Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Targeting local areas without creating landing pages for each town
-
I have a large ecommerce website which is structured very much for SEO as it existed a few years ago. With a landing page for every product/town nationwide (its a lot of pages).
Then along came Panda...
I began shrinking the site in Feb last year in an effort to tackle duplicate content. We had initially used a template only changing product/town name.
My first change was to reduce the amount of pages in half by merging the top two categories, as they are semantically similar enough to not need their own pages. This worked a treat, traffic didn't drop at all and the remaining pages are bringing in the desired search terms for both these products.
Next I have rewritten the content for every product to ensure they are now as individual as possible.
However with 46 products and each of those generating a product/area page we still have a heap of duplicate content. Now i want to reduce the town pages, I have already started writing content for my most important areas, again, to make these pages as individual as possible.
The problem i have is that nobody can write enough unique content to target every town in the UK via an individual page (times by 46 products), so i want to reduce these too.
QUESTION: If I have a single page for "croydon", will mentioning other local surrounding areas on this page, such as Mitcham, be enough to rank this page for both towns?
I have approx 25 Google local place/map listings and grwoing, and am working from these areas outwards. I want to bring the site right down to about 150 main area pages to tackle all the duplicate content, but obviously don't want to lose my traffic for so many areas at once.
Any examples of big sites that have reduced in size since Panda would be great.
I have a headache... Thanks community.
-
My pleasure, Silkstream. I can understand how what you are doing feels risky, but in fact, you are likely preventing fallout from worse risks in the future. SEO is a process, always evolving, and helping your client change with the times is a good thing to do! Good luck with the work.
-
Thank you Miriam. I appreciate you sharing with me the broad idea of the type of structure that you feel a site should have in this instance (if starting from scratch).
You have pretty much echoed my proposal for a new site structure, built for how Google works nowadays, rather than 2-3 years ago. We are currently reducing the size of the current site, to bring it as close to this type of model as possible. However the site would need a complete redesign to make it viably possible to have this type of structure.
I guess what I've been looking for is some kind of reassurance that we are moving in the right direction! Its a scary prospect reducing such a huge amount of pages down to a compact targeted set. With prospects of losing so much long tail traffic, it can make us a little hesitant.
However the on-site changes we have made so far, seem to be having a positive affect.And thank you for giving me some ideas about content creation for each town. I really like this as an idea to move forward after the changes are complete, which will hopefully be by the new year!
-
Hi Silkstream,
Thank you so much for clarifying this! I understand now.
If I were starting with a client like this, from scratch, this would be the approach I would take:
-
View content development as two types of pages. One set would be the landing pages for each physical location, optimized for each city, with unique content. The other set would be service pages, optimized for the services, but not for a particular city.
-
Create a Google+ Local page for each of the physical locations, linked to its respective landing page on the website. So, let's say you now have 25 city pages and 46 service pages. That's a fairly tall order, but certainly do-able.
-
Build structured citations for each location on third party local business directories. Given the number of locations, this would be an enormous jobs.
-
Build an onsite blog and designate company bloggers, ideally one in each physical office. The job of these bloggers would be something like each of them creating one blog post per month about a project that was accomplished in their city. In this way, the company could begin developing content under their own steam that would meet the need of showcasing a given service with a given city. Over time, this body of content would grow the pool of queries for which they have answers for.
-
Create a social outreach strategy, likely designating brand representatives within the company who could be active on various platforms.
-
Likely need to develop a link earning strategy tied in with steps 4 and 5.
-
Consider video marketing. A good video or two for each physical location could work wonders.
I'm painting in broad strokes here, but this is likely what the overall strategy would look like. You've come into the scenario midway and don't have the luxury of starting from scratch. You are absolutely right to be cleaning up duplicate content and taking other measures to reduce the spaminess and improve the usefulness of the site. Once you've got your cleanup complete, I think the steps I've outlined would be the direction to go in. Hope this helps.
-
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for jumping in.
The business model is service-based. So when i refer to "46 products" they are actually 46 different types of service available.
The customer will typically book and pay online, through the website, and they are then served at their location which is most often either their home or place of work. They actually have far more than the 25 actual locations, much closer to 120 I believe. However, I only began their SEO in February, AFTER they were hit by Panda. So building up their local listings is taking time, as the duplicate content issue seems far more urgent. Trying to strike a balance, and fix this all slowly over time to lay a solid foundation for inbound marketing, as its being diluted by the poor site structure.
Does this help? Am I doing the right things here?
-
Hi Silkstream,
I think we need to clarify what your business model is. You say you have a physical location in each of your 25 towns. So far, so good, but are you saying that your business has in-person transactions with its customers at each of the 25 locations? The confusion here is arising from the fact that e-commerce companies are typically virtual, meaning that they do not have in-person transactions with their customers. The Google Places Quality Guidelines state:
Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.
Thus, my wanting to be sure that your business model is actually eligible, given that you've described it as an e-commerce business, which would be ineligibl_e._ If you can clarify your business model, I think it will help you to receive the most helpful answers from the community.
-
You scared me then Chris!
-
Of course, if you've got the physical locations, you're in good shape there.
-
"It sounds like you're saying that your one ecommerce company has 25 Google local business listings--and growing?! It's very possible that could come back and haunt you unless you in the form of merging or penalization."
Why? The business has a physical location in every town, so why should they not have a page for every location? This is what we were advised to do?
"If there was no other competition, you would almost certainly rank for your keywords along with the town name"
I have used this tactic before, for another nationwide business, but on a smaller scale and it worked. Ie; they ranked (middle of page 1) but for non competitive keywords and the page has strong backlinks. With this site, the competition is stronger and the pages will not have a strong backlink profile at first.
My biggest worry, is to cut all the existing pages and lose the 80% long tail the site currently pulls in. But what other way is there to tackle so much duplicate content?
-
It sounds like you're saying that your one ecommerce company has 25 Google local business listings--and growing?! It's very possible that could come back and haunt you unless you in the form of merging or penalization. If not that, it's likely to stop being worth the time as a visibility tactic.
As far as whether or not mentioning local surrounding towns in your page copy will be enough to get you to rank for them, it would depend on competition. If there was no other competition, you would almost certainly rank for your keywords along with the town name but with competition, all the local ranking factors start coming into play and your ability to rank for each one will depend on a combination of all of them.
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
-
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
URL structure - Page Path vs No Page Path
We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
Landing pages for paid traffic and the use of noindex vs canonical
A client of mine has a lot of differentiated landing pages with only a few changes on each, but with the same intent and goal as the generic version. The generic version of the landing page is included in navigation, sitemap and is indexed on Google. The purpose of the differentiated landing pages is to include the city and some minor changes in the text/imagery to best fit the Adwords text. Other than that, the intent and purpose of the pages are the same as the main / generic page. They are not to be indexed, nor am I trying to have hidden pages linking to the generic and indexed one (I'm not going the blackhat way). So – I want to avoid that the duplicate landing pages are being indexed (obviously), but I'm not sure if I should use noindex (nofollow as well?) or rel=canonical, since these landing pages are localized campaign versions of the generic page with more or less only paid traffic to them. I don't want to be accidentally penalized, but I still need the generic / main page to rank as high as possible... What would be your recommendation on this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ostesmorbrod0 -
Which of these examples are doorway pages?
Hi there, I am soon to launch a new platform/directory website, however, have a concern over doorway pages. I have read many articles on the difference between Doorway and Landing pages and do have a good understanding, however, am still very anxious that what I intend to do will be risking Google penalties. I have looked at other directory/platform websites and have noticed that a lot of them are still using doorway pages and are not getting penalised. So I was wondering if someone wouldn't mind kindly letting me know their opinion on which of the following examples are doorway pages and which are not so I can better understand what I can and cannot do? Example 1: When I Google 'piano lessons new york' and 'trumpet lessons new york' I get the following 'landing pages' in search: https://takelessons.com/new-york/piano-lessons https://takelessons.com/new-york/trumpet-lessons To me, the above pages are definitely doorway pages as they are very similar with content and text and are simply an intermediary step between the Google search and their listings pages for piano/trumpet teachers in New York. Is this correct? Example 2: When I Google 'piano lessons Sydney' I get presented with the following web page in search: http://www.musicteacher.com.au/directory/sydney-nsw/lessons/piano/ I would think that this is NOT a doorway page as the user has been taken directly to the search results page in the directory and the page doesn't seem to have been set up for the sole purpose of listing in search results for 'Piano Lessons in Sydney'. Example 3: When I Google 'pet minding Sydney' I get presented with the following two pages in search: https://www.madpaws.com.au/petsitters/Sydney-New-South-Wales?type=night&service=1&from=0&to=99&city=Sydney&state=New-South-Wales https://www.pawshake.com.au/petsitters/Sydney%252C%2520New%2520South%2520Wales%252C%2520Australia Like Example 2, I don't think these pages would be classified as doorway pages as they too direct to the search results page in the site directory instead of an intermediary page. What do you think? Thanks so much in advance for your expertise and help! Kind Regards, Adrian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amor20050 -
Redirecting homepage to internal page (2nd Tier page)
We are planning to experiment redirecting our homepage to one of the 2nd tier page. I mean....example.com to example.com/page. We need this page to rank well, but it doesn't have much internal links or external back-links, so we opt for this redirect. Advantage with this page is, it has "keyword" we want to rank for in URL. "page" in example.com/page. Will this help or hurt us in SEO? I think we are missing keyword in our root domain, so interested to highlight this page. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0