Local SEO
-
Im trying to rank well for a local search. im trying to rank for my city plus lawn care. Its not that competitive, because people in this field dont know about seo. Im trying to just rank well for it can someone give me suggestions to do that. Should i create blogs and use the comments to hyperlink to my page. Im doing research on my competition and seeing what backlinks they are using. and off page seo ideas would be great as well We have a great google places page same with yahoo. We are trying to rank for different city's i rank well for the city i live in and my address is in, but i dont rank that well for other cities. Even tho they are less competitive than mine competitive under 500k results for my keyword
-
Hi John,
Considering I don't know where you are in terms of site development, I will offer some suggestions in general terms.
1. Do you keyword research to determine how your customers will find you. Include your city and/or state name in your searches. Build pages that your customers will find beneficial and optimize for those.
2. Use your city name and/or state in title tags and on page where appropriate.
3. Make sure you use your local area code, zip code, street address consistently in all your local directories and Google Places. Visit getlisted.org for directory submission ideas.
4. Put your address in the footer of your site.
5. A blog is a great idea for lawn seasonal lawn care tips. Take photos/videos of your work and post them on your site/blog to beef up content. Example: "Here's what we can do about chick weed starting to show during the winter months." - I called my lawn guy about it last week :).
6. Leverage social media (Facebook specifically) for connecting your customers and allowing your customers to share with friends.
7. I wouldn't have one picture on my site that was not a local picture. Name your files with localized tags and use proper alt tags.
8. Its okay to include surrounding communities in titles, meta descriptions and on-page etc. as Google will pick those up as well depending on the competition.
9. If you have relationships with local vendors ask them for a link.
10. Don't do more for your site than you can effectively manage. If you can't keep your site, blog, facebook page etc. fresh, don't do it. Scale it back, keep it simple and ALWAYS keep your customer's benefit the motivation for what you do.
Good luck!
-
Set up all your site business listings on Google Places, yelp, bing business, etc.
That will help a lot.
And if its not all that competitive as you say than basic on page optimization should do the trick . If it takes moer than link build. I suggest guest blogging
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
-
Keywords local and national
Hello everyone. I asked a similar question but still find myself a bit confused. I am a magician who is trying to improve my web presence. I found a list of keywords which I will list below. The results read from left to right the search results in the United States, and in Ohio ( where I am from). I found these results using google planner. Magician 14800 390 Magicians 5400 170 Corporate Magician 170 10 Comedy Magician 140 10 Here is my question. Lets use the word Magician as an example. I see that there are 390 results in Ohio for the search term Magician. Would I want to key the phrase "magician" or "Ohio Magician". How does google work with this? If I key just the word "magician" and someone in Ohio google searches for Ohio Magicians or something similar, will it detect their location and put me on there radar? When I key in " Ohio Magician" in the planner the results that come back are 0 or less than 10. I'm curious if google works on location and if I'm wasting my time keying in all of these cities that are showing no results. I began targeting "Cleveland Magician" "Columbus Magician" etc. Should I just stick with the main term Magician?
Competitive Research | | Jasonalanmagic0 -
White branded website & SEO
Hi guys, We might have as a new project to create a white branded website for a big portal in our local market (which have a strongest domain than ours): the goal will be to reach their big mass of users and if possible, place this new site BEHIND us on the SERPs. Since the content of the new website will basically be the same, we are considering 2 solutions: to "noindex" the site on search engines, which is a "secure" way to not create ourself a competitor to allow the site to be indexed on search engines but using the "rel=canonical" strategy to not be affected by duplicate content penalties (For example, we plan to add rel='canonical' href='http://www.ourdomain.com/category1/product2' /> on their page http://newsubdomain.theirdomain.com/category1/product2) The main question is: can the white branded website rank better than our site even with the "canonical" strategy? (Of course we could "lower" the quality of the white-branded website pages to avoid that risk... but if somebody has better advices, we would be glad to hear them 😉 )
Competitive Research | | Kuantokusta0 -
Old Hand But New At Local
Hi Mozzers, I've enjoyed success for customers with national campaigns but until now have never taken on a local campaign. My method has been to find out what prospective customers were looking for and create content around this, then engage customers through various inbound channels. This, combined with a strong value proposition and strong calls to action has been successful. What if anything should I change for a local campaign? I'd be interested in hearing from some people that have successfully conducted local campaigns. As always, any help is greatly appreciated.
Competitive Research | | waynekolenchuk0 -
SEO's done, 301s in place, old site STILL outranks new site. What to do?
Since Sep 2010 I have had a site up with minimal SEO optimization (www.chrisbrushmusic.com). Oct 29, 2012, I launched a new site on a new domain (www.chrisbrushdrums.com) with more content and tons of SEO work behind it. The content of the new site is significantly different from the old site, and I wish to keep the old site around. I have 301's in place for specific URLs on the old site that point to the new site. I have submitted xml sitemaps for the new site. As of now, the old site still outranks the new site (i.e. Google search for "nashville session drummer" and my old site is #9 - my new site is nowhere). What should I do? Thanks.
Competitive Research | | cbrush0 -
Working through the slides on my first seo project, I'm trying to determine the most popular content on competition sites.
From the video, I understand I should be looking for unique opportunities. But is there a baseline for product qualification, ie., a min. PA,LRD, Inbound LInks, social shares, etc. I guess I'm asking what I should be looking for in the data provided on each competing site? What determines THE most popular and unique product?
Competitive Research | | AhmadS0 -
RankTracker , Seo Spyglass?
just want to check is anyone using these other products? and if so do they work? RankTracker Seo Spyglass Website Auditor LinkAssistant? Thank you!
Competitive Research | | mikedw0 -
Is it valuable for a local business to build links into its Google Place?
G'Day All, Almost all of my clients are geo-based small service-based businesses. I've noticed during my research that the google places for our competitors in 3 separate niches (3 different clients) seem to be the dominating results for almost all relevant keyword terms. I'm curious to see if anyone has actively tried to increase the ranking of a google place by building links into it. Is this something that anyone else sees value to for a local small business? I would love to get some thoughts. And for that matter I'm also curious to see if anyone thinks there might be value to optimizing a Facebook Fan Page or Yelp Business page. They all seem to be key drivers of traffic our client websites so I'm wondering how difficult it is to make them rank as opposed to a website. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | blahblahblah20150 -
I would like a good SEO company
Hi, I know this must be a repeated question but I would like to have an SEO company that would take care of getting my site on the top three pages of google and I would like some advice over my website. I have been investing in link building for a month now but I think my meta tag might not be the most appropriate, i should probably have various and came across your website. I have found zero negative feed back on your company, I run other business but this is my first online experience and don't have the time to give it the SEO so with that in mind I would like to know what SEO packages would you recommend for my business and in what time would I be seeing page ranks in google bing and yahoo. I hope you can help me out, I'm a newbie at this and my online business is interesting and want to see it already operating my website is sheep buy.com, concept is people can sell for free, not just post an item like a classified site but actually sell for free through paypal and we don't charge a fee, so would really want some insight. Hope you can help me out. Beat regards Jerry
Competitive Research | | Jerrysb0