Is it still best practice to optimize your site with geographic long tail keywords?
-
Since Google is tailoring search results to user IP and location, is it still best practice to optimize your site titles etc. with long-tail geographic keywords? For example, instead of optimizing a page for "dentist in West Palm Beach, Florida", search users who are IN West Palm Beach can just search "dentists" and a list of local dentists will be displayed (both in the local listings AND organic search listings). I'd love to see Rand cover this on a Whiteboard Friday!
-
Hi Ricky,
Absolutely, when working with local businesses like dentists, you should be specifying their location in many areas of their website. These might include title and meta description tags, alt tags, link anchor text, on-page content, and schema-encoded NAP (name, address, phone number) on the footer and contact page of the website. Of course, do this in a non-spammy manner - as Wesley mentions - stuffing is neither necessary nor desirable. Your brick-and-mortar clients will typically be hoping for inclusion in Google's local results for the city in which they are physically located. Google will show these results both to searches who are in that city or who are including that city in their search term. For SABs (service area businesses like plumbers and carpet cleaning companies), again, the client should aim for local inclusion for the city where they are physically located, but organic inclusion for their service cities where they aren't physically located. This is how it typically works.
-
Optimizing the page with geographic long tail keywords is still best practice.
Google does display local search results based on IP adress when they have access to the location data of the given person.I would still recommend using the location based keywords as long as you don't keyword stuff your texts.
Hope i answered your question
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
-
A question on keywords that rank 51+
Good afternoon everyone. I wanted to pose a question to the group about keywords and the "on-page optimization - grade a page tool." I have a list of keywords that I am trying to rank for. Some of them are not ranked in the top 50, so on the keyword ranking tool it gives you the 51+ message in the rank column. For the items that are ranked I can try to improve them by looking at grade a page and typing in the URL and keyword. It will then give me a score and suggestions on how to improve it. With that being said, is there an easy way to find out which pages I should be optimizing those keywords which rank at 51+ for, besides typing the keywords in Google and seeing what URL it associates with the specific keyword? I hope the question above is clear.
Moz Pro | | trumpfinc0 -
Seasonal keyword tracking locally?
I'm managing a project for a local fence contractor in Wisconsin. During Fall, his site was getting a fair amount of traffic. (We only track traffic from the State of Wisconsin and exclude office IPs.) For November, traffic tanked and keywords fell. Is there a way to check the search volume by month to see if the recent extreme cold and early snow are the culprit, (people not searching for fences), or should I be looking elsewhere for a problem? I know I have to get more pages optimized for ideal keywords but time is extremely tight on this project. (But, that's another problem and story all of itself!) Thanks!
Moz Pro | | JanetJ0 -
What is the best approach to handling 404 errors?
Hello All - I'm a new here and working on the SEO on my site www.shoottokyo.com. When I am finding 4xx (Client Errors) what is the best way to deal with them? I am finding an error like this for example: http://shoottokyo.com/2010/11/28/technology-and-karma/ This may have been caused when I updated my permalinks from shoottokyo.com/2011/09/postname to shoottokyo.com/postname. I was using the plug in Permalinks moved permanently to fix them. Sometimes I am able to find http://shoottokyo.com/a-very-long-week/www.newscafe.jp and I can tell that I simply have a bad link to News Cafe and I can go to the post and correct it but in the case of the first one I can't find out where the crawler even found the problem. I'm using Wordpress. Is it best to just use a plugin like 'Redirection' to move the rest that have errors where I cannot find the source of the issue? Thanks Dave
Moz Pro | | ShootTokyo0 -
Noob question about keyword research
I have a client that does commercial building renovations. I looked at a lot of their competitors and did some googling to see what words people were using. Some terms such as commercial fit-outs, didn't really have any search volume. I did pick out some that had some volume, Google KW Tool said anywhere from 46 local searches for something like "commercial construction contractors" to 320 for "commercial construction companies". However, no data really shows up for local specifics like "commercial construction companies philadelphia". I tried looking at competitors in the Moz site explorer, but not too many were doing much link building to look at anchor text. Question 1) When it says "local monthly searches", is it defaulting to MY local area based on my google info? So if im in Philly area that local area is whats displaying? Question 2) I tried to run the same keyword list I pulled from Adwords tool through Moz KW tool, and it tells me some of the terms don't have ANY traffic! So know I am real confused as to whether the KW's i picked are good or crap! I attached image of the stuff. CnYyNb3
Moz Pro | | satoridesign0 -
Keyword Suggestion Tool
I want to know is their any good keyword suggestion tool other than Google keyword suggestion tool and keyword planner. I need to have a list of free ones only for now.
Moz Pro | | csfarnsworth0 -
MozRank in Open Site Explorer?
Hi, I wondered why mozRank is not showing in OSE? As this is the "equivalent" of Google's page rank? Thanks
Moz Pro | | CallieGunstinson0 -
Keyword Difficulty Tool Problems?
I was just using the keyword difficulty tool and for some reason, some of the keywords show "not enough data"...I'm not sure why this is the case because a few days ago, there was data... Anyway, is this because it take time for the tool to gather data each month, or is it because there's an issue with the GoogleAPI? Thanks a lot for your help!
Moz Pro | | simonmhchiu870 -
Alexa Ranking Sites
I found these two sites giving my competitor link juice: http://www.webnamelist.com/alexa/Alexa_186.html http://www.list-of-domains.org/alexa/Alexa_185.html I have seen these sites before and I just dont get why they are authoritative. The funny thing is I did a search for my competitors link on the page and its not showing up, is this a problem in site explorer? Why is site explorer mentioning these sites as my competitions best links when these links do not exist on their site?
Moz Pro | | SEODinosaur0