Getting many location pages indexed-help needed

[Steve Jones2]

I travel to my customers, covering a 50 mile radius.
My site has 30k location pages, based on 10 keywords and 3000 towns.
But Google has only indexed 1.5k of 30k pages.Around 9k are "crawled not indexed". This has been the case for a long time.
A freelancer has suggested he resubmit the pages-he can do 200 per day.But I'm wondering if this is a waste of time unless I try something else.

I'm not technical on SEO. Do I need to change page titles, embed a local map for each town, provide internal links? I don't have the skills to do any of this.
Basically, I need someone who's familiar with this issue to help me, so contact me if you think you can help.

 

[fisicx]

You are doing it wrong. Google won’t ever index all those pages.

The simple solution is a Google Business Profile set up as a Service Area Business. You then just use the website to provide evidence you work in the locations by writing blog posts about the work you do.

 

[ctrlbrk]

You are doing it wrong. Google won’t ever index all those pages.

The simple solution is a Google Business Profile set up as a Service Area Business. You then just use the website to provide evidence you work in the locations by writing blog posts about the work you do.

I'm still a SEO beginner, but why wouldn't search engines index all those pages?

Doesn't Amazon get pretty much everything indexed, and they';ve got products in the millions, surely?

 

[Ozzy]

I'm still a SEO beginner, but why wouldn't search engines index all those pages?

Only based on what I see in indexing on this site, Google decides what it thinks is relevant. So it indexes the site for what it thinks the site is relevant for, and all those other pages are just variations of the same thing.

I believe, think about what Google's AI search results will return. It uses Google Merchant to return product listings, Google My Business to return local business searches, and Google Search for websites to return answers to questions.

 

[Paul Carmen]

I'm still a SEO beginner, but why wouldn't search engines index all those pages?

Doesn't Amazon get pretty much everything indexed, and they';ve got products in the millions, surely?

Amazon has hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of unique pages for products, but it's not carrying out local SEO, so has no relevance to the OPs question.

Most sites that have local pages do this as if it were a PPC landing page; e.g. swap a town/area name and if you're lucky a couple of other keywords, but all other copy and content details are the same. This is OK for PPC, as you don't need those pages indexed, but not for SEO.

Google looks at those low quality pages and either sees them as the same (duplicate content) and ignores them, or worse, as a pointless page meant to trick people into going to a another page to sign up or purchase etc (doorway pages).

You can have thousands of local pages if you want, but these need unique copy and content to get indexed, and more importantly, have any chance of ranking for anything.

 

[Shopclicks]

I travel to my customers, covering a 50 mile radius.
My site has 30k location pages, based on 10 keywords and 3000 towns.

This is total overkill. You're obviously including villages that are covered as part of a larger town. Those pages are being cannibalised and are a waste of time. My advice would be to cull the location pages down to the 100 biggest towns and focus on those.
There is nothing wrong with duplicate content if it's relevant to your industry. The trick is to make that content relevant to the town or city it's targeting.
Competition is the greatest challenge. To win in serps you need the most relevant page content. It's not about unique content, it's about 'does your page solve this query?'

 

[fisicx]

Which is why blogging about the sink you installed in Smalltown works really well. Do this for each job and you will soon build up a huge corpus of relevant and indexable content.

 

[Shopclicks]

Do this for each job and you will soon build up a huge corpus of relevant and indexable content.

That's a 'nice to have' but not a priority. The priority for getting location pages indexed, is all the usual SEO elements (titles, meta, map, FAQ's, image titles and alt, etc.) all focused on the target location.

 

[fisicx]

Whichever route you take @Steve Jones2, getting 30k location pages indexed and ranked isn’t going to happen. You need a whole different marketing strategy. Which may mean spending some case on professional help. Not some cheap freelancer.