City pages can be a powerful way to connect with new clients in surrounding cities.
In fact, over the last 5 months we’ve increased one of our law firm client’s search traffic to their website by over 70% through the use of city pages.
The truth is, your business is surrounded by many smaller (or even larger) cities.
But with local SEO, you can only verify your physical location in Google Maps.
Local SEO takes care of your traffic and rankings for the city where you are physically located.
But what about the 10 surrounding cities where you are also trying to reach customers?
This is one of the more frustrating points we see with all of our local business clients.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking to a plastic surgeon, personal injury lawyer, or dentists. Every local business wants to find a way to connect to more customers in surrounding cities.
Today I’m going to show you a way that almost guarantees you will rank higher in Google and drive more search traffic to your website from surrounding those surrounding metro areas.
City Pages: Your doorway to surrounding cities
When it comes to reaching customers in your surrounding cities, the traditional path of local SEO isn’t an option.
The traditional local SEO strategy is to verify your business address and optimize your GMB listing for rankings in Google maps.
And when someone searches for a particular lawyer in your city, your verified GMB listing will appear in the Google Maps search results, like this:
This of course assumes an effective local SEO strategy has been implemented.
But what if you don’t have an address to verify in all of your surrounding cities and zip codes?
How are you suppose to compete in Google in all of those markets?
That’s where city pages comes to the rescue.
This is a powerful way for your law firm to start ranking in dozens of surrounding cities for your targeted practice areas.
And today I’m going to show you the exact 4 step process we use with all of our client’s city pages.
And by the way, this doesn’t just work for law firms. We have clients from all types of businesses effectively implementing city pages to reach more customers.
4 Step Process to creating city pages that rank fast
City pages allows your law firm to create content that’s relevant to a particular city and practice area.
For example, let’s say your law firm is located in Atlanta, Georgia
But you have clients coming from cities like Marietta, Sandy Springs, and Roswell – which are cities within the greater metro Atlanta area.
City pages can help your law firm get traffic and exposure in Google, and connect to new clients, in these surrounding cities without the need to verify additional Google My Business listings in Google Maps.
Here’s the 4 step process we use to build city pages for our clients that rank fast in Google search:
Step 1: Identify one practice area for your targeted city page
Your law firm may have multiple practices areas such as DUI, personal injury, estate planning, and business litigation.
To increase your chances to compete at the top of Google search and connect to new clients in surrounding cities, you need to target only one practice area an city per page.
According to the Metro Atlanta Chamber, there are 29 municipalities making up the greater metro Atlanta area.
Check this out:
And since I live in this area, I can tell you that the expansion of metro Atlanta goes well beyond this map.
We live approximately 1.5 hours east of Atlanta in Athens, Georgia. And every day it feels like we are becoming more a part of the sprawling urban expansion of Atlanta.
One to one targeting of city pages
So if your office is located in downtown Atlanta, but you want to reach new clients searching for car accident lawyers in, let’s say, Stockbridge (a city south of Atlanta) then you’ll need to create a city page optimized for the following keyword phrase:
Stockbridge Car Accident Lawyer
Your entire page, from the title and description tags, down through the body of the content, needs to be hyper focused on the city of “Stockbridge” and the “car accident lawyer” practice area.
To unlock the ranking power of this city page, you cannot inter-mingle competing topics (practice areas or cities).
For example, you don’t want to talk about your DUI practice area in Marietta within the content of your Stockbridge Car Accident Lawyer page.
Hyper focused, one to one targeting for your city pages is how you’ll unlock the relevance factor and page authority that your city page needs to drive higher rankings and more traffic from Google.
Step 2: Long form content: mastering LSI
Research shows that a direct correlation exists between an article’s word count and its ranking position in Google.
In the image below from Backlinko, you can see the impact of this relationship:
The more words you include in your article, the more likely it will be seen by Google as an authoritative piece of content, and the higher it will rank in Google search.
But…
Word count alone isn’t enough.
You also need to include high quality, well researched content around your specific topic.
That’s where the power of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) comes into play.
Here’s a great definition of Latent Semantic Indexing from Search Engine Journal:
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a mathematical method used to determine the relationship between terms and concepts in content. The contents of a webpage are crawled by a search engine and the most common words and phrases are collated and identified as the keywords for the page.
Google’s semantic algorithm looks to first identify the core topic of your content. In our example, that would Stockbridge Car Accident Lawyer.
And from there, LSI starts to identify additional topics that are related to your core topic.
And it analyzes the depth of your content surrounding those correlated keyword phrases and terms.
As you might imagine, when you create long form content (3,000+ words), the ability to increase your LSI relevance becomes much easier.
The more content you write produce around your core topic, the more naturally you’ll include many LSI related keyword phrases.
And this tells Google that your article on Stockbridge Car Accident Lawyer is in-depth, well researched, and provides a lot of valuable information around that topic.
Which ultimately means Google sees this page as a valuable piece of content that deserves to be ranked at the top of Google search.
LSI and long tail keyword phrase variations
The power of LSI goes beyond just presenting a well researched piece of content.
It also opens the door for your website to rank for a wide range of long tail keyword phrases.
When people are searching for a car accident lawyer in Stockbridge, Georgia, they may execute that search using many different phrase variations or topic variations.
Here’s a list of few different ways someone may search for a car accident lawyer in Stockbridge, Ga.:
- auto injury lawyer in Stockbridge
- accident attorneys in Stockbridge
- auto accidents with injury in Stockbridge
- ambulance lawyers in Stockbridge
- auto accidents claims with insurance in Stockbridge
- and so on…
When you include a wide range of LSI keyword phrases and topics around your core topic, your page will start to rank for these many different keyword phrase variations.
And this can result in hundreds, or even thousands of new visitors to your website that are highly relevant to your core topic “car accident lawyer in Stockbridge”.
In fact, research shows that the majority of search volume is actually found in the long tail phrase variations of core keyword phrases.
Even though the most search volume for any given keyword phrase may be found in the core phrase, when you add up all of the search volume in the long tail phrases, you exponentially increase the traffic potential from Google search.
How to build a list of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keyword phrases for your content:
You can quickly build your list of LSI keyword phrases to use in your content by visiting LSIGraph.com.
In this example, I’m looking for topically related keyword phrases around the core topic of “car accident lawyer”.
I’m not using the metro area of “Stockbridge” because that might be too granular to see strong LSI related keyword phrases.
Instead, I’m looking for high quality LSI related keyword phrases first, and then I’ll integrate the metro area along with the LSI phrases.
Here’s what I get when I run “car accident lawyer” in the LSI Graph tool:
- auto accident checklist
- geico what to do in an accident
- youtube auto accidents
- car accident with no police report
- auto accident
- car accident lawyers bakersfield
- car accident lawyer columbia sc
- car accident lawyer in maryland
- broward car accident lawyer
- oakland car accident lawyer
- pa car accident lawyers
- car accident lawyer chicago
- accident lawyers
- what to do after a car accident
- what to do in a car accident
- what to do in an accident checklist
- truck accident checklist
- auto accident attorney
- auto accident checklist pdf
- auto accident investigation checklist
- injury investigation checklist
- workers compensation investigation checklist
- what happens after a car accident
- workplace accident investigation checklist
- car accident lawyer
- accident checklist
- printable auto accident checklist
- geico reporting an accident
- geico insurance report an accident
- geico after an accident
- geico accident claim
- geico time limit to file claim
- claims geico report claim aspx
- how to deal with a car accident
- minor accident no police report
- auto accident no police report
- minor car accident
- youtube car crash
- youtube truck accidents
- youtube auto accident videos
- car accidents videos youtube
- car accident claims
- videos of car accidents
- youtube car accident
- car accident videos youtube
- accident youtube
- russian auto accidents youtube
- youtube wrecks
- accident but no police report
- insurance claim no police report
- car accident no police called
- accident with no damage
- no accident report no problem
- car accident without police report
I went the through the list and identified some LSI keyword phrases that might work well in my page that’s on the topic of Car Accident Lawyer in Stockbridge.
I especially like the references to things like car accident videos youtube, truck accident youtube videos, etc… because this gives you the opportunity to include rich media (i.e. videos) in your content.
And people love videos!
Including rich media in your content will give your readers something more to look at as they read your article.
And this increases the overall time spent on your page, which increases user experience factors such as time on site, which increases the overall relevance factor of your page, which in turn increases your Google rankings and traffic (yes… there’s a lot of factors that go into rankings).
- Read more about how User Experience influences domain authority
I went to Youtube and quickly found a video you could use in your article on Car Accident Lawyer
When you embed the video in your article, be sure to use at least an
subtitle tag above the video like this:
Youtube Videos of Truck Accidents
Adding the subtitle above your video gives you the opportunity to use one of your LSI related keyword phrases. Better yet, you can use it an
subtitle tag, which is even more powerful!
The power of Q&A’s for LSI targeting
Along with rich media such as videos, another powerful way to increase your LSI ranking factor is to include questions and answers around your core topic.
Again, the LSI Graph tools provides some great examples of Q&A’s to use in your content:
- how to deal with a car accident?
- what to do after a car accident?
- what to do in a car accident?
- what to do in an accident checklist?
Answer these questions with a paragraph or two, and you’ll quickly increase your LSI ranking factor.
Plus, you’ll find it easy to dramatically increase the word count and overall quality of your article.
Step 3: Meta Data Structuring:
[metro area + practice area]
Once you’ve written 3,000 plus words of super high quality, LSI filled content, it’s time to look at what I call “site structuring“.
Site Structuring is the strategic use of high quality meta data structuring within your website and web pages.
There are 3 core areas I focus on for web page site structuring:
- Title Tag /
tag
- Description Tag / tag
- Image alt tags tags
Optimizing your Title Tag in City Page
Within any page in your website, including city pages, Google will give the most weight to the first instance of your title tag on that page.
The title tag is indicated by the
tag in your code. If you use a platform like WordPress, the title of your pages and blog posts are automatically considered the title tags.
You can see the