City EMDs for B2B: why a few dozen searches were worth winning

Context

Mediterranean Experience runs team building and corporate events in Croatia: competitions, challenges, hunts and races for groups, and the logistics around them. It is one company trading through several legal entities, and it operates in seven cities.

I worked on it first as an employee, from 2018 to 2020, then as a client after I went independent.

The problem

The market is high-ticket B2B: corporate retreats, conferences and incentive trips. Companies bring whole teams to a destination, and a single event is worth tens of thousands of euros.

The search volume behind it is tiny: a few dozen queries a month per city. Standard SEO logic says don’t bother. The logic that applies here is different. When a planner in Munich searches “team building Dubrovnik” to organise a retreat, being the first result is the entire game.

The approach

The decision that mattered was structural: a separate website for each city the company operates in, rather than one national site with a page per city. Seven sites, each on an exact-match domain like dubrovnikteambuilding.com, and each with its own Google Business Profile.

Why a site per city. Buyers in this market search city first. A planner has already picked Dubrovnik or Split and wants someone who runs events there. An exact-match domain answers that query in the address itself, and its own Google Business Profile puts it in that city’s local results. On one national site, each city would have had a single page competing with local specialists and event directories. With a site of its own, each city could carry its own venues, partners and packages, and present the company as the specialist in that city, which it was.

Why it was worth seven sites. A few dozen searches a month per city would not justify one site, let alone seven, on volume. On value it was easy. One booking pays for the work, and in a niche this small, first position takes most of the enquiries there are.

Is this a doorway network? An experienced reader will be thinking it, so I’ll say it: several sites for one company can look like doorway pages. Doorway pages target a city and funnel visitors somewhere else. These don’t. The company runs events in each of these cities, each location has its own venues, activities and logistics, and each site sells what actually happens there. The Google Business Profiles are real listings for real operations.

What made each site distinct. Same core products, delivered differently and described on different pages. Each site has its own local vendor partners, packages built for that city, and photos from past events on location. The content was written for each city, not templated across them. Measured on the live homepages in October 2026, no two of them share more than about a third of their text, even with the city names treated as the same word.

The result

Each city site held first position in its own local market.

Dubrovnik Team Building is a good example. Its design is old and it shows, but it still ranks first in Google for “Dubrovnik team building”. The structure and the local relevance carry it, not the look.

In this market, a single corporate event is worth tens of thousands of euros.

The point

Keyword volume is a terrible proxy for value in B2B. Forty searches a month that convert at five figures beat forty thousand that don’t convert at all.

Most SEO prioritisation frameworks would have deprioritised this entire project.