Help with local Seo?
-
Hi,
I am really struggling with current predicament i find myself in. I am a small to medium sized business based in Newcastle in the UK and am trying to rank well locally for the keywords that i feel my customers will be searching for locally.
I have got to the stage where i am on page 1 of google uk or nearly there but cannot compete against the national companies who have the search terms then just add pages for virtually every city in the country.
For example my main product is "Artificial Grass" and my city/town is Newcastle
This is where my office is and where my customers are. This is also where my google places page states.
Now theres a company that sells Artificial Grass called www.asgoodasgrass.co.uk
that are based no where near but use the power of there site to come up in every local search by adding a page "Artificial Grass Newcastle" as well as hundreds of others.
They rank 3rd and im 8th.
There actual Newcastle page is poor, where as i put everything into my page including pics, video etc.
Still no joy.
I feel i am always going to rank behind these big boys even though i am the actual local company and have no intention of working others area that are not local to me.
By the time i rank behind the above type companies and the likes of yell.com i feel i am never going to be seen and fall back on expensive adwords to help me along.
I am a complete newbie at this and would love any help or tips you could give to give me a fighting chance in my area.
My site is www.totaldrivewaysne.co.uk incase you want to look
as you will have gathered my other primary product is driveways for which also i feel like i have a million competitors!
many many thanks for any responses
John
-
Hi John,
I can tell you have actually already done quite a lot in order to make sure your site ranks well.
I won't repeat what others have stated before me, but just wanted to mention a couple of things that might help a little... and as we know, every little helps
- Use a structured format for your address Schema.org, or other microformat.
- Structure your URLs in such a way that the location is mentioned within the URL (make it easy for Google to crawl and for your customers to navigate). You might have to rethink the site architecture a little.
- Create content that is optimised both for keyword and location (separate pages for every combination) > Local Landing Pages!
- The above will also allow you to have optimised Title and Description tags.
- Try to obtain Reviews that actually mention the keyword of the service your are trying to rank higher for.
Hope any of the above helps?
Cheers
Greg
-
Hi John,
Searching for 'artificial grass newcastle' from my location in the US, I actually see your company ranking #1...not that this is of much help to you. I have some questions:
-
If your core phrase is 'artificial grass newcastle' is google showing true, pinned local results for this term when you search for it from your location in Newcastle? Or, is everything organic (no pins)?
-
If this is not your core term, what is?
-
Is there a term related to your business that does bring up pinned local results? If so, what is it?
I'm asking these questions because it's important to determine whether you need to pursue a local SEO strategy or a traditional organic one in order to gain high rankings. Can you provide further details, possibly screenshots of what you are experiencing? I'll check back.
-
-
Hi John, that's a really frustrating situation, especially when you feel that the national companies have thin content.
Unfortunately there's no quick way to leap frog those national companies - being big and reputable, their sites are considered to be authoritative and they have a good range of links. You'll have to build up authority and high quality links over time to overtake them. JakubMovic's advice about contacting local journalists is a good way to gain links from authoritative sources.
I also don't see a Google Local Business listing for your site - is this something that you have implemented yet? This can be a really great way for local companies to compete with national ones (with the listings often appearing first in the search results), and it's free. http://www.google.com/local/add/ If you do have a local listing it might be a good idea to review which keywords you're targeting so that you appear for the highest value keyword combinations.
Good luck - it sounds like you've made a great start and with a bit more time hopefully you'll reap the rewards.
-
Hi!
You need links, especially high quality links. Start from preparing your SEO strategy, in your case you don't need huge amount of links for your local keywords. If you'll plan everything wisely you will see progress.
You can start from directories that you can find at http://www.seomoz.org/directories this is good start for you. Think about intresting informations about your niche or about product you sell. Write short press release for local news websites maybe a few actual trends about that kind of business. Search for local journalists which are interested in local business or economy, if you give them interesting info about your business you have chance that they will use it and write something about it. And you will earn link!
You can also write an article to post on site like ArticleBase, remember that it must be unique and good content. Remember about social bookmarking sites, facebook page (i noticed that you already have it), Google+ page and many more.
Hope it will help you.
Good luck!
-
It looks like basically all of your inbound links are from low-quality directories and article marketing. If you want to move up, you're going to have to do some real linkbuilding.
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
-
Are SEO Friendly URLS Less Important Now That Google Is Indexing Breadcrumb Markup?
Hi Moz Community and staffers, Would appreciate your thoughts on the following question: **Are SEO friendly URLS less important now that Google is indexing breadcrumb markup in both desktop and mobile search? ** Background that inspired the question: Our ecommerce platform's out of the box functionality has very limited "friendly url" settings and would need some development work to setup an alias for more friendly URLS. Meanwhile, the breadcrumb markup is implemented correctly and indexed so it seems there's no longer an argument for improved CTR with SEO friendly URLS . With that said I'm having a hard time justifying the URL investment, as well as the 301 redirect mapping we would need to setup, and am wondering if more friendly URLs would lead to a significant increase in rankings for level of effort? Sidenote: We already rank well for non-brand and branded searches since we are brand manufacturer with an ecommerce presence. Our breadcrumbs are much cleaner & concise than our URL structure. Here are a couple examples. Category URL: http://www.mysite.com/browse/category1/subcat2/subcat3/_/N-7th
Algorithm Updates | | jessekanman
Breadcrumb: www.mysite.com > category1 > subcat2 > subcat3 Product URL: http://www.mysite.com/product/product-name/_/R-133456E112
Breadcrumb: www.mysite.com > category1 > subcat2 > subcat3 > product name The "categories" contain actual keywords just hiding them here in the example. According to my devs they can't get rid of the "_" but could possible replace it with a letter. Also they said it's an easier fix to make the URLs always lower case. Lastly some of our product URLS contain non-standard characters in the product name like "." and "," which is also a simpler fix according to my developers. Looking forward to your thoughts on the topic! Jesse0 -
Ecommerce - SEO Quick Wins?
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone had any quick wins for an ecommerce site & SEO. I am the only SEO and we have a small online team and an ecommerce site with thousands of product pages. It's impossible to optimise everything, and we have taken the top 100 products and optimised them - starting from scratch with keyword research. I'm now struggling to prioritize what we need next - I know we need better internal linking, content, social and lots more, but this isn't something I can get through alone. I need a starting point and perhaps something with a quick win initially? Thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Getting listed in the Google local result - help!
Good day, I'm really struggling to get a client to appear in the Google Local map snapshot (on the right of the SERPs), even when their company name is Googled. I've tried everything including getting the main Google Local account verified, had some reviews put up, all the required and relevant info has been completed, yet their location and the map never appear. Any help out there as to how I can remedy this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Martin_S1 -
Do you Feel Street View for inside a local business is a ranking factor for the local algorithm?
I'm working in a market where the Google Trusted photographer is rolling out. The question came up if providing this data would boost your rankings in the local map pack. I've been asking a few fellow SEO peeps but I thought I would throw it out here for your opinion.
Algorithm Updates | | BCutrer0 -
Can anybody help me please!
Hi, I'm not an SEO expert! I'm even not a professional Webmaster. I'm a professional "Private Investigator", owner of a PI Agency in Bangkok (Thailand). Our website (thailand-investigation.com) was ranked, 18 months ago, on the 1st page in Google, Bing & Yahoo search engines for our major keywords! We are still good in Bing and Yahoo but we dropped to the 5th page and more in Google! I do not know when it happened? I was busy working managing my business and was not taking care on our website (BIG mistake)!I realized it beginning of august 2012. I redesigned our website, ad content, new pages...Started 2 months ago, but still no result with our home page! The new pages start to show-up!??? But still far away! I need to understand why? What is going on!? Why Google "de-ranked" us? And what to do to recover!!! I'm here to learn, try to understand and take your advises! So, please give me advises and if someone is ready to audit my website and explain me what to do, I'm willing to pay the service [not to much 😉 ]. Thanks, helpButton.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | MichelMauquoi0 -
Climate of fear in the world of SEO
There certainly appears to be a certain climate of fear about backlinks at the mo, and not without reason. I was wondering why Google moved from simply discounting links to punishing site owners for their backlink profiles, many of which were built up when the risks of punishment weren't there? I mean, I could send them the names of at least 1,000 sites in linkfarms / blog rings - you name it. I'm sure most of us on here could do the same. Responding to the whims of Google is such a waste of time and resources. Why doesn't Google simply choose a direction and stick with it? What is their strategy exactly?
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Big site SEO: To maintain html sitemaps, or scrap them in the era of xml?
We have dynamically updated xml sitemaps which we feed to Google et al. Our xml sitemap is updated constantly, and takes minimal hands on management to maintain. However we still have an html version (which we link to from our homepage), a legacy from back in the pre-xml days. As this html version is static we're finding it contains a lot of broken links and is not of much use to anyone. So my question is this - does Google (or any other search engine) still need both, or are xml sitemaps enough?
Algorithm Updates | | linklater0 -
Are the tags from schema.org beneficial for SEO?
I just came across schema.org, which has a massive list of attribute tags that can be added to HTML code, presumable with the benefit of giving search engines clear signals about your content -- and by extension, presumably boosting the ranking of good-quality content sites. Many of the tags point back to schema.org for definitions of content types. Since it's the first time I've seen this, I thought I'd ask the question: Do the tags listed at schema.org carry any weight with Google, or is this a self-promotional effort by schema.org to become an arbiter of SEO and content encoding? Thanks folks.
Algorithm Updates | | RobM4160