Creating Geo-Targeted Suburb Pages
When setting up your website for local search, it is important to focus on niche, relevancy and location. Your goal is to give your potential customers the information that they need to find you when they are searching for your product or service in your main city location or a suburb of your location.
Creating a Suburb Page
For example, let’s say you are a plumber in Tampa, FL. Your first objective would be to create content on your home page that tells the search engines that you are indeed a “plumber in Tampa Florida”. Now, as a plumber in Tampa you would most likely also serve the surrounding areas and suburbs of Tampa, FL. This is is why your Geo-targeted suburb pages are important.
First, make a list of the surrounding suburbs, neighborhoods, towns and unincorporated cities in the Tampa area and in Hillsborough County. Wikipedia usually has a long list of neighborhoods and unincorporated cities for almost every city in the U.S.
Once you have your list, look up each suburb on Wikipedia and any other websites that you can find to get as much information as possible about that location. You will need informative and useful original content. Don’t copy, or cut and paste. Pretend you are back in school, do your reading and research and write in your own words. Content about the specific location should land at around 750 words. Research fun things to do and see around town, history, local airports, roads, driving directions, nearby schools, nearby rivers, local parks, notable places, and other nearby towns and suburbs.
Always start your geo-targeted suburb page with a description of your business with bullet points about your business, then get into the content about the suburb. Each suburb should have its own page.
Suburb Page Site Structure
Create your site structure for each page like this:
domain.com/city/suburb-name/
bobsplumbing.com/tampa/ybor-city/
Title Tag
Plumber Ybor City | Ybor City Plumbing | Bobs Plumbing
Create a Main Areas Served Page
Create an areas served page and list all of your suburbs on that page. If possible, put the suburbs in alphabetical order. You can hyperlink to each of the actual Suburb Pages from the name of the suburb on the Areas Served page. Also link once from the Areas Served page to the Home Page of the website.
For an added benefit on your Areas Served page you can embed a Google Map showing your location. To take it one step further, you could embed a Google My Maps with directions from your location to each suburb if you are a SAB (Service Area Business) or directions from each suburb to your location if you are a brick and mortar business.
To create a Google My Maps, start off by going to https://www.google.com/mymaps and logging into your Google account. You will get to this page https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/ where you can click on the button “CREATE A NEW MAP” . Click create a new map. Enter your business name into the search box. If that doesn’t bring anything up, enter your business address. This will create your main location. Click on “Untitled map” and add your business name and description. Next click on the Y arrow that says “add directions” on hover. A new box will be added on the left bottom for driving directions with an A & B.
So, A is the starting point and B is the end. If you are a SAB (Service Area Business) you will want to make A your address and B will be your suburb destination where you will serve your customers. If you are a brick and mortar business, B will be your starting point and A will be your destination, as your customers come to you. You will repeat these directions until you have an established map of your local suburbs. There is a limit on how many directions that you can add to your map, so try to spread them out uniformly to create a radius around your business location.
Here is a sample image of a Google My Maps embed:
This is a fantastic way to let your potential customers know, through search engines, that your business serves each of these smaller towns, unincorporated cities and suburbs. This does require work but it will certainly pay for itself with increased visibility and revenue.