In today’s digital economy, visibility means more than having an appealing website, or an active social presence on social channels. For business portals, especially those that service users across a geographical spread, visibility through Location-wise SEO is critical. A business portal that can delivers content in a way that is relevant to the city, state, or country where the buyer is located has the potential to significantly increase traffic, leads, and ultimately conversions.
This post will discuss how your business can utilize City-wise SEO, State-wise SEO, and Country-wise SEO in order to enhance your search to rank better, and acquire more local visibility throughout your service area.
Why is Location-wise SEO Important for Business Portals?
Search engines have made great progress in detecting local intent. For example, if someone searched for “best accounting service in Chicago,” or “legal advisors in California,” Google would return search result pages that would be based on that geographical area. If your service portal has not been optimized to target geographic keywords, you are probably losing out on a large quantity of traffic for what could be yours.
Location-wise SEO provides portals, that potentially serve their customers across a wide range of locations, (e.g. directories, service aggregators, B2BA etc.)
1. City-wise SEO:
City-wise SEO focuses on being sure that your portal is optimized to rank for singular cities, which is ideal for a business which has local services or has business listings based on cities.
Key Approaches:
a. City-Specific Landing Pages
Every major city that your business targets should have its own page that will contain the following:
- City-specific keywords (example: “Best Real Estate Agents in Chicago”)
- Local partners or listings
- Local testimonials or case studies
- Contact info and/or address (if relevant)
b. Google Business Profiles Optimization (if applicable)
If your business portal lists listings, be sure that every listing has a Google Business Profile to the target city you are trying to list to help with visibility
c. Schema Markup
Use LocalBusiness schema with city-specific info to help the search engine understand the location aspect of the page
d. Hyperlocal Content
Blogs, guides, or local news based on the city, can help to create authority, example: “Top 10 IT Consulting Firms in Boston – 2025 Edition”
2. State-wise SEO: Linking Local & Regional
With portals that have an audience that can use the service in a broader area such as a state (or province) (this is especially true for bigger countries like the US, India or Australia, etc.)
a. Create State-Based Hubs
Develop specific state pages that will act as hubs for cities. For example, the California hub:
- could include a list of all of its cities and services.
- The breadcrumbs will look like the following: Home > California > Los Angeles
b. Target State-Level Keywords
Target words like “Top Doctors in Texas” or “Construction Companies in Maharashtra.” These keywords have outranked them in competition and associated with fewer national competitors. The more local intent is likely to have, the lower the competitiveness.
c. Consistent NAP Data
If your portal contains a list of businesses, make they have consistent Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP) data with all states and about their listings.
d. State-Based Link Building
Look for backlinks from the state chamber of commerce, state directories, and regional blogs.
3. Country Level SEO: Taking Your Business Global with Local Relevancy
When the business portal will be focusing users from different countries, then performing country level SEO is critical to best ensure you are visible and relevant in each market.
Key Considerations:
a. Country Specific Domains or Subdirectories
There are three different ways of targeting these countries.
- ccTLD
- Subdomain
- Subdirectory
Each method has advantages and disadvantages, and the subdirectory will allow for the best overall SEO value.
b. Hreflang Tags
Leverage hreflang attributes to show the user the correct language and regional version of your content to address and prevent duplicate content issues.
c. Native Language, Dialect
If two countries use the same language (e.g. U.S. and U.K.) make sure to optimize for local spelling, terminology and idioms. For example, in the U.S. there are “apartments,” but they are “flats” in the U.K.
d. Local backlinks
You want backlinks from local sites, forums, news sources, directories, etc. Because backlinks can generate more local authority in that region.
e. Make sure you speak to local search engines
Countries like China and Russia have their own search engines that are not Google, so optimize for Baidu for China, and Yandex for Russia
4. Technical SEO Considerations for Location-Based Competitive Advantage
a. XML Sitemaps containing Location URLs
Use a sitemap resource to locate city, state, and country specific URLs in order for Google to easily find these localized pages.
b. Canonical Tags to Avoid Duplicate Content
If you offer similar services across city / country, use canonicalization to avoid being penalized by Google for duplicate content.
c. Mobile and Speed Optimization
Google is prioritizing mobile-first indexing, specifically for local searches, you want to ensure that there is:
- Page speed (Utilizing Core Web Vitals tools)
- Responsive Design
- Click-to-call buttons for mobile users
d. Crawl Budget Management
If you have thousands of local pages, make sure they are not so deep in the structure that they cannot be crawled when required.
Best Practices at all Levels of Location
These best practices could be applied to almost all levels of location. Whether it is city, state, or country level.
1. Unique content/deck per location
Don’t just copy and paste the same template content changing the location name. Google doesn’t like thin or duplicate content.
2. Mobile Optimize
Most local searches happen on mobile devices. Mobile responsive design and CLICKABLE contact information are very important!.
3. Localized Reviews/Testimonials
When you can, having localized (city or state) reviews can improve trust, and local relevancy.
4. Internal linking
Linking resulted in strong internal linking and dominance of page authority between city, state and country.
Example Use Case: A Business Directory Portal
More straightforwardly seen within the example of a business directory portal whereby it lists service providers across countries.
- City-wise SEO: Every notable city would have its own page dedicated to local listings and keywords.
- State-wise SEO: A summary page of services per state.
- Country-wise SEO: Pages with localized subdirectories per country, with relevant language, currency, and legal information.
Under similar circumstances of organization and optimization, such effective portals could dominate SERPs across every area they target.
Conclusion
Local SEO is not the same everywhere. It requires some intentional planning, geo-specific keyword research, and an ongoing optimization process. Because business portals are unique to that city, state, and country, the SEO can be done in a way that provides scalable growth across all locations while still obtaining relevancy and local search visibility.
Implement these tactics and you are on your way to becoming the dominant go-to site in each of your provided targeted locations, generating more organic traffic, more leads, and more opportunities than ever before!
