Google offers detailed recommendations for sites that need to target multiple locations, such as businesses with offices in different states.
The topic was discussed in a Google Search Central SEO office hour hangout recorded on January 14th.
An SEO professional named Gail (last name not provided) asked Google’s search advocate, John Mueller, for an idea her clients had to optimize their sites for several US states.
The idea is to create landing pages for each state they operate in and automatically send visitors from the home page to the appropriate landing page via dynamic geo-IP redirection.
On top of that, they also plan to add a noindex tag to each individual landing page.
If you hear alarm bells ringing, your intuition is correct. This is not a good strategy.
Mueller explains the SEO impact of following the program and explains the various ways it can be done better.
See the suggestions in the following sections.
First consideration: Google crawls from one location
When targeting multiple cities or states with the same site, the first consideration is that Google only crawls from one location.
This means, as Gail’s client suggested, dynamic geo-IP redirection won’t help Googlebot find a different login page.
Mueller said:
“I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind. On the one hand…we generally just crawl from one location. Probably for most systems, that will map back to California.
Essentially this means that the content we can view will be California content and we won’t be able to access content in other states depending on the type of content you have there, for other state states this may be ok but there may be problem.
So the first thing to keep in mind is that when you search for your business it looks like this is purely in California, or even in San Francisco, and I don’t know how the IP addresses will map there.
So I think that often disappoints people, especially in the case of geo-IP redirection or dynamic exchange of content. “
While redirecting visitors based on their IP address may work in practice, it’s not optimal when it comes to crawling by Googlebot.
Second consideration: don’t redirect to pages that aren’t indexed
The second and more serious consideration for the plan proposed by Gail’s client is what happens when redirecting to a non-indexed page.
This, Mueller explained, caused the site’s homepage to drop out of search results:
“The other thing is that if you don’t index the individual state landing pages, then of course the state landing pages that people from California will go to will not be indexed either, which basically means your home page will drop out of search results. So That would be a very bad thing.”
Again, this plan might work for human visitors, but cause significant problems in terms of SEO.
This is what Mueller recommends doing.
Mueller’s recommendations for multiple locations
Rather than redirecting visitors to pages based on where they are, Mueller said, provide visitors with links to relevant pages with dynamic banners.
“My general advice for these kinds of situations is to make it easier for users to find the content, rather than automatically redirecting to a specific location.
When a user visits the home page, it’s like a dynamic banner on the page with a banner at the top that says: ‘Oh, it looks like you’re in Texas, we have an office in Texas, this is information and click this link to learn more.
This allows users to access these individual pages. Ideally, these individual pages would also be indexed, because then if someone were to look up your business name and state name, they would be able to find that landing page, which is basically ideal. “
Another way to handle this situation is to dynamically swap some copy on the home page based on the visitor’s location, Mueller said.
Instead of multiple landing pages for different states, you can set up your homepage to show visitors different text related to their location.
Mueller explained:
“Another approach you can take is to dynamically swap out some content on the home page. So instead of having a separate state landing page, you have your generic home page, and you can dynamically swap out that state-specific information.
The big part here is to make sure that the entire homepage still has enough generic content so that it’s not like everything in California, but it’s like this is a lot of information about your business because it looks like you’re in California here Specific information for California, or whatever state you are in.
So these are generally the two directions we recommend. “
Mueller clarified that there’s nothing wrong with creating separate state landing pages if Gail’s customers choose to go this route.
It’s not a good idea to create landing pages for every city in every state, but it’s OK to create landing pages for every state where your business is located.
“With regards to a handful of versions of individual state landing pages, we wouldn’t consider that problematic. If you had landing pages for every city in every state, that would start to look a little bit to our web spam algorithm. suspicious.
But if you’re talking about a few states, or even all states, you’ll have 50 different versions of your homepage with your local address, phone number, opening hours, and other local info about them . From our perspective, this is usually fine. “
Listen to the full discussion in the video below:
Featured image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, January 2022.
