lawn care. If a lawn care company who served this area did some further research and discovered that people in surrounding areas were also looking for lawn care tips, organic lawn care, and fall lawn care, then it could make sense to go after these three topics by creating a new geo page for each one (they would then have four different geo pages that they would publish for all areas that they serve around Seattle. They’d have one geo page for “lawn care <city>”, a second for “lawn care <city> tips”, a third for “organic lawn care <city>”, and a fourth for “fall lawn care <city>”. You’ll also notice the second to last suggested search option Google offers is “lawn care west seattle”. This is people in the western part of Seattle (a peninsula) looking for lawn care services in their area. Any lawn care company serving this area would also want to publish a specific “West Seattle Lawn Care” geo page to reach out to these people.
So whatever industry you’re in, use the Google’s suggested search feature to learn what people are looking for that’s connected to your services. Try different phrases and variations of what people call your service and then begin to spell out different geographic areas in your service area to see what people are looking for. You’re likely to be surprised and delighted as you find many more ways to reach out to people who really need what you have to offer.
Turning Off the Country (Nation) Level in URLs
If you’re a local business that only serves communities within a smaller geographic area, it may not make sense for you to have a national, country page. If this is the case with your business or organization, then you can turn the country level off for the geo page URLs that the generator will create for you. On tab 2, there are two options you can click above the big blue bar that turn off the country level using a drop down menu.
If you change your mind in the future and decide to reach a much larger market, you can always change things on the geo page generator and use the country level. However, if you do this, you’ll need to update the geo page URLs on your website by using redirects to redirect visitors from the old URLs to the new URLs (you can always get a tech person to help you with this, or see how to do it yourself on a YouTube video).
Turning Off the State or Province Level in URLs
Near the top of tab 2 to the right of the green boxes that allow you to modify the country, state/province, and city levels of your URL structure, it also allows you to turn off the state or province level in your URLs. We would recommend that you do not turn this level off as organizing your city or community geo pages under a parent state or province page works really well and search engines seem to really like this structure. If you have concerns about creating a state geo page when you don’t serve an entire state, we would suggest that you make it clear at the opening of your state page that you specifically serve a certain area in the state. If you end up getting a lot of traffic to your state page (and you don’t want it), then help visitors out by linking to other businesses or organization who serve other parts of your state (this is should only happen if there is a huge void in your industry in your state and you’re the only one showing up with content search engines consider to be highly relevant). You can add specific information to a specific geo page by adding it in your content management system (WordPress, Jumla, Drupal, etc.) after you publish a geo page or by using the “<info>” tag in the geo page generator workbook. See how to use the <info> tag here.
Adding Keywords to Your Geo Page URLs
If you’d like to sprinkle some special keywords into the URLs that the geo page generator creates for you, you can easily do this in the green section, in column N of tab 2. Anything you type into these green boxes will show up in the different hierarchical levels of your geo page URLs. Just make sure to never leave spaces. We recommend linking your words together using hyphens (“-“). To specify where you’d like the name of a country, state, or city to appear in the URL among the keywords you enter, just type “<country>”, “<state>”, or “<city>” (without the quotation marks) in the appropriate row (only use “<country>”, “<state>”, or “<city>” on their specified row in the green boxes).
Adding Phone Numbers, Addresses, Links, Images, and Other Content
You can add a geographic specific phone number and/or address to any geo page. This means the phone number and address can change with each geo page and always be the right ones for each area you are targeting. You can also add links to your geo pages, images, and other content. You can add all this content so that these different elements are unique to each page, the same on every page, or a combination of both. This page shows you how to add phone numbers, address, links, images, and other content.
How to Add Tables to Your Geo Pages
There are a number of ways to add tables to your geo pages.
- If you’re familiar with HTML, you can code a table right into any of the paragraph cells on tab 1 (Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 3, etc.), or you can copy and paste the HTML code into one of these cells.
- You can also paste your table HTML code into one of the <info> box columns on tab 2. This is our preferred way as it allows you to choose which city pages will have a table. We usually make at least three different versions of any table we create (paraphrasing the text and changing the order of some things in each table) and then sprinkle the different table versions among the cities we want to use those tables for using one of the <info> columns. To make a geo page super unique, you can also customize a unique table for each city, or for select cities, that displays local information or aspects of your service that local people would find helpful. You can use one of the <info> columns to assign these unique city tables to specific cities.
Here is more information about how to create tables and incorporate them into your geo pages.
How to Add Bold Text and Italics to Your Paragraphs
If you’d like to make some text bold on your geo pages, simply type “<bold>” within a paragraph between words where you’d like the bolding to start and “</bold>” (without quotation marks) where you’d like the bold text to end. Neither of these bold tags will show up on your finished geo pages. The only thing you’ll see on your finished pages is your text in bold between where these two markers are located. You can also use “<b>” and “</b>” or “<strong>” and “</strong>” instead of “<bold>” and “</bold>” if you prefer. See the example below.
Example of Creating Bold Text
Within this sentence we would like to turn some words into bold text to call extra attention to them.
In Columns 1, 2, and 3 of tab 1 of the geo page generator worksheet, we type “<bold>” into any sentence where we would like our bold text to start, and then we type “</bold>” where we would like it to end.
So our example sentence will look like this within in the paragraph spots in Columns 1, 2, and 3 of tab 1 of the generator worksheet:
Within this sentence we would like to <bold>turn some words into bold text</bold> to call extra attention to them.
When the sentence is published on your website, it will look like this:
Within this sentence we would like to turn some words into bold text to call extra attention to them.
Creating italicized text is similar. Just insert “<italics>” into your text where you’d like the italics to begin, and type “</italics>” in your text where you’d like the italics to end. You can also use “<em>” and “</em>” (the official HTML code for italics) if you prefer (by the way, you can put any HTML code into the generator, and it should work on your finished geo pages just fine). See the example of how to italicize text below.
Example of Changing Text to Italics
In this sentence we would like to turn a number of words into italics to make them stand apart from the other words.
In Columns 1, 2, and 3 of tab 1 of the geo page generator worksheet, we type “<italics>” into any sentence where we would like our italicized text to start, and then we type “</italics>” where we would like it to end.
So our example sentence will look like this within in the paragraph spots in Columns 1, 2, and 3 of tab 1 of the generator worksheet:
In this sentence we would like to turn <italics>a number of words into italics</italics> to make them stand apart from the other words.
When the sentence is published on your website, it will look like this:
In this sentence we would like to turn a number of words into italics to make them stand apart from the other words.
How to Double Check Your Work and Make Sure Everything is Good
Once you think you’re done putting everything in place for your geo pages, you can click on tab “3. Quality Check” and make sure you haven’t missed anything. Tab 3 preforms a quality check review on all the content you’ve created to catch any major issues, warn you of minor problems, and try to enhance your success with your geo pages. The “Quality Check Checklist” on tab 3 is broken down into eight sections. Each section focuses on a different aspect of your geo pages and attempts to encourage you to use what we understand to be the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices (they’ve worked extremely well for us). All of the core ingredients we have found to be essential to building top quality geo pages that consistently rank at or near the top of search results are here (you also need some core off-page ingredients to consistently rank at the top of search results too. You can learn about these here).
You’ll notice that the quality checklist basically uses a red light, yellow light, green light system to indicate what aspects of your content needs some work and what is good. A green circle with a check mark in it means that aspect of your content appears to be fine. A yellow circle is cautioning you that something may be wrong or does not appear to be completely finished. A red circle with an “X” displayed in it means that something appears to be missing or incomplete. Read the description beside any of these colored circles to see what aspect of your content they are referring to and what you need to do to address an issue if there is one.
Most things the quality checklist mentions are very important. They will all help your geo pages rank better, and some of them are essential for your geo pages to rank in search results. A critical one that can’t be overlooked is the last section on the list, “Paraphrasing Quality”. All of your paragraphs need to score 90% or better in order for your geo pages to have the best chance of success. If the paraphrasing isn’t done well enough, search engines may not recognize all of your geo pages as being unique content. They won’t show duplicate content (un-unique content) in search results. So working with this paraphrasing scoring system to ensure all of your paraphrasing results in unique content is critically important.
How to Launch or Publish Your Geo Pages
There are three ways you can publish your geo pages. Here are all the details.
How to Do Bulk Updates to Your Pages After They Are Published
Once you’ve published your geo pages, you may wish to update some of the information in them. We’ve created a way for you to instantly update vast numbers of pages at one time. You can see how this works here.
How to Get the Most from Your Geo Pages
There’s a whole lot you can do with the geo page generator. In fact, it should be able to help you create any geographically targeted webpage you want. Anything you can create on your website content management system (WordPress, Drupal, Jumla, etc.), you should be able to replicate with the geo page generator. Here are some common ways people like to take things further and do more with their geo pages.
How to Use Any Remaining Geo Pages to Help You in the Future
If you have some geo page city spots left over in tab 2 of your generator after you’re done launching geo pages in all the important cities or communities you want to target, you can use these extra spots to help keep your website strong in the future. Here’s how.
Do you have a question? Is anything unclear? Please let us know
If you have a question that is not answered in this guide or if something is not clear, feel free to email or call us. We’d be happy to help. Your question may even help us update this guide so that it can be more useful to others.
OLD TABLE TO FINISH WORKING IN
To help you better understand how to use the geo page generator and get the most out of it, we’ve created a guide to lead you through the process of creating geo pages and to explain the different concepts you’ll encounter in more detail. We’re still working on building out this guide. Below are the concepts we’ve covered so far.
- How to Quickly Create the Base Content for a Geo Page – How to create the text for a business service or product page from scratch really fast. Simply answer some questions.
- Paraphrasing Tips and Tricks – To help make paraphrasing easier and faster (we can also do the paraphrasing for you if it’s totally not your thing)
- City List Page (Tab 2) – How to work with it
- How to Figure Out which Communities Need a Geo Page
- What a Good Geo Page URL Structure Looks Like (Tab 2)
- Inserting Extra Content (Tab 2) – How to insert links, images, extra phone numbers, addresses, etc. How to work with all the extra content tags: <Phone>, <Address>, <Link>, <Info>, <Images>, etc.
- Tips for Doing More with Your Geo Pages
- How to Launch (Publish) Your Geo Pages (Tab 4)
- How to Position Your Geo Pages for Success
- How to Use Any Remaining Geo Pages to Help You in the Future