Most local retail stores want their web pages to turn up for relevant keywords plus relevant cities. Naturally, you want your store to show up in the city you are located in, but you may also be able to show up in nearby cities where you have numerous customers.

One of the ways to do this is simply to make sure the various cities you serve are listed on your web pages. But you don’t want to keep writing the city names over and over on a web page. That’s what a lot of SEO companies do. They stuff one city name all over a web page, and then another city on another page, and then another and another.

It’s just dreadful.

Thankfully, Google is not rewarding those pages with high rankings, at least not as much as they used to.

But it’s still a good idea to look for opportunities to naturally insert the cities you serve.

One opportunity that is regularly missed is to add a city to a testimonial. I often see a testimonial with just the name of the testimonial giver but no city. By simply adding the city after the name, you have automatically added a little more information that might help Google serve up your page to an interested party in that city.

Of course you always want permission to identify the city from whomever you are quoting.

Easy Web Tip #236: Don’t forget to add the city next to the name when placing a testimonial on your website.