Examples of great single location local websites

[thelocalstruggl]

Hi,
Can you suggest some local websites of single location businesses that are doing great at SEO? Just to study for myself.

 

[ToffeeLa]

Take a look at accommodation, restaurants or handymen services (washing machine repair, HVAC, pool cleaning, etc.). All competitive niches, all with well-known national sites/brands in competition, all can be spammy.

So look for the first local non-chain listing in the search results for your chosen location. To compete in the case of lodging SERPs, for example, against people like Expedia, AirBnB, VRBO, Marriott (to take a few at random) plus all of the wannabe lodging affiliate sites, a local website has got to be doing something fairly good.

Some examples from Little Rock (location picked out of thin air and each chosen as they were the first independent local site in the results):
https://capitalhotel.com/
https://www.advantageserviceco.com/
https://www.table28lr.com/

 

[thelocalstruggl]

Hey thanks for the links. I went through quite a few in attorney and dentistry niches. Few directory sites in these niches I felt. For lawyers it looks like a 1000 pages are needed at a minimum to rank. For dentists it's a more human hundreds.
I feel for the local websites because it's so difficult to sound non spammy when writing so many pages. A world renowned dentist writing a blog post on "How to fight cavities in London" is difficult to digest. Interestingly, most of the websites that rank use the "category/postname" url structure. May be just a coincidence though.

I accidentally clicked on a personal injury attorney map pack ad while researching. The guilt hasn't left me.

 

[ToffeeLa]

For lawyers it looks like a 1000 pages are needed at a minimum to rank. For dentists it's a more human hundreds.

Hehe. You are definitely looking at the greyish niches (greyish because the earnings can be so high). Depends if your industry matches that type of niche or is less competitive?

Certainly I would say that the number of pages isn't a ranking factor in itself - it's probably more to do with covering long tail in a profitable and competitive market (and may well be a negative ranking factor for people who aren't experienced in what they are doing). There isn't a perpetual ranking machine which clicks in just by producing more pages. It's more to do with links and perceived authority. But I'm sure there are people here who have played in those lead gen niches who might be able to give you better advice...

 

[thelocalstruggl]

A few more observations :
The homepage has huge number of links and traffic. Most of the time 90% for both the variables.
No website had more than 5k visitors/month. Generally 1k-2k for the top ranking website. So it's like an average of 1 visitor per page. Of course I'm assuming that the numbers from keyword tools are correct. Then again with claims in millions of dollars it's sort of crazy out there. I suddenly feel good that my 5 page website gets a few hundred traffic per month.

 

[southpaw]

I feel for the local websites because it's so difficult to sound non spammy when writing so many pages. A world renowned dentist writing a blog post on "How to fight cavities in London" is difficult to digest.

A personal injury website in major cities will have location pages that cover districts and suburbs, labeled 'areas served'.

Some of these personal injury websites also have sponsorships and community involvement pages. Scholarships and community events are periodic, and thus more pages, while also bringing in links and searches organically.

Then there's the hyper-specific set of pages such as "truck accident attorney" and "oil rig accident attorney".

Adding up the combinations, the number of pages can go past 500+ quite quickly.

On an aside, "truck accident attorney" has one of the highest CPCs I have ever seen.