State demand research
Volume, competition and seasonality assessed per state.
Some businesses genuinely sell state-wide: distributors, service networks, regional chains, education groups. For them, national pages are too broad to convert and city pages are too many to maintain. A state layer sits in between: enough specificity to be relevant, few enough pages to keep genuinely good.
We research demand at state level, including regional language variation where it matters, structure a hub with the state page above city pages beneath it, and build regional authority through state-level publications, associations and directories.
The layer between national and city
Some businesses genuinely sell state-wide: distributors with regional coverage, service networks, regional chains, education groups, logistics operators. For them national pages are too broad to convert and a city-per-page structure is too many pages to keep genuinely good.
A state layer sits between the two: specific enough to be relevant to a searcher, few enough to keep substantive, and a natural hub for city pages beneath it.
Regional language, only where the data says so
It is fashionable to assume regional-language content is always the answer in India. Sometimes it clearly is, and sometimes the commercial search in a state happens overwhelmingly in English or in transliterated form because the buyer is a business rather than a consumer.
We check the actual search data per state before commissioning translation, because regional content is expensive to produce well and worthless produced badly.
Authority at state level
State-level trade bodies, associations, regional publications, government supplier directories and regional news are all achievable link sources that a national PR effort will never reach.
They also carry genuine relevance signals for the geography you are targeting, which national links do not.
A hierarchy that makes sense to a reader
State page above, city pages below, service pages cross-linked, and a clear path back up. Users should be able to move from 'do you cover Kerala' to 'do you cover Thrissur' in one click, and so should a crawler.
Where you cover a state only partially, say so on the page. Overclaiming coverage produces enquiries you have to decline, which costs more than the traffic was worth.