External Linking and SEO strategy
-
I run a business where we offer music lessons in student's homes throughout a local area. We currently rank for phrases like piano lessons + city, or voice lessons + city because we have a page specifically made for each keyword + city combination. The result is a very spammy looking site.
I'm afraid that eventually this duplicate content will be penalized especially when we move into hundreds of cities throughout the US. With that in mind, I came up with a system that would give each page original content specific to the keyword + city. Whenever we hire a new teacher the teacher must fill out a short teaching philosophy which will be displayed next to their picture on pages where they can teach. I go through the teaching philosophy and add a keyword or two for search engines as well.
For example someone who can teach piano lessons in Los Angeles would appear on the piano lessons in Los Angeles page. This way I have some more original content. I am also going to systematically ask for testimonials from all of our customers which will then be displayed on the respective pages as well. Therefore the more teachers and students we get, the more content we have available on our site.
With that said, I'm still trying to think of ways to make a better user experience with more specific content on each page. Recently I was looking through whiteboard Fridays and found this video:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday
I thought it may be a good idea if I went out and found perhaps local sheet music stores and added them to my database. Then I would link out to them on specific pages, saying "this is where you can go to buy sheet music" or "buy a trumpet here". It would be a lot more elegant than that, but hopefully you get the idea. My entire site is database driven so as soon as I put the new stores information in the database it could show up on the instrument/city pages within 10 miles of the store, or something like that.
I'm posting this for opinions. Is this a good strategy? Some of my worries are that these other businesses almost all provide lessons in their store, so they would be direct competitors. I also really don't want to detract from what I'm selling, which are lessons. I'm worried about conversion rates mostly.
The positives to the approach though may be that I can get some good linking to these individual pages from these stores (if they'll link to a competitor), which is something that would be very difficult to do for these deep instrument+city pages. Also I'm thinking if I included the stores physical address then perhaps search engines would be more encouraged that the instrument+city page actually represents a local service.
Any ideas and thoughts are greatly appreciated!
-
I've employed a similar strategy for a client who has several lead generation websites. The have the ability to sell their "service" in many cities. I created several hundred landing pages specific to each city, I.E.- "credit counselor in san antonio texas". Believe it or not it worked very well. The nice thing about this strategy is that you don't have to do any heavy link building because in reality how many people are optimizing/creating content for these terms. This is the very definition of long-tail.
Although the search volume is much lower the conversion rates are through the roof.
Some things that I believed helped us:
-
Hand written, 100% unique articles.
-
Low-mid level keyword saturation. (7 instances per 500 words)
-
Avoiding keyword stuffing in titles.
-
Including a unique image with keyword in alt tag.
-
Including rich media (videos tagged as taking place within the geographic location)
-
Rolling out 2-3 pages per day.
I wouldn't pay much attention to the on-page stuff anymore. I built these pages last summer and perhaps focused too much on keyword usage. If you provide links to relevant external websites tag them with the "nofollow" attribute. They'll still be recognized as being relevant and you aren't spreading your link juice everywhere.
-
-
Hi Brian,
The strategy looks good. The user experience is the most important element here as you will have to give the users relevant and well organized content. You can also consider adding additional elements like:
-
zip codes
-
price rage of the lessons (it will additionally give you an option to add classifiers like cheap, affordable, expensive, etc.
<classifier><instrument>lessons</instrument></classifier>
-
favoured (based on the rankings)
-
popular (based on usage and popularity)
Such elements can expand your potential exposure and you will surely generate more traffic pretty soon. You will still have unique content because you will be generating different results based on the elements chosen by the user, unique testimonials, etc.
I hope you have a custom search in place which will make the job for the users easier. But still you may add some quick links in the footer which will orientate them pretty well. For example:
Search by <city>, Search by <instrument>Lessons, Search by Price, Search by Popularty and so on. Place 10-15 links under each of these classifiers and you will be . Of course you can do even better if you split the process in some logical steps like choosing the City first, Then the type of lesson, than the price or popularity. Feel free to contact me for any questions or suggestions that you might have.</instrument></city>
-
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
-
Long tail seo
Hi, I watched a video about long tail seo and it was mentioned there that finding keywords that have 0-10 search volume or no data at all may potentially have super high value for your specific business. Since opportunity score will tend to be high because there’s minimal searches or no data at all, the trick is to check the top 10 SERPs and if none of the 10 used your keyword then you may have found yourself a great long tail seo opportunity. Could anyone please clarify why that would be a great long tail seo opportunity? Thank you. -Michelle
Whiteboard Friday | | tanahoy0 -
Local SEO Citation Questions
I have checked out some great resources from Rand and others here on SEOMoz, as well as some other great articles written on YouMoz by you guys! I have two questions when it comes to citations for Local SEO though. I have heard that Google does not really take the address into consideration when indexing local citations. Instead it is a combination of the business name + phone number + area code. On one hand this makes a lot of sense as far as Google crunching all the information. You can achieve a fairly accurate citation with just those three things and still weed out a lot of the "brand mentions" as citations. However this conflicts with a lot of what I have been reading and watching as far as whiteboard Fridays and blogs here on SEOMoz. Can someone provide some insight or sources concerning this? Secondly, in case of SEO and Web Design companies, such as ourselves, who do not receive the "One Box" for Google localized search, do citations play any lesser role in ranking for localized seo keywords? I am not sure if there is a definitive answer to these questions or if they are open ended. Regardless any insight would be invaluable!
Whiteboard Friday | | KesilConsultingLLC0 -
Link building webinars
Hello, I'm doing link building for an ecommerce site using 100 articles as content for link building Which pro webinars and videos should I watch, and is there anything out of date in the ones you list? Thanks!
Whiteboard Friday | | BobGW0 -
Unnatural links
Realizing that there are several links pointing to my domain, and most of them I do not recognize, who seem to have been made by a competitor in order to hurt me in Google, how should I to proceed?
Whiteboard Friday | | soulmktpro0 -
Some questions on Multilingual sites with domain strategy
hi seomoz addicted, i need your help.... did you see the webinar last friday? i totally agree with randfish,
Whiteboard Friday | | guidoboem
especially when he talks about redirection; To create my multilanguage site i inserted a php redirection on my site homepage that redirects visitors to the right domains. everything it was working fine when i realized that googlebot was no more able to index both sites becouse it was redirected only to one.... i think that i'll create an home page where visitor could select their language and then by setting a cookie that redirects only the returning visitors ... what do you think? I've just one doubt, shall i put this home page on both domain, and what will be the new url adress of my current home page? How the new home page have to look like ( in terms of seo )? i mean there will be only an image and two links for the .com and .it domain, isnn't it? and how to put the cookie for returning visitors? hope to have been clear thanks,
Guido0 -
GEO TAG Images for local SEO
Hello, In the pro webinar "All About Google Places – Do’s, Don’t, Best Practices and More" Benu recomends to geo tag pictures. I'm bad with coding and using joomla. Can somebody give me a step by step guide ? For now I use this code: What do I have to ad? I want to have the picture asociated with barcelona. What do you recomend? Use regional code Microformat I found this in wikipedia ; In case you recomend me to use this. Where does it go exactly? Thanks for help
Whiteboard Friday | | igrizo0 -
SEO MOZ Crawl Report Help
I recently bought a web page from a reputable Real Estate company (Real Estate Web Masters). They are known for their ability to write codes that index IDX feeds from MLS boards but they charge a huge rate compaired to other web devlopers in the Real Estate industry. After joining the SEO MOZ community and running a few SEO Bot Crawls I was scared when I reviewed the campaigns that I created. The report came back with Duplicate content on my blog and a bunch of on site errors and warnings. Below you will find a few quistions if you could help me with these answers I would appreciate it. 1. I have 28 URL's that show up on the error report that say they have duplicate content. Should I deleate all of these pages or erase all the content and try to make them more custom? I cant tell if this is a URL issue or a content issue. The bot reads the errors and sounds like it is trying to point out that there are more than one or two URL's on my page that point to the same blog post. If that is the problem then it is a programming issue. 2.Duplicate Page title= I have just created this blog so there are only about 30 submissions but almost every blog says it has a duplicate title? 3. Title element to long= how important is this to fix? I think this is also a programming issue becuase these title elements are created to show homes for sale within a certain price range say 200,000 to 300,000. There is a lot of desription within these tites on the homes that show up and there is a lot of homes for sale within that price range. So once again I think this would be a programming issue. I am trying to keep up with the Real Estate Web Masters on this subject but there SEO rates are $2500 a month and I am a start up company so I really need to learn how to do some of this on my own. Please advise! Relevant links My Web page Real Estate Web Masters The REW Forum I have asked for help from | I dont know if they will let you view this but I will update your response within that forum if that is ok with you.
Whiteboard Friday | | bwpatton0 -
How would you Oustsource Link Building if your budget is $200?
Hi, We all know that Link building is a tough job which requires persistent effort , and for a content creator it takes focus away from his job , which is "creating content". So content producers resort to "outsourcing" their link building. Now, unlike business/ enterprise , professional SEO's cost a fortune and beyond reach of an upcoming content creator. So he/she resorts to cheaper link building mediums like Forum Posts , Blog Comments , Article submissions , automate bookmarking site submissions etc. All the above software relatively do not cost much ($50-$100) BUT create links which do not have much value and hence not desirable. ============ My question is - ============= How can a content producer (like me) with a budget of meager $200 spend his money to get "most value" out of his link building activities
Whiteboard Friday | | krishru0