<p>Like you said, it is hard to tell, but we know that links are still important for rankings so I have to believe that they had an impact in some way</p>

<p>Each question is found in the dropdown from the main nav, not directly in the main nav itself. Reading it now I can see that the wording is confusing. The Q&amp;As were made to dropdown and be easily accessible from the main nav.</p> <p>The sessions and conversions were not from exact searches and there were no geographic qualifiers either. But most of this client's locations are found in Michigan, so it is possible that proximity has some bearing. For this study we were tracking national rankings though, so I'm not sure that proximity had much influence.<br /></p>

<p>We have tried multiple questions and answers on a single page before, while using different keyword variants, but we never seemed to gain any traction with this method. I think that dedicating a page to each Q&amp;A has made it easier to rank for those separate questions.</p>

<p>There were other link building tactics we employed for the rest of the site while this study was going on so it's difficult to elaborate on everything that was going on, but for the Q&amp;A content we solely built forum links on sites like Reddit and Quora. We tried to only build two links on each site per month and only if there were relevant questions that needed answers. If there weren't relevant questions then we wouldn't build any links.</p>

<p>Thank you so much for this comment, it appears that Google had re-indexed the page with the wrong URL and SSL. We've fixed this problem now and you are now driven to the correct page.</p>

<p>I don't know if I would abandon general, short tailed keywords altogether. Especially if a local business has a specific geo they are targeting, as the short tailed keywords can help drive more "top-of-funnel" traffic. But I've also found that long tail keywords tend to have better CTRs and conversion rates.</p>

<p>Typically sites do put several Q&amp;A's on one page, but we found that creating an individual page for each Q&amp;A long tailed keyword helps the pages rank better and it helps the user find what they are looking for. I hope this answers your question.</p>

<p>Thanks for sharing the tips Eric. I'll have to see if they boost any of the pages that aren't quite hitting the "zero position" yet.</p> <p>It's surprising that you saw that bounces under 30 seconds were lower, I would think if the time on site was lower then the bounce rate would be higher, but I guess new SEO territories upend conventional wisdom. <br /></p>

<p>Thanks for sharing your post David. It is a great resource and I'll definitely be using what you wrote on my other sites.</p>

<p>What has your experience been with optimizing sites for featured snippets and voice search?</p>

<p>I finally got around to reading this post and it was fantastic. As someone that has worked heavily - and written about - Local SEO. It is always helpful to have more info to help clients stand out locally. </p>

<p>I've used similar strategies for business with multiple service areas and only one location, creating "service area pages." I've found that if there isn't a brick and mortar location in those areas they don't rank well. I'll have to dig deeper into WMT and see if the strategy you outlined above would work for my clients.</p> <p>Thanks for sharing!</p>

<p>While creating the CSPs our internal linking strategy was to just link to related CSPs under the copy. It then expanded to linking to the location pages in the copy and now we are expanding that to have internal links pointing to category pages within the CSP copy as well.</p> <p>The number of links to related CSPs was arbitrary honestly - the Austin location has fewer services than Indianapolis so it made sense to have fewer related links, but it wasn't a "strategic" maneuver. <br /></p> <p>This internal linking strategy was implemented for both pages but after this case study was run we had some issues with page URLs being changed - specifically for Austin - which lead to changes in the linking with these pages. We are rolling out CSPs for each location for this client and the linking will be changed across the board.</p> <p>Thanks for reading and thanks for the question.</p>

<p>The biggest impact we've seen so far is ranking for longer tailed searches that these pages are tailored towards. The majority of our local SEO work goes towards ranking the main location pages, so these pages have had little impact on that.</p>

<p>I agree with linking to strong content, especially FAQs. As search engines move to answer more questions within SERPs, FAQs will become more and more important to sites.</p>

<p>Good luck! We have since expanded this strategy to the other nine locations that this client has.</p>

<p>Thanks for reading! It's not surprising that your competitors would be penalized for creating pages for locations that don't even exist, but some people will try anything to rank.</p> <p>In my experience I've created "service area" pages for service industry sites - plumbers, electricians, etc. - that serve several areas but only have one physical location. These pages almost never outrank brick and mortar stores in the targeted geo, but they do let potential consumers know that their geo is covered if they are looking for services. This strategy works best with media or PPC spends.</p>