I was thinking about an earlier post about keyword research and thought of an issue I dealt with in the past. Is adding a new location just for the sake of adding it, considered adding value to your dealership’s SEO strategy? Or is it “busy work”?
Let’s say you’re an in-house Search Engine Optimization Specialist tasked with maintaining the SEO strategy of your dealership’s website. Let’s also say, you’re at a sticking point and don’t know what to do next. “What am I to do?”, you ask quietly to yourself. 
I’ve seen many times where SEO Specialist’s will just start arbitrarily adding cities because they think that’s what they should do (or that’s what they’ve been directed to do). Here’s the thing, It’s ok to do that. Just don’t start adding random locations to the home page of your site. By doing so, you could be decreasing the relevancy (I’ll define relevancy in an upcoming post) of the targeted keywords that you’re already ranking for with the home page. What you should do is create one or two landing pages depending on how many locations you’re adding to the strategy. By creating landing pages, you will be able to create specifically targeted content for the areas you’re going after and you will not detract from your current SEO strategy.
The next question is how do you decide which cities to target? Do you carpet bomb every town and city within 40 miles? One hundred miles? There could be a lot of hit and miss and wasted effort. A quick and easy way to see which locations are getting traffic is to set up a small PPC campaign. I could go into that here, but I’ll save setting up a PPC campaign for a post in the future.
So here’s the moral of the story. Don’t just arbitrarily add cities just to make it look like you’re doing something. There is little to no value in doing so. SEO (even Automotive SEO) is all about studying your analytics, drawing conclusions, testing your conclusions, and implementing the results.
