The Ultimate Guide To Suburb Pages for SEO

Speaker A: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur. Uh,

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the SEO show for another week. I'm Michael.

Speaker C: I'm Arthur.

Speaker B: My last name is Costin.

Speaker C: My last name's Arthur.

Speaker B: Arthur.

Speaker C: Arthur, yeah.

Speaker B: Arthur or Martha. You don't know if you're Arthur or Martha? Have you ever heard that saying? No, I didn't think you never heard anything.

Speaker C: I, uh, rarely know what you're talking about. So.

Speaker B: What in generally?

Speaker A: No.

Speaker C: You have a lot of weird like analogies and words and things that no one really uses anymore.

Speaker B: Yeah. If you don't know if you're Arthur or Martha, it means you don't know if you're coming or going.

Speaker C: I know what it means, I just haven't heard, uh, it used.

Speaker B: Anyway, we're talking suburb pages today on the SEO show. You excited? Like, jeez, if there's something to get excited about, it's suburb pages.

Speaker C: Well, it's not AI so it is exciting because we're going back to. I guess it kind of flows into AI, but more traditional SEO.

Speaker B: Yeah, but suburb pages are massive for showing up in AI.

Speaker C: Yes. Okay, well then, but anyway, ignore what

Speaker B: I said, but we're not focusing on AI. No, we're talking good old fashioned pages on your website to try sharpen Google. Yes, because everyone knows that as a local business, if you want to get customers, most of them are going to go type in plunge pool builder near me or plunge pool builder suburb. Um, yes. And get in touch with the ones that show up. And if you were to go to Google right now, let's just do it live. Let's do a thing. So what say business service. Let's say electrician. Electrician Parramatta. Because we're in Parramatta. As I scroll down the page, the first thing that ranks is Jim's Electrical. That's a suburb page. Captain Cook Electrical, they have a North Parramatta suburb page ranking. Airtasker yellow pages were their big directories. Landmark Electrical. Yep, they have a suburb page.

Speaker C: So what am I getting here?

Speaker B: So, uh, Aussie Home Services suburb page. Uh, and now Amber Electrical suburb page.

Speaker C: So there's a bit of a trend.

Speaker B: There is a trend here. Flash electrical in data.

Speaker C: Wait, let me guess, let me guess.

Speaker B: Suburb page. Wow. So then high pages. So out of those search results there were three directories, our Tasker yellow pages and high pages. And then everything else was suburb pages.

Speaker C: Are there any actual Electricians that are uh, Parramatta based that don't have a suburb page.

Speaker B: No. So it's all suburb pages but then there's the Google maps results above it, you know, flash electrical and data. Parramatta has a suburb page for their maps listing.

Speaker C: So I guess we've come to the conclusion that suburb pages are important.

Speaker B: They are important. M and people don't execute them the way they could or should be executed. So today we're going to talk about our favorite suburb page tactics. We're going to craft a beautiful suburb

Speaker C: page, the perfect suburb page.

Speaker B: So what's your perfect suburb page?

Speaker C: My perfect suburb page. One that ranks.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: First for the suburb that they're searching in.

Speaker B: True. How do you make that happen? If you good. Or if you were tasked with creating a suburb page right now that had to rank number one.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: Do you have general go to things? No.

Speaker C: No. So you would have very specific content that caters to that suburb or the suburbs needs. Because every suburb is going to be different. So talking about specific locations, maybe landmarks and things like that. Um, and I guess depending on the suburb, I guess depends on the niche. Right. But climate, whatnot, things like that. So really, really drilling down and making it hyper, uh, local, hyper relevant to

Speaker B: that suburb perspective and not just creating a page where the name of the suburb changes.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because that's what a lot of people do.

Speaker C: And that used to work a long, long time ago. Yeah. But not anymore.

Speaker B: No. So for me, the ultimate suburb page. Yes. You need a uh, blend of data that Google needs to see. So you know, meta title tag, H1 tag and then copy somewhere in the opening of the page like the hero banner that mention the specific suburb and keyword. So plunge pool builder or electrician or whatever. But then you also need it to convert ultimately. So first and foremost like the hero banner, uh, and stuff above the fold should be focused on the end user.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: So don't just jam in like punch pool builder everywhere with the suburb. It needs to speak to the end user first. But then later on the page I think a good suburb page always has like sales copy that talks about the benefits of the business and you know, how they make uh, your life better in that suburb mixed in with the suburb. And then more generic suburb page type copy where everything you said there like landmarks, local streets or references that people in the area would go.

Speaker C: Yeah, ah, shopping centers.

Speaker B: Yep. All that stuff. Maybe.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Shopping districts, streets that are well known.

Speaker C: Maybe a map embedded.

Speaker B: Maybe a map embedded and then FAQs is a big one as well. Tailored to that suburb. So the questions that people would ask, like what are the costs? Or you know what, what's different about you mentioning the suburb in the question and the answer.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Then also internal links.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: I knew it. You see me get excited.

Speaker C: I knew it. Yes.

Speaker B: Internal links nearby. Nearby suburbs that we also serve. Yeah. Linking to those suburbs.

Speaker C: That's very important.

Speaker B: It is.

Speaker C: Because if you don't have it, if you're just linking from one page, Google's not going to crawl that page that often.

Speaker B: No.

Speaker C: And it's not going to pass the link equity very well.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So having those internal links to all those other surrounding suburbs is going to create a web. It makes it a lot easier for Google and anyone to crawl the site and it's going to parcel in equity to all those pages.

Speaker B: How do you feel about a master page that lists all the suburbs?

Speaker C: Like an areas we service page?

Speaker B: Yeah, I know we're getting into it here. I feel pretty good about that.

Speaker C: Uh, no, you do need a page that links to all these suburb pages.

Speaker B: Yeah. So there's a couple of ways that you go about it. You do that or you can link from your homepage to a couple of the suburb pages. So in the body copy on your homepage you might be like, we service the North Shore Northern Beaches from Manly to Mossman. Mhm. And you make Manly and Mossman link to the suburb page. And then all of those internal linking that you've got from the nearby suburbs then link to all of the other suburb pages.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker B: So you always want a link from the homepage, I feel, to a couple of suburb pages or a like master. A, um, master suburb page list with all of your suburbs.

Speaker C: Why not have both?

Speaker B: You know what? Why not? Why not have both?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, do you know what else you could have? You could set up a XML sitemap just of your suburb pages. Submit that to, uh, search console. Why is this turning so weird? Because I'm just getting excited about doing suburb pages because.

Speaker C: Uncomfortable.

Speaker B: Well, hey, I'm just a bit, I don't know, just a bit excited.

Speaker C: The listeners didn't see the face you were making.

Speaker B: Um, so the reason I talk about this is last, last episode we're talking about how AIs like people that run local service businesses want to be found for people in their local area searching. And we spoke about the stonemason and how if I was to search for Mermaid beach, the best stone installer. Uh, if you have suburb pages that do this stuff, well, that's how you're getting found. That's how you're getting found in Google, as we just did at the start. Electrician Parramatta Every single page there's a suburb page. So if everyone's doing it, how do you beat them? Well, it's not by using templated ones where you're spinning out the suburb. It is having all of this stuff. So we joke, but doing the basics well. Title tag, H1 tag keyword in the first paragraph of the page. Mhm. Having FAQs having internal links to other suburbs talking about landmarks mixed in with your business benefits and selling points and then bespoke for every page. And it used to be something that we would just do manually. Remember the days that we used to have to charge per page to write copy, research, write copy, have copywriters look at landmarks and all that. That was just a big task to build suburb pages properly. Hence why people would do the templated approach that, you know, it wasn't worth the effort or it was always worth the effort, but budgets didn't stretch that far. Always.

Speaker C: And to be fair, a while back it did work. Would agree.

Speaker B: Just templated.

Speaker C: Templated. I mean we're going back maybe seven, eight years ago.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: But you could get away with, you know, having the same copy, just changing the suburb. Internal links were what really kind of like made or like made or broke it.

Speaker B: Yeah. Made or breaked.

Speaker C: Made or breaked it. Um, but then Google got smarter. It saw this thing. Content, duplicate content. And then it started no indexing and ignoring those pages. So you had to get creative.

Speaker B: Yeah. Tell you what's the worst word to see in search console in the world of a suburb page? Aficionado. Aficionado.

Speaker C: The worst word.

Speaker B: What's the worst thing to see in search console if you are a suburb page lover like us?

Speaker C: I don't know.

Speaker B: Crawled, not indexed.

Speaker C: Oh, right, sorry, I thought you meant keyword.

Speaker B: No, no, no.

Speaker C: I was wigging out there.

Speaker B: If you see crawled, not indexed in there, that means that Google does not like your sub. You do not have the authority to pull off your suburb pages.

Speaker C: No. And that's probably because the content sucks.

Speaker B: Yeah. Or you don't have enough links. But generally it's going to be every page is too similar. Yeah. Google's like, you know what, I'm crawling this, but I ain't indexing that. I'm not serving that up to my users.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: That's the crap. Suburb page. This is what we're trying to save you from. Yeah.

Speaker C: So how do you scale it now these days?

Speaker B: Well, rather Than using humans. You use AI. That's the obvious way to go, isn't it? Um, we shameless plug, have a little tool we've built called suburb page pro suburbpagepro.com but, uh, we just basically took Australia and split it down into cities, and then cities were split into regions. Regions have suburbs. So Sydney, for example, has north shore, northern beaches in the west, and then in each of them a whole bunch of suburbs. So you can plug in your business details. Keyword, um, selling points, benefits, like what you do for people with the call to action. You know, like when you quote or whatever, get a free quote, that sort of stuff. The keyword you want to rank for the regions you want to target. And then it will go through that tedious, what used to be a tedious process of writing stuff manually and write custom copy for the sales copy and like local landmarks and FAQs and all of that using AI. And then you just import that stuff into your website. So that's how we do it these days. Because doing it manually is. Who would do that?

Speaker C: You wouldn't even dream of it.

Speaker B: No. And it works like people say, well, you know, AI doesn't rank well. They used to think that, but like now it's if the content is.

Speaker C: Who's writing content?

Speaker B: No.

Speaker C: Manually.

Speaker B: No. No one.

Speaker C: Unless you're an academic or something.

Speaker B: Yeah, but I mean, journalists and stuff,

Speaker C: they're not writing stuff.

Speaker B: No.

Speaker C: They're still leaning on AI.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And I mean any SEO, like content is not written by a human.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it all ranks fine.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: I, uh, was gonna say, and like with the, with the tool we built, we've prompt like the prompts.

Speaker C: That's it.

Speaker B: It alternates through different types of prompts so it doesn't get in a, like a routine or a cadence where every page is following the same structure.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Some are written in first person, some are in third person stuff. And you change it all up. So that's all it needs to be to be different, bespoke enough across pages to rank. We see it time and time again. Like you spin up these pages and you rank well on the back of it and in AI. So, um, don't do it manually. You could do it. You could do it manually in like ChatGPT or something. If you said, I want to build suburb pages for these.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: 10 suburbs give me sales copy that talks about these benefits of my business mixed in with local landmarks for the suburbs.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: You could do it all manually. You don't have to use a tool like suburb page Pro. But um, I feel personally the days of templated baselines are toast now.

Speaker C: Yeah. I think what you said is important, like make sure that it's writing it uniquely because it does get into a pattern of starting to write very like the content will become very similar.

Speaker B: Yeah. The exact same flow.

Speaker C: Yeah, exact same flow to the point where eventually it kind of uses the same paragraphs with very slight changes.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And that's what that sort of stuff's going to get you, I reckon, pinged. Because it's going to be too similar,

Speaker B: too thin crawled, not indexed.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Uh, so make sure the prompts are good.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's really what it is. You've got to become a prompt architect, like SERP architect from that episode the other day.

Speaker C: Yes. It's a fine art, isn't it? Prompting.

Speaker B: Um, Embedding a Google map always used to be a thing for suburb pages. Yes. And another thing used to be images. You could your metadata in the images using location like coordinates.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: Related to which I don't know how much of a thing that plays in this day and age. Um, um. I don't even know how important embedding a Google map on it is these days.

Speaker C: Probably not at all to be honest.

Speaker B: And it's a bit of a pain really.

Speaker C: Like getting all the like location.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And using. You have to use like a developer uh, like account with Google to do it all. So there's stuff out there that will tell you to do that. But I don't think you the return for the amount of effort for it if you did it programmatically. Sure. But really it's just everything we've spoken about here is what's working to rank suburb pages in Google. And then of course the other thing.

Speaker C: Link building.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Oh my God. We're in sync today.

Speaker B: But it's more local directory type stuff. Just go search for the top Australian directories and make sure you're on all of them. Linking just to your homepage and then as long as your homepage links to your suburb master page or to a few of your suburb pages that flows through. I'll tell you one other thing you want probably let me get.

Speaker C: Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker B: No, no, go.

Speaker C: Guess I don't know.

Speaker B: You don't know local, uh, business schema data on the page for every location? No, I think just for like in your footer if you have like your address.

Speaker C: Because you can put in multiple locations, can't you?

Speaker B: If you have multiple locations. Yeah. But most local service businesses, um. Well, some I guess some do. Some have multiple GMBs and stuff, but at a bare minimum, you just want to tag up local business schema like your address, phone number, all that sort of stuff on your footer. Something like that. And most of the time you're not trying to service. I don't think trying to do an entire city worth the suburb pages is worth doing either.

Speaker C: No, because you really want to focus on like the core areas that have volume. Really. I mean, you don't have to. You can do the whole city.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Because with suburb pages, you know, even if you get one or two a month, it pays for itself.

Speaker B: Yes. But I also feel that you need to be a big enough brand in terms of the authority of your domain, because it's like Sydney, I think, is a bit. We've got about 500 something.

Speaker C: Ah.

Speaker B: Um, if you just go blast that onto your site too quick, you can run into issues with the velocity being too much and it not being crawled in index or you're not having enough authority for them all to rank. So strategically, you should focus on the stuff closer to home or the areas you want to service.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: Tools will tell you like, there's more volume for Parramatta. Sure, that's a bigger suburb, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have one for Harris park. Because people, as you said, dribs and drabs come in.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: The intent on them is much higher on a suburb generally than ranking. Even for like a big, you know, punch pool builder, Sydney, they're looking for someone near them. That's the other thing. I guess the conversion aspect of your site needs to play a part. Like on. We did a case study on Instagram, Feed your sales team, little plug again. Um, did a case study about this pool builder, Plunge Pool Builder. And in the design at the top of the page, it's like where locals, Illawarra, Southern Highlands, Shoalhaven, Southern Sydney, tick, tick, tick. Just immediately showing that you are a local business. So that when you have these suburb pages and people come in on them, they see plunge pill builder, Jerry Gong or whatever and that you are local.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: So, yeah, not really, um, rocket science.

Speaker C: No. But a lot of people don't do it properly. So, yeah, it could be rocket science to some. Yes.

Speaker B: So that is our episode on suburb pages. How do you feel about that one?

Speaker C: And what was the site?

Speaker B: Suburb Builder Pro or Suburb Page Pro, if you want to use it yourself to build stuff quickly a little bit, you've got to nerd out and set up your templates, import the data. But like it will save a lot of time on the actual creation of the content, which is the important part.

Speaker C: How long does it take to roll create like programmatically create the content?

Speaker B: 10 minutes probably. It depends how many pages you build.

Speaker C: Okay, interesting.

Speaker B: But you just enter in like details about your business, where you're trying to service, what suburbs you're going after and then it creates it all. And then it would take about an hour probably if you're a WordPress site to set up your template and import it all. So for stuff that used to take days, weeks, months. Oh we would have, we would have suburb page campaigns that roll out over a full year. Yeah. With a set number being built.

Speaker C: Yep. Now you do it in a matter of an hour.

Speaker B: Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker C: Happy days.

Speaker B: Happy days. Well that's about all we could talk about on suburb pages. Unless you have one. What's your last nugget of wisdom on suburb pages? I'm going to drop it right on you right at the end.

Speaker C: My last nugget of wisdom? I don't know.

Speaker B: Yeah, I've done that to throw you under the bus.

Speaker C: No, I'm just trying to think good content. I just think if you have to make sure that the content isn't just rubbish. Yeah. That gives it a good chance of ranking.

Speaker B: Yeah. Don't, don't half ass it.

Speaker C: Yeah, don't half ass it.

Speaker B: With AI now you don't have to

Speaker C: half ass it and maybe eat a little bit.

Speaker B: Oh you love eat.

Speaker C: Well I just think that if you like, if you are in a, like a service based business, have a little profile for yourself and if you're rolling out content and things like that regularly, it doesn't hurt having your little bio there. And I guess maybe not on location

Speaker B: pages but I'm going to tell you my last night. I've just, just come to me. Your Google reviews work in tandem with your suburb pages.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: So if you have people leaving reviews that mention the suburb I got by plunge pool built in Djangong. Mhm. And then in your replies you talk about suburbs and then you do updates, you know, you post to uh, Google your uh, Google business profile.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: You do updates that mention the suburbs as well. That stuff works really well in tandem with your suburb pages as we spoke about in the episode on AI.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Nice.

Speaker B: Um, it's a good little nugget. That's a great nugget.

Speaker C: Better than mine.

Speaker B: What was your first nugget? Good content. No, no, no, that's a meme in the SEO World.

Speaker C: I just think make the content like relevant and not um, gibberish. Like, yeah, like it's one thing to have unique content, but actually make the

Speaker B: content good, engaging, that someone can't be bored.

Speaker C: That's what I'm trying to say. Because it's one thing to have unique content across pages, that's fine. But make the content like, not rubbish. Like, because it's still your business and representing your business and people might read it. So put a little bit of effort into it.

Speaker B: Yep, you got to think about that with SEO. All this stuff you do for Google's benefit, people might read.

Speaker C: So the thing is, it's so easy just to be lazy with AI and just say, write me a, uh, uh, suburb page for this, for pest control, um, in this area, copy, paste, copy that reading and it's going to be rubbish. Like it's not, maybe not rubbish, but it won't be good. Put a little bit of effort into it and you're going to get something that's going to be a lot better and it's going to represent your brand better. It's going to have a better chance of ranking. It couldn't be easier to prompt. You know what I mean? Like, stuff like this used to take days, weeks, briefing a copywriter and you can't spend a couple of minutes prompting properly.

Speaker B: Like you can basically prompt the AI to build the prompt for you to build the sub pages.

Speaker C: But that's how lazy people have become, you know what I mean? Like I remember writing briefs for copywriters, spending like half an hour, yeah, putting out like a Google sheet or Excel sheet, saying these are the keywords you want, blah, blah, blah. Now people are like, ah, copy for this page.

Speaker B: Give me an article on, uh, no mistakes.

Speaker C: And then you know what? People don't even read it. You know why? Because sometimes I don't even read it.

Speaker B: What, what the. What it turns out sometimes, not all

Speaker C: the time if I'm feeling lazy.

Speaker B: But what are you, what are you doing with it? The stuff that you don't read?

Speaker C: What do you mean?

Speaker B: So you're saying the AI generates stuff for you and you don't read it, but then do you use it for anything?

Speaker C: Yeah, I use it on my side about keto. Uh, and I was posting stuff about keto and I got really, I got to the point where I just trust it.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: I don't have time to read this whole 1,200 word article.

Speaker B: We're headed rapidly to a future of AI consuming content created by AI. Out on the web. That's what the open web is going to be.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I think everything's going to move behind closed walls, like human community, kind of like a dystopian movie where, like, they're living in a little, you know, like zombies and they've got a walled garden that they live in. Out there's hell and in there's. All right.

Speaker C: Yeah, maybe.

Speaker B: I don't know. Well, on that note, have a great week. We'll be back with another episode of the SEO show at some point in the future. But until then, happy suburb page building.

Speaker C: Bye.

Speaker B: Bye.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the SEO Show. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We'll see you in the next episode.