Creating Content for Several Local Keywords
-
I have a client who is in the lead generation business for a specific aesthetic service. The company basically generates leads through SEO and sells them to hundreds of local businesses across the US and Canada.
There is some serious competition for the main service keyword (this is not the real keyword) e.g. “liposuction” and over the past year we have seen rankings fall significantly (from top 3 to 13-15).
But... what I have found is that most of the traffic, particularly the highly converting traffic, comes from local keyword variations e.g. “liposuction in san diego”. However, these keywords are also highly competitive because there are several local businesses in these areas.
How would you suggest creating content for these pages when they are all extremely similar and we need to target 100s of cities? For example the page “liposuction in san diego” is very similar to the page “liposuction in sacramento”, ect ect.
Thanks for the help!
-
my client owns the industry domain name. e.g. liposuction.com.
That's fantastic. There is no better domain to have for this type of site. I have a couple of these too.
What would you do with the local city pages?
I compete in local SERPs with pages that have lots of local facts, statistics, graphs, maps, links to local sources of services and information.
In an effort to create authority for the domains I have authored lots of content about the most highly searched topics, obtained content contributions from experts in the field (if you own liposuction.com there might be experts in that field who would write an article for you simply because it will be published on the KW.com and visible to a lot of people. These are not SEO articles from people who want a link they are informative content from people who have a message to spread. Most of this content is written to be "the first document that a person interested in learning about a subject should read".
Owning this type of domain gives you an enormous advantage over your competitors.
-
If you have a root keyword similar to "liposuction" then you are going to be under major major attack from doctors who are willing to invest big money for an ongoing web visibility campaign.
A few things that I forgot to mention: my client owns the industry domain name. e.g. liposuction.com. Also the website has been live and owned by the same person since 2000.
1) a sustainable plan that will create and continuously increase a massive level of authority for my website..... an enormous library of best-on-the-web liposuction articles that attracts thousands of links from med schools, physicians, bloggers, government health sites, etc.... that thousands of people post to facebook and tweet about....
How would you go about this from an SEO stand point? Most of the traffic in the industry seems to be coming from local search. This strategy would appear to gain links and ultimately rankings for general search terms that are not at a local level.
What would you do with the local city pages? Would you get rid of them all together? Or would you keep them in place and ultimately have their rankings driven by the internal pagerank of the website? If you would keep them what sort of content would you have on these pages.
Thank you for your help. It's much appreciated.
-
There is some serious competition for the main service keyword (this is not the real keyword) e.g. “liposuction” and over the past year we have seen rankings fall significantly (from top 3 to 13-15).
As local businesses become SEO savvy and aggressive your job is going to become more and more and more and more difficult. To hold your rankings you must be able to respond to SEOs attacking your SERPs in every city where you want rankings. If you have a root keyword similar to "liposuction" then you are going to be under major major attack from doctors who are willing to invest big money for an ongoing web visibility campaign.
If I was in that niche I would be looking for one of two things.....
- a sustainable plan that will create and continuously increase a massive level of authority for my website..... an enormous library of best-on-the-web liposuction articles that attracts thousands of links from med schools, physicians, bloggers, government health sites, etc.... that thousands of people post to facebook and tweet about....
or....
2) I would start working on a project that will diversity my income
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 NOT keyword stuff in long form content
My homepage has an authoritative guide with long form content. As a result, my main keyword is mentioned 40+ times. It's not forced, but natural, and the frequency of it is a function of the length of the article. Is that okay? Any suggestions or advise?
On-Page Optimization | | ntaparia171 -
Category Page Content
Hey Mozzers, I've recently been doing a content audit on the category and sub-category pages on our site. The old pages had the following "profile" Above The Fold
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
Page Heading
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products
600 words+ of content duplicated from articles, sub categories and products My criticisms of the page were
1. No content (text) above the fold
2. Page content was mostly duplicated content
3. No keyword structure, many pages competed for the same keywords and often unwanted pages outranked the desired page for the keyword. I cleaned this up to the following structure Above The Fold
H1 Page Heading 80-200 Word of Content (Including a link to supporting article)
H2 Page Heading (Expansion or variance of the H1 making sure relevant) 80-200 150 Words of Content
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products The new pages are now all unique content, targeted towards 1-2 themed keywords. I have a few worries I was hoping you could address. 1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?
2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.
3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selction of keywords, for example.
a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting infromation
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I dont want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categories Any other critisms or comment welcome0 -
Should I change PDF content?
Hi everybody, My Website is ranking well for several keywords and long-tail keywords. However, all these visits are going directly to some .PDF guides that exist on our products and information on industry sectors the company is based around. I feel the PDF's are bad simply because they dont offer easy interaction with the rest of the website. I am considering making each PDF into a webpage but am not 100% sure of the pro's and cons of doing so. I will still need to the PDF's accessible for user to download but don't want my new webpages to get tagged as duplicate content. Is it possible to,
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
1 - change the PDF's so they send any link authority to the new webpage
2 - make google aware that I want the webpage not the PDF to be the "ranking" page What is the likely hood of destroying my rank for these keywords on the PDF by making these changes and then not being able to rank the webpage for the same keywords? It would be pointless if I just lost all the traffic lol.0 -
Keywords ranking on Homepage but are not mentioned.
I was wondering why some of my keywords are ranking in my homepage but are not mentioned even once. Is it maybe because they are semantically related with the keywords targeted on the homepage? What are the reason(s) for this? Thanks for enlightening me with this one.
On-Page Optimization | | TWSOM0 -
Duplicate Content - Deleting Pages
The Penguin update in April 2012 caused my website to lose about 70% of its traffic overnight and as a consequence, the same in volume of sales. Almost a year later I am stil trying to figure out what the problem is with my site. As with many ecommerce sites a large number of the product pages are quite similar. My first crawl with SEOMOZ identified a large number of pages that are very similar - the majority of these are in a category that doesn't sell well anyway and so to help with the problem I am thinking of removing one of my categories (about 1000 products). My question is - would removing all these links boost the overall SEO of the site since I am removing a large chunk of near-duplicate links? Also - if I do remove all these links would I have to put in place a 301 redirect for every single page and if so, what's the quickest way of doing this. My site is www.modern-canvas-art.com Robin
On-Page Optimization | | robbowebbo0 -
Local SEO techniques
We have a competitor who has listed all the local villages and towns in the area that he wishes to target. these are listed in his footer and appear on every page. I understand that ideally, each location targeted would have it's own page with unique and relevant content. Is this competitor's approach a good one even though the names are essentially duplicates?
On-Page Optimization | | ojwilliams80 -
Duplicate content? Not sure.
Good news! I have my first real SEO gig and now I have to be able to actually deliver. I'm up for it but I want to be sure I'm seeing what I think I am before suggesting any changes. I'm working my way throught Danny Dover's excellent book SEO Secrets and learning tons! To see if there is duplicate content on the site, I've taken a sentence from one of the pages on the site and searched for it: i.e., site:storybooksforhealing.com "Some of the most quiet moments are often the most difficult after a loss. Mornings, late nights, time alone." The SERPs show 7 pages that have this text on it. It seems like this is duplicate content, right? This is a Wordpress website so what's happening is the actual page is here: www.storybooksforhealing.com/publish-cup-of-joy/ but there are several archive pages that show excerpts of this text, too. If this is duplicate content (first question) then how would I go about remedying it? Should I set the canonical reference to /publish-cup-of-joy page? Thank you for being patient with my NOOB questions.
On-Page Optimization | | ChristiMc0 -
Website Content
Is it bad to have html pages on a blog? I converted a completely HTML site to wordpress, but havd hundreds of article pages that are still html.
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0