How to Improve the SEO of City Pages Without Links

If you’re trying to improve a business’ visibility in specific towns or metro areas, then city pages could do the trick.

But what happens when you’ve created what you thought to be a perfect landing page, yet somehow it’s not ranking nearly as high as you thought it would?

To most SEO’s, the answer is obvious: it needs more links.

…Or does it?

Today I’m going to explain how I moved a city page from the second page of Google, all the way to the top 5 results without links (hint: it has to do with content).

How I Moved A City Page From Page 2 to The ‘Top 5’ Without Links

The Situation

Before I spill the beans, let me quickly explain the situation, and what my goal was.

One day, I was looking through All American Locksmith’s Search Console property for “opportunity keywords:” high-value, 2nd page terms with lots of impressions. I quickly set my sights on “locksmith norwalk ct.”

The Norwalk city page was ranking at the top of page 2 for that term, and it was generating tons of impressions, so I quickly knew that I had found the perfect candidate to try my experiment on.

What I Did

For reference, the Norwalk page used to be very similar to the other city pages. Check out the North Branford page: https://www.allamericanlocksmiths.net/coverage/new-haven-county/north-branford/

Something had to change. But what? Here’s what I did…

  • Removed all redundant instances of “Norwalk” from the H2’s
  • Revamped the “more about Norwalk” section. I’ve heard a lot of SEO’s talk about mentioning specific landmarks in the copy, so I decided to give it a try:

 

mention landmarks in city pages

Now most people might view this as spammy, and I agree to an extent; however, in a world where clients rarely give us original, local imagery or content, we have to do what we can to improve their rankings.

We recognized that this irrelevant block of text about popular Norwalk attractions is not ideal for the user; that’s why we added some padding around it. This way users know to scroll past.

The result?

improved norwalk ct locksmith rankings

So there you have it. Sometimes fresh content can do the trick, even if it’s not super useful to the user.

 

If you would like to know more about how we can improve your site’s local SEO, then contact us today!