True location in URL?
If you own a business in a small town near a big city, you’re probably a bit jealous of your competitors in this big city. The search volume for that city will most likely be significantly larger, and with that, the amount of potential customers as well.
So, is there any way you can still benefit from this proximity of potential customers? Perhaps if you also appear to be located in this city? You could, for example, easily use the name of a city in your URL, even if your business is actually located in the neighboring town. But how does this affect your SEO? And are there perhaps other reasons to avoid doing this? Let’s discuss in today’s Ask Yoast!
Vincent Ramos emailed us his dilemma:
I have a website with a city name in the URL, but my actual location is in the neighboring city, which gets smaller search volume. Our NAP is in the footer of every page with our actual address. Does it hurt my SEO that there’s a different city in the URL?
Watch the video or read the transcript for the answer!
Adding a different location to your URL than your actual location
“Does it hurt your SEO? No, but it might hurt your visitors when they come and visit your site because they expect you to be in city A and you’re not. So, I’d always tend to go to the side of honesty: just say that you’re in the city that you’re actually in.
You’ll find that actually being close to the center of the city that you want to be found in is very important in terms of local SEO. It’s very annoying, but that’s how most of the local rankings work. So, don’t lie, put your real location in your website URL if you can. See how that reflects on people and just say on your page, “We’re very close to ‘whatever the name of the city is’…”, because that’s the honest truth that usually lasts longer than any tricks around that. Good luck.”
Read more: Ranking your local business »
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It’s good info & so useful. Thanks
Useful information. I started to notice that my competition would be posting for the city I am located in, but the address would be in a different city. I have a question for my location. I am fairly close to the boarder of two cities and I was wondering would it be smart to try to rank for both cities or just try to stay true to what my address says?
Thanks Matt! We’d advise you to be honest about your location, no tricks that might disappoint users. What you could do, is mention in your content that you’re close to both cities though.
Nice post. I think that’s the only way to rank for many areas with one website. Would you create more links to those subpages or use the power of homepage to link internally?
Awesome information Joost, I recently did the opposite. I started with my hometown and actually I ranked first in the the first few months for it – then I actually found almost 0 of my audience actually came from that town. Nuts isn’t it! Anyway, I’m sure it works bigtime for cities.
Sounds great, Scott! At least your honesty worked somehow :-)
Great post.can i do this in my affiliate site ?
It’s good information and so useful,,,,,
Also, I feel that its a great initiative by Yoast to start a series of Ask Yoast where you guys help and guide all the beginners with SEO problems. More power to you!
Great to hear, thanks a lot! :)
I agree putting your genuine location is way better. It helps in local SEO and better chances of local business. having a different location on the website can also lead to negative talk which may/ may not lead o poor business.
I did not do this on my site, but is there a way I can get a full audit of my site?
You might want to take a look at our blog series: SEO audit. These articles can help you in order to perform an audit yourself! This is the first article: https://yoast.com/seo-audit-part-1/. Hope that helps! :)
Yeah, read carefully every point is explained very clearly it also helped me a lot so I can recommend to anyone.
Great article. I’ve debated whether to use additional locations for our website, but decided just to stick with the actual physical locations we use.
Hi,
I sent an email to support@yoast.com but no answer yet after some days!!!
very good . thanks
that was a great blog with full of information, thanks a lot for so much help
Thanks for sharing this Joost. Which is more impactful seo-wise? Having the location in the domain or in the page/category url?