LOCAL SEO / Ranking for the difficult 'service areas' outside of the primary location?
-
It's generally not too hard to rank in Google Places and organically for your primary location. However if you are a service area business looking to rank for neighboring cities or service areas, Google makes this much tougher.
Andrew Shotland mentions the obvious and not so obvious options: Service Area pages ranking organically, getting a real/virtual address, boost geo signals, and using zip codes instead of service area circle.
But I am wondering if anyone had success with other methods? Maybe you have used geo-tagging in a creative way? This is a hurdle that many local business are struggling with and any experience or thoughts will be much appreciated
-
I guess part of the reason is that local search results do not show up for some of your keywords, as in "SeaTac Bankruptcy Lawyer", and so organic results are the only option.
Yes you are very right some of this will not work for specific industry or unique geographic areas. Thanks again for all your input.
-
This worked for organic. I've never had much luck ranking on the local search results outside of my immediate physical locations. However, I get plenty of traffic through the organic results; and frankly, I think that my clients prefer seeing my content to just seeing the local results.
However, the major caveat is that this is specific to your niche and may not work as well for certain businesses. Since I'm running a law practice, my clients like organic results because they like the information that is available in my targeted pages.
-
Thanks for that insight greatly appreciated. No this is something you observed for organic results or local results as well?
-
I can illustrate with a very specific example that will hopefully clear it up a little bit. I am a bankruptcy lawyer with offices in Seattle and Kent. Seattle was my major target because it is a major city and the largest in my target region. However, there are dozens of towns around Seattle. I wanted to get as much reach as possible.
When I did my keyword research, I found that searching for "SeaTac Bankruptcy Lawyer" mostly brought up results in Kent. The reason was that there are no bankruptcy lawyers in SeaTac with a web presence. The bankruptcy lawyers were concentrated in Kent. Since this was the case, a good ranking for Kent spilled over to a good ranking for SeaTac. This meant that instead of trying to focus on both Kent and SeaTac, I was better off focusing just on Kent. The result is that by ranking well for Kent, I get a geographic spillover to smaller towns around Kent like SeaTac and Auburn.
When you are doing local optimization, try to think of the metro area as a flow chart with the biggest city at the top (level 1) and the smaller ones coming below (levels 2 - whatever). You will find that the further you go down the flow chart, the fewer strong competitors there are. This means that ranking will for a city at level 3 of the flow chart gives you spill over to a city at level 4 or level 5 provided that there isn't strong competition at level 4 or 5.
So focus on unique landing pages for the cities at the lowest level where there is active competition. This will give you spillover to all the levels below that level. Then, once you have established those landing pages, work on landing pages at another level down. They key is that the landing pages need to be unique to avoid the duplicate content penalty.
-
Thanks David for your sharing your process.
"and see if you can focus on locations that are spread throughout the metro area."
-for clarification what do you mean by this? Are you looking for areas with low competition and trying to find gaps, because you did mention you are focusing on areas that are known for attorney's.
Thank you, and awaiting more response
-
I have the same issue with marketing my business. This is what has worked for me.
You don't have to rank for every town in the metro area. You just have to rank for the towns that people associate with your business. For example, I am a Seattle bankruptcy attorney. There are about 6 other areas that people associate with bankruptcy attorneys. This is because not every area has a lot of professionals.
What I did was look at my competition first. See where they are located throughout the metro area. Then do some keyword research with "Business name + location" and "location + business name." Then compare the results to the map and see if you can focus on locations that are spread throughout the metro area. Then write unique landing pages for each.
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
-
What is the best strategy to SEO Discontinued Products on Ecommerce Sites?
RebelsMarket.com is a marketplace for alternative fashion. We have hundreds of sellers who have listed thousands of products. Over 90% of the items do not generate any sales; and about 40% of the products have been on the website for over 3+ years. We want to cleanup the catalog and remove all the old listings that older than 2years that do not generate any sales. What is the best practice for removing thousands of listings an Ecommerce site? do we 404 these products and show similar items? Your help and thoughts is much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JimJ3 -
Free tool, and it ranks well for adult sites and checking if they are down, will that hurt us with ranking for normal sites with google?
Hi all, We rank for searches around "is youporn down" and similar because we provide a free tool to check if a website is up or down: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youporn I am worried that ranking for these adult searches is hurting us with ranking for things like "is reddit down", thoughts? I'd appreciate some input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bwb0 -
Why would a blank page rank? What am I missing about this page?
In terms of content, this page is blank. Yes, there's a sidebar and footer, but no content. I've seen a page like this rank before. I'm curious if they're implementing something on the back-end I don't realize or if this is just a fluke? Etc. Also, the DA of the site is only a 15, so I don't think that's the reason. http://www.thenurselawyer.com/component/tags/tag/20-pasco-county-personal-injury-lawyers.html Thanks, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
How/why is this page allowed to get away with this?
I was doing some research on a competitor's backlinks in Open Site Explorer and I noticed that their most powerful link was coming from this page: http://nytm.org/made-in-nyc. I visited that page and found that this page, carrying a PageRank of 7, is just a long list of followed links. That's literally all that's on the entire page - 618 links. Zero nofollow tags. PR7. On top of that, there's a link at the top right corner that says "Want to Join?" which shows requirements to get your link on that page. One of these is to create a reciprocal link from your site back to theirs. I'm one of those white-hat SEOs who actually listens to Matt Cutts, and the more recent stuff from Moz. This entire page basically goes against everything I've been reading over the past couple years about how reciprocal links are bad, and if you're gonna do it, use a nofollow tag. I've read that pages, or directories, such as these are being penalized by Google, and possible the websites with links to the page could be penalized as well. I've read that exact websites such as these are getting deindexed by the bunches over the past couple years. My real question is how is this page allowed to get away with this? And how are they rewarded with such high PageRank? There's zero content aside from 618 links, all followed. Is this just a case of "Google just hasn't gotten around to finding and penalizing this site yet" or am I just naive enough to actually listen and believe anything that comes out of Matt Cutts videos?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Millermore0 -
Negative SEO and when to use to Dissavow tool?
Hi guys I was hoping someone could help me on a problem that has arisen on the site I look after. This is my first SEO job and I’ve had it about 6 months now. I think I’ve been doing the right things so far building quality links from reputable sites with good DA and working with bloggers to push our products as well as only signing up to directories in our niche. So our backlink profile is very specific with few spammy links. Over the last week however we have received a huge increase in backlinks which has almost doubled our linking domains total. I’ve checked the links out from webmaster tools and they are mainly directories or webstat websites like the ones below | siteinfo.org.uk deperu.com alestat.com domaintools.com detroitwebdirectory.com ukdata.com stuffgate.com | We’ve also just launched a new initiative where we will be producing totally new and good quality content 4-5 times a week and many of these new links are pointing to that page which looks very suspicious to me. Does this look like negative Seo to anyone? I’ve read a lot about the disavow tool and it seems people’s opinions are split on when to use it so I was wondering if anyone had any advice on whether to use it or not? It’s easy for me to identify what these new links are, yet some of them have decent DA so will they do any harm anyway? I’ve also checked the referring anchors on Ahrefs and now over 50% of my anchor term cloud are totally unrelated terms to my site and this has happened over the last week which also worries me. I haven’t seen any negative impact on rankings yet but if this carries on it will destroy my link profile. So would it be wise to disavow all these links as they come through or wait to see if they actually have an impact? It should be obvious to Google that there has been a huge spike in links so then the question is would they be ignored or will I be penalised. Any ideas? Thanks in advance Richard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rich_9950 -
Would having a + plus sign between keywords in meta title have an effect on SEO?
I have seen one of my clients' competitors do this in their meta title and it got me a little intrigued... I understand that google uses the + sign as an operator in adwords, and to a certain extent, as a search tool, but would it help or make any difference to the SEO in the meta title/data (eg. 'SEO+Marketing+Services')? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LexisClick10 -
Article Re-posting / Duplication
Hi Mozzers! Quick question for you all. This is something I've been unsure of for a while. But when a guest post you've written goes live on someone's blog. Is it then okay it post the same article to your own blog as well as Squidoo for example? Would the search engines still see it as duplication if I have a link back to the original?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
How tdo you replace an old SEO company's work?
I have a client that has been paying someone for what is basically directory placement on very specific niche sites that they have created. These sites are exact match keyword domains with not very high PA or DA (they're in the teens) and they provide no direct traffic. It's basically a link wheel that is probably helping them to rank for some of their bigger holy grail keywords. They are also providing some low quality article/blog marketing on these sites. Ultimately, they link to them ALOT and it's working in this specific niche. This client no longer wants to pay for these services, but there's the possibility of all of the links being taken down and their rankings being set back a ton. Has anybody ever experienced this and if so, how did you deal with it? What are some good tactics? Any tips would be great.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0