As a local business selling a product or service in your city, there’s a predictable way to structure your website.
Homepage:
/
Service (or product) pages
service-in-city / product-in-city
service2-in-city / product2-in-city
service3-in-city / product3-in-city
Competitor pages
competitor1-alternative(-in-city)
competitor2-alternative(-in-city)
competitor10-alternative(-in-city)
Blog pages
/blogs/helpful-blog-topic-1
/blogs/helpful-blog-topic-2
/blogs/helpful-blog-topic-3
/blogs/helpful-blog-topic-4
/blogs/helpful-blog-topic-5
1.) Homepage
Your homepage should make it extremely clear what you offer. You cannot be clear enough.
You list all services or products that you offer and link to them.
All your important pages should have a link from the homepage.
The more important a page is, the higher it should appear on your homepage. You also want to include a link to important pages in the navigation bar.
The footer serves as another great location to link to pages you care about a lot.
2.) Service or product pages
Each of your service deserves a landing page. If you offer 10+ services (e.g. google ads management, meta ads management, social media managmenet), each service needs to have 1 page dedicated to it. It is best to also always add the name of the city.
Each service page should only talk about that one particular service and have that service in the H1 and H2s.
Avoid the mistake of cramming in multiple products and services on one page.
You can build supplementary pages for your company to intercept customers to make sure potential customers hear from your first when they are doing research about your company.
yourdomain.com/your-company-name-packages
3.) Targeting alternatives
It is often a good idea to build pages for about your competitors. Specifically, customers of your competitor who are dissatisfied with the service/product will search for “[competitor] alternative”.
H1: Looking for a [Competitor1 alternative]? H2: Why [your product] is the best alternative for [competitor1] etc.
You can also add the city name to make it extra clear to google and your visitors that you are offering the service in a given city.
H1: Looking for a [Competitor1 alternative] in Canada? H2: Why [your product] is the best alternative for [competitor1] in Canada etc.
It works because the visitors of that page are usually using a product like yours but have bought from a competitor and they are looking to change. They 1.) have money and 2.) are looking for a solution.
The conversion rate of the visitors can be as high as 50%.
4.) Blog posts
All your blog posts can be in the /blog/ subfolder.
Make sure that the blog posts are about keywords and topics people actually search.
Also Make sure that the the slug is clear.
It is better to have a url like this:
rather than this:
Google does care about having the right keywords in the url.
Advanced Topics: Internal links
Below you can see the screenshot of a large job portal (https://sg.jobstreetexpress.com/).
From the homepage, there are links to all major categories like: job categories, companies, employment types
From the major category subfolder, the user can then go even deeper in the site architecture (for example full-time-job in given state).
This helps google and googlebot to understand your website and efficiently crawl through your website.
We have seen hundreds of sites without internal links and many orphan pages (pages that do not receive a single link). Usually, google does not crawl it as efficiently. The lack of internal links also prevents the page to rank higher on Google.
To improve crawlability of your website, large websites build a large footer that contains links to the pages they care about the most.
This footer helps to
improve crawlability (googlebot is able to reach and crawl all pages)
send link power to pages you care about (helps
