Complete the City List Page tab “2. City List & Extra Content”) by entering the names of the cities you wish to create landing pages for in the first column. So if you want to target big American cities, you might enter Chicago, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, and so on (see Example 1). However, in a more realistic example for a lot of small businesses, you’ll probably target a some cities located close together, suburbs, towns, or communities. So if you were targeting New York City, your list would probably include New York City, Manhattan, Queens, Bronxs, , , etc. If you serve nearby cities such as New Jersey or __, you would include them too. If you serve Minneapolis–Saint Paul, you would include Minneapolis, Saint Paul, , , , , and , on your list.
Whenever you create these geo landing pages for cities, suburbs, communities, towns, neighborhoods, or regions you need to also create a landing page for the state or province where these places are located. You’ll also need a page for the country where these are located.
So continuing with our previous example . . .
The reason you should create state, province, and country landing pages is because this caters to the way Google thinks and processes things. They are very structured, and they reward a well structured website. However, if you’re the first one to launch geo pages in your industry in the areas you serve, you should be able to get away without creating state, province, or country pages.
You’re probably thinking, “Why would I want to create a page for my country, state, or province when I don’t even serve that entire area? Won’t that just confuse people and cause problems?” The answer is “No”, and here’s why:
- If you don’t create any links to your country, state, or province page(s) from your website and other websites, then Google will view them as unimportant pages since you and no one else is linking to them. It will hardly send any traffic to a page that isn’t even linked to by its own website. You can further downplay the importance of these pages to Google by being selective with the keywords you use when you do link to these pages on your website (we’ll share more about this with you later). These country, state, or province pages are important place holder pages for ranking purposes, but if you don’t fully serve these areas, then they are not important pages from your potential customers’ point of view. We’ll show you later how to signal to Google if these pages are important or if they are not important.
- When you create state, province, or country landing pages, if you don’t serve these entire areas, then clearly state near the top of each of these pages (in bold text if you want to) the parts of that region you do serve. You don’t want to waste anyone’s time, and you don’t want them to waste yours either. By stating clearly, up-front the areas that you serve, things should be clear to visitors and these pages shouldn’t cause any problems for you. If you notice any of these pages get a lot of visitors, or you get inquiries from them, you could consider expanding into locations where people are inquiring from or link to other companies who serve the areas you don’t. But most of the time, this sort of thing probably won’t happen. Click here to learn how to put a special message at the top of any country, state, or province geo pages.