How to promote the site in the regions?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

Good afternoon.
There is a small shop. Now we have set up delivery throughout Tatarstan, in the Sverdlovsk, Moscow and Chelyabinsk regions. There was a need to promote the site there as well. Previously, the site in the issue was moving strictly according to St. Petersburg.

Before turning to SEOs, I would like to understand at least a basic understanding of the topic myself, so as not to be deceived. I read several articles and came to the following conclusions, please indicate if I'm right or everything is wrong.

1) To promote the site by region, you will have to choose a top city from each region with a population of over 100k people. And for each city to prepare its own version of the site (new text, new phone number, and preferably the address)

2) It is better to advance by folders, i.e. site.ru/moscow, site.ru/kazan, and not subdomains: kazan.site.ru, because it is longer and more expensive (link mass). Right?

Or is there some other way to approach it?

Answer 1

My imho.
Promotion across regions is a tricky thing.
First you need to decide what exactly will be the content for promotion in the region.
It can be:
a) when choosing a region, all the same pages are shown as on the main site, but they are added dynamically: url, headings and texts, meta tags, alt in pictures, phone numbers if necessary, and other content. In fact, I chose "Kazan" from the list of cities - I went to site.ru/kazanand there already has its own content, optimized for Kazan. When moving around the site, the url structure is based on the "/kazan/odegda" region. This option allows you to move on low-frequency requests, and in general on a large number of requests, but difficult to implement, more suitable for self-written projects, produces a bunch of links, more difficult to track and manage the project. An example in the implementation https://bamper.by/zchbu/gorod_brest/
b) just separate pages like "buy jeans in kazan", "buy jeans in samara", etc.
are optimized for frequency queries, are plain text.
This is a simple option, many people do it, including the seo studios themselves sculpt like "website promotion in Minsk", "website promotion in Borisov", etc. And this also works, and it is primitive in implementation. But the number of requests is limited. To me I like this option, it works.
c) something in between.
for example, in order not to bother with programming, ordinary categories of goods are created in the CMS in the form of regions, such as "Kazan", "Samara", etc. They are not displayed in the general catalog so as not to distract people. They have their own URL, products, texts and tags. That is, it turns out not just a page, but a whole category with products, but sharpened for requests from the region. Moreover, made using standard tools of the same Opencart without involving a programmer. Also, IMHO, a normal option.
d) a separate site on a separate domain/subdomain.
in this case, a complete copy of the site is made, transferred to a subdomain and promoted there.
the difficulty is that pulling a bunch of sites for SEO is much more difficult than one, updating products and prices is a separate story, there will be no single registration, etc. That is, I would consider this option in an exceptional case, for example, if you need to show different products and prices for different regions.

Answer 2

1) well, of course, you don’t have to turn directly the top of the city - both Google and Yandex take coordinates from browsers, but it will be better if the site is visited only from the region region (as well as non-regional subdomains) + if not subdomains, you will get a hemorrhage in the "contacts" section and other common ones for the site, and if you accumulate - you will get a bunch of additional pages in general, there are two ways and you need experiments