As you probably know, the most important thing you can do to get your website to rank in search results is to build links to your website in general and links to your important pages that you really want to rank on their own. If you link to your geo pages from a prominent place on your website, the link juice that flows to your website will trickle down to your geo pages and help them to rank in search results more quickly.
Building some links to your geo pages from other websites is a good idea. The extent to which you will need to do this all depends on how competitive your industry is, how many of your competitors are using geo pages, and how well your website ranks without geo pages. So far, because only large, national companies are using geo pages, we’re not seeing a lot of competition. So building a lot of external links to geo pages so far hasn’t seemed to be necessary.
The one of the secrets the big companies seem to consistently miss is linking to their own geo pages from their own website. To prove to Google and other search engines that you think the content on your website is good, you need to link to it. If you don’t link to one of your webpages, that’s a signal that the page is so unimportant – or of such a poor quality – that even you don’t link to it. So find ways to link to your geo pages. Every geo page should be linked to at least once, and important ones should be linked to a number of times (don’t go crazy though, that would look really weird to search engine algorithms).
Here are some ideas for linking to your geo pages
- If you have a state or province geo page, it should link to all your city geo pages within its borders. You can incorporate the names of these cities into the paragraphs on the page, create a bulleted list of these city geo pages, create a list at the bottom of the page, or create a menu for the page that lists the city geo pages. If you can include the one, two, or three words that are the keyword focus for each geo page in the link to each geo page, that could be helpful. At the very least, make sure the city name is in the link. Below are some examples to give you some ideas.
- Create geo pages on different topics and use them to link to your other geo pages. So for example, if there is both an industrial or commerical aspect to your service and a personal or residential aspect, you should probably create a set of geo pages that goes after people looking for your commercial service and another set of geo pages that targets people looking for your personal service. Your commercial geo pages could link to your personal geo pages. So your Chicago commercial geo page could let people know that you also provide personal level service and link to that Chicago geo page. Just avoid having pages like this link to each other. You should almost never do this. Links should generally flow only one way. If you have too many pages that point directly back at each other with their links, this will hurt your search engine rankings.
Build links to your geo pages from other websites. You’ll need to do this for geo pages that are in competitive situations. This is the same thing you would do for any other piece of important content on your website. However, if you are launching geo pages for keyword topics that your competitors haven’t covered yet at the local level, then simply linking to these geo pages from your own website can many time be good enough.
- If you rushed through creating your geo pages to get them up as quickly as possible, make a point of coming back to them to make sure they are optimized for success. Make sure you have at least one image on your geo pages (it can be the same one) with alt text (a description for Google’s benefit). Make sure you have at least one outbound link on your geo pages from each page to another website. Follow the many optimization tips contained on tab 3 of the geo page generator. Following these best practices plus building some links to your important geo pages, will give them the best chance of success.
- If you can afford to invest in an SEO expert, consider doing that – even if you can only afford to pay them a small amount to get started. They can leverage your geo pages to make your entire site more successful and bring in a lot more targeted visitors. If hiring an SEO person is not in the cards right now, these geo pages should still do a whole lot for your website.