How to Launch Your Geo Pages

What to Do Before Launching Geo Pages

Before you begin to launch your geo pages on your website, make sure you have done the following:

In the Excel Geo Page Generator workbook, on tab “1. Page Content” make sure you’ve filled in the minimum number of paragraphs in “Column 1”.
Make sure you’ve paraphrased your “Column 1” paragraphs in “Column 2” and “Column 3”.
Make sure you have a “Main Title/Heading” above your paragraphs in Columns 1, 2, and 3.
Make sure you’ve created a list of cities to target in tab “2. City List & Extra Content”.
Check tab “3. Quality Check” to make sure you haven’t missed anything important and that there are no major issues with your geo pages. Anything that’s missing or wrong will have a red “X” beside it. Potential issues will be indicated with a yellow symbol, and everything that looks good will have a green check mark icon beside it.

There are three ways you can publish your geo pages on your website.

Launch them manually one-by-one
Use the auto-launcher
If you have an IT team, have them turn the geo pages into a script and launch them that way

1. How to Publish Your Pages Manually One-By-One

Once you’ve completed the steps outlined above, your geo pages will be waiting for you on tab “4. Pages for Export” once you change the “Generate Geo Pages” option near the top of the worksheet to “Yes”. Your geo pages will be listed by city. Just like in the example below, you’ll see the cities listed on the left side. To the right of each city in the same row is the data for you to copy and paste into your content management system (WordPress, Drupal, Jumla, or whatever website content management system you use) to create your new pages.

[Screenshot of city pages ready to launch with cities on the left side]

What Each Columns Is For

In the first column, you’ll see the “Page Title”. This is your H1 Heading. It’s super important to letting your site visitors – including search engines – know what your page is all about. The next column to the right is the “Body” text and content for your geo pages. This is the main content with all your text, images, and links. The next column is your “Page URL” this is the website address for each of your geo pages. The next column to the right contains each geo page’s “Meta Title”. This is the page title that appears in search results. The contents of the next column also appear in search results. This is the description of each geo page. It’s called the “Meta Description”. The next column has the “Keywords” for your pages if you’d like to use them, and the last column has a “Canonical Link” for each geo page. This is the full page URL (address) that you can put in the canonical link field when you create each of your pages. To the right of the “Canonical URL” column are two extra columns titled “Updated” and “Notes”. We use the “Updated” column to record the date when we last updated a geo page. We typically type in the date there when we first launch a page and then later if we come back and do something to change it. If you update your pages in the future, this is a helpful way of keeping track of when you last touched a page. We also use the “Notes” section to the right to mention if we made a unique change to a certain page, or if we want to flag a page to come back to for some reason.

How to Start Launching Your Pages Manually

Before you begin launching a lot of geo pages, we suggest creating just one first. Create the page on your website and make sure it looks good. Check to make sure that your paragraphs and headings look right, your images are positioned properly, your links work, and your bold text is showing up. If you haven’t put a picture on your geo page yet, now could be a good time to do it. Sometimes you need to move a picture around on a page a bit to find the ideal place for it. Once you find the right spot for the image, you can then insert it into your geo page generator (using <image> in the body text and then filling out the image info column on tab, “2. City List & Extra Content.”

If you make some corrections to your geo pages after viewing the first one, launch one more to test out your changes and make sure they look fine. Once everything looks good, you can begin launching all your geo pages. Please be aware, though, that we suggest that you do not publish more than 5 pages per day. Otherwise you could risk appearing to Google as though you are spamming the internet with massive numbers of new pages all at once. Launching 5 pages per day seems to work well. This take a bit of patience, but the rewards are worth it. To make things easier for you, we’ve created an auto-launch feature that will automatically publish onto your website whatever geo pages you select. Here are the instructions for using the auto-launcher.

Steps to Publish Geo Pages Manually

Login to your website content management system (WordPress, Drupal, Jumla, etc.)
Create a new page. You should have a bunch of empty white fields (text boxes) sitting in front of you waiting to be filled. Here’s how to fill them:
- Choose a geo page to launch by choosing a city.
- Select the cell with the “Page Heading (H1 Heading)” for the city you’ve chosen by clicking on the cell.
- Copy the content from this cell by pressing the “Ctrl” key on your keyboard followed by the “C” key (holding them both down at the same time for a moment). This will copy the contents of that cell into your computer’s memory.
- Go back to the new page you’re creating on your website content management system, click inside the space where you’re supposed to put the web page title, and press the “Ctrl” key on your keyboard followed by the “V” key (holding both down at the same time for a moment). This will paste the contents of the cell you copied in the last step. You’ll now see that you have a title for the web page you are creating.
- You’ll need to do this copy and paste procedure (Ctrl + C and then Ctrl + V) to copy and paste the contents of each cell for each city into each new geo page you create on your website. The only exception to this is the “Body” cell. It contains all the main content for each of your geo pages and is formatted in HTML code. Excel does not allow this code to be copied and pasted straight into your website content management system as it is (it adds some extra formatting that mucks things up). So one extra step is required.
- To copy and paste the “Body” cell contents into your new page, open up Microsoft Word and copy and paste the “Body” cell contents into a blank Word document (using Ctrl + C and then Ctrl + V. Processing the body HTML content through Word removes the weird formatting that Excel adds). Select all the contents of the Word document by pressing Ctrl + A. Copy what you’ve selected by pressing Ctrl + C. Go back to the new webpage you are creating, find the option near where you enter the main body of your page (the big, huge text box) that allows you to switch to plain text or HTML code view, and select that option. Now you can paste your content into the body text area of your new webpage by clicking on the body field (big text box area) and pressing Ctrl + V.
- Continue the copy and paste procedure (Ctrl + C and then Ctrl + V) for all the rest of the cells you wish to copy from the geo page generator into your new city geo page. Here are the remaining cells to copy over for each city geo page and what they are:
  - Page URL – This is the webpage address for each of the geo pages. Using meaningful URLs like this looks nice for visitors to your site and helps Google better understand your page.
  - Meta Title – This is the page title/heading that shows up in search results. Use this title to attract visitors to you webpage in search results.
  - Meta Description – This appears below the Meta Title in search results and gives people a brief description of what your page is all about.
  - Keywords – These are options as Google no longer requires them. Using keywords is another way to give search engines a better idea of what you page is all about.
  - Canonical URL – This is also optional. If your website is setup to use this, it allows you to declare to search engines that your page is the original version of the content that appears on it. If someone copies (scrapes) your content, it helps search engines figure out who the real owner is.
- Once you have created one page. Inspect it carefully, read it over from top to bottom, and make sure everything looks good and is as it should be. If anything needs to be fine-tuned, do it now before you launch more geo pages. Enter any changes into the geo page generator so that they will appear on all future pages you create.

2. How to Publish Your Pages Using the Auto-Launch Tool Built Into The Geo Page Generator

Once you’ve completed the steps outlined above and you believe you are done, your geo pages will be waiting for you on tab “4. Pages for Export” once you change the “Generate Geo Pages” option near the top of the worksheet to “Yes”. Your geo pages will be listed by city. Just like in the example below, you’ll see the cities listed on the left side. To the right of each city in the same row is the data for you to copy and paste into your content management system (WordPress, Drupal, Jumla, or whatever website content management system you use) to create your new pages.

[Screenshot of city pages ready to launch with cities on the left side]

We’ve created the auto-launch tool to allow you to publish and update your geo pages effortlessly (compared to creating each new page manually). To use the auto-launch page creation feature, open up your geo page generator Excel file you’ve been working on. When it opens, if you look carefully under the menu options ribbon near the top of the program, you may see a “Security Warning” that lets you know that “Some active content has been disabled.” Beside this message is a button that reads “Options…” Click on this button. A “Security Alert” box will then appear informing you that Excel has disabled “Macros & ActiveX” as a standard precaution. Select “Enable this content” and press the “OK” button. The macros and code we’ve programmed into the worksheet allow the auto-launcher to create and update pages for you. Without this tool, you’ll have to create and update all your geo pages manually one-by-one. We’ve created and updated thousands of geo pages manually over the years, but using the auto-launcher is so much faster and easier.

(See if user needs to enable Microsoft HTML Object Library and any other developer options)

Now you can go to tab “4. Pages for Export” and choose the cities you would like to launch geo pages for. However, to get started, just choose one page to make sure that everything is working properly. Place a check mark in the box beside the page you would like to publish. Before you can publish the page, though, you’ll need to login to your content management system (WordPress, Drupal, Jumla, etc.) in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (the auto-launcher uses Internet Explorer to create the new pages on your website). Once you’re logged in to your website, go back to your geo page generator Excel file and click the big green “Publish Selected Pages” button. You should see a window open up in Internet Explorer, the content for the new page populating the appropriate fields, and then the finished page will be saved and left there for you to inspect.

Have a careful look at the new page. Make sure all parts of it are filled out correctly: the page title, the body, the page URL, the page meta title, and the meta description. Also make sure that all of your content looks good to you. We suggest reading your brand new, first geo page from top to bottom to make sure that everything flows and looks good for your site visitors.

Once you’ve confirmed that everything is working well with your first page, feel free to launch more. Just select the pages you’d like to publish by checking off the box beside each one. Once the boxes are checked, press the green “Publish Selected Pages” button and you should see the pages automatically created right in front of you. We strongly suggest that you do not publish more than 5 pages per day. Otherwise you could risk appearing to Google as though you are spamming the internet with massive numbers of new pages all at once. Launching 5 pages per day seems to work well.

3. Getting Your IT Team to Publish Your Geo Pages Using a Script

If you’re publishing hundreds of geo pages, this option can make things even easier for you. With this approach, you save the completed city geo page data from tab “4. Pages for Export” as a CSC file. Email the CSV file to your IT department, tell them what it is and what you’re doing, and ask them if they can create a script to launch 5 pages per day until the list is complete. You would then check up on the pages once they are created to make sure that everything looks fine and to make sure that the national page links to the state or provincial pages and that the state or provincial pages link to their respective city pages (you can make sure these parent pages are linking to their children pages by updating the national and state or provincial pages. You can do this manually or by using the auto-launch page refresh tool).

Don’t give the CSV file to your IT person until you’ve published a few pages yourself just to make sure that everything is working right and looks good.

How to create a CSV file

We’re actually looking at creating a user-friendly version of this option that anyone can use – so anyone can use this option without needing an IT department.

Extra Tip: How to Update Your Geo Pages Using the Bulk Update (Auto-Update) Tool Built Into The Geo Page Generator

Once your geo pages are published, you’ll likely want to update them at some point in the future. If you have published a lot of city pages, updating your state or province geo pages will automatically add links to all the appropriate city pages at the bottom of your state or province geo pages. Updating a country page will do the same for all states or provinces you have added. Other common reasons to refresh geo pages could be to update the number of years you’ve been in business, the number of locations you have, the awards your business has won, or the products or services you offer. You might also need to change an address or a phone number or test out different copy, images, and videos to improve your sales. Rather than making these changes one-by-one on your geo pages, you can make them in Columns 1, 2, and 3 on tab “1. Page Content” of the geo page generator and then use the auto-launch feature to update all your existing pages very quickly.

Here’s how updating your pages works. When you launch your geo pages using the auto-launch tool (checking off the box beside a city name and then pressing the big green “Publish Selected Pages” button), it automatically grabs the ID number for each new geo page webpage it creates. As you launch new pages, you’ll see these numbers populate near the left hand side of tab “4. Pages for Export”. The generator then uses these page ID numbers to publish any future updates directly to each page. This way each page you specify is updated quickly and effortlessly. All you have to do is make your changes in the geo page generator, select the pages you would like to update on tab 4 by placing check marks beside the city names, and then press the big green button.

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