Folks, I can’t stress enough the importance of including relevant geo-targeted area profile pages within your website page navigational mix, especially if your industry is real estate and you want to dominate your local market – Gosh, who doesn’t want that?
I consider area profile pages to be foundational and absolutely key to smart website navigation. If linked backed to from other pages and posts within your site, area profile pages will boost your local search engine placement and your property search (real estate) if you add call to action search links within those pages.
When I create page navigation for a new WordPress website or a WordPress conversion to StudioPress/Genesis, I always start with area profile pages, a.k.a. county, city, town, community, subdivision, municipality, designated place, etc. pages, or however my client is choosing to break down their geo-targeted area of focus.
Start with a comprehensive game plan for the areas you want to target because quality area profile pages take a lot of time to research and write and should include the following information: area overview, demographics, climate, geography, history, housing, educational stats, schools, hospitals, economy, employment, recreation, parks, transportation, quality of life, etc. I do recommend that you stay away from discussing race and religion, especially when it comes to real estate and equal fair housing regulations.
If you don’t have the time to write your own quality, geo-targeted area profiles,hire a professional to write them for you. As I always tell my clients, “Quality area profiles are labor intensive and not for the faint of heart.”
Defining Your Area of Focus with Geo-targeting
Some websites geo-target multiple cities and counties while others have a more granular focus like neighborhoods, communities or subdivisions within a single city radius. Whatever your area of focus is, you will want to create child pages and that fall under the main parent page in your URLstructure and tab menu.
Creating Maximum Area Authority with Geo-targeting
All area profile child pages should be linked to the main parent page and to one another whenever possible – subdivision pages to town or city pages; city pages to county pages; county to county pages, and so forth. Area profile pages should also be linked back to from other posts and pages whenever relevant.
Internal linking, otherwise known as deep link navigation SEO, will create maximum geo-targeted area authority for your website if you follow this plan.
Here are a few examples of comprehensive geo-targeted area profile pages with deep internal linking for area authority:
- Greater Tampa Bay Florida
- New Tampa Florida
- Grafton MA Real Estate
- Ashland MA Real Estate
- Columbia TN
- Clarksville TN
- Williamson County TN
- Rutherford County TN
Why Adding a Google Map is Good for Geo-targeted SEO
A great way to enhance your website area authority is by adding a Google map to area specific pages and posts. There are many java script maps available, even fancy ones that include tabs for walkability scores, local businesses (Yelp), Zillow, schools and more. However, these fancier maps might look nifty from a usability standpoint, but they do nothing for your geo-targeted SEO and that’s what you’re trying to accomplish, right?
Search engines are smart but they can’t watch a movie and they can’t read java script – hence the reason why I recommend using a straight forward, interactive, embedded Google Map. That way, you are literally pulling data from Google and how can that be wrong? Google LOVES its own content and by adding a Google map within your area profile pages and anchoring it with a heading tag, you are helping Google and the other SEs ascertain what area your content is about.
How to Embed a Google Map into a Page for Geo-targeting
Embedding a Google map into html is as easy as embedding the iframe of a YouTube video – copy paste 1-2-3. That being said, I like to add a title to the map with the use of a heading tag, such as <h3>Map of Nashville, Tennessee</h3>. Heading tags are good for SEO when they support the main h1 title and make it easier to insert a map iframe in the right spot when you are in html view.
Easy Step-by-step Instructions for adding a Google Map:
- Click on Google Maps to open up the search box
- Type in the area you want to geo-target into the search box. You can search by country, state, city, county, zip code, multiple zip codes or unique street address.
- The map will open and in the upper right corner you will see a link button. Click on the Link and copy the iframe code from “Paste HTML to embed in website.”
- Open the html view of your page and scroll down until you find the place where you want the iframe of the map inserted. Save or update.
- Paste in the iframe code and save or update.
- You should now see an interactive Google map on your page.
If your WordPress website is brand new or you’re thinking about revamping your current site and want to kick up your geo-targeted area authority, definitely include area profiles to your page navigation mix. If you don’t have time to write comprehensive area profile pages, give me a call and I’ll be happy to write them for you – my specialty!
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Hi Vic,
Glad you brought that up. I have been meaning to ask you about this:
I have created a few public Mesquite subdivision maps in Google. Does Google recognize them as ‘Google maps’ ?
Or would it be better as far as SEO to just use a generic Google map?
V.
Hi Virginia, Send me a link to those pages so I can take a look
Victoria, would Geo targeting of Cities, neighborhoods and subdivisions make up for the lack of indexed IDX?
Some IDXs available to me here do not provide indexing, but have good applications for doing Geo Targeting.
The solution that can be indexed on our IDX is not very good at Geo Targeting.
Thanks
GS
Gordon,
Yes, using geo-targeted pages is good SEO! You can add IDX elements within the pages to give your users some call to action. Adding searches, featured listings or hot links might not help with SEO, but they will help with usability and more importantly – lead conversion. We create a hot link template with the most popular searches and just change the city/area name for each page. Here is an example of a link template that we used for a client in Arizona:
Click The Links Below For A General Search Of Scottsdale Homes Or A Specialty Search
General Search of Scottsdale Homes
When you mouse over the link, you will see that the URL has a town code at the end of the string. I use find and replace within TextPad to change the townname from Scottsdale to Phoenix. This way I can create multiple city and specialized searches within minutes as opposed to hours!