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Category: Local Website Optimization

Considering local SEO and its impact on your website? Discuss website optimization for local SEO.

  • dogtopiamichigan


    Hello, I have a strange issue that I have not come across before:My subdomain is: michigan.dogdaycare.com. Some of the Keyword searches show our subdomain being nested under the main domain for Google searches instead of being indexed individually. Example search term: Dogtopia Bloomfield https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=dogtopia+bloomfield -This will show two subdomain links nested under the main domain Example search term: Dogtopia Birmingham https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=dogtopia+birmingham -This shows the subdomain showing correctly in searches and not nested. Any idea as to how to fix this? Thanks in advance!

    | dogtopiamichigan
    0
  • ScorePromotions


    Hi MOZers, We are looking for some advice on whether to have a single TLD(.com) or 2 separate domains (.ca) & (.com) Our website will have different products & pricing for each of US users(.com) and Canada users(.ca). Since, we are targeting different countries & user groups with each domain - we are not concerned about "duplicate content". So, does it make more sense to have a single domain for compounding our content marketing efforts? Or, Will it be more beneficial to have seperate domains for the geo-targeting benefits on Google.CA & Google.COM? Looking forward to some great suggestions.

    | ScorePromotions
    0
  • Red_Spot_Interactive


    Hello Moz World, I'm wanting to know the best practices for utilizing a subdomain versus a subfolder for multi location businesses, i.e. miami.example.com vs. example.com/miami; I would think that that utilizing the subdomain would make more sense for a national organization with many differing locations, while a subfolder would make more sense for a smaller more nearby locations. I wanted to know if anyone has any a/b examples or when it should go one way or another? Thank you, Kristin Miller

    | Red_Spot_Interactive
    0
  • ChaseMG


    I'm working on developing some local pages for an HVAC company. They cover two counties, so I was planning on having two county pages, then linking them to individual city pages to keep the menu simpler and not cluttering it up with a couple dozen city pages for people to slog through. Has anybody ever done county pages before for local SEO? Or at least seen them? Just curious to see if there's any real benefit overall for have separate county pages, or if I should just stick to city pages.

    | ChaseMG
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  • Mr.bfz


    Hey Guys, Does anyone have experience or can point me to the right documentation about geo targeting possibilities for specific states in the US or specific areas in the world. Local SEO does not apply in my case, since my website is not a business nor have a physical address. My website offers information that is only relevant for specific states in the US, how can I leverage my I optimisation to gain more exposure in those specific states? I really appreciate any help. A

    | Mr.bfz
    0
  • Kingalan1


    Recently " .NYC" domains have become available for purchase to New York City based businesses. I own and operate a New York City commercial real estate firm, nyc-officespace-leader.com. New domain would be www.metro-manhattan.nyc Our existing domain has been in use for seven years.would there be an SEO benefit to transferring our site to .NYC domain? Or would a new domain kill our domain rank? Thanks, Alan

    | Kingalan1
    0
  • PeteC12


    Hello All, I am currently doing my H1 ,H2, H3 Tags on my redesigned website We have the ability to have links to relevant DIY Guides on the bottom of our webpage and these are currently displayed under a heading "DIY Useful Guides" above my on page content which is at the bottom of the page. My H2 Tag will obviously be the title that sits above my On Page Content at the bottom of the Webpage and I was going to do the H3 Tag for my DIY Guides Is it a problem if the H3 tag sits above the H2 Tag on the Page or not ?  Or have i got this wrong and I need to move the DIY Guides (links) to below the on page content so the H3 tag sits below the H2 tag? thanks Pete OTmPbbR

    | PeteC12
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  • MickEdwards


    I'm starting to use schema on a site currently working on the business address in the footer.  What is the correct way to use data that has more than one line? So for example the address is something like "Unit 1, Some Farm, Some Street..." Unit 1, Some Farm Some Street or Unit 1, Some Farm
    Some Street

    | MickEdwards
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  • TFinder


    I have a local client with a 500 page site.
    They advertise online and use traditional media like direct mail.
    A print media company, Valpak, has started a website
    And wants the client to use their trackable phone number
    And a proxy website. When I type the proxy domain in the browser
    It appears to be client home page at this proxy URL. The vendor
    Wishes to track activity on its site to prove their value or something
    My question is: is their any "authority" risk to my clients website
    By allowing this proxy site??

    | TFinder
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  • KHCreative


    I would like to get some opinions on the best way to handle duplicate / similar content that is on our company website and local facility level sites.  Our company website is our flagship website that contains all of our service offerings, and we use this site to complete nationally for our SEO efforts.  We then have around 100 localized facility level sites for the different locations we operate that we use to rank for local SEO.  There is enough of a difference between these locations that it was decided (long ago before me) that there would be a separate website for each.  There is however, much duplicate content across all these sites due to the service offerings being roughly the same.  Every website has it's own unique domain name, but I believe they are all on the same C-block.  I'm thinking of going with 1 of 2 options and wanted to get some opinions on which would be best. 1 - Keep the services content identical across the company website and all facility sites, and use the rel=canonical tag on all the facility sites to reference the company website.  My only concern here is if this would drastically hurt local SEO for the facility sites. 2 - Create two unique sets of services content.  Use one set on the company website.  And use the second set on the facility sites, and either live with the duplicate content or try and sprinkle in enough local geographic content to create some differential between the facility sites. Or if there are other suggestions on a better way to handle this, I would love to hear any other thoughts as well. Thanks!

    | KHCreative
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  • DanielBernhardt


    Does the geographic Location of my Server effect my SEO? HELP US! We are arguing for 3 weeks already. My partner has mentioned multiple times in the past that  "since 2013 google does not require your server to be in the country you are targeting for seo"
    And that actually all they care about is if its a good and fast server - not where its physically located in the world. I am a strong believer that the geographic location of your server directly effects your SEO ranking... lets say if you want to target www.google.ru for your seo, best you have a server located in Russia for hosting your website.. WHO IS RIGHT? Choose the winner and base the facts.
    If anybody has the correct answer and information to base it on it will help us alot - and maybe even spare some unnecessary violent between us two! we found some articles across the web, sadly they are all dated back to 2012.... Thanks in Advance for all the help guys!

    | DanielBernhardt
    0
  • Mark_Ch


    Hi All, I'm looking to rebrand my current website to a new domain name.
    In short the current website has out grown it's potential. The domain name is not memorable nor is it attracting a wider audience.
    I will create my new website and 301 redirect the old website to the new, hence pass SEO value. Google Places
    Having spoken to Google they tell me that I can simply change the URL in Google Places to the new URL. Articles on my current website
    I have a number of rich content articles on my current website, can I simply create my new website and copy & paste these previously written articles? Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
    What should I do for accounts associated with the current website? Any other useful information would be much appreciated. Regards Mark

    | Mark_Ch
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  • delpino


    Hello everybody, I'm a programmer so I'm not very good at marketing. Any idea what the best way is to promote my language learning site? (http://www.antosch-and-lin.com/) Since Google Penguin the site has taken a big hit and the changes suggested by a SEO expert hasn't helped. Thanks for any suggestions!

    | delpino
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  • whis


    We are having a quality/ relevance issue with some of our traffic. One of the problems is that we are ranking well in certain foreign countries, which is driving irrelevant traffic to our site (as we only really cater for UK residents). Is there any way to suppress our overseas Google rankings whilst retaining good performance in the UK? Thanks.

    | whis
    0
  • molchman


    I am currently having our website completely redone by a design company.  Are there any suggestions on this process as to not lose the rankings we currently have for our site?  The domain will remain the same however we are planning on changing our host.  We also have a good amount of sub domains that the web company will not be changing for us.

    | molchman
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    Hi everyone, I'm looking for some feedback on Yoast Local SEO, and if you think it'd work for our site. www.kempruge.com. Our site is a wordpress site, and there's nothing about it, off the top of my head, that makes me think it wouldn't work, but I've been wrong before. We do use All-In-One SEO, not the Yoast plugin, so I'm not sure if that's compatible.or would cause a problem? (The reason we use All-In-One and not Yoast is because that's what we had when I got here, and I'm worried what would happen if we switched). Also, we have three offices, and I need to be able to do local seo for all three. I know Yoast says it supports multiple offices, but I'd feel more comfortable if someone on here let me know from his/her experience that it did. Anything else you want to add about Yoast Local, I'm all ears! Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • David-Kley


    Happy Friday Mozzers! I wanted to pick your brains this morning, and see what your thoughts were on how Google missed this one. One of our competitors is ranking high in Google, and has been for some time. About 5-6 months ago, his site skyrocketed from page 3-4 to the top of page one. The site meta tag is pulling in logo alt text, content is very messy and sales driven, and after looking at the backlink profile in MOZ tools, it has a ton of links from China, Japan, Korea. Most of the backlinks are from blog pages, about everything under the sun, from UFO's to porn sites. This site has consistantly ranked high at the top of the page for many different competitive keywords. My question is this: HOW? After all the updates done by Google, and their focus on web spam, what is allowing this site to rank high constantly?  (5-6 months now, and often in the number one spot). Here is an example of some of the backlinks. There are a LOT of them. http://sundtjek-wp.alexandra.dk/?p=1
    http://ice.anyang.ac.kr/xe/teacher/2095
    http://blog.so-net.ne.jp/etsuko_hayashi_ET3/2006-07-02 Don't worry, we are not looking to follow in his footsteps, lol. I was just wondering how this can happen, and for such a long time period.

    | David-Kley
    0
  • Mest


    Hi, My company runs a small blog in swedish. Most of the visitors are our customers/prospects. We will write about generic concepts regarding our business and the occasional company news story. However, I have quite a few ideas for articles that could be interesting to a lot of people, and I'm tempted to write those in english for better exposure. I would love it if that exposure could boost my companies authority. How should I go on about this? Can I somehow tell search engines that a certain part or page of the site is in another language? Should I translate our entire site to english and post the english post in a separate blog feed? Any insight is welcome. Thanks in advance!

    | Mest
    0
  • sptechnologies


    When translating a website to additional languages, is it recommended, for Google SEO purposes, that the keywords, re-written URLs, meta titles and meta descriptions of each page be translated as well; or have those elements been completely depreciated?

    | sptechnologies
    0
  • aj613


    Rebuilding a site that currently has good rankings.  The original site was build in Joomla. I am doing the rebuild on WordPress.  The old site is at the domain www.savannah-dentist.com, but clicking on any link generates a url with a subfolder; i.e. the website is at www.savannah-dentist.com, click on the logo and you will go to www.savannah-dentist.com/rosenthal/, the "meet the doctors" link goes to "www.savannah-dentist.com/rosenthal/meet-the-doctors" When I rebuild the site, do I have to retain that url structure? If I get rid of the folder and make everything simply like www.savannah-dentist.com/meet-the-doctors, will I be jeopardizing our rankings? Thanks! -Adam

    | aj613
    0
  • kinimod


    Hi there, I am new to MOZ Q&A and  first of all I appreciate all the folks here that share their expertise and make everyone understand 'the WWW' a bit better. My question: I have been developing a 'travel guide' site for a city in the U.S. and now its time to choose the right domain name. I put a strong focus on SEO in terms of coding, site performance as well as content and to round things up I'd like to register the _best _domain name in terms of SEO. Let's suppose the city is Atlanta. I have found the following domain names that are available and I was wondering whether you guys could give me some inside on which domain name would perform best. discoveratlanta.org
    atlantaguide.org
    atlanta.travel
    atlantamag.com Looking at the Google Adwords Keyword tool the term that reaches the highest search queries is obviously "Atlanta" itself. Sites that are already ranking high are atlanta.com and atlanta.gov. So basically I am wondering whether I should aim for a new TLD like atlanta.travel or rather go with a .org domain. I had a look around and it seems that .org domains generally work well for city guides (at least a lot of such sites use .org domains). However, I have also seen a major US city that uses .travel and ranks first. On the other hand in New York, nycgo.com ranks well. Is it safe to assume that from the domain names I mentioned it really doesn't matter which one I use since it wouldn't significantly affect my ranking (good or bad)? Or would you still choose one above the other? What do you generally thing about .travel domain names (especially since they are far more expensive then the rest)? I really appreciate your response to my question! Best, 
    kinimod

    | kinimod
    0
  • Berner


    HI,rategy. So I spoke to a local Colorado seo company and they suggested to find whatever keywords is the most searched under my GWT's and put .com behind it and build other sites for other keywords. I was curious about this type of strategy. Does this work? This seo guy said I could just get a DBA bank account and such for each domain name etc. I am not wanting to mislead anyone, but I am curious if for the sake of promoting other services, if creating other websites with partial and EMD's are worthwhile? Another issue I worry about is if I put my companies phone number, then next thing you know there is 3 or 4 sites that use that same phone number. To me this does not build trust with Google. But being I am learning, maybe this is a common strategy, or doomed from the start. Just curious what you think. Would you build other sites to try and rank for other services? Or keep one sites and maximize it? Thank you for your thoughts. I just do not want to pay $3000 per site if it will hurt not help.

    | Berner
    0
  • Inevo


    Hi, If an ecommerce site has different prices for the different regions within the same country (based on IP location), will this impact Google somehow? Case: Furniture website in Norway. Shipping is expensive when you ship a sofa, so prices will differ depending on where in Norway you're located. Switching location is easy, but the default price you see will be based on your IP location.

    | Inevo
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  • SarahCollins


    Hi All, We have an ecommerce Website with multiple locations for our stores and we currently display separate location specific pages for the different categories and sub categories. This has helped us previously to rank well for local search in each of the areas we have a store but over the last few months since humingbird, our local rankings on some things have dip a little . We want to implement a branch locator of some description to improve the user experience. From looking at other websites with branch locators, they tend to a separate button/page with which you can search for a branch etc. However, they don't have location specific pages. My query is should I do it so if  a user comes in on a specific category location page and follows it through to product page , then to have a tab on the product page displaying the local branch from which he can come in. My thinking here is that , is that it would help confirm my local citations and help improve local rankings. Or Should the local branch be displayed on the local category pages instead or as well ?. If a user comes in from the homepage or not on a specific location page, then the branch locator will allow them to search for a specific branch. Should I also put in a branch locator as a separate page or can It be in more places. I don't want to damage anything which may have an effect on rankings due to citations and NAP on the location specific pages. Any advice or good examples to look at would be greatly appreciated thanks Sarah.

    | SarahCollins
    1
  • kirmeliux


    Hi, Sorry if this rambles on. There's a few details that kind of convolute this issue so I'll try and be as clear as possible. The site in question has been online for roughly 5 years. It's established with many local citations, does well in local SERPs (working on organic results currently), and represents a business with 2 locations in the same county. The domain is structured as location1brandname.com. The site was recently upgraded from a 6-10 page static HTML site with loads of duplicate content and poor structure to a nice, clean WordPress layout. Again, Google is cool with it, everything was 301'd properly, and our rankings haven't dropped (some have improved). Here's the tricky part: To properly optimize this site for our second location, I am basically building a second website within the original, but customized for our second location. It will be location1brandname.com/secondcity and the menu will be unique to second-city service pages, unique NAP on footer, etc. I will then update our local citations with this new URL and hopefully we'll start appearing higher in local SERPs for the second-city keywords that our main URL isn't currently optimized for. The issue I have is that our root domain has our first city location in the domain and that this might have some negative effect on ranking for the second URL. Conversely, starting on a brand new domain (secondcitybrandname.com) requires building an entire new site and being brand new. My hunch is that we'll be fine making root.com/secondcity that locations homepage and starting a new domain, while cleaner and compeltely separate from our other location, is too much work for not enough benefit. It seems like if they're the same company/brand, they should be on the same sitee. and we can use the root juice to help. Thoughts?

    | kirmeliux
    0
  • LincolnSmith


    I have a client that has an international website. The website currently has IP detection and redirects you to the subdomain for your country. They have currently only launched the Australian website and are not yet open to the rest of the world: https://au.domain.com/ Google is not indexing the Australian website or pages, instead I believe that the bots are being blocked by the IP redirection every time they try to visit one of the Australian pages. Therefore only the US 'coming soon' page is being properly indexed. So, I would like to know the best way to place a geolocation redirection without creating a splash page to select location? User friendliness is most important (so we don't want cookies etc). I have seen this great Whiteboard Friday video on Where to Host and How to Target, which makes sense, but what it doesn't tell me is exactly the best method for redirection except at about 10:20 where it tells me what I'm doing is incorrect. I have also read a number of other posts on IP redirection, but none tell me the best method, and some are a little different examples... I need for US visitors to see the US coming soon page and for Google to index the Australian website. I have seen a lot about JS redirects, IP redirects and .htaccess redirects, but unfortunately my technical knowledge of how these affect Google's bots doesn't really help. Appreciate your answers. Cheers, Lincoln

    | LincolnSmith
    0

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