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Category: Local Website Optimization

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

  • empireelec


    I know this has been asked and answered but my situation is a little different. I am a local electrical contractor.  I specialize in a service and not a product.  Competition is high in the local market due to the other electrical contractors that have well seasoned sites with very good DA/PA.  Although new to the web I am not new to the trade.  Throughout years almost back to the AOL dialup days I have been collecting domain names for this particular purpose.  Now I want to put them to good use. Being an electrical contractor, there are many different facets of work and services we provide. My primary site is empireelec.com A second site I threw online overnight with minimal content is jacksonvillelightingrepair.com.  Although it is a fresh site, there is minimal content and I have put almost zero effort in to it.  It appears to be ranking for keywords a lot quicker. That leads me to believe I should utilize my other domain jacksonvillefloridaelectrician.com and target just the keyword Jacksonville Florida Electrician. It leads me to believe I should use jacksonvillebeachelectrician.com for targeting electricians in jacksonville beach. And again with jacksonvilleelectricianservice.com I can provide a unique phone number for each site. Am I going about this all wrong?  Everything I read says no,no,no but I feel my situation is a little more unique.

    | empireelec
    1
  • KevnJr


    We have this white space below our logo when our local schema markup is added: http://d.pr/i/73EmV0 Can the markup be hidden to remove the space and still be indexed by google? Kevin

    | KevnJr
    1
  • joseph.defranco


    My company is a global company with locations in AU, UK, and USA. Each has their own website. For example, we have https://www.catskill.us (for the USA), a https://www.catskill.com.au (for the AU), and https://www.catskill.co.uk (for the UK). I have used both canonical tags and hreflang tags for our USA website to distinguish any duplicate content from our AU and UK websites. I am wondering if I used the canonical tags and hreflang tags appropriatley in the below example for our USA website. Is it the best way to avoid link value loss? | |
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    | joseph.defranco
    0
  • Najia-ali


    _ Hi team_ I have been working on a website called signboards.co.in since 4 months.it was not in top 100 but now below 50 for 2-3 keywords.even after submitting in many directories after competitor analysis moz shows only one external link in its link metrics.apart from this every possible thing required for SEO is done in a proper way,but still it is not giving results.can you help me out?all my other clients work is going good except this one.can you please let me know what is going wrong with my project?As the project submission date is near i need your help as soon as possible. Thanks Najia jehan

    | Najia-ali
    0
  • Flaske


    Hello guys, I am from azores are 9 islands in portugal. I live in São Jorge is one island. My question is. If one person seach by Azores Canyoning or São Jorge Canyoning. Because Azores is one region and São Jorge is one island inside Azores. And i want have this two exact keywords in title page. Canyoning is a service. Azores Canyoning - São Jorge Canyoning | Brand Name what is best way to write this title? Or is not good?

    | Flaske
    0
  • SignGuyMike


    I have had a version of my site for over 10 years. Only in the last few years have I really focused on using it to drive orders. Overall for my local area I do OK. I use to do very well until my web host accidentally deleted my site. I have been rebuilding from scratch now and it is going good. My question is about authority. I just started working with Moz and I see that I have no authority, no links, and I am at a loss. I recently got an online magazine in my industry to publish an article I wrote, but other than that I am not sure how to improve authority and links. Any advice would be great.

    | SignGuyMike
    0
  • tombeavan


    Tom Beavan Websites is my business where I create and design affordable websites for small businesses in Wordpress. I am looking to improve my traffic to my website as dramatically as possible. At present, my website is a one-page website with limited content - https://www.tombeavan.co.uk. My website ranks #1 for local keywords like: Web design Wiltshire Web design Trowbridge Wordpress developer UK So in terms of keyword position, I am doing well for local business but I only get 200-300 visitors per month. I would like to dramatically improve this to improve the number of enquiries I get. I do tend to get a few enquiries but think if I improve the website traffic, the quantity of website enquiries will increase too? I have a long list of tasks I would like to do for SEO: Add a lot more content to the website Add more backlinks Guest blogging Lots more What would you recommend a good starting place or a place which will increase traffic effectively? Thanks for your advice in advance 🙂

    | tombeavan
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    I have been looking at the website of local web design companies and every single one in my area has a footer with links to a separate page for that local city. This seems like a bad idea to me, but everyone in the local pack has it. Does it work?

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • TheKatzMeow


    We've taken down the attorney's official page. Should we redirect her old page to the home page? Do a custom 404? I'm sure there's a best practice here but I'm blanking.

    | TheKatzMeow
    0
  • LureCreative


    Curious on this topic, as websites that are image heavy, but have little written content can have depend on alt text for "readable content". I am aware the "best practice" is to write it as if you were describing the image to a blind person, but are there any SEO strategies that people have seen good results with? Some examples I've heard are: "unique keyword phrase" "unique keyword phrase + brand name" "Unique Keyword Phrase + LSI Keyword" Interested to hear feedback from the Moz Community! And thanks in advance for sharing your insight.

    | LureCreative
    0
  • Meier


    Hey gang, I want to first say thank you to anybody that tries to help me with this. I'm not quite sure where to start. So first I get the message in search console for my locksmith website that it looks like I have some spammy structured data.  I remembered that for one landing page I did have the stars short code on it and it was displaying the stars. Well, I went and looked and they were indeed no longer showing. So I simply deleted the shortcode, but I wanted to do a thorough check of my landing pages, one by one. Now I have project supremacy on my wordpress site, which I stand by, it's a solid product and I have been able to make my per page schema look really good, zero errors. So I went through each page that had errors on it and fixed them and sent it all back into google for 'reconsideration'. BUT today (sorry this is getting long) I look in my search console and I see that ALL of my blog posts have errors on them. Something wrong with the hentry. As I test one of the posts in structured data tester tool I see 4 errors and 4 warnings. I don't have the author displaying which is not true and some other things. But I have never ever tried to schema any of my blog posts and there is ZERO site wide schema, I already checked. Where is this bad schema living, and could that be the reason for the spammy stuff? Thank you crew!!! mwDd8

    | Meier
    0
  • Marge_Blizzard


    Hello I can't get the following script to work. There seems to be something with the closing tags I've tried various combinations, however, no luck.

    | Marge_Blizzard
    0
  • stldanni


    Good Morning, All! I work for a home builder - www.HibbsHomes.com. Their site has hundreds of pages and blogs and I'm looking at consolidating many of them as they're older and use an older SEO strategy. Can you take a look at their portfolio? http://hibbshomes.com/custom-home-builders-st-louis/st-louis-custom-homes-portfolio/ I'm wondering if I should consolidate the various projects into their own pages by house type and city - rather than having all on one page? Both for SEO and for easier searchability. How would you organize this for these? The benefit to setting up city pages is the local SEO rank (St Louis has so many suburbs). The benefit to setting up pages by home style or size would be for user experience. How do I improve this for both? And... how do I optimize for conversions better?

    | stldanni
    1
  • matt.nails


    Hey Mozzers, I have a local SEO question for you. I am working with a medical professional to SEO their site. I know that when creating city pages, you want to try and make each page as strong as you can, showcasing testimonials from people who live in those towns, for instance. Since my client is in the medical profession, i was going to include a list of parks from that town and say something about how, "we want to encourage good health, etc." However, i began to wonder whether i should just create one, large resource for the surrounding towns having to do with parks, dog parks, and athletic activities and link to it in the top nav. thoughts? Nails

    | matt.nails
    0
  • jozwikjp


    Working on a large franchise network with thousands of subdomains. There is the primary corporate domain which basically directs traffic to store locators and then to individual locations.  The stores sell essentially the same products with some variations on pricing so lots of pages with the same product descriptions. Different content All the subdomains have their location information address info in the header, footer and geo meta tags on every page. Page titles customized with franchise store id numbers. Duplicate content Product description blocks. Franchisee domains will likely have the ability to add their own content in the future but as of right now most of the content short of the blocks on the pages are duplicated. Likely limitations -- Adding City to page titles will likely be problematic as there could be multiple franchises in the same city. Ideally it would be nice if users could search for the store or product and have centers return that are closest to them. We can turn on sitemaps on all the subdomains and try to submit them to the search engines. Looking for insight regarding submitting all these sites or just focusing on the main domain that has a lot less content on it.

    | jozwikjp
    0
  • SeoJaz


    Wondering if there ever has been any recent consensus on best SEO strategy for a Franchise. I feel it is safe to assume that just having one corporate website with a "store locator" that just brings up the address, phone and hours of a location is not optimal.  Yes, the important thing is to get a Google Places for Business listing for each location so you can come up in the 3-pack and regular Maps result, BUT, the rankings for the 3-pack is largely determined by the site's authority and relevance to the specific search term used, IN ADDITION TO, the proximity of the business to the search user's physical location. Apparently it is widely believed that domain authority does not transfer from www.mycorporatedomain.com to somecity.mycorporatedomain.com. And of course we also know there is a potential for a duplicate content penalty, so you can't just duplicate your main site for a number of locations and change the address and phone number on the contact page. If the products and or services are identical for each location, then it's going to be somewhat ridiculous to try and rewrite many sections of the website since the information is no different despite the location. It seems in general more people are advocates of putting location pages or micro-sites in a subfolder of the corporate domain so that it can benefit from the domain's authority. HOWEVER, it is also widely known that the home page (root URL) of any domain carries more weight in the eyes of Google. So let's assume the best strategy is to create a micro-site where phone and address is different anywhere they appear and the contact page is customized to that location, and the "Meet The Staff" page is customized to that location.  The site uses the same style 'template' if you will as the main site. Let's also assume you can build a custom home page that has some different content, but still shares the same look and some of the same information as the main site.  But let's say between the different phone, address, and maybe some different images and 20% of the content rewritten a bit, Google doesn't view it as dupe content. So would the best strategy then be to have the location home page be:  somecity.mycorporatedomain.com and the product and services pages that are identical to the main site you just use a rel canonical to point to the main site? Or, do you make the "home page" for the local business be a subfolder of the main site. So I guess what it boils down to is whether or not the domain authority has more of an effect compared to having a unique home page on a subdomain. What about this?  Say the only thing different on the local site is the contact (phone/address) in the header and/or footer of every page, the contact form page, and the meet the staff page.  All other content is identical to the corp site, including the home page.  I think in that case you need to use a script to serve the pages dynamically.  So you would need to server the pages using a PHP script that detects the subfolder name to determine the location and dynamically replaces the phone and address and server different contact and staff pages.  You could have a vanity domain mycity.mycorporatedomain.com that does a 301 redirect to the subfolder home page. (This is all ofcourse assuming the subfolder method is the way to go.)

    | SeoJaz
    0
  • Hyperlinkinfosystem


    My website is Ranking well in all other keywords in all other countries Except US IP and only one particular keyword. Example :- One keyword ABC is ranking well in UK UAE and also on first position but in US IP not even in top 100 results or not even top 300 results

    | Hyperlinkinfosystem
    0
  • Fetseun


    Hi Guys, Im new to Moz and very keen to do SEO right without upsetting Mr. Google too much. Are local business directories worth the effort? Its a laborious job, but happy to do it, if its effective and won't be considered spammy by Google? Thanks

    | Fetseun
    0
  • SEOdub


    If there is a local business that thrives on ranking nationally for people searching for their services in that location, do you target the business's actual service areas or target nationally? For instance, a hotel in Denver, Colorado.  Would the areaserved markup be: "areaServed":[{"@type":"State","name":"Colorado"},{"@type":"City","name":"Denver"}] Or "areaserved":"USA" The "geographic area where a service or offered item is provided" would be denver, colorado. But we would be looking to target all people nationally looking to travel to denver, colorado. Or would it be best to target it all, like: "areaServed":[{"@type":"State","name":"Colorado"},{"@type":"City","name":"Denver"},"USA"]

    | SEOdub
    0
  • engeniusbrent


    I live in Greenville, SC (who has a large "Greater Greenville" reach). I work for an agency with many clients who are located just outside of the city in smaller towns, sometimes technically in counties other than Greenville. Often, they provide services in the city of Greenville and aim to grow business there, so we'll use "Greenville, SC" throughout site copy, in titles, and in meta descriptions. Are there any negative implications to this? Any chance search engines think these clients are being deceptive? And is it possible these clients are hurting their ranking in their actual location by trying to appear to be a Greenville-based company? Thank you for any thoughts!

    | engeniusbrent
    1
  • BigChad2


    I know this was true a few years ago, however is there still an advantage to having an embedded map vs. a pop up map in 2017?

    | BigChad2
    1
  • will_l


    Hey there Mozzers! It's been a while since I've been back around these parts after working at a search agency many moons ago. I remember way back how it was stupidly easy to rank for something like "date ideas toronto" when I had an exact match domain www.cheapdateideas.ca and dateideas.ca (which I still own). Anyhow, I've been looking to build up my domain www.dateideas.net with hyper local date ideas and essentially looking to build this for the long term and expand after I hit a certain critical mass in terms of high quality content mostly written by myself to start. Eventually, if it makes sense, hiring authors or getting guest contributors to contribute to the blog if there's enough incentive to do so (which I'll figure out at some point). Question for y'all for a newbie that was semi-pro and now all my knowledge from before isn't so cutting edge. How would you guys approach it. I am looking to build this for the long haul, so it may very well be that some of your answers are "write amazing content", I'll be okay with that answer. Cheers, Will

    | will_l
    1
  • hanamck


    I work in a small web & design agency who started offering SEO  2 yrs ago as it made sense due to them building websites. There have been 2 previous people to me and I now work there 3 days a week and they also have a junior who knew nothing before she started working for us. She mainly works for me. My question is, how many clients do you think would be reasonable to work on? We currently have around 55 and I have been working there for nearly 5 months now and haven't even got to half of the sites to do some work on. I've told them the client list is way too big and we should only have around 15 clients max. However they don't want to lose the money from the already paying clients so won't get rid of any and keep adding new ones Their systems were a mess and had no reporting or useful software so I had to investiagte and deploy that, along with project management software.  Their analytics is also a mess and have employed a contractor to help sort that out too. It's like they were offering SEO services but had no idea or structure to what they did. Meta descriptions were cherry picked which ones to be done, so say 50/60 on a site not filled in. So it's not like I have 45 or so well maintained accounts. They're all a mess. Then the latest 10 new ones are all new sites so All need a lot of work. I'm starting to feel incredibly overwhelmed and oppressed by it all and wanted to see what other SEO professionals thought about it. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

    | hanamck
    0
  • DigitalCRO


    Hi Guys, We have a Business to Business Software Website. We are Global business but mainly operate in Ireland, UK and USA. I would like your input on best practice for domain set-up for best SEO results in local markets. Currently we have: example.com (no market specified) and now we are creating: example.com/ie (Ireland) example.com/uk (united kingdom) example.com/us (united states) My question is mainly based on the example.com/us website - should we create example.com/us for the US market OR just use example.com for the US the market? If the decision is example.com/us should we build links to the directory or the main .com website. To summarize there is two questions: 1. Advise on domain set-up 2. Which site to build links to if example.com/us is the decision. Thank you in advance, Glen.

    | DigitalCRO
    0
  • matt.nails


    I am familiar with how to do regular keyword research, finding opportunity based on competition, search volume, etc. For local search, do I go to all the trouble of finding hidden gems or just pick higher volume terms that have local intent. For instance: A search for "physical therapy" is a high volume term that Google thinks has local intent. If i pick a low volume national term, that has 11-50 avg searches per month, I have lower chances...and even less chance that someone is searching locally. What say ye? Nails

    | matt.nails
    0
  • Saatchi_HU


    Good day, To make a long story into a short one - have you ever had any experience or encounter where you've needed GA to capture the HTTP referrer of your traffic before a 301 redirect script triggers (and thus strips the original source of traffic)? I am working with a multitude of sites where the TLD redirects to a language directory, and because many of the referring sites and sources of traffic come into the TLD and then hit a 301, the referring source is then lost and most of this then shows as Direct traffic to the language directory (the effective 'home page').in GA. Would sincerely appreciate any inputs you might have about how to effectively capture these sources as a workaround. I'm probably in need of a smart analytical fix, a clever tagging method or some development amendment that is unfamiliar to me. For the sake of this discussion, building the TLD up to an existing page is not a viable or feasible fix in this instance. Thank you!

    | Saatchi_HU
    0
  • Easigrass


    Hi, I have a large artificial grass website with many franchise location landing pages. At the moment i have most of the landing page URLs like this www.domainname.com/uk/city/ My TLD does not contain the keyword "artificial grass" so should I follow the location with the keywords /city-artificial-grass/ or is Google pretty savvy these days and will it know that I am an artificial grass company? I'm after the best recommendations for this if possible. Thanks

    | Easigrass
    0
  • SeoSheikh


    Hi, i'm trying to report on the ranks of my local landing page URLs within my website. What is the best way of seeing this data from certain locations around the UK? For example - I have a landing page that is targeting London. How can I see how that ranks in the SERPs from various locations within the Greater London area? Can this be done accurately on MOZ or SEMrush? I would like to see how other people track their local pages for ranking locally. Thanks

    | SeoSheikh
    0
  • Cesare.Marchetti


    INITIAL SITUATION: We offer a branded product/service in different cities. We have different contact pages for every city (—> basically just a form and a map, i.e. 100% SHALLOW). GOAL:
    We would like to rank for the branded keyword only (—> more generic search intent) but as well as for branded keyword + cities (—> more transactional search intent) combinations. REMARK: It would make little sense in my opinion to develop the individual contact pages (for every city) to „full“ pages with real content as there isn’t really specific content for the differenct cities to add. OPTIONS:
    1) HOME page: target for the branded keyword CONTACT pages (one for each city): target for the branded keyword + city name HOME page: target for the branded keyword + all the city names CONTACT pages (one for each city): : NO keyword targeting at all HOME page: target for the branded keyword + different city names CONTACT pages (one for each city): target for the branded keyword + city name Add CANONICAL tag to main page ???!!!??? What is best practise? What would you recommend? Is there another solution? I really would like to know your opinion. Thanks a lot for your hints in advance.
    Cheers,
    CesareBearbeiten

    | Cesare.Marchetti
    0
  • mostcg


    Hey all, If a business operates in one city but works with associated organizations across multiple regions how would this impact a local SEO campaign? For example, a transportation company is located in Texas but services the Northwest and New England by outsourcing to smaller transportation companies in each of those regions. Would it be wise to create pages for each region they service on their website and then break that down in further into specific cities? Also, would it be worth targeting local search terms even though specific cities are serviced by the associated organizations and not the parent company itself? Thanks in advance, Andrew

    | mostcg
    0
  • JoyHawkins


    I'm looking for some examples of really well built product/service pages that have great conversion points on them. I find most small businesses do a terrible job at highlighting their features & benefits (the "why") for their services and wanted some inspiration from those that are doing a fabulous job.

    | JoyHawkins
    0
  • Mishel298


    Hi, i Have a website that is powerful and i dont want to hurt it. http://dreamgaragedoor.com/ right now i need a projects gallery page that people goes there to find out the models and products and services images. i have created the page and it would be 6 slider in the page and each slider has at least 10 images inside. first question is having this much images would or wouldnt hurt my webiste. second what ALT should i use for this many pictures in 1 page. for example i think having ALT like below in one page would be bad SEO wise. Sliding-gate-1, Sliding-gate-2, Sliding-gate-3, Sliding-gate-4,... please take a look at the gallery page and let me have your pro ideas. http://dreamgaragedoor.com/galleries/ thanks

    | Mishel298
    0
  • Bryan_Loconto


    I am working with a client in the dental space that has an existing (11 year old) website for his practice. His domain is tied to his last name, which he would like to get away from because he plans to sell the practice in the next couple years. Backstory: Prior to taking him on, he was working with an SEO agency out of India that were built him quite an ugly backlink profile. Once we discovered it, we immediately notified him about the risk of a penalty if left alone. He was riding high in Google SERP's so of course, it was of no concern to him. Needless to say about a year ago he was inducted into Google's "manual penalty club" for suspicious links. His site vanished in Google and all! Hooray! But no, not really... We met with him to discuss the options, suggesting we clean up his backlink profile, then submit for reconsideration. Based on the time we told him it could take to make progress and be back up and running, he wasn't very excited about that approach. He said he wanted us to rebuild a new site, with a new domain and start fresh. In addition, he wanted keep his original site live since it is tied to his already thriving practice. To sum it all up, his goal is to keep what he has live since his customers are accustom to using his existing (penalized) website. While building a new brand/website that he can use to build a cleaner backlink profile and rank in Google as well as to sell off down the line without having his name tied to the practice. Question: Being that he has an existing site with the company NAP info throughout and the new site will also have the same NAP (just a different domain/brand), is there a "best way" to approach this? The content on the new site would be completely unique. I understand this approach is iffy but in his situation it makes sense to some extent. Any feedback or ideas on how to best handle having two sites running for the same dental practice? If any part of my question is confusing or you need further details to help make a suggestion, please fire away and I will be happy to give as much detail as possible. Thanks Mozzers!

    | Bryan_Loconto
    1
  • Zoope


    Hey folks, So I'm aware of the importance of consistent citations, and the mayhem call tracking numbers have been known to cause in regards to that in that past. So just wanted some up to date clarification on these two things: Local SEO isn't strictly speaking a big deal for us as we supply a software and as such are technically global. I'm presuming consistent citations are still worth aiming for though, and will help increase general authority as well? Let me know if I'm totally wrong about that! What's the best practise set up for call tracking, given that your main NAP number you'd obviously want hardcoded somewhere, alongside showing your dynamic numbers to relevant visitors. Apologies for any ignorance, as always any help and advice is muchos appreciato.

    | Zoope
    1
  • mattchew


    I've submitted my site to google search console, and only 6 images of 89 images have been indexed in 2 weeks. Should I be worried? My site is http://bayareahomebirth.org Images are a pretty big part of this site's content and SEO value. Thanks for your help!

    | mattchew
    0
  • manoman88


    Hello, I'm implementing hreflang for my e-commerce websites which have different languages and do serve different content based on location. Currently, I'm only using hreflang for for alternate language (fr-fr, fr-be, fr-ma, ...). I wonder if it might be better or if I am allowed to add other version of my websites (IT, ES, DE,... ) even if those version are serving specific content for these specific location. So, the content (products) of Germany is different of the product of the other countries. Here is an example : www.mywebsite.com/apple-phone (selling apple phone for US with product avalaible only in US). www.mywebsite.de/apple-phone (selling apple phone for Germany with product avalaible only in Germany, the available models might be different from US and other websites). www.mywebsite.it/apple-phone (selling apple phone for Italy with product avalaible only in Italy, the available models might be different from US and other websites). www.mywebsite.es/apple-phone (selling apple phone for Spain with product avalaible only in Spain, the available models might be different from US and other websites). www.mywebsite.pt/apple-phone (selling apple phone for Portugal with product avalaible only in Portugal, the available models might be different from US and other websites).

    | manoman88
    0
  • NgEF


    I run the digital marketing for a local start-up that's ranking for groups of semi-related keywords. We've been around for about 6 months in beta and have recently (a few days ago) done our official launch. We're starting to get some coverage in local media and I've tried my best to ensure that links to our site are included with a good range of keywords. What else can I do to fully take advantage of the press coverage that will be coming our way?

    | NgEF
    0
  • mkbeesto


    We have a client who carries 4 product lines from different manufacturers under a singular domain name (www.companyname.com), and last fall, one of their manufacturers indicated that they needed to move to separate out one of those product lines from the rest, so we redesigned and relaunched as two separate sites - www.companyname.com and www.companynameseparateproduct.com (a newly-purchased domain). Since that time, their manufacturer has reneged their requirement to separate the product lines, but the client has been running both sites separately since they launched at the beginning of December 2016. Since that time, they have cannibalized their content strategy (effective February 2017) and hacked apart their PPC budget from both sites (effective April 2017), and are upset that their organic and paid traffic has correspondingly dropped from the original domain, and that the new domain hasn't continued to grow at the rate they would like it to (we did warn them, and they made the decision to move forward with the changes anyway). This past week, they decided to hire an in-house marketing manager, who is insisting that we move the newer domain (www.companynameseparateproduct.com) to become a subdomain on their original site (separateproduct.companyname.com). Our team has argued that making this change back 6 months into the life of the new site will hurt their SEO (especially if we have to 301 redirect all of the old content back again, without any new content regularly being added), which was corroborated with this article. We'd also have to kill the separate AdWords account and quality score associated with the ads in that account to move them back. We're currently looking for any extra insight or literature that we might be able to find that helps explain this to the client better - even if it is a little technical. (We're also open to finding out if this method of thinking is incorrect if things have changed!)

    | mkbeesto
    0
  • 100yards


    They're website is hosted on a .com.au domain. Should they host their Chinese language pages under their current domain (.com.au) using a subdirectory (i.e. /asia) or should they use another separate domain that they own that is a regular .com? Or does it really not matter?

    | 100yards
    1
  • UVdesign


    I having issues fully understanding how to get the Video SERP packs.  I am owner of a wedding videography company and would love to start getting the video SERPS.  I am just not 100% sure how to go about this and everything I have read is not making sense.  Any thoughts would be great

    | UVdesign
    1
  • lfrazer


    Hello, I have two questions..if someone could shed some light on the topic, I would be so very grateful! 1. I am still making my way through how schema is employed, and as I can tell, it is much more specific (and therefore relevant) in its details than using the data highlighter tool. Is this true? 2. Most of my clients' sites have a footer with the local business info included on every page of their site (address and phone). This said, I have been using the structured data markup helper to add local business schema to home page, and then including the footer markup in the footer file so that every page benefits from the local business markup. Is this incorrect to use it for every page? Also, I noticed that by just using the footer markup for the rest of the pages in the site, I am missing data that was included when I manually went through the index page (i.e. image, url, name of business). Could someone tell me if it is advisable and worth it to manually markup every page for the local business schema or if that should just be used for certain pages such as location, contact us, and/or index? Any tips or help would be greatly appreciated!!! Thanks

    | lfrazer
    0
  • Dions


    We opened a new location in a new market in early February and eventually tapered off improving SERP rankings when we reached an average rank of #3. As we began increasing in ranking, the competitions' average rankings we're declining. Suddenly, in April, one of our competitors spiked to an average SERP ranking of #1. The site that jumped to the top of SERP was a location page and there was no content changes, or changes to their website. Our competitor's links also decreased during the time of this spike. Does anyone have any ideas as to what caused our competitor to spike so high, so suddenly? Thanks,

    | Dions
    0
  • kimberleymeloserpa


    Hi, I represent a franchisor who does all marketing- including local seo- for our franchisees. I've read a lot about local SEO and understand the basics, but have some remaining questions. 1- If our typical territories are quite large and encompass more than one major city, should we create multiple location pages for the same franchise owner? I believe the answer should be yes from an SEO stand point, but the problem is that most of our franchisees naturally just have one business address (their home). Since PO boxes and virtual offices aren't the way to go, what's the best course of action? And when I say major cities, I'm really talking about major cities (and not just small towns/boroughs). Can they just use a friend's/relative's address? 2- There's a lot of info out there about "locations pages," but it's not really clear whether or not you should really just have ONE page for each location, or several pages with different content? For instance, it looks like a lot of businesses are creating just one, "home-page" looking landing page for their individual locations, with everything from services to testimonials on just that one page. Is this preferred over creating several different local pages for that one location? The latter is what we currently do. From the user stand-point, it looks like each franchise location has it's own "mini website" on our main website. For instance, a landing page optimized for the local business name, a local services page, a project/photo gallery page, local review page, etc. It seems like a lot less work just building one landing page for each location, but is the payoff the same? I'm torn between the two strategies- is it really worth the extra work (in terms of traffic + local ranking) to build out the individual pages for the one location? Thanks Moz Community!

    | kimberleymeloserpa
    0
  • seo_plus


    Hi, Just curious if people see a benefit from BOTW / HotFrog as offered here in the Moz Local stuff. I was always under the impression that stuff offered here would be "of quality" however I just did a bit of background checking and both of these seem to be marked with nofollow, and I'm guessing some of it has been for a long time. Are there other benefits that accrue?  BOTW is not cheap, and while HotFrog is cheap, I feel a need to be somewhat wary of these options - but I SO want to trust the MOZ brand! Moz is pretty well known for excellent analysis - so...  has anyone done any recent analysis on this? Is everything going away?? Please tell me it ain't so! thanks!!

    | seo_plus
    1
  • Greenery


    I'm writing new landing page copy for a client in the HVAC industry. The client has one office, but its service area includes several cities in a metropolitan area. I'm writing two types of pages: Service-specific landing pages (e.g. "Air Conditioner Repair," "Furnace Inspections") Location-specific pages (e.g. "Dallas Heating & Air Services," "Plano Heating & Air Services") My question is whether I should also include specific locations within the service-specific pages if I'm already doing the location-specific pages as well. For example, would it make sense to do a page on AC repair with title/H1 elements like "Dallas Air Conditioner Repair Service" or "Air Conditioner Repair in Plano and Dallas" in light of the fact that there will already be 10-12 location-specific pages? My preference is to NOT include location-specific stuff in the service landing pages except for maybe a passing reference to something like "...need HVAC services for your Dallas-area home" or similar. It just seems more natural that way. Thoughts?

    | Greenery
    1
  • spadedesign


    For some reason, we have been fighting and fighting to get a website to rank and no matter what we do- nothing seems to work. I'm just taking over the website handle it personally, but was curious if anyone here had advice on what the issue may be. It isn't even ranking for its brand name, any ideas? http://estesroofingtx.com/

    | spadedesign
    0
  • photoseo1


    Does anyone know of a Schema or Microdata Formatting Creator that you can just put your data into and your Schema or Microdata code will pop out? I am not a coder at all. I want to use it form my local search data so I can just add in all the info and the code will be created. Thanks for the help.

    | photoseo1
    0
  • SwanseaMedicine


    So, one of my pages has an optimisation score of 93. The DA of the website is 74 and is lower than many of our competitors, but to rank 12th? Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions? All the images are under 100kb, but the page speed isn't great (not something I'm currently able to change). All alt tags are using variations of our keywords.

    | SwanseaMedicine
    0
  • Gavpeds


    Hello, everyone. I am struggling a little with the vast amounts of information about how best to get a local service area business ranking and the best practice. If I explain what I have been doing and then see how I can improve. I have created a couple of websites for window cleaners. These window cleaners offer several services like window cleaning, gutter cleaning, conservatory cleaning, pressure washing etc. They also cover several towns/cities so it's important for them to be able to target all these areas in search. They don't have multiple offices so only have one home/office address and by the nature of the job provide services at the customer's house/business. What I have been doing is creating a page for each service they provide then to cover the areas I have been doing two things. Creating a page on the site called areas covered with a list of the areas they cover and also adding in the title of the page the main one or two areas that are most important to them. From what I can gather this might not be the best approach?? Google may see the areas in titles as keyword stuffing? Google also doesn't like a list of areas in one go anywhere on a site which can also seem like keyword stuffing? So for an example, this would be a rough title structure of service pages Window cleaners in town/city, town/city and town/city Gutter Cleaners in town/city, town/city and town/city As I said I am not sure this is the best way to do this from what I read. I have read about area specific pages but i struggle to see how i could make each area specific page unique enough as the service is exactly the same in each area. I have also read that putting the most important keywords at the begingin of the the title is better so using the above example would this be better? town/city window cleaners - business name So from what i understand having pages like this might be better Window cleaners town/city1 Window cleaners town/city2 Window cleaners town/city3 Gutter Cleaners town/city1 Gutter Cleaners town/city2 Gutter Cleaners town/city3 and so on but like I say I am aware each of these area specific pages would need to be unique but being that the services are exactly the same in each area I am not sure how I could warrant creating all the pages. Writing about the specific area on the page seems a little odd in that the visitor who lands on that page doesn't want to learn about their area, they live there and know the area. They want to know what the service is and if they do in fact cover their area. In which case how can i best ensure all or most of the areas they cover are targeted and show in search? Some sites i have done cover around 20-30 towns around them so how can best ensure they rank for them? I have also been reading conflicting information about how to structure pages and urls. Some say don't use commas in page titles, some say don't use underscores and only use hyphens. Similarly, I have read that the URL should not contain any hyphens but I am not sure about this seeing as WordPress often adds hyphens between words in URLs. Some say you should always have an H1 on every page others say it's not all that important anymore. With images, i have also been giving them alts the same as the page titles thay are on, is this the wrong thing to do? Id be happy to private messge (if i can do that here) one of the sites I would be eternally grateful if anyone can help in firstly clarifying how I could best improve ranking for areas covered and secondly what best practice is to structure page content like H1's image alts etc. Thanks

    | Gavpeds
    0
  • GarrettDenham


    Friends, I'm hoping to get some feedback on optimizing a website. It's a parallax web design so there's really only one title tag and meta description. I don't want to stuff the on-page content with keywords that don't flow with the copy/branding. What are some additional opportunities to optimize this website? It's not ranking in SERPs and has a low DA. Here's the URL, please take a look and let me know what I could be doing - https://saintst.com/ Thanks!

    | GarrettDenham
    0

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