SEO for location outside major city
-
Hello,
I'm hoping to get some opinions on optimising a site for a client based 30 minutes outside of Dublin. Obviously there is a higher search volume for "x in Dublin" than "x in small town". What do you think the best strategies are for incorporating the "Dublin" into keywords? For example is it OK to use phrases like "x near Dublin" or "x in Greater Dublin", or do you think this is a bit misleading?
The client in question sells good online, so the customer wouldn't physically have to visit the store.
Thanks!
-
Glad to be of help, Alice, and good luck!
Miriam
-
Thanks for your replies Adam and Miriam.
You have confirmed what I was thinking already - that I could optimise for phrase like "x near Dublin" but it will be very hard to rank higher than competitors who are physically based within the city limits.
-
Hello Alice,
Were you attempting to do Local SEO for this business, then the answer would be 'no, you should not attempt to optimize for Dublin as your main target.' The reason for this is that local results are based on the validity of the physical address and local phone number.
Your case sounds somewhat different, however. If no customers come to the business, then it won't qualify as a local business in the eyes of Google. Because of this, yes, you can certainly optimize for phrases like 'near Dublin' if you feel this will assist the client in some way. But, what you should not expect from the work is that you will be able to outrank true local businesses, locally, who have physical locations in Dublin and are able to take advantage of the different local options like Google+ Local.
Hope this helps!
Miriam
-
Personally I don't see any problem with you identifying your business as Dublin based. You are clearly close enough to the city to service it so I don't see a problem here.
You often see businesses citing their location as London or as having a London office which is technically not in London but in one of the neighbouring counties such as Surrey, Middlesex, Essex or Kent. As long as you are close enough to the main city then I see no problem in claiming your location as that main city. Others may disagree but that's what I think and in practice, many businesses already do this.
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
-
Is that trailing slashes necessity for an SEO doing blogs
Hi, I have a website, https://australiatimenow.com.au/ I would like to remove the trailing slash and move to .HTML formal. I have never done SEO on my articles. Is that, any issue causes if I move to .HTML format?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | joshnajenny0 -
Active Rain and SEO
I have been an active rain member for a long time. When I check my web site I can not find any links from Active Rain. I just updated my Active Rain profile and upgraded to their paid subscription. Can you tell me if this blog is creating a follow link back to my web site at www.RealEstatemarketLeaders.com the blog on active rain is here. at http://activerain.trulia.com/blogsview/4529309/hud-homes-for-sale-in-tri-cities-wa
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Brandon_Patton0 -
Local Map Pack: What's the best way to handle twin cities?
Google is increasing cracking down on bad local results. However, in many regions of the US there are twin cities or cities that reside next to each other, like Minneapolis-Saint Paul or Kansas City. According to Google guidelines your business should only be listed in the city in which your business is physically located. However, we've noticed that results just outside of the local map pack will still rank, especially for businesses that service the home. For example, let's say you have a ACME Plumbing in Saint Paul, MN. If you were to perform a search for "Plumbing Minneapolis" you typically see local Minneapolis plumbers, then Saint Paul outliers. Usually the outliers are in the next city or just outside of the Google map centroid. Are there any successful strategies to increase rank on these "Saint Paul outliers" that compete with local Minneapolis results or are the results always going lag behind in lieu of perceived accuracy? We're having to compete against some local competitors that are using some very blackhat techniques to rank multiple sites locally (in the map results). They rank multiple sites for the same company, under different company names and UPS store addresses. Its pretty obvious, especially when you see a UPS store on the street view of the address! We're not looking to bend the rules, but rather compete safely. Can anything be done in this service based scenario?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AaronHenry0 -
Black Hat SEO Case Study - Private Link Network - How is this still working?
I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so. How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total. As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords. I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this? Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful. I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
Does IP Blacklist cause SEO issues?
Hi, Our IP was recently blacklisted - we had a malicious script sending out bulk mail in a Joomla installation. Does it hurt our SEO if we have a domain hosted on that IP? Any solid evidence? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Does posting on Craigslist damage our SEO or reuptation?
We have a website that's a single person barbershop. She has been promoting on Craigslist, and that is outranking the website in the SERPs. However, the craigslist results showing up are actually expired and don't link to anything. They just seem to be cached by Craigslist. My question is, is Craigslist considered to generally not be a good avenue for directing inbound links for services on your site? Or is it a good strategy to use Craigslist to build link traffic for service businesses? I get mixed responses when I search for this. Thanks eYtdHtg.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smallpotatoes0 -
Vendor Descriptions for SEO... Troublesome?
Howdy! I have been tossing this idea around in my head over the weekend and I cannot decide which answer is correct, so here I am! We a retailer of products and is currently in the midst of redesigning our site-- not only design but also content. The issue that we are facing is with product descriptions from our vendors. We are able to access the product descriptions/specs from their websites and use them on ours, but my worry is that we will get tagged for duplicate content. Other retailers (as well as the vendors) are using this content as well, so I don't want this to have an adverse effect on our ranking. There are so many products that it would be a large feat to re-write unique content-- not to mention that the majority of the rhetoric would be extremely similar. What have you seen in your experiences in similar situations? Is it bad to use the descriptions? Or do we need to bite the bullet and do our best to re-write hundreds of product descriptions? Or is there a way to use the descriptions and tag it in a way that won't have Google penalize us? I originally thought that if we have enough other unique content on our site, that it shouldn't be as big of a deal, but then I realized how much of our site's structure is our actual products. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jpretz0 -
HOW TO: City Targeted Landing Pages For Lead Generation
Hi guys, So one of my clients runs a web development agency in San Diego and for lead generation purposes we are thinking of creating him city targeted landing pages which will all be on different domains ie. lawebdesginstudio / sfwebdesigngurus I plan to register these 20-30 domains for my client and load them all up on a my single linux server I have from godaddy. I noticed however today using google's keyword tool that roughly only 5-10 cities have real traffic worth trying to capture to turn into leads. Therefore I am not sure if its even worth building those extra 20 landing pages since they will receive very little traffic. My only thought is, if I do decide to build all 30 landing pages, then I assume I will have a very strong private network of authority websites that I can use to point to the clients website. I mean I figure I can rank almost all of them page 1 top 5 within 2-3 months. My question is: 1. Do city targeted micro sites for the purpose of lead generation still work? If so are there any threads that have more info on this topic? 2. Do you suggest I interlink all 30 sites together and perhaps point them all to the money site? If so i'm wondering if I should diversify the ip's that I used to register the domains as well as the whois info. Thanks guys, all help is appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AM2130