Local SEO - Rich content and list of towns enough?
-
I'm working on creating pages to target local SEO. I've created pages for example 'wedding band london' with useful content and optimised them with title tags, alt tags etc and will continue to do so for major cities and queries where there are significant search volume. However, I also want to pickup longtail local search queries such as 'wedding band camden' etc... Will adding a list of towns somewhere on the page for each city or county help drive traffic to the site from such queries? Is so what's the best way to structure the page?
-
Hi Samuel,
Google will consider you most relevant to whatever your physical address is - this is the locale for which you can work towards your main local/blended rankings.
Beyond this, yes, you can work for organic visibility for other towns you serve in. Having a unique landing page for each of your major service cities is a smart way to go. You can then linkbuild to these pages to go after organic visibility.
I agree that you should not simply go the route of listing towns in a list. Have you considered blogging? Instead of putting too many geo terms per page, have you considered using a blog to showcase weddings you've done in Camden, etc.? A few photos of your band, folks dancing, pics of the venue and 400-600 words of text describing the event, songs the couple requested, testimonials from the bride and groom or family members would make a strong blog post on the subject and could get that long tail traffic you seek. The nice thing about this would be that it would naturally generate very unique content. Though I'm sure there are similarities in all your gigs, each one must be a little bit different, right? And, it would enable you to optimize part of your site for things like regional and neighborhood/district names.
I hope this is a helpful suggestion.
-
Hi Gerry,
Thanks for your reply. It makes sense not to include too many towns so as not to risk diluting the value of the main keyword. Most of the long tail search terms I'm talking about are likely to bring me 2 - 5 clicks a week as an estimate. It does seem, and IS a lot of work to build pages for low traffic keywords so I guess I need to figure out if it's worth my time or if my time is better spent building links and improving domain/page authority. The reason I think building local pages is the best option is simply because the industry is so competitive for the main keyword terms and I think that perhaps highly targeted local terms would convert better anyway.
I think I'll go with the strategy of short but useful content (maybe around 100 words) which might be a good compromise as theses pages wouldn't take too long to build. As the long tail keywords are not competitive (most people don't bother with them at all) hopefully they'll rank page one pretty easily. I could potenitially get a few hundred highly targeted leads this way.
-
So I'm no expert, but I've spent a lot of energy and money with several revisions related to local SEO. Here it is for what it's worth and you'll have to judge for yourself.
The more cities and town names you add to any one page the more you will dilute the organic value in the one town or city that is most important to you. You may want to include the names of a few towns within a city if they are a logical and natural language why in which people speak about a given place. For example, if you were writing a page about New York, you could logically include info on Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Manhattan and (you might want to not bother with Staten Island), but you certainly would not want to mention services in Nassau and Suffolk which are well outside the city boundaries. But that wouldn't negate the thought of a separate page for each borough.
So how do you deal with services across a large geographical area without massive duplication? There are more and more problems arising with SEO placement with duplicate and "near duplicate" content. On my core website I have tried to use templates with some success, where I generate pages for different cities and towns using some common content, but leaving room for custom content on each page - more than just a city name variable. (Be sure that the meta data is also very unique). For my business, which is pest control, weather has a big impact on pest pressure. So I have a template for coastal, inland, mountain and valley towns - plus a few more. Then I also leave room for additional custom content for each city/town page - to eliminate near duplicate content and to address real differences between towns. Each town has it's own demographics and culture - so I address that as it relates to the products and services I offer.
Still, the best bet is to create totally unique pages for each targeted geographic area. That takes time. I am gradually addressing this, but wow, serving all of Southern California means creating a lot of unique local pages. I your business too, I am sure that in different cities and towns you will find that customers have different preferences and budgets. You can address that with unique pages for each geo.
I came across a company that for a while has had very good SEO placement, but with a tactic that I think will get detected. This company has massively duplicate content, but it is not on the same website. They have purchased separate domain names for every town and populated the identical content across these websites. I am sure Google will start smacking this website soon enough.
I hope this helps.
Gerry
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
-
Duplicated Content on Wordpress Mobile&Desktop versions- Is it bad for SEO?
Hello, I use a Wordpress theme for displaying mobile and desktop versions separately. The problem is that if you use tools like screaming frog or if you look at the code (view source), you can detect duplicated content. But if you're browsing on your mobile you will see only the content I have created for the mobile version and the same if you're looking at the desktop version, you will only see the desktop content.
On-Page Optimization | | AlphaRoadside
Is this creating an SEO problem? If it is, please let me know why and if it has a solution. Thanks in advance.0 -
Product Descriptions (SEO)
Hello, I sell products relating to wood. Although the products vary, I like to give description of the wood type for the customers who might not be familiar with it. Will it hurt my rankings to give the same descriptions for the same wood type as long as the majority of the description is different? Here is an example of the layout: 1. Different description for different products 2. The same short description for the same wood types (seen throughout multiple pages) Hopefully my question makes sense.
On-Page Optimization | | mattl992 -
What constitutes duplicate content on a page?
I am working on SEO for a Shopify store. Their products are very similar, hence the pages are so similar that Moz shows them as duplicate content. The only difference in the product pages is the title and model number. I am going to "go for the gold" and try re-writing all the product descriptions. It's incredibly difficult due to the products being nearly identical with just a minor variation. I know I could go down the road of just creating variants --- but the customer is not down for that. Here's my question: what constitutes duplicate content? 80% of the content, 90%???? If I can going to re-write the descriptions, what should I aim for? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | steve_linn1 -
Phone number for SEO
We have had an interesting question from a client. They have asked if removing their phone number from their website would have an affect on their rankings. Our immediate answer was 'No' but it may affect the Brand, Usability and Customer experience by restricting the methods of contact. This then made us think that perhaps then it could have an effect in the long term. This situation is also complicated by the fact that they do not have a Google Local Plus account for operational, sensitivity reasons (they don't want to openly publicise their address) We believe that there shouldn't be any negative affect but thought we would open a discussion. Thanks in advance for any comments/ideas.
On-Page Optimization | | vital_hike0 -
Dealing with thin content/95% duplicate content - canonical vs 301 vs noindex
My client's got 14 physical locations around the country but has a webpage for each "service area" they operate in. They have a Croydon location. But a separate page for London, Croydon, Essex, Luton, Stevenage and many other places (areas near Croydon) that the Croydon location serves. Each of these pages is a near duplicate of the Croydon page with the word Croydon swapped for the area. I'm told this was a SEO tactic circa 2001. Obviously this is an issue. So the question - should I 301 redirect each of the links to the Croydon page? Or (what I believe to be the best answer) set a rel=canonical tag on the duplicate pages). Creating "real and meaningful content" on each page isn't quite an option, sorry!
On-Page Optimization | | JamesFx0 -
Duplicate content
the report shows duplicate content for a category page that has more than one page. how can we avoid this since i cannot make a different meta content for the second page of the category page: http://www.geographics.com/2-Cool-Colors-Poster-Board-14x22/c183_66_327_387/index.html http://www.geographics.com/2-Cool-Colors-Poster-Board-14x22/c183_66_327_387/index.html?page=2 thanks, Madlena
On-Page Optimization | | Madlena0 -
Duplicate Content Question
On the home page of my site I have a read more link that takes you to a different URL with basically the same content, just more of it. Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/ Read More Link on Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/deckmaintain.htm I think this may be affecting my seo. Any suggestions on what I should do about this? Should I add a canonical to the home page and/or on the other page? Both pages are indexed by google. Thanks for any help or tips.
On-Page Optimization | | opwdecks0