Local Landing Pages struggling with rankings although I've done most things needed. Any idea?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I am wondering if someone could advise if there's anything obvious here as to why my local landing pages suck ranking wise even though I have done all of the following. http://goo.gl/Lr4HXa
I am trying to rank for Garden tool hire Bristol on my landing page. Main category page is garden tool hire
- Consitant NAP - Citations.
- Local branch address on Page , in title tag, H1 tag and the address is in on page content which is unique.
- Schema.org has been set up with address in this aswell etc.
- Pagination set up and view all page has concanical tag pointing to page 1
- Speed not an issue as this is a fast site.
- Currently all the product links on the page are H3 tags but I've seen this on lots of other sites.
- All my NAP Citations point to the parent branch pages although I don't have any individual deep links pointing to this page.
- Unique Content
I currently don't have internal links to relevant articles on my blog page as I have those on my main category landing page as you can see here - http://goo.gl/sO9A9U but I can add these as well to all my location specific landing pages if you think it would help.
Any thoughts greatly appreciated
Pete
-
Content needs to be vastly different, not just slightly varied.
This can be painful, and take a lot of time and creativity to figure out how to write the same 300-500 words in a different way.
I wrote a personal blog post not too long ago on ways to write content for location pages: http://doyledigital.com.au/content-for-location-pages/
-
My pleasure, Pete, and don't overlook the nice medium of the blog for continuing to showcase your involvement in various cities. I think Google is still very much in love with fresh content
-
Many thanks Andy and Miriam, I think you may well be right. Whilst this technique was extremely successful a couple of years back for me Google changes have stopped this method performing as well so it may be perceived as spammy in their eyes. Whilst I've got unique content etc , I could still be getting affected by some form of algorithmic penalty
Will have to look at how to restructure things.
thanks
Pete
-
Hi Peter,
My own preference for doing this type of Local SEO/copywriting is to structure sites like this:
-
A page for every office or a page for every city served
-
A page for every service
I feel like once you get into trying to cover every possible city/service combo on landing pages, there can be some danger of creating thin or throwaway content. Unless your city A lawn mowing service is somehow totally different than your city B lawn mowing service, you probably shouldn't be creating these pages. Instead, have a page for city A, a page for city B and a page for lawn mowing.
I'm not saying that what I'm describing is the only way to do this - just that it's my personal preference for small-to-medium businesses.
-
-
My competitors do it and they do okay ranking wise hence I thought it may be page specific issue.
thanks for your input though, I will try and see what can be changed.
Pete
-
although the products are the same on the pages.
This is what is going to prevent you from reaching these goals. Google isn't going to rank two pages the same with just a difference in basics. It isn't enough for them.
There is usually a lot more to look at in these circumstances if you want to start ranking for location phrases too, because what you are doing there alone isn't enough. This is more likely to bring down problems than help you gain rankings.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Yes I see what you mean but I have a main category page and then branch specific landing pages of those category pages each with unique content on each of them.
The title tags etc all have the location in there to make them unique although the products are the same on the pages.
I don't see how else one can rank for specific location pages for their categories any other way as it's to competitive to try and compete with the majors so local search for each branch is an better way forward if I can get it work.
thanks
Pete
-
Hi Pete,
Just a very quick observation, you might be running into pages that are quite similar:
- http://www.bestathire.co.uk/branches/bristol-tool-hire-shop
- http://www.bestathire.co.uk/garden-tools-bristol
Then you also have...
Pages 2 & 3 appear to be exactly the same, but with a different title, heading, etc. Google won't thank you for that.
I would spend some time thinking about the phrases you wish to rank for and making sure your pages are all suitably different in content and offerings.
-Andy
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
-
Site architecture? I've got a free user report, that shoots back a page with their data for them to share with co-workers and friends.
Hi, I have a site about to go online that users can run a free report that connects to their calendar app to get 12 months of statistics for their meetings, and then it shoots out a report. So they go to a.com/freereport and they get back a.zom/freereport/report/xxxxxx The content of those reports is different, but the structure is the same as it is a fun way to show off meeting stats to co-workers and friends. I don't see the point of Google indexing those as the traffic to those pages is going to be from social networks and viral, but I do want the backlink credit. Will I get backlink credit if I nofollow that folder? I am having a hard time deciding what to do seo wise and would love some thoughts and advice, what would you recommend? Do nothing fancy. Mark the report folder no follow. Try to do something with rel=cannonical to point those pages to the root page? Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | bwb0 -
I've had a sudden a increase in crawl issues as of yesterday (like 300 from a steady 10, does anyone else have this issue?
the main issue is that it's now indexing both www and http:// - anyone else got this issue or had any changes suddenly on their crawl results?
Technical SEO | | beckyhy0 -
Wrong page ranked in Google, specific example
Hi All, I've searched for previous questions and many talk about the same problem but do not post an actual example. I am also thinking to do a blog post and a series of experiments once there is a theory. My target keyword is "Exhibition Stand Hire" and this is the target page on our site http://goo.gl/qt54lb Site appears on page 6 of SERPS (google.co.uk), but instead of this page a homepage is listed. But if I'm searching for the term using quotes, ie "Exhibition Stand Hire" the right page appears on page 4 of the SERPs. Our home page only uses the keyword in the body text, while target page is very optimised. Could it be over-optimised? I've tried mixing up words in the title tag to not offer an exact match, also i've varied the anchor text of all incoming links but that didn't fix the problem. (Hence why at the moment they all use different terms to point to this page) None of this helped alter what page is chosen to appear. Is it simply the matter of page not being strong enough compared to other less relevant pages on the site? How come many other sites rank better with much less effort? (i'm using OSE to determine competition) Thank you.
Technical SEO | | georgexx0 -
Duplicate page errors from pages don't even exist
Hi, I am having this issue within SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnosis report. There are a lot of crawl errors happening with pages don't even exist. My website has around 40-50 pages but SEO report shows that 375 pages have been crawled. My guess is that the errors have something to do with my recent htaccess configuration. I recently configured my htaccess to add trailing slash at the end of URLs. There is no internal linking issue such as infinite loop when navigating the website but the looping is reported in the SEOmoz's report. Here is an example of a reported link: http://www.mywebsite.com/Door/Doors/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/ btw there is no issue such as crawl error in my Google webmaster tool. Any help appreciated
Technical SEO | | mmoezzi0 -
Best practice: unique meta descriptions on blog 'tag' pages
Hi everyone, I'm curious, are there best practices for introducing unique meta descriptions on blog tag pages (I'm using wordpress)? For instance, using platinum seo, on an original post, the meta description is either the excerpt or a specified custom sentence. It doesn't appear that platinum seo allows for custom descriptions on tag pages. Love to hear your thoughts. Thanks! Peter
Technical SEO | | peterdbaron1 -
Do you get credit for an external link that points to a page that's being blocked by robots.txt
Hi folks, No one, including me seems to actually know what happens!? To repeat: If site A links to /home.html on site B and site B blocks /home.html in Robots.txt, does site B get credit for that link? Does the link pass PageRank? Will Google still crawl through it? Does the domain get some juice, but not the page? I know there's other ways of doing this properly, but it is interesting no?
Technical SEO | | DaveSottimano0 -
My pages says it has 16 errors, need help
My pages says it has 16 errors, and all of them are due to duplicate content. How do I fix this? I believe its only due to my meta tag description.
Technical SEO | | gaji0 -
It's imposible to keep track of rankings?
Hello, here something interesting I'm Using Rank Tracker from SEOMOZ And from the link-assistant's Rank Tracker as Well... I need to track Google.com and Google.co.ve (venezuela) so I did... i got my keyword an here are my results. 1 Keyword A at google.com (united states) Rank Tracker SEOMOZ = pos 6 Rank Tracker OTHER = pos 6 Manual Query on google.com = 9 (I used the exact url seomoz tells me its using) 2 Keyword A at Google.co.ve Rank Tracker SEOMOZ = pos 8 Rank Tracker OTHER = pos 7 Manual query on google.co.ve = pos 8 So.... Why it's that?, so far I think that google.com for me down here (it actually says "Español") it's a different index? for latinamerica? only spanish pages? maybe it's because there's a couple of minutes between looking with one tool and the other... any help, would be great... Dan
Technical SEO | | daniel.alvarez0