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I manage the seo for a local auto repair shop. There is a single location. This is not a franchise with multiple city locations.

In an attempt to improve the local seo rankings I am thinking about changing the structure to

URL = acmeautoservice.com/city-state/services/brake-repair

TITLE = Brake Repair | City ST | ACME Auto Service

H1 = Brake Repair in City ST

I do NOT want to be penalized for seeming spammy to the search engines ...

So, is it too much to put the city and state in the url, title, and h1?

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It's perfectly normal to use city, state to in URL & Meta title etc.

In fact, since its a local business it would be recommended to place the city name.

You can decide on the website structure with regards to framing the URL but you may like to have URL like:

example.com/brake-repair-service-in-city-state

Note: That these play very little role in ranking so think about overall presence & planning accordingly.

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  • I am thinking of having the home page be : acmeautoservice.com/auto-repair-city-st | and then having subfolders | acmeautoservice.com/auto-repair-city-st/services/brakes/brake-repair ... do you see an issue with repeating words like brakes in this url in that fashion? – MattClendenen Jul 21 '17 at 0:07
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    Should home page finish at .com right? With regards to URL structure, i would say keep it simple. Like: example.com => Home | example.com/service/ => Services | example.com/services/break-repair-serviec-in-city-state. One or 1 repeat should be OK. – TopQnA Jul 21 '17 at 0:16
  • Is it more beneficial to have the keyword closer to the root or to have it organized under a subfolder such as services? Also, would it be a penalty to have acmeautoservice.com/services since the keywords are literally back to back. Maybe instead do auto-repair-services? – MattClendenen Jul 21 '17 at 0:45
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    Generally, there is no penalty for how you structure your URL. Just keep in mind that not to repeat keywords way too many times. 1 or 2 repeat is OK. Don't worry, service repeat twice is perfectly all right. I will not recommend creating /services/ unless you got too many pages under services. So, make it simple like: example.com/service-name-in-city-state. Even if you create /services/ for fewer pages that is OK too. These come more on website planning side and less on SEO. – TopQnA Jul 21 '17 at 1:11
  • Why do you not recommend creating /services unless there are many pages? – MattClendenen Jul 21 '17 at 1:16
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You are on the right track, adding the city name to the Title, Description and H1 tags is a good idea.

But modifying the url for the main page is unnecessarily and should be avoided.

There are numerous was to boost your local rankings.

  • Add the business to sites such as yelp and Facebook.
  • Add the business to google maps.
  • Create rich relevent content to entice visitors to the site.

Overall, just try not to over do it, search engines have gotten very smart and if they think you are trying to manipulate your sites search results ranking it will not help your site in the long run

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