Google loves and rewards websites that are well structured. The URL structure we’re about to show you has worked really well for every organization we’ve helped with geo pages. It essentially looks something like this: from a country geo page, a visitor can click through to a state or province geo page, and from a state or province geo page a visitor can click through to a city geo page.
Country Page > State or Province Page > City Page
United States > Colorado > Denver
Canada > Ontario > Toronto
Not only does a good structure like this allow a website’s visitors to click through a page hierarchy, but the hierarchy is reflected in the page’s URL so that it looks something like this:
http://www.example.com/usa/colorado/denver-carpet-cleaning
In this URL structure, the “/” after the “.com” part of the URL shows a subfolder following after a parent folder. So in the URL example above, “usa” is a folder that comes under the home page, “colorado” is a subfolder under “usa”, and “denver-carpet-cleaning” is the page itself that we would visit if we entered this full URL into our browser (If it existed. This is just an example). As you can see, the page “denver-carpet-cleaning” is located in the “colorado” folder.
It’s well worth setting up your geo page URL structure like this. Google’s algorithm knows what state or province every city is located in and what country each state or province is in, but if you make things easy for their robots and neatly lay your geo pages out in a nice hierarchy, then they are able to better understand what each page is about, how it relates to your other geo pages, and what your website is about. They reward this with higher rankings in search results and more visibility for both your geo pages and your website as a whole.
If your business only serves a small area that is confined to one state or province, then you don’t need a country page like is shown in the example above. However, if you’re going to create geo pages for cities located in a number of different states or provinces, then creating a country page to group all the states or provinces under would be a good idea.
To complete the URL structure, it’s a good idea to add some of the most important keywords that are found on the geo pages you are creating. If your geo pages are about carpet cleaning, put that in. If they’re about tax accounting services, put that in. Below are some examples.
Examples of businesses that only serve cities within one state or province:
http://www.example.com/carpet-cleaning-colorado/denver
http://www.sample.com/tax-accounting-services-ontario/toronto
http://www.illustration.com/lawn-care-services-california/san-francisco
http://www.how-to-do-it.com/massachusetts/boston-management-consulting
http://www.company.com/minnesota/minneapolis-limousine-service
Examples of businesses that serve cities in multiple states or provinces:
http://www.example.com/usa/carpet-cleaning-colorado/denver
http://www.sample.com/canada/tax-accounting-services-ontario/toronto
http://www.illustration.com/lawn-care-services-usa/california/san-francisco
http://www.how-to-do-it.com/us/massachusetts/boston-management-consulting
http://www.company.com/united-states/minnesota/minneapolis-limousine-service
http://www.sample-site.com/rentals-usa/minnesota/minneapolis-construction-equipment
You’ll notice in the examples above that it doesn’t matter where the keywords for your service go in the URL. You can put them with the country, state, province, or city. What does matter, though, is that the hierarchical structure of Country > State/Province > City is maintained.
How to Work with Pre-Filled Geo Page URLs
In the URL section of the geo page generator, it will attempt to pre-fill your geo page URLs for you. Treat the URLs it creates for you as a suggestion. You can override its suggestions and type in anything for the URLs that you want.
At the top of the URL section, it provides three rows for you to customize your URLs and have your changes automatically applied to all the geo page URLs below. The top row allows you to modify the country section of the URL, the second row lets you edit the state/province section, and the third row enables you to change the city section.
Feel free to add your most important keywords for your geo pages to any of these three sections. Just make sure to let the generator know where you’d like the name of the country, state/province, or city to go by using “<country>”, “<state>”, “<province>”, or “<city>” on its specified row (we start things off by inserting these for you).
We normally suggest including your important keywords within the country section of the geo page URL (or if you only serve areas within one state or province, within the state/province section). This way when you create a country or state/province pages, your keywords will be included in the URL (for Google’s benefit). If you only serve a number of states or provinces and don’t really want to attract national attention, then include the keywords in the state/province section of your URL.
If you only serve a small geographic area around one city, it’s still a good idea to create a state or province page as a parent to organize your city pages. Just make it really clear to anyone who lands on your state or province page that you only serve a specific region of your state or province.
If you’d like to individually customize some or all of your city page URLs, you can do that too. All of the pre-filled city page URLs can be typed over in the URL column.