Should we add the city to our keywords for a site that is only local?
-
This is one of those things I have done for a long time and all of a sudden asked myself was it necessary: For our local clients, we add the city name (Houston, KC, Birmingham) after each keyword. An example would be TestSite.com/big-tester-houston
A Title Tag might be Big Tester Houston | Test Site, etc.
Where appropriate we do the same with H1 or H2's and occasionally in the content we will use the city name.
The thought being that since the site is only for a given city, it will be deemed more relevant than a site from outside.( I understand there are other factors in SEO; this is a specific question around adding the city). Yes, we also optimize with local directories/citation sites.
Is this overkill, is it even worthwhile? Is there any evidence one way or another?
I would love some strong opinions backed up with something other than anecdotal evidence where possible.
-
Hi Robert!
Nice to see you. I would recommend that you read this post from Mike Blumenthal from a couple of weeks ago if you haven't already:
Some of Mike's readers found the advice regarding the use of geomodifiers to be controversial and this led to an extremely long discussion between Mike and readers on this topic. I think you will find it to be relevant and extremely interesting, but you'll have to make up your own mind what you think!
-
Depending the scope and type of business the website is promoting adding the city name to your page content can be great. I have done it with two websites and it worked quite well.
For those sites, I placed contact info toward the top section of the pages.
That said, some people do not like to set page content up that way..... it worked for me though.
Give it a try, it may work for you, if not, the beauty is, changes can easily be made.
Thats just my two cents... good luck! and happy holidays
-
I do know that in the past year Google has weakened the power of keywords in the domain name, however, I don't believe that applies to file names. In this video: Matt Cutts does point out that this would be a very easy thing to test.
And I believe from my personal anecdotal experience that using the name of the locality in file names is useful for SEO.
-
We did this for a local client 2 years ago and had dramatic improvement. That said, we also followed it up with a link building campaign (of course). Try it for one of the pages and track any improvements, then roll it out if it works
Does this help?
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 to uncover GA "Not Provided" organic keywords?
Hello, Google Analytics has a lot of keywords which are tagged as "Not Provided" So how can i uncover what these are? Otherwise how do i know which organic keywords are doing well or not?
Reporting & Analytics | | Riz_Khan0 -
Does subdomain (or sub sub domain) affect analytics data of root site?
We self-host our public website, but over time have also added subdomains onto it that are not public and are for internal or even client portals. I am seeking advice as to whether those subdomains affect the analytics data (self referrals, visits, bounces) of the public site that I am tasked with analyzing. I feel that it does skew the data but need to build a solid case to move the public website to a new domain, so as to leave the existing one in tact with all of its subs.
Reporting & Analytics | | MarketingGroup0 -
Site relaunch and impact on SEO
I have some tough decisions to make about a web site I run. The site has seen around for 20 years (September 1995, to be precise, is the date listed against the domain). Over the years, the effort I've expanded on the site has come and gone, but I am about to throw a lot of time and effort back into it. The majority of the content on the site is pretty dated, isn't tremendously useful to the audience (since it's pretty old) and the site design and URL architecture isn't particularly SEO-friendly. In addition, I have a database of thousands vendors (for the specific industry this site serves). I don't know if it's a factor any more but 100% of the links there have been populated by the vendors themselves specifically requesting inclusion (through a form we expose on the site). When the request is approved, the vendor link shows up on the appropriate pages for location (state) and segment of the industry. Though the links are all "opt-in" from vendors (we've never one added or imported any ourselves), I am sure this all looks like a terrible link farm to Google! And some vendors have asked us to remove their link for that reason 🙂 One final (very important) point. We have a relationship with a nationwide brand and have four very specific pages related to that brand on our site. Those pages are essential - they are by far the most visited pages and drive virtually all our revenue. The pages were put together with SEO in mind and the look and feel is very different to the rest of the site. The result is, effectively, a site-within-a-site. I need to carefully protect the performance of these pages. To put some rough numbers on this, the site had 475,000 page views over the last year, with about 320,000 of those being to these four pages (by the way, for the rest of the content "something happened" around May 20th of last year - traffic almost doubled overnight - even though there were no changes to our site). We have a Facebook presence and have put a little effort into that recently (increasing fans from about 10,000 last August to nearly 24,000 today, with a net gain of about 2,500 per month currently). I don't have any sense of whether that is a meaningful resource in the big picture. So, that's the background. I want to totally revamp the broader site - much improved design, intentional SEO decisions, far better, current and active content, active social media presence and so on. I am also moving from one CMS to another (the target CMS / Blog platform being WordPress). Part of me wants to do the following: Come up with a better plan for SEO and basically just throw out the old stuff and start again, with the exception of the four vendor pages I mentioned Implement redirection of the old URLs to new content (301s) Just stop exposing the vendor pages (on the basis that many of the links are old/broken and I'm really not getting any benefit from them) Leave the four important pages exactly as they are (URL and content-wise) I am happy to rebuild the content afresh because I have a new plan around that for which I have some confidence. But I have some important questions. If I go with the approach above, is there any value from the old content / URLs that is worth retaining? How sure can I be there is no indirect negative effect on the four important pages? I really need to protect those pages Is throwing away the vendor links simply all good - or could there be some hidden negative I need to know about (given many of the links are broken and go to crappy/small web sites, I'm hoping this is just a simple decision to make) And one more uber-question. I want to take a performance baseline so that I can see where I started as I start making changes and measure performance over time. Beyond the obvious metrics like number of visitors, time per page, page views per visit, etc what metrics would be important to collect from the outset? I am just at the start of this project and it is very important to me. Given the longevity of the site, I don't know if there is much worth retaining for that reason, even if the content changes radically. At a high level I'm trying to decide what questions I need to answer before I set off on this path. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | MarkWill0 -
Redirects to external sites
Hi there, I have listings that all link to external sites. In order to track how many times each link was clicked I coded a redirect script that simply redirects to the respective url. www.mysite.com/go/123/ - redirects to another site www.mysite.com/go/541/ - redirects to a different site Is there anything I should or should not do from seo stand point such as blocking the /go directory in robots or adding a no-follow tag to links? I'd appreciate your advice. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | vmotuz0 -
Google Analytics Site Search to new sub-domain
Hi Mozzers, I'm setting up Google's Site Search on a website. However this isn't for search terms, this will be for people filling in a form and using the POST action to land on a results page. This is similar to what is outlined at http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1012264 ('<a class="zippy zippy-collapse">Setting Up Site Search for POST-Based Search Engines').</a> However my approach is different as my results appear on a sub-domain of the top level domain. Eg.. user is on www.domain.com/page.php user fills in form submits user gets taken to results.domain.com/results.php The issue is with the suggested code provided by Google as copied below.. Firstly, I don't use query strings on my results page so I would have to create an artificial page which shouldn't be a problem. But what I don't know is how the tracking will work across a sub-domain without the _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.domain.com']); code. Can this be added in? Can I also add Custom Variables? Does anyone have experience of using Site Search across a sub-domain perhaps to track quote form values? Many thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | panini0 -
When one of my sites returns a ranking that consistently reads "No Data", what does that say about the site?
I am getting "No Data" reads for some of my sites - I personally think it has to do with the site's construction - especially the landing page... I inherited this site to do SEO - it was not created with on site SEO in mind - please help if you can sites are: www.storagesanangelo.com www.storagemidland.com Should I get webmaster to remove the big map graphic and add text and pics instead... Sure appreciate brilliant thoughts - even about yetis and beer
Reporting & Analytics | | creativeguy0 -
How to Refesh site comapign?
How to Refesh site comapign? its displaying 3 days old data. now fixed some contents. unable to test it. kindly guide me for howto refresh the report?
Reporting & Analytics | | peanut20100 -
Yahoo Site explorer: Different results for www & non-www domain. Can we merge these?
When checking our domain on yahoo site explorer, different results are shown for www.theprintspace.de and theprintspace.de. We have done a 301 redirect, as we want to optimise our www.theprintspace.de domain. However, we have a lot more backlinks for theprintspace.de. Is there any way of merging the two, so we don't loose all the linkjuice we get for theprintspace.de and use those links to optimise www.theprintspace.de? Thanks for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Waplington0