Geo.placename and geo.region different from physical location
-
Hello -
I am considering adding geotags to landing pages for services offered. The problem I have is that the physical location of the business, registered on Google places, is different from where these services are performed. The company is a lawn care provider that services several small cities and is based out of our residence. I plan on creating landing pages for each of these cities so I am hoping to use these tags to indicate to the world that this location is my desired audience.
Example, the business is in a town called New Market, MN population small so that is my location on Google places. 99.9% of the business we do is done in neighboring cities of Northfield, Lakeville and Eagan.
Is is it an acceptable practice to put geotags on landing pages for those cities or would this be considered dirty pool? On the eagan-lawn-care page place a geotag for Eagan and a different one on the Lakeville page?
Gracias!
Derrick
-
Hi Derrick,
I hear you on that, but Google's total guidelines for Local businesses (http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528) are very cursory...some might say intentionally so. Google is not motivated to explain word for word how to achieve high rankings in their system, so while the basic mantra of creating content for users and not search engines is their public message, the truth of the matter is that a great deal of what Local SEOs and SEOs do is experimental and is very much about the bots and not people.
When something is found to work, the idea gets spread around and becomes an accepted best practice that aids ranking efforts, until Google changes their rules (think Penguin, Panda, and the never-ending changes of policy in Local). Schema and other types of markup are relatively new, so everyone is pretty much experimenting with this. What you would be doing would fall in line with that, if you choose to test your strategy idea. Who knows, you might discover something no one else has noticed! You're not alone in wishing the guidelines were totally clear about every scenario, but one might say that it's not in Google's best interests to operate that way, right?
-
Thanks Miriam -
I wish there were clear cut guidelines for this so I didn't have to guinea pig it.
Derrick
-
Hi Derrick,
Thank you for clarifying. While I don't think this would hurt you if you're just adding it to the city landing pages, I doubt that it would have much, if any, ability to influence your organic rankings in places where your business isn't physically located. I would imagine that links would be a much more influential element in regards to your city landing pages than this markup would. Personally, I wouldn't implement this for my own clients because, after all, their content is stemming from their physical locale, just like their services are, but I'm not predicting that this would put you at risk for a penalty or anything, so if your want to experiment, go ahead. Maybe try adding it to one of your city landing pages and not another and see if you can discern that it has made any difference for better or worse?
Good luck!
-
Sorry, I am referring to schema.
-
Hi Derrick,
Can you define, specifically, what you mean by geotags. Are you talking about Schema, rich snippets, geotagged images, something else? Please describe.
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
-
Same URL, different Drupal content types
Hi all, I am working in Drupal which isn't always SEO-friendly. I want to convert some of our articles that are currently in an old article type to our new shiny longform template without losing SEO value. The process we use right now is to: change the URL of the old article in the CMS from /article-title to /article-title-old and then make the longform template /article-title in the CMS. Then hit publish. That way we can avoid having to mess with redirects. My concerns are that this will be seen as a bait and switch by Google. They are, after all, two separate pages — node-1 and node-2 on the back end — that are being smushed into the same skin aka same URL. I don't know if updating to the new template wipes out some of the info Google may have deemed important. I guess you could argue it's a redesign by CMS but I'm still not sure. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | webbedfeet0 -
Website in English targeting different countries - is it worth investing in .com?
Hi, I was wondering... Let's say there is a company in Norway and It sell tours in Norway. Website is only in english, content stays exactly the same for each country (as the website is for people looking for tours in Norway). The domain is registered with .no ccTLD. Main target is USA, Canada and Uk and couple of other countries in Europe. Would the website benefit from having .com instead of .no? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LeszekNowakowski0 -
Location targeting with no physical location
If you have no physical premises (i.e. operate online) but you only serve clients in a specific area, what is best practice for targeting a local area? I know G. Places can be used if you have a premises, and that .co.uk / hosting server location make a difference, but beyond that... ? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | underscorelive1 -
Crawl Diagnostics - How to find where broken links are located?
Hi, One of my sites has a 4xx error that has been picked up in the crawl diagnostics section. It is a broken link. Does anybody know if it is possible for me to find out which page the broken link was found on? I have checked all of the pages on the site that I thought were linking to the page that seems to have a problem but all of these links are fine / not broken. Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CherryK0 -
Multiple (different) domains and canonicalisation
Hello, We've had experience with canonical tags for various domains before, such as tidying up product categories etc... However, can anyone point me to any guidelines about different domains using canonicalisation. For example: If I had the following sites, all with identical content - exampledomain.com completelydifferentdomain.net anothertotallydifferentdomain.com With canonical tags pointing to the first one (exampledomain.com), could this be harmful? Is it better to 301 redirect the other sites? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sarbs0 -
Moving a blog from unique domain to root /blog/ but on 2 different servers? HELP!
I have a main site hosted on one server, I have the blog hosted on another server - BOTH of which my team has FULL control over. I ultimately want the blog to reside on the root domain: www.mysite.com/blog/ My network team is saying "DNS will not allow this to happen, the resolution will ultimately have to be on blog.website.com" Has anyone out there done this? Is it even possible? HELP!
Technical SEO | | BCA0 -
Difference between changing sitename.com and sitename.com/ info?
my crawl is showing duplicate content between my sitename.com and sitename.com/ i remember the beginner's guide referencing that these are separate websites - but how do you modify their title info on a wordpress.org blog, and what's the difference between getting to these two sites? also, are there any wordpress.org plugins to mass fix meta descriptions, and not founds, retroactively? i have all in one seo, but not sure how to apply the changes retroactively. a new crawl shows too many to fix manually (89+) missing metas, mostly due to multiple pages on categories, etc. and other time consuming, tedious generations.. any help appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | prospects0 -
Htaccess 301s to 3 different sites
Hi, I'm an htaccess newbie, and I have to redirect and split traffic to three new domains from site A. The original home page has most of the inbound links so I've set up a 301 that goes to site B, the new corporate domain. Options +FollowSymLinks
Technical SEO | | ellenru
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Brand websites C and D need 301s for their folders in site A but I have no idea how to write that in relationship to the first redirect, which really is about the home page, contact and only a few other pages. The urls are duplicates except for the new domain names. They're all on Linux..Site A is about 150 pages, should I write it by page, or can I do some kind of catch all (the first 301) plus the two folders? I'd really appreciate any insight you have and especially if you can show me how to write it. Thanks 🙂0