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Take it to the Next Level

How to Create City Pages & Get More Prospects

By on October 12th, 2022 in Uncategorized

Today, we’re finally graduating from SEO 101! 

We’re moving beyond the advice we discussed throughout our SEO series and getting into some more advanced territory. Certainly, this puts us into the “taking your law firm to the next level” category, at least when it comes to SEO.

Before you get overwhelmed, these strategies on city pages can be implemented by anyone. They are more advanced but you don’t need to outsource all of it to an agency. We’ll teach you exactly how to set up city pages yourself today.

The Basics

City pages are simply a method of adding more content to your website. You’re taking your current practice area pages (likely the most visited pages on your website) and adding additional content with not just practice area information but practice area information tied to a specific geolocation.

Creating and implementing city pages does take effort. However, that effort is more than worth it for the payoff. They help you reach your goal of capturing the attention of searchers near enough to your town to visit your practice.

If you’re only focusing on local searches, it’s likely that many ideal clients will never find you. If a searcher 25 miles away from you looks for a lawyer on Maps and there are lots of law firms within 5 miles from them, you probably won’t show up on their search. 

Additionally, not every search has local intent. You want to make sure you show up in traditional listings as well. City Pages are a great way to do this as they capture some prospects by showing up in regular organic listings underneath Maps.

Creating City Pages

To add city pages to your website, you can’t just put your location at the bottom of your home page. This won’t do anything for SEO. City pages are much more complex.

Before you even think about creating city pages though, you must make sure that your basic practice area pages (the ones without cities associated with them) are ranking on the first page of Maps in at least a few searches. You’ll leverage this when you create your city pages.

Once you have that in place, you can start looking at your competitors in the different geographies and markets where your ideal clients live. Prioritize and create your first city pages in the locations that are less competitive.

Here are some additional ways to help your city pages rank above your competition:

  • Make sure that your different city pages are similar but unique. They shouldn’t be completely the same. Don’t copy your content and just replace the suburb or city. Think about what you haven’t talked about or what you can describe differently while including the specific geography you’re targeting.
  • Make sure your word count is larger than your competitors’. If your competition’s city page has 1000 words, you may need 2000 to beat them out.
  • Don’t just talk about your practice area. Add some FAQs to each city page as well. You need a schema FAQ markup on these which may require getting some help from your webmaster.
  • Once you have your city pages on your website, cross-link the new city page to your other relevant pages. Link to your new city page on your current practice area page that’s already ranking.

A Bonus Tip For Finding Prospects

There are places out there with little to no legal competition. These are called legal deserts and they’re a great opportunity for some law firms.

City pages are a great way to get your firm in front of rural areas that are close enough to your office that someone could drive there. You could also do a lot of work for these clients online. Creating a city page for these places helps meet a societal need for these people and provides a good flow of prospects to your firm.

If you want to learn more about how to create amazing city pages, check out Episode 063: Enhancing your Local SEO with City Pages.