Local SEO - Adding the location to the URL
-
Hi there,
My client has a product URL: www.company.com/product. They are only serving one state in the US. The existing URL is ranking in a position between 8-15 at the moment for local searches. Would it be interesting to add the location to the URL in order to get a higher position or is it dangerous as we have our rankings at the moment. Is it really giving you an advantage that is worth the risk?
Thank you for your opinions!
Sander -
Oops, above post was from me Sorry, I was logged into a different account when responding.
-
Hi Sander,
You are mentioning Local, but are also saying you serve a state. Local is city-related, not state-related, so I want to be sure I'm fully understanding your scenario. Are you saying:
-
Yours is a local business with a physical location in a specific city or multiple cities and in-person contact with customers?
-
Or, yours is a virtual business with no in-person contact, offering a product to an entire state?
-
You have one product featured on a single page and you want to add a city name (or a state name?) to that product page URL?
-
You have one product and are thinking of building multiple pages to cover multiple cities, adding them to the URLs for all cities in which you offer this product?
Some clarification would help, for sure!
-
-
Hey Sander,
Anders hit the nail on the head - but I felt I needed to add a bit of information. Be careful how you decide to add location to your URLs, as it could potentially hurt your rankings. There is much more involved in local search relevance than just a city or state name being included in a URL.
Also, it could seem "spammy" if your website becomes overrun with local tags. I would suggest setting up a structured URL, for exampls "www.company.com/Nevada/Las-Vegas/Products"
This way your URLs are serving 2 purposes - thoughtful organization and helping out with your keyword strategy.
Best,
Christopher
-
Hi Sander!
According to https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors it could be of some value to have some sort of geographic keyword in the URL, but I guess it would also be of value to have this as part of the onpage copy, in the title, meta description etc if it is possible to add i a ntural way, without making it look spammy.
If you have some contact information on the page, it could also be valueable to mark it up according to schema.org (same goes for the product information if not already done).
If you are changing the URL, also make sure to 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.
My 2 cents. Hope this helps
Anders
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
-
Remove URLs from App
Hi all, our tech team inherited a bit of an SEO pickle. I manage a freemium React JS app built for 80k unique markets worldwide (and associated dedicated URL schema). Ex/ https://www.airdna.co/vacation-rental-data/app/us/california/santa-monica/overview Mistake - App, in its entirety, was indexed by Google in July 2018, which basically resulted in duplicate content penalties because the unique on-page content wasn't readable. Partial Solution - We no indexed all app pages until we were able to implement a "pre-render" / HTML readable solution with associated dynamic meta data for the Overview page in each market. We are now selectively reindexing only the free "Overview" pages that have unique data (with a nofollow on all other page links), but want to persist a noindex on all other pages because the data is not uniquely "readable" before subscribing. We have the technical server-side rules in place and working to ensure this selective indexing. Question - How can we force google to abandoned the >300k cached URLs from the summer's failed deploy? Ex/ https://screencast.com/t/xPLR78IbOEao, would lead you to a live URL such as this which has limited value to the user, https://www.airdna.co/vacation-rental-data/app/us/arizona/phoenix/revenue (Note Google's cached SERPs also have an old URL structure, which we have since 301ed, because we also updated the page structure in October). Those pages are currently and will remain noindexed for the foreseeable future. Our sitemap and robots.txt file is up-to-date, but the old search console only has a temporary removal on a one-by-one basis. Is there a way to do write a rule-based page removal? Or do we simply render these pages in HTML and remove the nofollow to those links from the Overview page so a bot can get to them, and then it would see that there's a noindex on them, and remove them from the SERPs? Thanks for your help and advice!
Local Website Optimization | | Airbnb_data_geek1 -
Best practice for local keyword ranking in URLs
Hi, I have a large artificial grass website with many franchise location landing pages. At the moment i have most of the landing page URLs like this www.domainname.com/uk/city/ My TLD does not contain the keyword "artificial grass" so should I follow the location with the keywords /city-artificial-grass/ or is Google pretty savvy these days and will it know that I am an artificial grass company? I'm after the best recommendations for this if possible. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | Easigrass0 -
Company with different branches: Generic Keywords & Localized Keywords: Best practise?
INITIAL SITUATION: We offer a branded product/service in different cities. We have different contact pages for every city (—> basically just a form and a map, i.e. 100% SHALLOW). GOAL:
Local Website Optimization | | Cesare.Marchetti
We would like to rank for the branded keyword only (—> more generic search intent) but as well as for branded keyword + cities (—> more transactional search intent) combinations. REMARK: It would make little sense in my opinion to develop the individual contact pages (for every city) to „full“ pages with real content as there isn’t really specific content for the differenct cities to add. OPTIONS:
1) HOME page: target for the branded keyword CONTACT pages (one for each city): target for the branded keyword + city name HOMEÂ page: target for the branded keyword + all the city names CONTACT pages (one for each city): : NO keyword targeting at all HOMEÂ page: target for the branded keyword + different city names CONTACT pages (one for each city): target for the branded keyword + city name Add CANONICAL tag to main page ???!!!??? What is best practise? What would you recommend? Is there another solution? I really would like to know your opinion. Thanks a lot for your hints in advance.
Cheers,
CesareBearbeiten0 -
Local food delivery SEO strategy
Hey guys, I'm working with a new company that doesn't have a brick and mortar storefront, they deliver. They basically deliver pre packaged smoothies in a VERY localized area (Vancouver, BC). I'm wondering how grandiose their goals should be re ranking for keywords that have non localized authority. What do I mean? Lets say their marketing pillars are "health education related to smoothies" "convenient veggies for smoothies" "(insert health benefit here) for smoothies". Should they be trying to compete for these keywords? Or should they really be trying to rank with keywords especially to Vancouver? Side note: What kind of effect does Country and Locality have on keywords that are generally used by content providers and not service related companies building out an inbound strategy? Thanks in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | Anti-Alex0 -
Single sites per location as well as group site. Should we get rid of single sites & only keep group site.
Currently we have several single sites for each of our dealership locations as well as an automotive group site linking to each location(dealership) website. Currently there is no landing page for each location on the group site. To save money we were looking into beefing up our group site and getting rid of our individual location sites. 301 redirecting them to location landing pages on the group site website. Each site has about the same authority including the group site. Each dealership location resides in the same province(state) but some locations are a 7hour drive apart so not all within the same vicinity. I want to ensure we continue to rank well in each location. I won't be able to include all geographic locations in the title tag on the homepage of the group site due to the character restrictions. What would you recommend? Keeping the individual websites per dealership location OR focusing solely on a group website. I need to ensure we continue to rank well in each city where each dealership resides. Thanks for any recommendations! It's greatly appreciated. Thanks for everyone's thoughts & opinions.
Local Website Optimization | | DCochrane1 -
SEO: .com vs .org vs .travel Domain
Hi there, I am new to MOZ Q&A and  first of all I appreciate all the folks here that share their expertise and make everyone understand 'the WWW' a bit better. My question: I have been developing a 'travel guide' site for a city in the U.S. and now its time to choose the right domain name. I put a strong focus on SEO in terms of coding, site performance as well as content and to round things up I'd like to register the _best _domain name in terms of SEO. Let's suppose the city is Atlanta. I have found the following domain names that are available and I was wondering whether you guys could give me some inside on which domain name would perform best. discoveratlanta.org
Local Website Optimization | | kinimod
atlantaguide.org
atlanta.travel
atlantamag.com Looking at the Google Adwords Keyword tool the term that reaches the highest search queries is obviously "Atlanta" itself. Sites that are already ranking high are atlanta.com and atlanta.gov. So basically I am wondering whether I should aim for a new TLD like atlanta.travel or rather go with a .org domain. I had a look around and it seems that .org domains generally work well for city guides (at least a lot of such sites use .org domains). However, I have also seen a major US city that uses .travel and ranks first. On the other hand in New York, nycgo.com ranks well. Is it safe to assume that from the domain names I mentioned it really doesn't matter which one I use since it wouldn't significantly affect my ranking (good or bad)? Or would you still choose one above the other? What do you generally thing about .travel domain names (especially since they are far more expensive then the rest)? I really appreciate your response to my question! Best,Â
kinimod0 -
SEO for a homepage... What do you put? Focus on the brand or products?
Hi to all. Ok so I am curious how to format and seo a website homepage? This question is more in the way of dedicated towards how to rank locally if you have multiple services? See I have a construction website and we have many services. So do you try and format the homepage to promote the brand, or do you go after the services? Like would you say hey we are this company we serve here and here, and basically make it an about us page? or do you say hey this is who we are, but say we do this, that, and the other? I am afraid that although I have a webpage for each service, if the main url gets the link juice right now, how should a homepage be? Thank you for any tips or suggestions. Chris
Local Website Optimization | | asbchris0 -
Bing ranking a weak local branch office site of our 200-unit franchise higher than the brand page - throughout the USA!?
We have a brand with a major website at ourbrand.com. Â I'm using stand-ins for the actual brandname. The brand is a unique term, has 200 local offices with sites at ourbrand.com/locations/locationname, and is structured with best practices, and has a well built sitemap.xml. Â The link profile is diverse and solid. There are very few crawl errors and no warnings in Google Webmaster central. Â Each location has schema.org markup that has been checked with markup validation tools. Â No matter what tool you use, and how you look at it t's obvious this is the brand site. Â DA 51/100, PA 59/100. A rouge franchisee has broken their agreement and made their own site in a city on a different domain name, ourbrandseattle.com. Â The site is clearly optimized for that city, and has a weak inbound link profile. Â DA 18/100, PA 21/100. Â The link profile has low diversity and generally weak. Â They have no social media activity. Â They have not linked to ourbrand.com <- my leading theory. **The problem is that this rogue site is OUT RANKING the brand site all over the USA on Bing. Â **Even where it makes no sense at all. Â We are using whitespark.ca to check our ranking remotely in other cities and try to remove the effects of local personalization. What should we do? Â What have I missed?
Local Website Optimization | | scottclark0