Large scale geo-targeting?
-
Hi there. We are an internet marketing agency and recently did a fair amount of working trying to optimise for a number of different locations. Although we are based in Preston (UK), we would like to attract clients from Manchester, Liverpool, etc.
We created landing pages for each of the locations that we wanted to target and each of the services - so we had an SEO Manchester page and a Web Design Manchester page for example. These were all written individually by a copywriter in order to avoid duplicate content. An example of one of the first of these pages is here: http://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/places/seo-blackpool.php
We created a 'where we cover' page and used a clickable map rather than huge long list of text links, which we felt would be spammy, to link through to these pages. You can see this page here: http://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/where-we-cover.php
Initially we gained a great deal of success from this method - with the above Blackpool page ranking #7 for "SEO Blackpool" within a week. However these results quickly disappeared and now we don't rank at all, though the pages remain in the index. I'm aware that we don't have many external links pointing to these pages, but this cannot explain why these pages don't rank at all, as some of the terms are relatively non-competitive.
A number of our competitors rank for almost all of these terms, despite their pages being exact duplicates with simply the city/town name being changed. Any ideas where we've gone wrong?
-
I'm from Burnley originally and I've worked in Blackburn and Manchester previously but now I live and work in Dublin, Ireland It's nice to see somebody local on here.
I would suggest Social Bookmarking the new pages that you have created and I think you'll be surprised at what will happen, something so simple. Have you updated your sitemap as well?
-
Thanks for the reply Glenn. I really can't see why we would have been penalised as everything we do is above board, although it does seem as if that might be the case. I certainly think that the QDF point you make is a valid one, although it could have been around the time of the latest Panda update too, so perhaps that might have flagged up something.
I think our next step might be to recreate the pages from scratch on entirely new URLs and see if that has any effect. We will certainly try and poach some of our competitor's links too!
-
It's possible that your site has been penalized, though I don't see too many reasons why it would be in reviewing your OSE report. From a cursory investigation, I'd say you've done a great job earning the links pointing to your site... though if any trickery was involved, you may be penalized, so you may want to investigate how to get out of that trap.
I suggest you investigate the link profiles of the competitors who rank for almost all of your targeted terms. If your on-page SEO is truly better than there's, it's likely that their external link profile is earning them the rankings you desire. Learn from their strategy.
Your initial high rankings could have been related to QDF.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How can I target more similar keywords in the most effective way?
Hello Community In my niche there are many keywords that are similar and Im not sure how to go about targeting them. Quick example: buy domain name register domain name register domain and hosting For these 3 keywords I have 1 article that ranks first for the first keyword and 5 and 8 for the other two. If I want to have higher chances of landing a first position for the other 2 keywords, should I write an article for each of them? A specific piece of content designed around each single keyword? My niche is in Italy so don't bother checking on Google 🙂 Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_IT0 -
Canonical Question: Root Domain Geo Redirects to SubFolder.
Howdy, Working on a larger eComm site that 302s you based on your location. With that in mind should I canonicalize the final page. domain.com => 302 => domain.com/us/, domain.com/fr/, etc... (Should these all have a canonical pointing to the root domain.com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blake.runyon0 -
Keywords going to Subdomain instead of targeted page(general landing page)
Why are some of my keywords going to subdomains instead of the more general/targeted landing page. For example, on my ecommerce website, the keyword 'tempurpedic' is directing to the subdomain URL of a specific tempurpedic product page instead of the general landing page. The product has a page authority of 15 and the Tempurpedic landing pages with all the products has an authority of 31. I have also noticed that my 'furniture stores in houston' keyword directs to my "occasional tables" URL! instead of a the much more targeted homepage. Is there something I am missing here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nat88han0 -
Can a large fluctuation of links cause traffic loss?
I've been asked to look at a site that has lost 70/80% if their search traffic. This happened suddenly around the 17th April. Traffic dropped off over a couple of days and then flat-lined over the next couple of weeks. The screenshot attached, shows the impressions/clicks reported in GWT. When I investigated I found: There had been no changes/updates to the site in question There were no messages in GWT indicating a manual penalty The number of pages indexed shows no significant change There are no particular trends in keywords/queries affected (they all were.) I did discover that ahrefs.com showed that a large number of links were reported lost on the 17th April. (17k links from 1 domain). These links reappeared around the 26th/27th April. But traffic shows no sign of any recovery. The links in question were from a single development server (that shouldn't have been indexed in the first place, but that's another matter.) Is it possible that these links were, maybe artificially, boosting the authority of the affected site? Has the sudden fluctuation in such a large number of links caused the site to trip an algorithmic penalty (penguin?) Without going into too much detail as I'm bound by client confidentiality - The affected site is really a large database and the links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites based on how the articles are tagged. The links point to dynamically generated content based on the url. The site does provide a useful/valuable service/purpose - it's not trying to "game the system" in order to rank. That doesn't mean to say that it hasn't been performing better in search than it should have been. This means that the affected site has ~900,000 links pointing to is that are the names of different "entities". Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated. I've expresses a pessimistic outlook to the client, but as you can imaging they are confused and concerned. LVSceCN.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougRoberts0 -
Target keyword still in domain name?
Target keyword still in domain name? getting domain name same as keyword still work for SEO ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Xml Sitemap for a large automobile website
Hello moz fellas, I need expert advice for PakWheels about xml sitemap generation. There are hundreds of thousands of pages (mostly USG) and these are increasing day by day. What is the best practice of controlling all these pages in xml format. Where can we generate sitemap.xml to submit in Google and Bing webmaster tools. Your input may help us in managing these URLs in an xml format. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | razasaeed1 -
GeoIP - Redirect all but target country
My client would like to redirect all non UK traffic from their UK site to their main group site. I am intending to use a .htaccess redirect, like this: RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} !^GB$
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.group.com$1 [R,L] I have tested the redirect at it works fine. My question is if I put this in place would it have any negative SEO impact on the UK site?0 -
One site or five sites for geo targeted industry
OK I'm looking to try and generate traffic for people looking for accommodation. I'm a big believer in the quality of the domain being used for SEO both in terms of the direct benefit of it having KW in it but also the effect on CTR a good domain can have. So I'm considering these options: Build a single site using the best, broad KW-rich domain I can get within my budget. This might be something like CheapestHotelsOnline.com Advantages: Just one site to manage/design One site to SEO/market Better potential to resell the site for a few million bucks Build 5 sites, each catering to a different region using 5 matching domains within my budget. These might be domains like CheapHotelsEurope.com, CheapHotelsAsia.com etc Advantages: Can use domains that are many times 'better' by adding a geo-qualifier. This should help with CTR and search Can be more targeted with SEO & Marketing So hopefully you see the point. Is it worth the dilution of SEO & marketing activities to get the better domain names? I'm chasing the longtail searchs whetever I do. So I'll be creating 5K+ pages each targeting a specific area. These would be pages like CheapestHotelsOnline.com/Europe/France/Paris or CheapHoteslEurope.com/France/Paris to target search terms targeting hotels in Paris So with that thought, is SEO even 100% diluted? Say, a link to the homepage of the first option would end up passing 1/5000th of value through to the Paris page. However a link to the second option would pass 1/1000th of the link juice through to the Paris page. So by thet logic, one only needs to do 1/5th of the work for each of the 5 sites ... that implies total SEO work would be the same? Thanks as always for any help! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OzDave0