Optimizing for Local Terms
-
I am just building my website and planning keyword strategy for my pages.
How much is too much in terms of optimizing locally?
So if I want "web design firm birmingham al," is it overkill to add that in the URL slug, title tag, essentially all the on-page optimization?
/web-design-firm-birmingham-al
much uglier than
web-design-firm
Obviously, would prefer to think big and believe it can go beyond one city to compete in other markets statewide or regionally, thus, optimizing for one city is too narrow (and there's the ugly url thing).
I'm working on offsite local optimization, so I'm thinking this will not be necessary.
Thoughts?
-
Hi Again C Smith, Regarding this: "I bet there's a "best practice" implementation out there - perhaps an "Areas Served" channel, with the cities as sub-pages, and then some truly unique content on each page with some keywords seeded in." I recommend you take a look at this other discussion I'm having with a marketer whose client is a contractor in a service radius. View my very long, most recent comment toward the bottom of the thread to see my advice on how to do this legitimately (without being spammy): http://www.seomoz.org/q/use-schema-on-service-areas-page-for-local-business-2#post-123244 This is applicable to your business model, as well:)
-
@Miriam, Owen:
I agree that a light SEO hand is best. As one who was a writer and journalist first, I despise over-optimization.
When you are just starting out with a new website, it's tough to know how aggressive one should be. When looking at the competition for local search terms, it does seem like most of my competition that ranks well does "over-optimize" for these local search terms like "birmingham alabama web design."
However, I need to just keep my head down for the next couple of months and blog repeatedly.
I've seen that done - creating a unique page for each locale - I'm not a fan of it. I'm not knocking your comment, but it does seem that in most implementations I've seen, the content seems to be bordering on duplicate with only the local SEO terms swapped out. I bet there's a "best practice" implementation out there - perhaps an "Areas Served" channel, with the cities as sub-pages, and then some truly unique content on each page with some keywords seeded in.
Curious to what others might think of this strategy?
-
Hello C Smith,
Like your avatar.
Okay, so here's the thing: 'web design' is not actually a local query, due to Google's handling of this niche. I believe it was in January of 2010 that they stopped showing true blended/local/pack-type results for web design queries, so your approach to this is basically going to be organic, in terms of SEO, rather than what you'd be doing if you were a shoe store in Birmingham.
If you're located in Birmingham and your goal at this point is to attract Birmingham-based businesses, then I would imagine your whole website (not just a landing page) would make frequent mention of Birmingham and the businesses you serve there.
But, as Owen has rightly pointed out, it is better to use a light hand in this. Don't go overboard. Write titles, tags and text that read naturally. Remember, you don't have to string your phrases together every time. In other words, you don't have to write:
Birmingham Alabama Website Design Services
over and over again.
A paragraph might contain the words 'Birmingham' and 'Website Design' and 'Services' and 'Alabama' within it, of course, but they don't have to be stuck all in a row with glue:)
Between Panda, Penguin and EMD issues over the past year, Google is very clearly moving towards a preference for naturalness. So, using a gentle touch is going to serve you better in the long run, both as far as human users and search engine bots are concerned.
-
I'd suggest starting out a bit more modestly. Follow SEO best practices as outlined via the SEOmoz tools and Google SEO 101. Present the keywords in a natural way which lets the user know what the page is about. If you find you aren't gaining traction in terms of visibility for those terms, and your competitive analysis tells you, you should, then perhaps increase the optimization.
Exact match domain value is something Google is looking with a sharper eye on now so don't overdo that just to rank for a city phrase out of the gate.
-
Hi- I'm not an expert but it seems like you could create a main landing page that includes links to all possible cities (maybe use a div tag for all that extra info.) at: web-design-firm, then create a specific landing page for each city: web-design-firm/birmingham then optimize that page. It's a lot of work for someone advertising to a lot of different locations, but you could use the opportunity to add really great locally-specific content that would help your users and SEO.
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
-
Does optimization of PDF files for search matter in 2017?
Does optimization of PDF files for search matter in 2017? If yes, what is the optimal way to do it? Is there a risk that it will compete for rankings with the parent page that is it's linked to?
Keyword Research | | Scratch_MM1 -
Google: Is There a Way to Find Your "Unknown Search Terms"
I believe Google stopped reporting search terms for privacy reasons. All my searches show as "unknown". I found a video that showed how to get around this but it's not current. Is there any way to get your Google terms search information? Thanks, Jo-Ann
Keyword Research | | VinJGirl0 -
Should I concentrate keyword ranking locally or nationally?
Hi all, I have spent few last days reading here in community and watching Moz videos about keyword research. I used keywords planner tool. Here is the question. When I researched keywords I took into account search traffic nationwide UK rather then my local search volume. My photography business operates more for local customers rather then nationwide. Does it mean that I need to concentrate on my local city/region search volume rather then nationwide. After I have done Nationwide keyword research I realised that most of those keywords which are with really high search volumes are pretty much non existent in my local search results. I meant to the point that keyword search volume is under 10. Considering that I have small number of pages i could use them for, my guess is that it is no point to target those high search volume keywords as most likely those won't be my clients anyway. I might be getting all this wrong, but wanted to ask here. Thank you all, Regards, Armands
Keyword Research | | A_Fotografy1 -
Local keywords still relevant?
Now with Google localizing search increasingly personalizing queriesquery results, is it still necessary to add geo-specific modifiers to keywords? [reworded for clarity]
Keyword Research | | SSFCU0 -
Best Practices For Keyword Optimization
Hey currently building a new page on a clients site in the weight loss niche. The keywords he wants to rank for are the following: <colgroup><col width="198"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
Keyword Research | | monster99
| [fat burning foods] | 49500 |
| [foods that burn fat] | 22200 |
| [fat burning foods for women] | 2900 |
| [belly fat burning foods] | 2900 |
| [best fat burning foods] | 1900 |
| [fat burning foods for men] | 1900 |
| [list of fat burning foods] | 720 | His site is new, but he has excellent content production capabilities. My question is, in terms of optimizing the page (the title and url) for these keywords would you focus on the highest volume keyword. In this case the highest volume keyword is "fat burning foods" however is the most competitive and dominated by high domain authority sites (50+ vs. clients site which is around 30). Thus its highly unlikely he will rank for that keyword for quite a while. But for the keyword term "best fat burning foods" the competition is alot less in terms of DA and other factors but volume is smaller with 1900 hits a month. So would you optimize the page (the title and url) for "best fat burning food" or would you optimize thinking about the long-term and eventually ranking the keyword "fat burning foods". My thinking would be to optimize the page for "fat burning foods". And that the benefits of optimizing (url and title) for "best fat burning foods" isn't ideal for the long-run. Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated. Cheers, Mark0 -
Are on-page optimization tools becoming outdated?
So from what I've noticed, Google is using a lot of semantics in their algorithm. When it comes to using a tool to determine on-page, keyword/phrase factors, most on-page optimization tools check exact matches and give you a rating and suggestion based on that. What about synonyms and "natural", related terms? My question is, are these tools becoming more inaccurate by not using semantic/synonym checks?
Keyword Research | | Talooma0 -
Most Important Keyword Term
Question about a sites most important keyword term. So lets say you have a website and your most important keyword term is "Blue Widgets", you also have a page named "blue-widgets.htm". What do we do with our index page in this instance? Especially for the title tag? Should I put "Blue Widgets" in the title tags of both pages? I'm guessing this would be a duplicate meta tag error? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Keyword Research | | TRICORSystems
Thanks
-Brandon0 -
Does anyone have a best practice for identifying local keyword terms?
I utilize a variety of keyword tools when I'm doing research, Google keyword tools, word tracker, keyword spy, etc but as soon as I throw in a city or state, the numbers seem to drop drastically or disappear. I understand that naturally these numbers will decrease because it will be a less popular term, but I feel like I have a great phrase and i don't understand why there isn't ANY local data for it. I was wondering what process you go through to specifically identify local terms.
Keyword Research | | webdecorators1