Looking for advice - 1 website - 2 cities?

how to best go after two markets with 1 site

[francie brady]

I have a friend who has two small service related businesses that are located in two cities quite far apart. He is just about to redesign his website and asked me for some SEO input.
Right now they have both city names in each title tag (I know this doesn't make sense). Other than setting up Local Search for each branch tied to it's respective city, what kinds of things should I recommend they do?

Thanks :-)

[edited by: inbound at 4:12 pm (utc) on Oct. 9, 2009]
[edit reason] Specifics Removed [/edit]

[dertyfern]

both city names in each title tag makes me believe that there is a page for each city. If you are asking what in addition to local search you can suggest, there's seo for each city location. ppc may be another option, including local ppc.

[francie brady]

thanks - right now the site doesn't have a page for each city, so that is something they'll need to address. And once they have those pages, then it will be easier to have local go to each city's respective landing pages. Anything else?

[inbound]

It's always a good idea to have the full address and contact details for a business on all of their pages if there is just one branch (it helps the customer find a phone number on any page and it gives a simple way for search engines to geotag the page).

You could probably extend this to showing the details for both offices on each page (and, importantly, have a page dedicated to each office with things like directions, map, description of specifics such as important staff boigraphies & comprehensive service list - make sure you link to those pages, probably in the heading that goes above the contact details for each office e.g. "Widgetville Office") as that still would not take up too much space - or put details for one office up and just link to the other.

Getting 2 locations performing well should not be too difficult, at least it's a managable number.

Good luck

[francie brady]

Thanks Inbound :-) -- good advice - I will pass this all along -- :-)