City pages do work for roofing company SEO. Roofers can rank in various areas by publishing local landing pages for each city. At Roofing Webmasters, we’ve utilized this strategy for our clients for over a decade. We even once published city pages for the entire state of Texas. As a result, the client ranked #1 for 90% of city-related queries on foam roofing.
In today’s Roofing SEO Podcast, Nolen and Jason discuss the evolution of city pages, how Google indexes them, and how you can maximize their performance to generate more local roofing leads.
How Many City Pages Can Roofers Publish?
Five years ago, most roofing companies could publish unlimited city pages and rank for all of them on Google search results. However, as Google’s algorithm has grown more sophisticated, other factors dictate how many city pages a roofing website can publish.
20 City Pages
For a typical roofing website, we now recommend about 20 city pages. But, again, the key is providing a helpful website with a good user experience. For example, if a roofer has only ten service pages and thousands of city pages, the site might appear to have spam-like tendencies and get filtered on SERPs.
50-60 City Pages
Some websites can still publish 50-60 local landing pages and index them all. Google will consider your authority, tenure, and overall website value to determine whether or not your city pages index. Of course, the city pages’ quality also plays a role in whether they can rank.
100+ City Pages
When you surpass 100 city pages, you have to be very careful with your site’s overall quality. People in the SEO industry generally fear a duplicate content penalty, but that’s not proven to exist. The real problem with publishing 100+ similar location pages is decreased content value. It’s not about duplication; it’s about depreciation and negative user experience.
1,000+ City Pages
We mentioned that one of our clients had location pages for every city in Texas. That’s more than 1,000 city pages, including towns and municipals. While this strategy is complicated to implement, it may work under particular circumstances. We discuss the factors that help you rank for many city pages throughout the podcast.
Factors That Influence Location Page Value
The more valuable your location page is, the more you can index on your website. However, keep in mind that in Google’s eyes, value comes from a variety of factors, some of which expand beyond the individual location page. Below, we outline several factors that influence city page value.
Website Authority
Like most SEO strategies, location pages work best with websites with authority. You can measure authority with 3rd party metrics like Moz Domain Authority, Majestic Trust Flow, and AHRefs Domain Rating. None of these metrics come from Google but are based on Google’s presumed formula for assigning website authority.
Content Quality
The quality of your content, not just on the location pages but overall, will influence how many pages you can publish. For example, a roofing company with 20+ unique service pages can typically rank for more locations. If you establish your website as one that provides value to Google searchers, you have more leeway when publishing new pages.
Service Uniqueness
Our foam roofing client is an excellent example of uniqueness which gives you a lot more latitude to publish hundreds and even thousands of city pages. Because Google’s index lacks pages specializing in foam roofing in cities across the U.S., it will be more interested in your pages. Unique services like foam roofing are more scarce than general roof repair.
DataPins
DataPins is a local SEO tool that allows roofing contractors to pin their jobs using the DataPins web app on their mobile devices. Roofers can take up to six job pictures and tag the city and service. As a result, you validate your city pages with a digital hand raise and geo-coordinates every time you complete a job.
As almost all of your competitors’ city pages sit in the index untouched, your city pages continuously add new and unique content, strengthening their overall value. Furthermore, your pin captions which may mention things like GAF shingles, also appear on the city pages, producing exclusive long-term keywords that no competitor has ever mentioned.
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