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Category: Local Website Optimization

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

  • garcia.meme


    Hi, I am having doubts about my search visibility on my brand key words, all of them have a constant rate of 32.50% and don't move up or down in months, even that when I track my site it has a great variety of organic entries each week. what can be the issue, if it's an issue, or why it's the search visibility not changing? Thanks for your responses.

    | garcia.meme
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  • KylieM


    We are currently located in OKC and are opening a new location in Dallas. After much research, I found the best way to do the website is to create a subdomain a redirect people based on their IP location so our current SEO will help give substance to the new location. My question is, should I recreate the whole website under this subdomain using Dallas instead of OKC throughout or should I just recreate 1 or 2 pages? This is all very new to me and I need as much help as I can get lol.

    | KylieM
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  • Virginia-Girtz


    Hi Mozers, I'm working on some Schema for a client of mine, but whilst doing the research on GeoShapes with my developer, we came across a potential issue with this particular mark-up. My client is B2C business, operating in numerous places across the UK. I want to use the Circle property from GeoShape to draw out multiple circles across the UK, but am I able to do this? From looking at some other websites, most seem to just have one GeoShape. Can I have multiple on the same page and same domain? Thanks! Virginia

    | Virginia-Girtz
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  • Jeffvertus


    Hello All, I am currently spear heading SEO for a national franchise. I am coming across locations in the same city and zip code. I'm definitely finding difficulties in naming the location in a way that will be specific to the franchise locations (locations are 1 mile away from each other). I am looking to apply geo specific location names for each center regardless of local city terms.  (e.g. Apexnetwork of north madronna, Apexnetwork of south madronna) Also, building the website and location to read (apexnetwork.com/north-madronna….. apexnetwork.com/south-madronna) While encouraging the client to continue using the geo specific terms while writing blogs. Is this best practice? Any feedback would help.

    | Jeffvertus
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  • CatherineCorn1


    IYO, What is the Best Language to Build a Site With and Why?  Thanks Catherine Corn

    | CatherineCorn1
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  • SMQ


    Hi All, We are considering changing the link structure for the website of a large restaurant group, which represents about 100 restaurants in the USA. While I have some opinions, I'd very much welcome the opinions of some other seasoned SEO's as well. There are two options on the table for the link structure, which you can see below. The question is for restaurants with multiple locations, and how we structure those URLs. The main difference is whether we include the "/location/" of the URL, or if that is overkill? I suppose maybe it could have some value if someone is searching a term like "Bub City Location", with "location" right in the search. But otherwise, it just adds to the length of the URL, and I'm not sure if it'll bring any extra value... In this example, "bub-city" is the restaurant name, and "mb-financial-park" is one of the locations. Option A
    http://leye.local/restaurant/bub-city
    http://leye.local/restaurant/bub-city/location/mb-financial-park/ Option B
    http://leye.local/restaurant/bub-city
    http://leye.local/restaurant/bub-city/mb-financial-park/ Thoughts?

    | SMQ
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  • Davey_Tree


    Hi! Looking for some link building advice. For some background, I work for a company that has over 100 locations across the US. So we are deeply involved with local SEO. We also do a ton of evergreen/ national SEO as well and the spectrums are widely different for the most part. We also have a very successful blog in our industry. It really is an SEO’s dream. I do not even need to worry about a link strategy for this because it just naturally snatches them up. I’m trying to find some unique ways to utilize the blog to boost pages on my main root domain, more specifically, at the local level. It is really hard, besides the standard methods for local link building, to get outside sources to link to our local office pages. These pages are our bread and butter, and the pages we need to be as successful as possible. In every market we are in, we are at a disadvantage because we have one page to establish our local footprint and rank, compared to domains that have their entire site pointed at that local area we are trying to rank in. I’ve tried linking to local office pages from successful blog posts to attempt to pass link juice to the local pages, but I haven’t seen much in terms of moving the needle doing this. Are there any crafty ideas on how I can shuffle some internal linking around to capitalize on the blog’s authority to make my local pages rank higher in their markets? Thank you! -Ben

    | Davey_Tree
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  • Kevin_P


    I am trying to see if there is a reputable / research-backed source that can show which industries are most competitive for search engine optimization. In particularly, I'd be interested in reports / research related to the residential real estate industry, which I believe based on anecdotal experience to be extremely competitive.

    | Kevin_P
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  • oxojeck


    Hi everyone! I want to create multi language site (main language is English) with community and anothers subdomains. The community will also be in different languages. The site has a single database, only translation is required. What is the best way in terms of seo to create it? I see two options: 1) One language - one domain. For example: en: site.com; community.site.com; shop.site.com; subdomain.site.com; de: site.de; community.site.de; shop.site.de; subdomain.site.de; etc One domain, language as subdomain. For example: en: site.com; community.site.com; subdomain.site.com; fr: fr.site.com; fr.community.site.com; fr.subdomain.site.com; etc or en: site.com; community.site.com; subdomain.site.com; ru: site.com/ru; community.site.com (?); subdomain.site.com (?) What's the better way? The project will have at least 10 language. Thanks in advance for help!

    | oxojeck
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  • shaunn14


    In Open Site Explorer I can see that the www and non www versions of my site gets treated differently with one group of links pointing to each version of the same page. This gives a different PA score. eg. http://mydomain.com DA 38 PA 37 http://www.mydomain.com DA 28 PA 27. Currently our preferred variation is https://www.mydomain.com but it used o be http://mydomain.com for 3+ years and I can see that the non www version of my domain have more authority. Would you advise us to "change back" to setting our preferred url as the non www version as before or would it have a negative impact on our SERP ranking etc if we change it again now?

    | shaunn14
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  • Adam_PirateStudios


    Hi, I have 2 questions I am seeking an answer for. We have a home page in english GB, we then also have products which are specifically served in US. For these pages where the phone number is american, the spelling is american, the address is american, do we need to implement href lang tags? The page isn't a version of another page in english, the page is only in the native language.Secondly, is it recommended to create a second home page and then localise that page for US users?I'd be really greatful if anyone has any pointers as googles forum doesn't explain best practice for this case (as far as I can tell).Many thanks

    | Adam_PirateStudios
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  • RankAmateur...


    Hello! We are a retailer with brick and mortar stores in different cities. We have a website (ourbusiness.com), which includes a blog (ourbusiness.com/blog) and a separate ecommerce site for each store in subfolders (ourbusiness.com/Boston-store and ourbusiness.com/Atlanta-store). NB: We do this for non-business reasons and have no choice. So, this is not like REI (for example) or other stores with lots of locations but one central ecommerce operation. Most experts seem to recommend a site structure that echoes REIs. IE: a home page principally devoted to ecommerce (rei.com) includes an Our Locations-type page (rei.com/stores) which links to local store pages like (rei.com/stores/fresno) I understand how this would help REI, since their homepage is devoted to ecommerce and they need a store locator page that doesn't compete with the shopping experience.  But since we can't send people to products directly from our home page, is there any reason for us not to put the store locator function right on the home page? That is, is there any reason in our case to prefer (A) ourbusiness.com/our_locations/Boston_store  over (B) ourbusiness.com/Boston-store? As i see it, the extra page (/our_locations/) could actually hurt, as it puts products one click further away from customers, and one link deeper for bots. On the other hand, it may make the multi-store structure clearer to bots (and maybe people) and help us in local search. Finally, would it make a difference if there were 10 stores vs 2? Thanks for any thoughts!

    | RankAmateur...
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  • RSR


    Hi, I have a non-profit organization that advocates for mental health education and treatment. We are considering creating regional chapters of the non-profit in specific countries - France, UK, Russia, etc. What's the best long-term foundation for global organic growth? Should we simply internationalize our content (.org/uk/)? Or create a custom site for each ccTLD (.org.uk, etc.? Since it's an educational site, the content for each country would not be particularly unique, apart from: Language (regional English nuance for UK and AUS, or other languages altogether) Expert videos and potentially supporting articles (i.e., hosting videos and a supporting article for a UK Doctor versus a US Doctor) Offering some regional context when it comes to treatment options, or navigating school, work, etc. Any thoughts would be much appreciated! Thanks! Aaron

    | RSR
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  • Keith_Kaiser


    I'm having an issue correctly formatting a medical specialty for a gastroenterologist. The Google structured data tool is giving me the error of "The property specialty is not recognized by Google for an object of type _Physician". _ Any suggestions on how to correctly update the schema code for a physician's specialty? Thanks, Keith LsPc55X iHUW88a

    | Keith_Kaiser
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  • GrouchyKids


    Helping a friend with some keyword research, their business is based in Wales. I am not a Welsh speaker, whats the best way to do Keyword Research?

    | GrouchyKids
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  • Greenery


    I'll start with the story, but the main question is at the bottom. Feel free to scroll down :-). I've got good news and bad news regarding a client of mine. It's a service area business that only serves one metropolitan area. We've got a great blog with really valuable content that truly helps people while firmly establishing my client's industry expertise. As a result, local traffic has spiked and the company generates more leads. So that's the good news. The bad (bad-ish?) news is that the client also gets tons of traffic from outside the service area. Not only that, people are calling them all the time who either live in a different state and don't realize that the company isn't local to them or are located out of state but are calling for free advice. On one hand, the client gets a kick out of it and thinks it's funny. On the other hand, it's annoying and they're having to train all their intake people to ask for callers' locations before they chat with them. Some things we're doing to combat this problem: 1. The title tag on our home page specifies the metro area where we're active. 2. Our blog articles frequently include lines like, "Here in [name of our city], we usually take this approach." 3. There are references to our location all over the site. 4. We've got an actual location page with our address; for that matter, the address is listed in the footer on every page. 5. The listed phone number does not begin with 800; rather, it uses the local area code. 6. All of our local business listings, including our Google My Business listing, is up to date. 7. We recently published a "Cities We Serve" area of the site with highly customized/individualized local landing pages for 12 actual municipalities in our metro region. This will take some time to cook, but hopefully that will help. "Cities We Serve" is not a primary navigation item, but the local landing pages are situated as such: "About Us > Cities We Serve > [individual city page]" **Anyway, here's my main question: **In light of all this, is there any other way to somehow shield my client from all this irrelevant traffic and protect them from time-wasting phone calls?

    | Greenery
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  • SEO1805


    Absolutely perplexed on the ranking factors for Google Maps (hence also the 3-pack in normal search results). Are seeing search queries that return 3-pack and organic result like this and wondering why these sites are getting 3-pack preference?Not that sites 2 and 3 are no closer to the test user's location than Site 4.  All 4 sites have a street address showing.3-pack result:#1 - Site 1 - No reviews. Same distance as Site 4 to user. #2 - Site 2 - 1 review for 1 star. Farther from user than site 4. #3 - Site 3 - 2 reviews for 5-star average.  Farther from user than site 1, 2, and 4.#4 (not show in 3-pack) - Site 4 - 6 reviews with 6 star rating, closer to user than site 2 and 3.Organic results below 3-pack:#1 - Site 4#2 - Site 4#3 - Other site#4 - Site 1Sites 2 and 3 not in top 10 organic non-map resultsSo what would be the most likely ranking factors keeping making site 1-3 rank above site 4 in the 3-pack/map results?If on-page and backlink factors were at play, you'd expect to see sites 1, 2 and 3 higher than site 4, and in the case of site 2 and 3 at least in the top 10 of the organic results.  All sites were similar distance to the user.

    | SEO1805
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  • tntdental


    Hello, I work exclusively with Dentists and we have been putting our json schema in the footer for a while now. Just recently they made 'image' a requirement for the Dentist category. We already use the logo in our schema and that is an image. Since the schema is in the footer, it is on every page, and the only image on every page is the logo. Does the image we add to our schema need to be on the actual web page or could it be anything related to the business, like an image of the practice or the dentist? Would it hurt to have the logo listed twice in the schema - once as the logo and once as the image? Trying to figure out what the best thing to do is for the required 'image' field for a dentist. Thanks! Angela

    | tntdental
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  • SEO1805


    We are doing some local SEO for our business which is in 10 cities.  We have built a city page with unique content for each city and linked to a unique contact page with contact information unique for each city.  The content on our existing page is fairly thin.  2/3 of it is the same amongst all pages as our services are the exact same from city to city so the description ad menu of our services.  Then 1/3 of the content is unique to the city which is a stock photo and 1-2 paragraphs of text containing about 175 words. We have another chunk of content for each city which is probably 2-3 paragraphs but each paragraph will be short so probably in total 200 words in 1-3 paragraphs.  The subject of the content is related to one of the most popular search queries that are location specific.  For example, if we were a company that provided say, environmental remodeling services in city X, this second chunk of content might be about required building permits when doing remodeling in City X and how to get them, how much they cost.  If the original content on the pre-existing landing page is already pretty thin, is the SEO effect going to most likely be better to add the content to the existing page or, even though it's less than 200 words, add the content to a separate page and cross link between the main city page and the city contact page.

    | SEO1805
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  • Smileworks_Liverpool


    Hi Everyone, What is the best practice for authorship in 2018 and going forward? I am moving my entire blog over to a new wordpress theme so it's easier to read and navigate in an attempt to make it look better on the mobile and give better UX / CRO and implicit user feedback signals to google. On the old blog I would say who the author is in the URL, H1 and in the content.  This includes an image of the author with an image alt with their name, qualifications and blurb. I've now set up each author as a 'user' for the new blog and their image and name comes up because I've marked those blogs as authored by that particular user in Wordpress. What should I do as far as the SEO elements are concerned? I have read Eric Enge's blog about authorship being dead here and also that authorship should be marked up in schema correctly - which I've done.  Also I've read around how it provides indirect signals even though it's no longer a direct ranking factor. Should I tell wordpress to ignore the authorship SEO element by unticking the boxes relating to publishing authorship or let wordpress just do it's thing?  Should I keep the images and alt tags and H1 in there or take them out and let the wordpress system take over the authorship SEO elements? It's going to look funny to have author (in wordpress theme) and then author details again just below? So what is the best practice for authorship in 2018 and going forward? Am I making too big a deal of it and can just let wordpress sort it out.  Something it seems to do very well? Thanks in advance, Ed.

    | Smileworks_Liverpool
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  • onitamara


    Hi everyone! I am just starting to practice SEO by assisting a friend with her local relationship therapy practice, and I'm not sure whether or not she needs a blog. Here's the content they currently have: A page for specific categories within relationship therapy (unmarried couples, marriage, divorce, pre-marital, etc) On each page, she describes what that type of therapy is, what clients can expect, and how she will help them during the process. My question is this: Does it make sense to start a blog, or, is it better to build out the main, static service pages with more content? I'm worried that if she does start a blog, that it could potentially take away from the authority of the main service pages. For example, let's say she writes a highly specific post titled "how to talk to your husband about marriage". Is it better to just incorporate aspects of this post on the main marriage page, or keep it as a blog post? I really appreciate any suggestions and I'm happy to answer any questions.

    | onitamara
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  • aj613


    We've all used the Google Adwords Keywords Tool, and if you're like me you use it to analyze data for a particular region.  Does anyone know how accurate this data is?  For example, I'd like to know how often people in Savannah, Georgia search for the word "forklift".  I figure that Google can give me two kinds of data when I ask for how many people in Savannah search for "forklift". They might actually give me rough data for how many people in the region actually searched for the term "forklift" over the last 12 months, then divide by 12 to give me a monthly average. Or they might use data on a much broader region and then adjust for Savannah's population size.  In other words, they might say, in the US people searched for "forklift" and average of 1,000,000 times a month.  The US has a population of 300,000,000.  Savannah has a population of about 250,000.  250,000 / 300,000,000 is 0.00083.  1,000,000 times 0.00083 is 208.  So, "forklift" is searched in Savannah an average of 208 times. 1. is obviously much more accurate.  I suspect that 2. is the model that Google is actually using. Does anyone know with reasonable certainty which it is? Thanks,
    Adam

    | aj613
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  • Searchout


    Our company originally started in one city, now it is in multiple and the city we started in is actually now less important to our business than some of the new cities. We've of course have Google Places for Business listings for all our cities and are listed in the other prominent directories for each City (Bing Places, Manta, Superpages, etc etc) We have created once city page for each city in our domain.  All this has improved our Local SERPs for those cities but they pale in comparison to our dominance in the city we started out in.  We did have the first city in our home page title, we took that out. The obvious problem is from an SEO standpoint your home page is your "strongest" page but how do you make your home page rank top for multiple location intent searches:  "{city} {target keyword}"  ? The 3-pack is KEY.  For example, for one city we make it into the local 3-pack but we are not in the organic SERPs on page 1 outside of the 3-pack. As far as I can tell the major factor in 3-pack ranking is of course proximity of business to the user's location or user's location intent.  I would say followed by the natural ranking factors (or at least a large subset of them) that Google uses for its normal organic rankings, followed by Google Places reviews.  You would think the Google places reviews really make a difference, but not as much as you think. So how do you dominate local searches in different cities when competing against local-only companies?  My only guess is you need to create as much content as possible.  You don't want to make micro sites I think as you lose all the link juice going to your main site.  But how much content can one make that isn't duplicative.  You can describe the same products and services over and over for each city but that's not useful nor wise.  I guess you could do some re-writing.  But other than a different address, phone, and staff members, if your service is identical for each city it doesn't leave a lot of room for useful content creation to improve local search SERPS. I guess this begs the overall question, can a multi-city company ever dominate local SERPS when the search has a location intent (city name in the search) it there is even just a couple competing local companies doing some SEO work. it seems it is an extreme uphill battle if not next to impossible. (Never say never.)

    | Searchout
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  • misterfla


    We are in the self-storage business and have locations through the Pacific Northwest. As we grow, there are cities where we've added multiple (2-3) locations. But we're discovering that we're having a great deal of difficulty ranking for all of these. For instance, we have two locations in Vancouver, WA. One is West Coast Self-Storage Vancouver, and the other is West Coast Self-Storage Padden Parkway. Both are in Vancouver, WA, but for the most part, only West Coast Self-Storage Vancouver is getting ranked. In fact, on those searches where Vancouver ranks, Padden Parkway doesn't show up anywhere. Not in the top 10 pages anyway. Each location has an outer landing page and an inner details page. On each page, we've placed unique, city-optimized keywords in the URL, Page Title, h1s, content. Of course each location has a separate NAP. Each location also has its own GMB page. Each location has a decent amount of reviews across multiple sites (Google, Yelp, GetFiveStars.) Both locations were previously on their own domain until a year ago when they were redirected to their current URLs. Both of those original domains were close to the same age. With the Padden Parkway location, we've tried to be even more hyper-local, by including the address in the URLs and in the h1 of the outer page. We've also created an h2 that references local neighborhoods around the business. We're also running into this situation in at least one other city, so I'm wondering if this has something to do with our url structure. Other businesses in our space use the URL structure of domain.com/state/city/location. We only go down to the state level. What are we missing?

    | misterfla
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  • tdastru


    I am working on an automotive retailer site that displays local car inventory in nearby dealerships based on location. Within the site, a zip code is required to search, and the car inventory is displayed in a typical product list that can be filtered and sorted by the searcher to fit the searchers needs. We would like to structure these product inventory list pages that are based on location to give the best chance at ranking, if not now, further down the road when we have built up more authority to compete with the big dogs in SERP like AutoTrader.com, TrueCar.com, etc. These higher authority sites are able to rank their location based car inventory pages on the first page consistently across all makes and models. For example, searching the term "new nissan rogue" in the Los Angeles, CA area returns a few location based inventory pages on page 1. The sites in the industry that are able to rank their inventory pages will display a relatively clean looking URL with no redirect that still displays the local inventory like this in the SERP:
    https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/New+Cars/Nissan/Rogue
    but almost always use a rel=canonical tag within the page to a page with a location parameter attached to the end of the URL like this one:
    https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/New+Cars/Nissan/Rogue/Los+Angeles+CA-90001"/>
    I'm having a hard time figuring out why sites like this example have their URLs and pages structured this way. What would be the best practice for structuring the URL and rel=canonical tags to be able to rank for and display location based inventory pages for cars near the searcher?

    | tdastru
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  • rswhtn


    Hi Everyone, I’ve got a weird SEO issue that I hope you’ll be able to help with. I’ve broken it down in to the key points below: Impressions for our primary and secondary keywords dropped dramatically on 02.10.17. Impressions have only dropped on non geographical keywords. “UK” variants are still ranking well. Investigation shows we’re not ranking outside of London at all for primary and secondary keywords. Primary and secondary keywords are still ranking well in London, the city where we’re based We’ve looked at our competition who do rank for the primary keyword both in and outside London. We noticed we have our “postaladdress” in our schema. The competition don’t have their address in their schema. We updated our schema 2 weeks ago and now use the Yoast schema which is the same as our competitors use. Approx 1 week after removing the schema we started showing up for primary and secondary keyword again, but very low - fluctuating between page 15 and page 24. It’s been 2 weeks now and no improvement. AHREFS and google webmaster, both incorrectly detail that we rank top 5. Which is true to a degree, but only in London. Thank you in advance!

    | rswhtn
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  • Dandelion


    I have started working with a few law firms this year. They already have websites and I am doing various marketing tasks such as copywriting, redesigns, and, of course, SEO. In a couple of cases I was surprised to find that they had made the pages describing their various practice areas post content. I'm not sure why. But I suspect that the idea might have been to have the phrase: /practice-areas/ as a part of their URL. I didn't really like the idea of treating pages like posts. It seems a bit like working the system. But apart from that, wouldn't pages have a higher value as "permanent" content? As posts - their publish date has more weight, right? And they'd get old? But maybe the previous developers were on to something and the category/post approach to listing practice areas is the way to go? I am starting a new site for a new firm and I'd like to feel more confident about the right structure to choose for this kind of website before I start. Does anybody know the right answer? Thanks!

    | Dandelion
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  • arzawacki


    Hello Community, I am a designer and web developer and I mostly work with squarespace. Squarespace has SEO best practices built into the platform, as well as developer modes for inserting custom code when necessary. I recently built a beautiful website for a Hail Repair Company and referred them to several companies to help them with SEO and paid search. Several of these companies have told this client that in order to do any kind of SEO, they'll need to completely rebuild the site. I've seen some of the sites these companies have built, and they are tacky, over crowded and hard to use. My client is now thinking they need to have their site rebuilt. Is there any merit to this idea? Or are these companies just using the knowledge gap to swindle people into buying more services? The current site is : https://www.denverautohailspecialists.com/ Any advice would be appreciated.

    | arzawacki
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  • rswhtn


    Hi Everyone, I've got a bit of a confusing SEO issue which I'm hoping you'll be able to help with. Apologies in advance for the long post, I've put an abridged version below also. We have one main keyword and it seems to have disappeared in some locations. The main keyword is "clothing manufacturers" and up until recently we had stability for almost a year. We're based in London, England and we regularly check "clothing manufacturers" to see where we're showing in search, and we usually see between 3rd - 5th. We use AHREFS to track rankings and noticed recently that "clothing manufacturers" had disappeared totally. We asked some people in different areas of the country to check where we were showing in search - one in Somerset, one in Liverpool, one in Beckingham and we used a VPN in Manchester. In all of these areas we aren't ranking for our main keyword at all. In London though we're 5th which is the lower end of normal. We then checked other keywords and it turns out "Clothes manufacturers" is one we're also not ranking for outside of London. However for "clothing manufacturers uk" and "clothes manufacturers uk" we are ranking for in every location we have tried. "Clothing manufacturers uk" is currently the keyword which brings us the most traffic. There are no manual penalties in webmaster tools, but looking at analytics it looks like our impressions for the main keyword have been down over the past 90 days, so we think we have had a problem and not realised for some time. Around a week before we see that our traffic for "clothing manufacturers" dropped, we made some structural changes to the website homepage, where we added LSIs, more H2s, more long tail keywords and more content, taking the copy from around 500 words to around 1100 words. This was in an effort to make the homepage less keyword stuffed and more natural. As a result of this we saw an overall increase in traffic and enquiries, and that's the reason we didn't notice for so long that traffic from "clothing manufacturers" has dropped so badly. Our first thought is that this might be something to do with Schema. Our website was until last week using a schema which included our "postal address" which is our physical office location in London. The schema was implemented in June 2017 and we have noticed that 3 months after implementing the schema, in October, our traffic fell dramatically for our main keyword, "clothing manufacturers". At the same time, our traffic for "clothing manufacturers uk" increased dramatically. Interestingly, the schemas used by our competitors don't include their office addresses and they show up all over the country for "clothing manufacturers" and "clothes manufacturers". One of our competitors is physically within half a mile of us. Have you guys seen a schema limit a company to searches only in one locality before? We have now removed the address from the schema to see if we start ranking all over the country again, like we used to before we implemented it. If this is the problem then it could take 3 months to turn around like it did for us to get in to this situation (Schema implemented June 2017, traffic fell October 2017). We're therefore trying to investigate every possibility to ensure we leave no stone unturned. Do you have any thoughts on the problem and if it could be schema related, or possibly something else? Thank you in advance! TL:DR Keywords "clothing manufacturers" and "clothes manufacturers" no longer ranking around the UK. Still ranking in London where we are based. Still ranking well for "clothing manufacturers uk" and "clothes manufacturers uk". Traffic for "clothing manufacturers" dropped 3 months after implementing schema and one week after making changes to website homepage (increased word count, added long tail keywords, LSIs and H2s). Schema included "postal address" which we notice none of our competitors have. They rank all over the country for "clothing manufacturers". One of our competitors is based within half a mile of us in London. Could having the address in the schema limit us to one locality? Could it be something else entirely?

    | rswhtn
    0
  • NewSEOguy


    VERY much a newbie with MOZ Pro (10 days into my 30-day trial), so for that, I apologize. I just want to get an idea of the time needed to accumulate data for keywords, and if I am doing all this right. I'm guessing this...use the tool and enter as many keyword possibilities as I can come up with for my website. Then wait a week or so. Then make a keyword decision. Is this the recommended or best practice? If it makes a difference, my website pertains to a local onsite service that I provide. Any web traffic more than 50 miles of my physical location would be a waste. My 1 on 1 session with Seun was great, but now I need to put it all together and make some traffic happen! Any other ideas, please throw them my way. If I'm completely off-base with this, feel free to send insults!

    | NewSEOguy
    0
  • NewSEOguy


    VERY much a newbie with MOZ Pro (10 days into my 30-day trial), so for that, I apologize. I just want to get an idea of the time needed to accumulate data for keywords, and if I am doing all this right. I'm guessing this...use the tool and enter as many keyword possibilities as I can come up with for my website. Then wait a week or so. Then make a keyword decision. Is this the recommended or best practice? If it makes a difference, my website pertains to a local onsite service that I provide. Any web traffic more than 50 miles of my physical location would be a waste. My 1 on 1 session with Seun was great, but now I need to put it all together and make some traffic happen! Any other ideas, please throw them my way. If I'm completely off-base with this, feel free to send insults! Thanks, Billy

    | NewSEOguy
    0
  • OlatzB


    Hiya, We are about to launch a new blog called 'Leading Minds Network' and we are wondering what would it the best SEO friendly name convention across the website. Wether if we call it 'blog' across the website and then drive people to our blog page called 'Leading Minds Network' or whther if we call it 'leading minds Network' on the website and drive people to the 'leading minds network' page. Any suggestion would be appreciated Regards Olatz

    | OlatzB
    0
  • BrianAlpert78


    To check that I understand the terminology, "cornerstone articles" are posts (or pages) that have some extensive, detailed, important information about a subject that other blog posts and articles can link to in reference, right? For example, a website for an auto repair shop might have a blog post about what cold weather does to a car's transmission and that post could link to a cornerstone "explainer" article that goes into more detail explaining to car-dummies like me what a transmission even DOES. But are core pages also in this category of cornerstone content? Or are they something entirely different and should be constructed accordingly? By "core pages", I mean the base-level pages about what your business is and does. For the repair shop example, I mean things like an "About Us" page or a "Services" page*. *or broken up into individual pages listing the services related to brakes, engine, wheels, etc. Thanks!

    | BrianAlpert78
    0
  • eyeflow


    Google has this page on location pages. It's very useful but it doesn't say anything about handling the duplicate content a location page might have. Seeing as the loctions may have very similar services. Lets say they have example.com/location/boston, example.com/location/chicago, or maybe boston.example.com or chicago.example.com etc. They are landing pages for each location, housing that locations contact information as well as serving as a landing page for that location. Showing the same services/products as every other location. This information may also live on the main domains homepage or services page as well. My initial reaction agrees with this article: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide - but I'm really asking what does Google expect? Does this location pages guide from Google tell us we don't really have to make sure each of those location pages are unique? Sometimes creating "unique" location pages feels like you're creating **doorway pages - **"Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names". In a nutshell, Google's Guidelines seem to have a conflict on this topic: Location Pages: "Have each location's or branch's information accessible on separate webpages"
    Doorway Pages: "Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names"
    Duplicate Content: "If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one." Now you could avoid making it a doorway page or a duplicate content page if you just put the location information on a page. Each page would then have a unique address, phone number, email, contact name, etc. But then the page would technically be in violation of this page: Thin Pages: "One of the most important steps in improving your site's ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content." ...starting to feel like I'm in a Google Guidelines Paradox! Do you think this guide from Google means that duplicate content on these pages is acceptable as long as you use that markup? Or do you have another opinion?

    | eyeflow
    0
  • benkapow


    I'm currently running 2x Shopify Stores (names changed from actual): "coolpants.com" is our UK store "us.coolpants.com" is our USA store However, Google Analytics has shown that most of the traffic to "coolpants.com" comes from the USA, and this market has our biggest growth potential. So we want to switch our domain setup to the below: Make "coolpants.com" our USA store Stop using "us.coolpants.com" and redirect it to "coolpants.com" Set up our UK store as a new domain ("coolpants.co.uk) or subdomain ("uk.coolpants.com") My question is – should I set up the UK store as a domain or a sub-domain? What are the pros and cons of each? Thank you in advance for any help!

    | benkapow
    0
  • Kevin.Bekker


    I'm working for a few regional brands and would like to create a best practice doc for the structure of a location page.  Has anyone seen anything recent regarding a structure for local, regional and national pages? Thanks all, Kevin

    | Kevin.Bekker
    1
  • Greenery


    I'm familiar with the SAB best practices outlined here. Here's my issue: Doing local landing pages as described here might not be ideal from a user experience point of view. Having a "Cities We Serve" or "Service Areas" link in the main navigation isn't necessarily valuable to the user when the city-specific landing pages are all places within a 15-mile radius of the SAB's headquarters. It would just look like the company did it for SEO. It wouldn't look natural. Seriously, it feels like best practices are totally at odds with user experience here. If I absolutely must create location pages for 10 or so municipalities within my client's service area, I'd rather NOT put the service areas as a primary navigation item. It is not useful to the user. Anyone who sees that the company provides services in the [name of city] metropolitan area will already understand that the company can service their town that is 5 miles away. It is self-evident. For example**, who would wonder whether a plumbing company with a Los Angeles address also services Beverly Hills?** It's just... silly. But the Moz guide says I've got to do those location pages! And that I've got to put them high up in the navigation! This is a problem because we've got to do local SEO, but we also have to provide an ideal experience. Thoughts?

    | Greenery
    1
  • karmadigital


    I've got an odd issue (that I've never encountered in 12+ years in SEO). A client's home page isn't ranking for their brand term. It's a medical spa in Las Vegas, so physical location that takes online appointments. We have an online booking system (which isn't a good one) that originally had a booking page replacing our home page. My thought is that Google associated that page as our home page because it was a stronger domain and the booking page is most used. That tool didn't allow the booking page to be noindexed (I know, crazy)- so I changed the name inside the booking tool away from the brand name as to not have both the site and the booking site optimized for the brand. Other things I've checked: The home page is indexed Home page canonical tag points to itself Title tag contains brand name at front (rest of site it's at the end) Robots.txt is accurate (allows home page) XML sitemap contains home page (and accurate for other pages) To make this even more confusing, if you search the brand name the physical location appears on the right rail with accurate URL. Any other ideas that I may be missing?

    | karmadigital
    0
  • gremmy9


    Hi everyone, I am a psychologist in private practice in Colorado and I recently went from one location to 2 locations. I'm currently updating my website to better accommodate the second location. I also plan continued expansion in the future, so there will be more and more locations as time goes on. As a result, I am making my websites current homepage non-location specific and creating location landing pages as I have seen written about in many places. My question is: I know that location landing pages should have unique content, and I have plenty of this, but how much content is it also okay to have be duplicate across the location landing pages and the homepage? For instance, here is the current draft of the new homepage (these are not live yet): http://www.effectivetherapysolutions.com/dev/ And here are the drafts of the location landing pages: http://www.effectivetherapysolutions.com/dev/denver-office http://www.effectivetherapysolutions.com/dev/colorado-springs-office And for reference, here is the current homepage that is actually live for my single Denver location: http://www.effectivetherapysolutions.com/ As you can see, the location landing pages have the following sections of unique content: Therapist picture at the top testimonial quotes (the one on the homepage is the only thing I have I framed in this block from crawl so that it appears as unique content on the Denver page) therapist bios GMB listing driving directions and hours and I also haven't added these yet, but we will also have unique client success stories and appropriately tagged images of the offices So that's plenty of unique content on the pages, but I also have the following sections of content that are identical or nearly identical to what I have on the homepage: Intro paragraph blue and green "adult" and child/teen" boxes under the intro paragraph "our treatment really works" section "types of anxiety we treat" section Is that okay or is that too much duplicate content? The reason I have it that way is that my website has been very successful for years at converting site visitors into paying clients, and I don't want to lose aspects of the page that I know work when people land on it. And now that I am optimizing the location landing pages to be where people end up instead of the homepage, I want them to still see all of that content that I know is effective at conversion. If people on here do think it is too much, one possible solution is to turn parts of it into pictures or put them into I-frames on the location pages so Google doesn't crawl those parts of the location pages, but leave them normal on the homepage so it still gets crawled on there. I've seen a lot written about not having duplicate content on location landing pages for this type of website, but everything I've read seems to refer to entire pages being copied with just the location names changed, which is not what I'm doing, hence my question. Thanks everyone!

    | gremmy9
    0
  • GaryT_SEO


    NOT talking about the same page being linked to twice Talking about One (1) (landing) page Being Listed Twice In Navigation. Looking for a definitive answer that there is NO negative SEO ( or negative anything ) to put the same page in your site's Navigation Bar ... twice  (or more than once) Can't find anything written that there is anything to consider or be concerned with, but, thought I'd ask. I'm a newERbie, but not a NEWbie...have 2.5 years experience in local, on-page SEO...but only know what I know Maybe I should know this, but, I don't. E.g.      Home       New Cars     Used Cars     Special Offers    Service    Finance    About Us PickUps         PickUps This is JUST an example, but, we have multiple occurences, let's say,  Trade-In-Value  ... in two places. One page, two locations in navigation. I have SEEN it being done, 'all the time', but now, when I went to do it with a little bit of a different rationale, I was questioned about ' ... is this okay for SEO ' I THINK yes But, I want to KNOW yes ... it is ok.

    | GaryT_SEO
    0
  • SamFanatic


    Hi guys, recently won a client who operates globally, their domain is .com and their head office is in the UK. They have built regional sub-directories and translated content and pages of their site for /ru, /fr etc. The issue comes with their /us and /ca pages. This content for the most part is identical to the main .com site. The content is still in English and can't in most situations be changed to be more localised, so there are duplicate content issues. Trying to think of options: Ensure hreflang is added properly, build regional links to regional pages, get local contact details / NAP on all regional pages, set up Google business listings for each regional office and link accordingly. Will Google be able to identify these regional pages as more suitable search results for US searches? Make the main .com version of the content the canonical, which takes away any ranking benefits of the regional pages altogether, but removes the duplicate content issues and means we can focus link building and content resources into making sure the .com version of the page ranks well. Thanks!

    | SamFanatic
    0
  • SharonEKG


    Hello,
    my first question is, i started working in August on a website for furniture repair and services that is a local business and who ever setup the website and did the SEO before me implanted the front page content and many other pages in the theme itself, we got Yoast premium and i mostly get bad rank of the page both from Yoast and Moz im guessing because it is simply cant find the links and content that is on the page since it is in the theme code. should i recommend the company to do a makeover and move everything to the actual wordpress page?
    Also many changes has been made to the website, too many to track and i have seen in the past month an continues drop lower and lower of our visibility, but yet in the past week and half huge jump in some rankings. some of them are for hard to rank keywords, a jump of sometime 20/30+ up the ranks.
    since i dont have a track of all the changes has been made, is there a way to know what cause it? Also one last question,
    i have implemented google tag manager and been configuring it for the past month and now i have finally getting close to track all metrics we would like to track, i have removed all google analytics codes that i knew of and managed to find through search through the theme and plugins but yet when i fire up tag assistant it shows two codes the tag manager and analytics, i know it could interfear each other or give false/double readings. is there a way to track it and remove it? i have went through all theme files.. and cant find it.. Thanks!

    | SharonEKG
    0
  • IrvCo_Interactive


    What is the current advice for displaying content based on a user's geolocation? On the one hand, I know the rule of thumb is that you are not supposed to treat googlebot any different than any other user to your site and shouldn't show different content than what you would show a regular user, however on the other hand, if we personalize the content based on the geography, it means that the content that is indexed would be specific to Mt. View, CA in Google's index, correct? I know I heard years ago that the best practice was to use javascript to personalize the content client side, and block the js with robots.txt so that google indexes a default page and not a geo-specific page. Any insights or advice appreciated.

    | IrvCo_Interactive
    0
  • Alpine9


    We have two websites (different businesses) in the technology sector that sell the same products on the same platform (OSC) but have different branding. We have tried to make the static content different and the user generated content is different. SEO as largely different. But the one site has much better rankings than the other. Whilst the under performing site is not responsive yet, I need to decide whether to merge the two businesses into one or continue on the two separate websites approach. I would only pursue the latter approach and invest further time and effort into this under performing website if I knew I was "on the right" track. My SEO knowledge is not extensive and so I would be interested in any views the community has? I note that kogan.com.au and dicksmith.com.au have a similar dual website approach (same company) and they are both major brands in Australia. I thank you in advance for any thoughts you may have.

    | Alpine9
    1
  • AndyL93


    We are are a managed IT services business so we try and target people searching for IT support in a number of key areas. We have created individual location pages (11) to localise our service in these specific areas. We put these location links in the footer which went to the specified IT support pages respectively. Now we have created a general 'managed IT services' page and are thinking of linking to these specific pages on there as well as it makes sense to do it. Would having these 11 links in the footer as well as on the 'managed IT services' page be spamming? or would it be good practice? If this is spamming, which linking location should hold preference. Would appreciate the feedback
    Thanks
    Andy

    | AndyL93
    0
  • Juvo


    Hi, I have unticked "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" a few months before the initial release of my website. I don't want to be found by search engines until the official release (still a few months left). Do you think that ticking this box again will harm the website's long-term ranking or have any repercussion on the website? Do you have any additional advice to avoid being temporarily ranked until the official release which won't harm the website in SERPs? Thanks for your answers.

    | Juvo
    0
  • EmmaGeorge


    What is the best way to differentiate and optimize two similar websites's SEO, having in mind that they do not produce content?

    | EmmaGeorge
    0
  • Visionisto


    Hello All!  First post in this community. I hope someone can help with an issue I'm having with my website, 3vdental.com. 1. When I Google my brand name, 3V Dental Associates, I see one result on the front page. This result shows ONLY my brand name as the title tag... See here: https://www.screencast.com/t/Vwq4l2Lrn 2. When I Google my domain name, 3vdental.com, I see a second result, that still only shows my brand name as the title tag, but with sitelinks showing in the results... See here: https://www.screencast.com/t/L37hxZ8rd1xp 3. Both results above are not ideal, as they are not displaying the correct title and meta tags set within the Yoast SEO plugin. Here's a front-end view of the site displaying the correct title and meta tags.. See here: https://www.screencast.com/t/CZS3CBja4m Is there any way to correct this so that Google displays my preferred tags when my website is displayed? Thanks for your help in advance!

    | Visionisto
    0
  • BFMichael


    I'm trying to balance local geographic keywords with product keywords.  I appreciate the feedback from the group! Michael

    | BFMichael
    0
  • LMW


    Hi all, Business who has 2 locations.. They have 2 separate pages for their locations https://www.jacobsallen.co.uk/contact-us/jacobs-allen-bury-st-edmunds/ https://www.jacobsallen.co.uk/contact-us/jacobs-allen-haverhill/ But the location and address details also appear on https://www.jacobsallen.co.uk/contact-us/ and the home page. Is this going to be hurting their local SEO? In my opinion yes and the address info should just be on the 2 location pages. Thanks in advance

    | LMW
    0

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