Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both
-
Hi All,
For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page.
My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them?
Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated
Happy New Year
Tony
-
You are very welcome, Tony! Thanks for coming to Q&A. Miriam
-
Thanks Miriam - most helpful.
I think my challenge is that I want to get local businesses who also focus on national leads the most bang for their money. But your answers make perfect common sense - so thanks for taking the time to answer in full - most appreciated
-
Greetings Tony,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. While I have no hard data to share with you (haven't ever seen a conclusive study published on this) I think your guiding light should be deciphering the relative importance of your 2 target audiences. What percentage of the business occurs nationally and what percentage occurs locally? This figure might, then, dictate how much effort you should be putting into national vs. local efforts on and off the site.
Local SEO can certainly be done in addition to national SEO. It sounds to me, however, that you have heavily slanted all pages towards geographic terms. If local business is only a small portion of the rankings, I would be inclined to simply put the complete NAP (name, address, phone number) in the footer site wide, put it on the contact page and optimize perhaps 1-2 other pages on the site with local information...perhaps the about page (visit us at our offices). Then, get the business profiled in the various local indexes.
There isn't a template for doing this. Every business is slightly different, and the competitiveness of your vertical and nature of your products/services may create nuances that simply can't be answered with a broad 'do this'. For example, a company might offer plumbing services locally, but sell plumbing fixtures nationally. Different pages would need to be devoted to the different areas of work - the planning and organization is very important, so that those pages suited to neighbors have been optimized locally, while those that have a national focus are not being presented narrowly, as if they were only meant for neighbors.
Tracking and testing how people are using the site, once you've attempted to gear certain pages towards certain audiences, will be very important. This is what will tell you whether you are getting it 'right' or not.
Hope this helps!
Miriam
-
My own opinion, if you have your address in the footer seems enouth to make you rank for your city, while not tying you to it.
But thats my gut feeling only.
-
Hi Alan,
I'm wondering is there is a minimum SEO threshold for effective local coverage that doesn't detract on national rankings ie less focus on location to rank nationally but enough to also rank locally??
Thanks for your feedback.
-
ok then yes that is a dilemma, having your cake and eat it is not really possible I believe
-
Hi Alan,
My question centered on town / county vs national, not international or multi - country.
Thanks for your fast response anyway.
Tony
-
I believe to rank in moe than one country you need more than one web site, if you have a .uk and a .au website, you do not need to worry about duplicate content.
See Matt Cutts
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
-
Page rank and menus
Hi, My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEO is this not bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AL123al0 -
International SEO Options?
Hi we currently have a site which is a example.com domain in the Australian market (we have geo-targeted to Australia within search console). We are looking to expand to United States. I have added the potential options down below, just wondering which one you guys think would be best from a SEO and practical standpoint? Or if there are other options i should consider? Option 1 The Australian domain is strong so this option takes this into consideration. Keep example.com (Australian) Add on: Sub-Directory for US Which would be: example.com/us/ In Search Console set the sub-folder to target US and also setup hreflang tags. Setup the US site on the sub-directory. Option 2 Add sub-folders for both Aus and US example/au/ (Australian)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jaynamarino
example/us/ (United States) Setup hreflang targeting. Cons
Need to set up redirects for the current site to new location which is .com/au/ might also see drop in performance due to redirects. Cheers.0 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
SEO Indexing issues
Hi, We have been submitting sitemaps on a weekly basis for couple of months now and only 40% of the submitted pages are indexed each time. Whether on the design , content or technical side, the website doesn't violate google guidelines.Can someone help me find the issue? website: http://goo.gl/QN5CevThanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZeFan0 -
SEO time
I wanto to be in the top of the google search. I am usiing a lot of SEO tools but... I have done it during one month. Do I have to wait more?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlosZambrana0 -
Ranking on google but not Bing?
Any reason why I could be ranking for Google but not Bing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Loosing Ranking
Hi, I'm working on a real estate website last 2 years. I've get top position on local and organic search result. But last 2 month I'm loosing ranking on some keywords on both local and organic search. I'm doing boomarking, guest posting related to real estate and social media promotion but getting no result that's way I'm looking seo person for my website. Thanks and waiting for your feedback
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KLLC0 -
Keyword Ranking Question
I have recently hired a SEO company to help with our keyword. My question is what are the best tools to use to verify what that are reporting. I can do an unpersonalized search, but I am likely still getting the my local results. I have been using the SEOmoz rank tracker in the past but for some reason it is not able to retrieve results over the past day or so. Are there any other good tools to check ranking for an exact url at the for non-localized, non personalized results? Thanks for the suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0