How local is local SEO?

[Adnan.Hassan.Khan]

If I manage get a client ranked for a localised organic search term on a county level. For example: "keyword - West Midlands" or "keyword - Hertfordshire"

How high will the website rank for all the cities and districts within that county?

I am going to give this a go but I was wondering if anyone else has had any experience with this?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Adnan,

True local results revolve around cities, not counties, and inclusion in the local pack of results typically requires having a physical location in the city of search. Beyond this, you can develop content for additional cities where you're not physically located, and that could include content you develop for counties, too, if research indicates county terms are important in your niche, but the goal of this work would typically be organic visibility rather than visibility in Google's local pack of results. Hope this helps!

[gazzerman1]

I have done this many times before and had some great success.

However.... Panda targets low quality thin content. If you are going to go down this route, DO NOT simply make pages that are just city and towns for that county with just a bit of content.

Spend time creating each area one by one for your niche and grow the site bit by bit. Low quality content in just a few areas of your site can cause the whole site to struggle.

If done wrong you can damage the site by taking the focus and theme of the main services being provided.

[ocelot]

I can see what you are trying but in my experience especially in competitive markets you might rank in the results but I doubt if it will be on the 1st set of local results.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Adnan

My experience with this is that more people tend to search with a town or city qualifier than at a county level. That is because they are really searching for a service or maybe a shop close to where they live and so with that as their intent they won't tend to use a county.

Regarding your question about how high a website will rank when optimised for a county for searches against the cities and districts, it would depend on how competitive that search was. If there are not many offering the service in the specific city then it's likely that Google will spread their net wider to bring in search results for other locations in the same area but by distance not by county.

I suggest you do some keyword research for searches with city/town qualifiers and compare them to the county results before going any further and make your decision on what to target after that.

I hope that helps,

Peter

[GPainter]

You can be sneaky and use a proxy from those cities and take a look..