My client wants to rank for multiple cities

[Ambassy]

Well my client wants to rank for multiple cities which are in near proximity of the capital he is located in.
I've suggested him to make a landing page for each region which he has agreed to.
However, I told him to write a unique piece of text of ~400+ words for each landing page.

What he has done though, is to write a single article in which he proposes to simply replace CITYNAME with the current region of the landing page.
I have my doubts about this seeing as he very well could get penalized for duplicate content if he was to produce 20 landing pages, all being identical with the city replaced as the only thing.

What are your thoughts on this? Doesn't it sound like a bad idea?

 

[M4XW3LL]

He won't go anywhere with the same content by just changing the name of the city, there will be no duplicate content penalty but you can't rank with what he did. He should write unique content for every city.

 

[TheGamer]

I certainly wouldn't do that. That would definitely be classed as duplicate content. Also a word of advice, I have found that 1K+ text helps much better than just 400 words of text. Again this is not the only thing but just one of the factors in ranking.

 

[mickyfu]

My thoughts are if I were your client, I would expect you to do the work.

 

[Ambassy]

Thanks for confirming my beliefs guys.

My thoughts are if I were your client, I would expect you to do the work.

They're a small startup company so they said they'd prefer to write the content themselves in order to save money.

 

[ChadTKimball]

Well my client wants to rank for multiple cities which are in near proximity of the capital he is located in.
I've suggested him to make a landing page for each region which he has agreed to.
However, I told him to write a unique piece of text of ~400+ words for each landing page.

What he has done though, is to write a single article in which he proposes to simply replace CITYNAME with the current region of the landing page.
I have my doubts about this seeing as he very well could get penalized for duplicate content if he was to produce 20 landing pages, all being identical with the city replaced as the only thing.

What are your thoughts on this? Doesn't it sound like a bad idea?

yes this is absolutely a bad idea. If he does this he will get smacked by the panda algorithm or whatever it is these days, but that type of content will not rank. He may be able to come up with examples and argue with you of people that are doing this successfully, but if you watch those pages they do not last long. And they do not come back once they are smacked.

There are black hat approaches to this though,, setting up dozens of actual local listings all over the place in all the cities that he wants to target. It's a great way to generate local leads for a business like this.

 

[bmminc]

Very bad idea. It will kill the site. You NEED unique content for each location page. Hell, i've seen people rank better by copying the wikipedia page of info about the city, and slapping on a short paragraph about their company and services. THAT worked better than what you mentioned.

(Both are a very bad idea though)

Create a unique page for each location
Create a unique page for each service
Create a regularly updated blog

They will have to spend a good amount of $$$ on content, or get their asses in gear and write some stuff. You cannot be lazy with local SEO.

 

[W9go]

complete crap ..... its no problem.
i have pages with 100reds of citys tehy rank as well .... but for only 6 he can do some text variation.

 

[codfordinner]

Why is the client doing any of this?
Lol, if he can't afford your services tell him to get lost. Most of the time they can.
Now you're wasting time making threads about ridiculous things your client is doing and It's time to get blunt with the client.
Tell him what he's doing won't work, you have a way to do things the right way, if he wants to learn SEO and do it himself then by all means.

 

[ija61]

Despite all the above comments I say that this can work. I have an website build based on this approach and is working for 4-5 years and it passed all the algo updates.

Is true that changing only the city name will not be a good idea. You must add some more unique content. As long as you don't change the keywords density you can add the city description or some data about that city like population, location and things like this. Try to think at some content that can make the page unique and that can also be scraped over the web.

Create a database with that data and then populate the pages with the content from the database extracted based on the city.

 

[scottlies]

That alone (city name change) is a bad idea. Mix it up! Yes you can use same content but change some words from it.

 

[MontieSkaggs]

definitely need all unique content... you should look in to creating actual google+ local listings so you can simply rank in the pack results in each different city. there are numerous address workarounds to do this.

 

[STONESEO]

he needs to change the articles of each landing page mate. He needs to have unique content on each site, at least he could manually spin the articles and make them unique and readable.

 

[TzoLy1]

You could create subdomains like city_domain_com or domain_com/business/city but pay attention to content. If you automatically generate content for landing page you won't make any big deal. For each city make a unique content and after that you could start a off-page campaign.

 

[Worldwidebacklinks]

Ranking for additional locations is fairly content heavy, you really have to go the extra mile in order to actually rank well. Location specific content, local client testimonials etc go a long way! Good luck.

 

[intrepid]

Let your cheapskate client pay the Google penalty for laziness. Or pay you to do it correctly.

 

[rosario1990]

Content sharing is a good idea for ranking a website now a days. it's really helps to drive much traffic as well side by side keyword ranking.

 

[mickyfu]

Makes me wish I outsourced my SEO to someone who asks for advice in a public forum where 99% of the members are clueless.

 

[Aluminium]

he needs to change the articles of each landing page mate. He needs to have unique content on each site, at least he could manually spin the articles and make them unique and readable.

This, he has to create content that specifically targets every single city.

 

[myopic1]

Guys, appreciate your help with something...I've decided to become a plumber, my client already paid me and he wants be to add some extra pipes to his gas boiler, does anyone have any thoughts about how I should do this? Does this sound like a bad idea?