We’ve all done it. We’ve all gone online and searched for a business using the formula “service + city.” So as a business owner, it makes sense to optimize your website for these keywords.

For example, you run a preschool with a single location that serves families in Lancaster, PA. You’d be smart to optimize your homepage, About Us page, and Contact page using keyword variations of “preschool + Lancaster.” However, things get tricky for small businesses that fall into one of these categories:

• Single location serving multiple areas
• Multiple locations serving multiple areas

If your small business operates as one of these business models, it makes good SEO sense to create location pages on your website for each city you serve or operate out of. This will allow you to optimize your homepage, About Us page, and other key pages for your brand and concentrate the “service + city” keywords on your individual locations pages. Sounds simple enough right?

But here’s the catch, you need to present all the local information in such a way that you avoid the issue of duplicate content on multiple locations pages. But that leads to the next question—how bad is duplicate content in local SEO?

What’s The Issue With Duplicate Content?

Google’s SEO best practices identify duplicate content as content that “either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar.” Duplicate content may come as a result of content that has been “templated” and is not uniquely crafted for each page. Titles may be too similar or the content may be virtually the same from page to page with only minor keyword changes.

So, when a user performs a search, the search engine struggles with which piece of content to return to satisfy the user’s needs. As a result, the search engine may not return any of these pages in the search results.

While you won’t be actively penalized for duplicate content by Google, having unique content for each page on your site is a ranking factor. Without it, you may see drops in your organic traffic.

Additionally, multiple location pages with content that is too similar can be flagged as doorway pages. These are template pages that are keyword optimized (in this case for “service + city”) but offer no real value to the user. Their only purpose is to drive users to another part of the site. If you’re going to include location pages on your site, make sure they include everything a user needs to know.

How Does Duplicate Content Impact Your Local SEO?

For a long time, it was easy to produce content for your location or service area pages. You created a template page, with the same word-for-word content, and then simply popped the correct city onto each page.

The trouble with this practice is that when search engines encounter multiple locations pages with identical content, they have trouble telling them apart. This can cause several problems for your SEO efforts.

It Can Hurt Your Rankings

A search engine’s goal is to present searchers with results that have helpful information. Not pages that simply rehash content already found elsewhere, including content within your website.

This is why they have search ranking systems designed to prioritize original content when ranking results. So, if you have multiple pages that look similar, Google will try to identify which page is the original.

But if it can’t identify the original, your rankings could suffer and the page might not rank at all. And if your content does rank, the version that gets chosen might not be the version that you want to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).

It Can Distribute Backlinks Unequally

Backlinks are crucial for local SEO, but if duplicate content exists across multiple pages, the link value weakens. This reduces the overall impact of your backlinks.

Each backlink is like an endorsement from another website, which tells Google that your content is probably accurate and helpful.

For example, you have two identical pages with similar URLs. Instead of having all your backlinks go to one page, they’re split between the two. So instead of having one page strengthened with all the backlinks, you get two weaker pages with fewer links.

This distribution could lead to lower rankings since neither page gains as much authority as a single page would.

It Can Hurt Your Site’s Crawlability

Search engines need to crawl and index your content for it to show up in search results. Duplicate pages waste your crawl budget, which is the amount of time and resources search engine crawlers devote to crawling your site before moving on.

If you have too much duplicate content, crawlers can end up reviewing multiple versions of the same content. This reduces the number of pages that can get crawled. The fewer pages that get crawled the more this can impact your site’s visibility in search results.

It Can Hurt Your Credibility

Having unique content on your site shows that you are an expert in your field and helps you gain your audience’s trust. Duplicate content doesn’t let you stand out from your competition and can cause people to turn away.

And that’s if they can find your site in the rankings.

By showing content targeted to your audience, you can improve your user experience and show why someone would look to your site as the authority on a specific topic.

How to Find Duplicate Content

Now that we’ve covered what duplicate copy is and why it hurts you, the next step is to check your location pages and site for it.

Finding Duplicate Content

Not sure if you have duplicate content? There are several ways to find out.

The first way is to do a search using “site:yoursite intitle:keyword.” This will find all the pages on your site that have the keyword in the title.

Several online tools can audit your site and find any duplicate content:

• Duplicate Content Checker
• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• SEM Rush

This isn’t a complete list but will give you a starting point to do your research and see which tool will work best for you.

How You Can Individualize Locations Pages

There are several practices that you can incorporate to avoid duplicate content on multiple locations pages. If you can use them all, great! But even incorporating just a few will help you avoid the issue of duplicate content and the confusion it causes for search engines and users alike.

Write Truly Unique Content

This one is non-negotiable. You must take the time to present the key information about each location so that it doesn’t mirror another page. You need to go beyond the quick fix of simply swapping out the city name

Add Photo or Videos

Showcase photos or videos specific to each location or service area you work from. Remember to add appropriate alt text for each image to individualize the page for an exact location.

Include Staff Bios

Whether your staff includes teachers, accountants, electricians, or chefs, including staff pictures and bios is an easy way to add unique content to your locations pages.

Share Customer Review or Case Studies

Another easy way to get over the hump of duplicate content on multiple locations pages is to include customer reviews or testimonials that are submitted for each of your business’ locations. Also, consider creating case studies to spotlight the great results you’ve produced for clients in those areas.

Provide Directions and a Local Map

Driving directions and maps are fantastic ways to localize your individual locations pages and provide key information to your customers. Do your locations pages suffer from “cut and paste” duplicate content? It may be a huge time investment, but individualizing your pages can only help your search result rankings.

Realizing Your Pages Have Duplicate Content?

Do your location pages suffer from “cut and paste” duplicate content? It can be a huge time investment to fix them, but individualizing your pages can only help your search result rankings.

There many metrics that measure the effectiveness of SEO and internet marketing in general. For small to medium-sized businesses it can be overwhelming trying to keep track of these metrics and understanding what is driving these numbers. Domain Authority is one metric Tower Marketing uses to measure SEO progress and success of a client’s website campaigns in comparison to competitors. DA looks at a variety of broad spectrums, taking into account many of the factors Google considers important.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is scored on a scale of 0-100 and was developed by the analytics software team Moz.com. The DA metric predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. You use DA when you’re comparing one site to another or tracking the “strength” of your website and content efforts over time.

Where did the Metric Domain Authority Originate From?

Domain Authority is comprised of several metrics that are calculated to show a picture of how well a domain is likely to have its pages ranked in Google’s search results (SERPs). It is based on data from the Mozscape web index and includes the total number of links, MozRank and MazTrust scores, and dozens of other factors outside of Moz. DA uses a machine-learning model to predictively find an algorithm that best correlates with rankings across thousands of search results that Moz predicts against.

Is Domain Authority a Stable Metric to Measure Against?

Yes, it is, but it is important to understand that the Domain Authority is affected by several organic factors that will always continue to fluctuate. DA is a slow-growing score because it is based on organic elements of marketing (unlike paid search which is almost instant).

Don’t expect to see your DA jump from 23 to 47 in just six months worth of SEO. There are too many factors involved to make the DA index move that fast.

How is Domain Authority Calculated?

Moz has calculated this metric by combining all other link metrics. These metrics include the number of domains linking to your site, number of pages linking to your site, number of total links (internal and external), ‘followed’ vs ‘nofollowed’ links (equity passing links) as well as MozRank, MozTrust, etc.—into a single score.

DA is heavily link-based, but it takes into account the quality of content and social linking signals too. So, why is there so much emphasis on links?

People link and share content they like. No one shares an ugly looking website or a website they can’t find. Links are still arguably the strongest signal of how popular a website and its pages are.

How Should Your Business Apply Domain Authority to Its Site?

As mentioned earlier, Domain Authority uses machine-learning. This helps it build up a better understanding of Google’s algorithm, which is constantly changing, so that it can best model how search engine results are generated.

There are over 40 signals included in the calculation of DA. This means your website’s Domain Authority score will often fluctuate. For this reason, it’s best to use Domain Authority as a competitive metric against other sites, as opposed to non-industry specific websites.

If your website content is education-related, don’t compare your DA against a sports website. Compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, capiche?

Additionally, since it’s not a precise metric, it’s not the best data to measure the success of your internal SEO efforts with. Instead, you should look to other important engagement metrics to assess your efforts.

How is DA Scored?

The Domain Authority score ranges from 0 to 100 and is a logarithmic scale (non-linear scale for large ranges in quantities). Thus, it’s easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 than it would be to grow from 70 to 80. As your DA grows it will be harder to acquire more points.

How can Businesses Influence their own Domain Authority?

Unlike other SEO metrics, Domain Authority is difficult to influence directly. It is made up of an aggregate of metrics (MozRank, MozTrust, link profile, and more) and each have an impact on this score. This was done intentionally; this metric is meant to approximate how competitive a given site is in Google’s SERPs. Since Google takes a lot of factors into account, a metric that tries to calculate it must incorporate a lot of factors, as well.

The best way to influence this metric is to improve your overall SEO. In particular, you should focus on your link profile and getting more links from other well-linked-to pages that are relevant. Links from other websites act as a vote of endorsement. The more links for relative industries that have good quality content on their sites and that are active on social media, the greater the chances of your DA growing.

What is my DA Score?

There are free tools to find out what your DA is and also what your competitors are ranking at. Moz has created a toolbar for Chrome that you can download onto your browser. You will see a new menu above your navigation bar showing you the DA authority scores as well as some other handy metrics. Click here to download the MozBar.