Well Ranked National Site - Need Local Rankings
-
We are a virtual company doing business in 30 states nationwide. All our business is done via the phone, fax, email and express mail.
Back in 2008 I optimized our small 8 page website for our key terms and was able to rank the site #1 nationally for our main keywords. (I did a 6 month consulting gig for the company). The site remained #1 in Google until last year when some serious competitors entered the space and knocked us down to the middle of page one.
Then with the Panda update #1 & #2 we have seen our traffic drop 50% mostly due to not receiving the City + Keywords rankings any more.
I have now been hired full time to bring us back but my question is this
- Do I need to build out city specific pages on the existing website?
- Do I need to buy keyword specific domains and create microsites?
- Do a combination of both?
I would love to do both but I have to prioritize my efforts.
Any thoughts would be great.
-
That is what I thought. Thanks for the reply. Now I need to find time to return the favor to the board.....pay it forward.
-
citykeyword.com is best for quick results, a new domain can rank quicly, but as time go on the advatage is dimished when you build up other signals.
but citykeyword.domain.com keeps the link juice in your site. As long as your subdomnains are well linked to the root domain google will see it as the same site.
-
In regards to the onsite optimization, I am still trying to slowly fix some of the issues. It is an old site not built well and done in tables. Once I get a bit more money, I plan to rebuild the website in wordpress.
A follow on question from above. Although you say the long term strategy is a single site with local city pages, which process would see quicker results? city specific domains + keyword or state.website.com/city + keyword.html ?
Just curious what you think. thanks.
-
City domain names is a good idea, but as you say, you will be splitting you efforts, so I say no. city landing pages is a better idea, try and get the city into your link text when you get links, local directories also will help
You also have a lot of on page issues, you have a lot of images with out alt text, I mean a lot, there is a good chance to put some city names, you also have a lot of non relevant link text, “click here” I would definitely fix them
You also have a lot of soft 404s, missing pages, or in your case mostly images that give a 200 instead of a 404. this is not helping, google has made a point about this recenly
Your code includes a lot of noise to content ratio, lots of script, flash and stuff, search engines like clean code.
How I see it a site with many violations needs many more links to rank than one that is violation free.
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
-
Can't understand our Ranking; DA, PA and On Page all better than Competiton; Ranking no where
Our rankings are up and down but our domain is clean, DA and PA good
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexSTUDIO18
and there is really in depth content which is all original. We are at a bit of a loss; The site is
http://www.fightstorepro.com I can use the phrase "Boxing Gloves" as an example
http://www.fightstorepro.com/gear/gloves/boxing-gloves.html PA 26 , DA29
Good original content; Video content, On page grade A
Not ranking in top 50 places?? The competitor in Pos4 is not matching our placing Anyone shed any light on this?0 -
Handling duplicate content, whilst making both rank well
Hey MOZperts, I run a marketplace called Zibbet.com and we have 1000s of individual stores within our marketplace. We are about to launch a new initiative giving all sellers their own stand-alone websites. URL structure:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | relientmark
Marketplace URL: http://www.zibbet.com/pillowlink
Stand-alone site URL: http://pillowlink.zibbet.com (doesn't work yet) Essentially, their stand-alone website is a duplicate of their marketplace store. Same items (item title, description), same seller bios, same shop introduction content etc but it just has a different layout. You can scroll down and see a preview of the different pages (if that helps you visualize what we're doing), here. My Questions: My desire is for both the sellers marketplace store and their stand-alone website to have good rankings in the SERPS. Is this possible? Do we need to add any tags (e.g. "rel=canonical") to one of these so that we're not penalized for duplicate content? If so, which one? Can we just change the meta data structure of the stand-alone websites to skirt around the duplicate content issue? Keen to hear your thoughts and if you have any suggestions for how we can handle this best. Thanks in advance!0 -
Ranking sites in vertical markets with 90% scraped content
Hi, Hoping to get advice about ranking sites (a vertical market search engine/portal like a car site for example) that gets its content from scraping car sites. For various reasons (mostly scale eg cant get car dealers to push their listings to us) content was scraped. The startup has received great press, TV interviews, incubator programs etc, and has also secured very significant investment. I feel if this site was launched pre-panda it would be ranking much better. We have invested significantly in our tech, our search tools and site innovation place us easily as market leader in this space. Anyone with experience in ranking sites with legitimate reasons for using scraped content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edthomasnp0 -
Site Not Ranking- No Reason Why
I have a client with a HUGE website who should be ranking for it's competitive keywords. No penalties, or bad links. Old domain. Not ranking for anything. Client has a huge AdWords spend and my theory is that it's not ranking organically because of the AdWords spend. I can't think of anything other reason. Anyone? Thanks. The keywords I'm trying to rank this client for aren't even competitive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
How much content is needed to be competitive and rank well?
When considering on page / on site seo what process do you use / take to evaluate how much content is needed to be competitive and rank well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
Need to shorten and change site-wide meta titles (50.000 pages). OK to do all at once?
Just noticed that google completely screws up our meta titles in the SERPs. Google decided to show titles which are not understandable to visitors and worst of all even shows titles in different languages than the actual page. The words of the displayedf titles are nowhere on the page (actually they are parts of old title tags that we stopped using 6 months ago and that we used on different pages). Pages are crawled weekly. All our meta titles are a bit longer than the 70 character limit, so I plan to rephrase and shorten them so that they are all max. 66 characters. Dynamically we choose different variations of title texts based on character length of keywords. Having titles that fit into SERPs without cutting are supposed to have less probability to be changed by google. I heard some people reporting loss of rankings after site-wide meta title changes. Especially since we changed title tags sitewide already about 6 months ago I am a bit concerned. How would you proceed? Just do the site-wide change all at once?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
Hey Mozzers, I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well. My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together? To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other? My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial. A little advice/clarification would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
.GOV Link - same impact on my site's rankings whether link to home or Gov related category?
I own a job site and I am about to get a link from a .GOV. My site has a category called "State Jobs". Should I ask the ".Gov" to link to my homepage or to the state job page and use the anchor text "State Jobs". I understand "State Jobs" page would get a big kick by that being the anchor text and linking to that specific page, but the question I have is this: for my site as a whole (homepage and various categories) would they get around the same "push up" whether the linking is to 1) my homepage with anchor text being my site's name or 2) to the state job specific page and in this case the anchor text would be "State Jobs"? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0