Best strategy to follow for a single service site
-
Can anyone share what they feel is the best strategy to follow for a single service site?
Would you optimise and target the homepage for the primary service they offer or target a page one level lower and leave the homepage to target the Brand name?
Links to any references or case studies would also be greatly appreciated, thank you!
-
Great addition of Jonathan! I also think a well implemented example will not get affected by this update but identical pages won't do you much good in the future. So if you start with this strategy, make sure you do it good!
-
As a word of caution to this, Google is updating its doorway page algorithm. I am not sure if this will affect a well implemented example of this strategy, although I would be surprised if it did (i.e. very unique content with text relevant to each location), but I think it will be designed if you use identical pages with just different location names then there is a real risk.
See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html
Ultimately it won't be fully known until it is implemented, if it hasn't already.
-
Hi OLLI_M,
I would definitely focus your homepage on the keywords / search intents for your primary keyword. This page is your best change of scoring in your own city and has the possiblility to score in city’s close by.
You don’t have to worry about scoring on your brand because:
- When people search for your brand name they want you. So from an search engines perspective you’re the 100% match with this search intent and you will have a great dwell time and CTR which work in your favor.
- You will probably get enough inbound links with your brand name in it. That’s very natural.
There are probably a lot more reasons why you will score on your own brand name but I hope these make it clear you don’t have to worry about it.
When you determine your website structure you will probably need some insights in the following:
- Are people adding local modifiers like “Car service [city name]”
- What is the search volume on those keywords? Based on this, are there any more city’s in your service area you intent to rank on besides the city you’re located?
- What is the competition on the keywords you intent to rank on?
In a normal situation where you have one physical location and you serve a couple more nearby city’s I would advise you to focus your homepage on the city you’re based in and add level one pages for the city’s in your service area you intent to rank for. Make sure these pages are added to your normal navigation and are interesting for visitors who do either enter your website through your homepage as directly through the local landings pages.
Miriam wrote a great guide for creating those service area’s on Moz. You might want to check it out: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
You can also check out this project we have been working on some time ago: www.skaya.nl (Dutch website).
When you click on “Waar rijden wij” you will find a list of the city’s they give driving lessons. Every page has some unique tips and information about driving lessons in those specific city’s. In this case we also added the city we’re based in as a level one page. So either our homepage as the local landings page can score on the city were based in.
Two more great resources when you want to start local SEO I would love to share with you:
- http://moz.com/blog/40-important-local-search-questions-answered
- http://moz.com/blog/11-ways-local-businesses-can-get-links
I hope this helps!
PS. When you look at the example there are two improvements for this website. The tabbed content should be shown immediately and there should be less duplicated content like the prices for example. Just so you don’t copy the wrong parts of this tactic
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
-
Value of no-follow links
I'm curious to understand roughly how much % of value a no-follow link has in building authority relative to a do-follow link? I understand that Google seems consistently and growingly focused on value - ie. is the link valuable in growing the business, irregardless of SEO - and perhaps therefore the no-follow / do-follow distinction is becoming a more unnecessary dichotomy. How does Google look at do-follow vs no-follow links? And how much weight now is really given to one compared to the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Site Merge Strategy: Choosing Target Pages for 301 Redirects
I am going to be merging two sites. One is a niche site, and it is being merged with the main site. I am going to be doing 301 redirects to the main site. My question is, what is the best way of redirecting section/category pages in order to maximize SEO benefits. I will be redirecting product to product pages. The questions only concerns sections/categories. Option 1: Direct each section/category to the most closely matched category on the main site. For example, vintage-t-shirts would go to vintage-t-shirt on main site. Option 2: Point as many section/category pages to larger category on main site with selected filters. We have filtered navigation on our site. So if you wanted to see vintage t-shirts, you could go to the vintage t-shirt category, OR you could go to t-shirts and select "vintage" under style filter. In the example above, the vintage-t-shirt section from the niche site would point to t-shirts page with vintage filter selected (something like t-shirts/#/?_=1&filter.style=vintage). With option 2, I would be pointing more links to a main category page on the main site. I would likely have that page rank higher, because more links are pointing to it. I may have a better overall user experience, because if the customer decides to browse another style of t-shirt, they can simply unselect the filter and make other selections. Questions: Which of these options is better as far as: (1) SEO, (2) User experience If I go with option 2, the drawback is that the page titles will all be the same (i.e vintage-t-shirts pointing to the page with filter selected would have "t-shirts" as page title instead of a more targeted page with page title "vintage t-shirts." I believe a workaround would be to pull filter values from the URL and append them to the page title. That way page title for URL t-shirts/#/?=1&filter.style=vintage_ would be something like "vintage, t-shirts." Is this the appropriate way to deal with it? Any thoughts, suggestions, shared experiences would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I am trying to rank for the phrase "a link between worlds walkthrough" I am on page 1 but there are several results that just outranks me and I cannot see any reason that they would be doing so. My site is hiddentriforce.com/a-link-between-worlds/walkthrough/ For that page I have 5 linking domains, varied anchor text that spans from things like "here" to a variety of related phrases. All of the links come from really good sites My page has 1400 likes, 90 shares, and about 20 each in tweets and +'s DA of 44 PA of 37 The 4 and 5 ranked sites both have WAY less social interactions, lower PA and DA, less links, etc Yet they outrank me why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
Website Siloing..best practice?
Hi all I am doing some research this week on the effects of siloing a Magento site. We have about 1,654 pages with approx 1,400 products. We want to silo the website in order to address the internal linking issues and to also focus the customer journey in a more organised way. I need to report all of the possible angles and effects that this will have on the site, prior to implementing it. Does anyone have info on best practice for siloing? I'd appreciate any help... Thanks Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Total_Displays0 -
For multi language sites, what is best - two domains or one with both languages?
We are assisting a client in setting up English and Spanish sites in Texas. They want to be able to find customers who are Spanish speaking predominantly or totally along with the customers they now get who are English speakers. We are building them a new site and I have researched to find answers all over the board or less than clear. Should the structure be such that we have one site with a set of English and Spanish pages all with Spanish links to Spanish pages and English links to English pages. Should we instead just have an English site for those people who utilize English and a different site for those who utilize Spanish? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher0