While all dealerships have a physical location in a specific city or town, owners know that the target audience they want to reach, and who visits your business, extends out past city lines. Areas that are an easy commute of under 100 kilometres can be catered to, as potential customers will typically look and travel to surrounding areas near where they live for the right vehicle, especially with it being a large and important purchase to get correct. This creates an online quandary: how do you target neighbouring cities and towns that fall into your service area with your online content?
The solution is simple: service area-specific pages! There is, however, a right and wrong way to go about creating service area pages. It's not good enough just to stuff 10 nearby city names in your landing pages and blogs, nor is it wise to make a templated page for each location with the same copy-pasted information that only swaps out the location name.
Instead, capture highly interested search traffic from the different service areas your dealership can serve through hyper-local, unique, and high-quality city and service area pages that build the trust of customers, while also being far more likely to be sourced by Large Language Models (LLMS) like ChatGPT and Gemini, as well as search engine-based AI features like AI Overviews (AIOs)!
Read along to learn more about how local SEO now more than ever depends on proximity, relevance, and prominence, them being the three pillars that dictate how businesses get ranked in online searches. This includes how service area pages help with this, along with helpful tips from yours truly at EDealer on how precisely to go about creating high quality service area pages that shine. These all feature hyper-specific local area information and references, are easy to navigate, include proper technical information, along with inventory that is location-specific, and local input to foster trust and a stronger relationship with both potential customers and AI!
The 3 Pillars of Local SEO Ranking: Proximity, Relevance, & Prominence
Local SEO has changed with the surge of AI, but fundamentals remain, like with the three pillars that Google uses to determine how your business may or may not rank in local search and map packs. Let’s break them down:
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Proximity
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Relevance
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Prominence
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Because these three pillars cater specifically to your dealership’s physical location, you can influence them further by adding in additional information about the different areas your dealership services. This pertains to those that are close enough to be within an easily commutable distance (have proximity), are relevant to what customers may be typically searching for that you serve (have relevance), and that you are a prominent source for said business and informational purposes through your reputation (have prominence).
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6 Tips on How to Create & Implement High Quality Service Area Pages
There’s no denying that service area pages can help boost your local SEO, but how do you go about creating these pages properly? Simply follow our top 6 steps below:
1. Know & Research Which Cities/Service Areas You Want to Target
Start by mapping out which cities, towns, and locations you want to target within the area local to your dealership for these pages. Keep to a driving distance of under an hour (or 100 kilometres), as these will be your best bets for potential customers that will actually come to your dealership. You probably have a good idea just by operating your business where your customers are located, but make sure to look at your analytics in GA4 to get hard data on where people are coming from. You may even be surprised at some popular areas, but the data will always have your back and can be counted on!
2. Set Up the Navigation and Keep Technical Format in Order
Before creating any of your service area pages, start with an “Areas We Serve” page, and make it easily accessible from your main menu navigation, such as nesting it in a dropdown from your About section. Adding it to the website footer is also wise for ease of access. This can be used as a foundational page that you can build from and centralize everything on as you build it out, now and in the future, as well as can establish an internal linking network, which helps potential customers more easily find your information, along with search engines and AI crawlers.
Once the navigation location has been established and the parent page created, ensure you keep the technical elements in mind when creating this page, and all the future service area pages themselves. Give them a clean and clear URL structure with a proper hierarchy and local schema, and internally link the different pages to each other. As always, make certain to utilize proper foundational technical SEO elements like title tags, URL construction, and meta descriptions.
3. Have Hyper-Localized Content
Every service area page should include specifics that make each page stand out from every other service area page. This means the content needs to be unique to each page by actually describing and telling the story of that location, how it’s relevant to your business operations, how you serve it differently than any other location, and why they should come to you specifically over other locations. So, no, you can’t write generic landing page content and just sub in a different city name for each page!
This content should be unique and localized to the specific community within the service area, and can include elements like:
- Driving directions to the dealership from the service area, including commute times from the area to the dealership (such as “just twenty minutes away down the Trans-Canada Highway”)
- Mentions of well-known regional landmarks/neighbourhoods in the service area, and how they’re applicable to how you can serve the customers in the area, or your business operations
- A reviews section featuring reviews from locals in the service area who have done business with you
- Images directly taken in the service area itself (just like we don’t want boilerplate words on the page, we also need unique images!)
4. Include Targeted Inventory for Localized Needs
Knowing the lifestyle and driving needs of potential customers in the service area, include an inventory selection that touches on the needs and demands of shoppers in that area. For example, have a slider of fuel-efficient vehicles for suburbs where commuting is key, or a slider of heavy-duty trucks for rural farming communities that need a vehicle to balance work and life needs!
5. Show Off Local Initiatives
Did your dealership take part in a community event in that particular service area? Any support your dealership has done or is planning to do of community initiatives featuring local high schools, sports teams, charities and more in the service area are a great way to show both potential customers and the online ecosystem that you are a trustworthy and active part of that community. As well, an active social media feed that features your business involved with the local area’s goings-on, and Google reviews and testimonials specifically from customers in that service area, are also very much worth including.
6. What to Avoid
- Do not post a mass of duplicated pages with the same content that simply have the different names of the city/service area swapped in.
- Do not include vague service offerings, or information that isn’t relevant to that location, or try to make do with misleading local social proof that actually isn't relevant for that location
- Do not just keyword stuff your location name and keyword multiple times, and in unnatural language. Write proper content that is correctly formatted.
- Do not target cities that are outside of the area you would realistically serve.
- Do not clutter your navigation with all of these pages listed. Instead, list them on the main foundational overview page.
Improve Your City & Service Area Content With Our Team at Dealer
If you’re looking for assistance creating high-quality city and service area content for your dealership, look no further than our team at EDealer! Our SEO content packages are the perfect way to showcase all of the different areas you service, with website content creation (the pages themselves), and our Local SEO package is here to help target your Google Business Profile! Reach out to us, and let us help you grow your online reach today with high-quality service area pages!
