Am I pigeonholing myself with a geo-targeted titles?

[Fueled]

I've got a site that ranks very well in my local area for mobile app development related keywords.  We use terms like "NYC" and "New York" in our title tags.

However I do not believe that this is NORMALLY a "local" geo keyword.

The reason that I believe this is because my competitors rank all over the USA (and even in Europe) for these keyterms, but we only rank in our local area of New York.

Is it possible that by including geographic terms like NYC and New York, that we are actually HURTING our rankings in other cities like Los Angeles and Chicago?   If we removed these words, could we see rankings increases in other parts of the world?

The other side of the coin is that if we remove the "NYC" and "New York" keyterms, could we see serious drops in the local area as a result?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Rameet,

I'm sorry my earlier replies didn't help. I'll close your earlier post and let's leave this one open in hopes that you get replies that are what you were looking for. Thanks for letting me know!

[AWCthreads]

Well, the school of hard knocks has been testing me quite well.

I don't know that I'd add too much to your experiment, but thanks for the invite.

[Fueled]

We're going to run a test on super easy keyterms to see what happens when you add or remove geo targets from the titles and content.

Would you like to do this with us?

[Fueled]

Thank you for following up!

I felt that I had asked the question poorly and that you seemed confused about what the real issue was.   So i used new language to hopefully get a more appropriate answer.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Rameet,

I'm following up to discover if you did not feel you got an answer on this previous thread on the same topic:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-can-i-tell-if-my-targeted-keywords-are-geo-based

I understood from your thread that it was your competitor, not you, who had optimized a website for NYC terms, but the question you have asked here is basically the same. Because of this, I want to discover if you feel something was missing on your previous thread, prompting you to re-post this same question. Please, let me know. It's important to us that you receive help with your question!

[AWCthreads]

I'll add also that some of our geo-targeted keywords rank well nationally when the competition is not relatively strong compared to other keywords.

[AWCthreads]

"Is it possible that by including geographic terms like NYC and New York, that we are actually HURTING our rankings in other cities like Los Angeles and Chicago?   If we removed these words, could we see rankings increases in other parts of the world?"

If someone in Chicago or Los Angeles types in a mobile app keyword without entering a city in the search then you most likely will be pigeonholing yourself because Google is seeing your pages as authoritative in your geo-targeted location.

For pages we want to rank nationally - we exclude geo-targeting and only geo-target keywords we want to win in our local/regional market.

[Fueled]

We crush them.

3DykS.png

[AWCthreads]

I've wondered and posted the same question here myself.

Last year at the time, feedback from reliable forum users was that there was no conclusive data to suggest that geo-targeting hurts national serp results for non-geotargeted keywords.

There are a lot of brick and mortar stores serving local and regional that would be hurt by this.

How do your domain and page authorities compare to those who are ranking well nationally?