Better to use specific cities or counties for SEO geographics?
-
Hello SEO experts!
We are encountering a difficult situation at our marketing firm with a client who wants to optimize her site for keyworks + counties, as she doesn't want to be restricted to one specific city. We have suggested alternate solutions like location pages, utilization of H2's, etc, however, she wants to know the effectiveness of using a specific city (ie: Winona, MN) vs a county (ie: Winona County, MN) for SEO purposes. The research I have conducted thus far hasn't gotten me very far, basically I'm seeing that it all comes back to what people search for (cleaning services in Winona, MN vs. cleaning services in Winona County, MN). Does anyone have any insight into this issue?
-
This is unscientific and based on the way I personally search, but I'd ask how people in the area refer to that area for some additional input. Here are some examples of the ways I have searched for locations in areas I've lived in (or had family live in).
In the SF Bay Area, I used to live in Newark. There were about 30,000 people in the city, and it was surrounded by the SF Bay on one side, and Fremont on three other sides. I would verbally tell people in the region that I lived in Fremont, and I'd search for local businesses using Fremont instead of Newark, as otherwise I'd get results for New Jersey.
I have relatives that used to live in Woodstock, VA. Everyone always thinks of Wodstock, NY, and it's hard to find local info, especially when searching from the West Coast. A lot of businesses describe themselves as in the Shenandoah Valley (and it was Shenandoah county), so I'd often search for Shenandoah, or Front Royal, which was the nearest sizable town.
Other relatives live in Battle Creek, Iowa, a town of 800 or so people. Even with adding Iowa, I get way too many results for Battle Creek, Michigan. If I need to search for something (usually on ebay, looking for memorabilia) I will search for Ida Grove or Ida County.
I know this really isn't an answer to your question, but more of some things to think about. Again, I'd ask (if you're not local to the area yourself) how people usually describe where they live, and look at search volume for that. Maybe also run some AdWords targeted to desired zip codes, and then look in the Search Query Reports in AdWords to see what cities people type in to modify their search?
-
I used to live in a town that had a couple thousand people.. It was the largest town in the county. The county was large enough that it would take 1.5 hours to drive from the northwest corner to the southeast corner - not because the distance was that great - but because there were few good roads in that direction. Many of the people lived on an unpaved road and most of the people had a well instead of water service.
In the entire county there was one tiny hospital, a few grocery stores and enough stoplights that you could count them on your fingers. But there were more campsites than residents and the population of the county would double the day before the first day of deer hunting or trout season.
If you had a healthcare emergency you better be right with God. It could be an hour before an ambulance gets to you and another hour before you get to a tiny hospital with a couple GPs and one surgeon and then transferred to the hospital of a small city another hour away.
-
I'd listen to EGOL and Kemp. Sounds like they know the rural places better than I, and these rural people don't know how to search good yet
-
Continuing on what EGOL said, we have had very good experiences with County + keyword for areas outside of Hillsborough County (outside of Tampa). You will not find Pasco + keyword or Hernando + keyword ever showing up on any mainstream keyword tool. They just don't have the search volume...however, we get conversions on those landing pages all the time.
Frankly, I don't know how you would even do county vs city research, because you (most likely) will not find search volume for counties even though conversions might be there. However, as William said, they are the same name. So, in your particular case, it really shouldn't matter.
Best,
Ruben
-
In some parts of the United States people use town and city names when they talk about where they live or where things are located or where they are going. These people usually live in towns and cities and that is how they think about places.
However, many people live in rural areas - not in any town or city. These people often use counties, instead of cities when they talk about where they live or where they are going.
The lower the population density the more likely they are going to use counties instead of towns and cities. Why? Because the tiny towns and cities where they live are unknown to most people. Everyone has heard of Pittsburgh and Cleveland but nobody has heard of Gassaway and Erbacon, yet they probably know the name of the county if they live in that region.
People who live in cities "don't get it" when they hear rural people talking about what county they are from... but people who live in rural areas understand city people talking about what city they are from. This shows that rural people are smarter when it comes to geographic locations.
-
Agree with William. Show your client the keyword search volume data on searching by city vs by county. Several of the sites I run have localized pages and we have gotten into discussions about getting more specific by using zip code or the names of neighborhood as we were well optimized for city + service. Why not zipcode + service etc.
It came down to, nobody searches for zipcode + service or neighborhood + service in the areas we focus on. Yours may be different, so look at the data first, but I bet it will hover at the city level. You can put it to your client this way, "I can spend a lot of your money on pages that are optimized at the county level and they could even rank for that search. But if no one is searching for those key terms, then I have just wasted your money and time."
Good luck!
-
Wait... the town and county have the same name? Then there's no issue.
People don't search by county and rarely put in the state when searching a city geo. Your money term is variations of, "cleaning services in Winona". Even though this phrase and others like it don't have a high search volume, experience and years of data tell me this would be the way to go. Unless you wanted to focus on carpet cleaning, which is a different ball game.
To sedate your client, maybe discuss a local SEO play with G+. Then you can define the exact area you'd like to cover, which would include both no problem.
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
-
I need help in doing Local SEO
Hey guys I hope everyone is doing well. I am new to SEO world and I want to do local SEO for one of my clients. The issue is I do not know how to do Local SEO at all or where to even start. I would appreciate it if anyone could help me or give me an article or a course to learn how to do it. Main question The thing that I want to do is that, I want my website to show up in top 3 google map results for different locations(which there is one actual location). For example I want to show up for
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seopack.org.ofici3
online clothing store in new york
online clothing store in los angeles or... Let's assume that we can ship our product to every other cities. So I hope I could deliver what I mean. I'd appreciate it if you could answer me with practical solutions.0 -
Looking for an SEO Mentor
I do in-house marketing for a medium sized luxury architectural design firm. I have a good understanding of the moz platform and general SEO but would like to findsomeone to provide regular guidance and answer some specific questions regarding our SEO. Specifically, we want advising on keywords, blog content, and link building. Ideally we'd like to engage a consultant (remotely) on an hourly basis. We'v have had very poor experiences with big SEO firms so that’s definitely not something we’re looking for. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WorkshopAPD
Caio0 -
Specific page does not index
Hi, First question: Working on the indexation of all pages for a specific client, there's one page that refuses to index. Google Search console says there's a robots.txt file, but I can't seem to find any tracks of that in the backend, nor in the code itself. Could someone reach out to me and tell me why this is happening? The page: https://www.brody.be/nl/assistentiewoningen/ Second question: Google is showing another meta description than the one our client gave in in Yoast Premium snippet. Could it be there's another plugin overwriting this description? Or do we have to wait for it to change after a specific period of time? Hope you guys can help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversal0 -
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Htaccess rewrite rule (very specific)
Hello, Awhile back my company changed from http: to https: sitewide (before i started working here). We use a very standard rewrite rule that looks like this: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://opiates.com/$1 [R,L] However, with this rule in place, some http: urls are being redirected with a 302 status code. My question is, can I safely change the above code to look like this: RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://opiates.com/$1 [R=301,L] to ensure that every redirected is returned with a 301 status code. The only change is in the [R,L] section. Thanks to whomever can help with this. I'm pretty sure its safe but I dont want the site to go down, even for a second, so figured I would ask first.0 -
SEO for eCommerce?
I'm working on a game plan for the on-page optimization for a growing e-commerce site (https://www.boutine.com) and I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with similar projects. Specifically, how to get the most SEO value out of product and category pages. Thanks in advance! -Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boutine0 -
SEO Landing Page Fail
We have a PPC landing page template that I've used to aggregate blog post collections thematically. http://www.ietravel.com/machu-picchu-travel http://www.ietravel.com/kenya-and-tanzania-safari The hope was that they would start ranking. After 5 months, it has yet to happen.Thought it was a good idea at the time because these pages have a nice prominent call-to-action area. It now occurs to me that the pages are probably under-performing because they are not incorporated into the main site navigation. Do you think that if I move these under their appropriate categories in the main site I'll see some lift? (Of course, I will add 301 redirects as well.) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csmithal0