In the SEO industry, the phrase "content is king" is frequently heard. Although I agree with that point, it should not be applied universally to every site in every circumstance. In reality, for SMBs and local businesses, too much low-value content may have the opposite impact.

This is the situation. Last year, one of our clients struggled to rank with some of their most important keywords. The firm had another company set up hundreds of boilerplate service area pages targeting social security disability terms before partnering with us. Each page was dedicated to a specific city or service area, but the users who visited those pages received no real benefit.

The issue. The pages had the following characteristics:

Content is very similar. In most of the service area pages, the location was the biggest difference. This is a popular strategy used by businesses who want to target several areas in the hopes of attracting searchers searching for "keyword + location."

Designed with the aim of ranking in those cities. Since the content was created solely for the purpose of appearing in search results, it did not meet the needs of the searchers.

No links. There were almost no incoming links (or internal links) on the individual service area websites, making it difficult for search engines and searchers to locate them.

No traffic. Because of the above reasons, the services area pages were not supporting the local business site in any way and may have contributed to cruft.

The solution. We decided to remove all of the pages and redirect them to the main social security disability pages on the site because they weren't adding value to the site, mostly due to points three and four listed above.

The result. My client saw significant improvements in their local pack rankings for "social security disability attorney" within weeks of implementing this strategy.

In certain industries and markets, service area pages can be extremely effective. However, before introducing a plan like this one, it's important to assess the impact of the content you're adding to your web.

Why we care. When you invest time and money into an SEO strategy, it's critical to have a testing strategy in place that iterates and produces the desired results. Every circumstance necessitates a thorough examination of each customer, their market, and the SERP landscape to decide if they need additional content on their site and, if so, what the best form of content is for the target audience they're attempting to reach. Connect with your local SEO company.

Rather than writing and uploading a lot of content without a plan or strategy to back it up, make sure you have a plan in place to develop links to the content — including internal links — and check to see if the pages you've already built are attracting traffic. Connect with your local SEO company to help you strategize your plan.

Instead of adding 50 of these service area pages as a first step, it would have been easier to add a few service area pages and see how they do.