Does anyone have stats or know where I can find stats on searchers who use geolocated queries versus geomodified?
-
My client is a franchise business and they want their location landing pages to rank for every one of their 60 plus locations nationwide. They are performing extremely well for geomodified terms. The argument is that people rarely ever search using the city name. Are there stats to back up whether this claim is true, and if so, do you know where I can get a hold of such data (outside of searching in Keyword Planner... unless that's the answer!)
-
Hey Kevin,
Mike & Phil would be good guys to reach out to, for sure. I'm glad if my reply was somewhat helpful and I'd love to see more recent data on this. Good luck with your client!
-
Kevin, Thanks for this, I did call Stat and spoke to them. They are more of an enterprise SEO solution and were not able to speak to the search data that I'm looking for here particularly. But I appreciate the comment and the lead!
Miriam, thanks once again for your thorough response, and for the links you shared. I think this is ultimately a very important study for local marketers, seeing as geolocated terms are a completely different play. Our solution was to build article/informative content for the query in question, and then use the Google Geolocation API on the website to guide the user to their nearest location. That way, we rank for people who are searching for the general geolocated query (we'll say "plumbing repair" to run with your example) and in most cases, the second organic result is the franchise location page for that city.
We're trying to convince the client of the value in ranking #1 with the article content page—but they're not convinced. They want the location page as the first result for geolocated queries in every city. Then of course, they want multiple results for cities where they have multiple locations, which is another story.
I'm going to reach out to Phil Rozek and Mike Blumenthal about a recent study regarding geolocated versus geomodified search data for local businesses, because I think it raises an important distinction. I personally always geomodify my queries—I don't leave the work to Google. I find I get better results. But I don't know if I'm in the minority, or not. As I say, my client is #1 for every city when the geomodifier is added to the keyword. It would be great to have data to back up the importance of having that real estate.Thanks again for your great feedback!
-
Hey Kevin,
I don't find that Keyword Planner is terribly helpful with local terms. Now, obviously, if your clients are hotels or other distance-type businesses like that, people are going to be using a ton of geomodifiers because they are located in one city but then looking for lodgings in another, but if the industry is plumbing, or something like that, likely you'd see less use of city names, in queries, particularly on mobile devices.
Your question has made me go searching around for any recent statistics on use of geomodifiers and what I'm coming up with is pretty old:
marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-seo-geo-modifiers.html
http://www.ngsmarketing.com/the-two-types-of-local-search-and-how-local-seo-should-reflect-them/
If anyone in the community has done or knows of a more recent study, please do link to it.
A very good indication that users use geomodifiers in looking up all kinds of local businesses can be seen in the 'related search' results at the bottom of Google's SERPs. For example, If I just look up 'plumbers', the related search results are returning me 8 suggested terms 3 of which contain city names. So, that would be something to look into for your client
Sorry not to be able to turn up any really recent data on this. It would certainly be good if someone would do a new study!
-
I talked to GetStat at MozCon this year and believe that they can help you out on this. No guarantees though. Good luck!
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
-
Anything I can throw money at to get a quick boost?
I run SEO for a multi-location business. Most of our locations are great and others are still ramping. SEO is a long process but we have higher expectations for these stores. While all the normal stuff get going to boost our rankings, is there anything quick I can just throw some money to get a jump start?
Local SEO | | danieldaher0 -
Can we use the same titles and meta descriptions for all of our office locations? We have 18 locations in total.
Hello, TTR Data Recovery has 18 different office locations and I am wondering if we can use the same title and meta description for all locations and just change the location name...For example: #1 Best Data Recovery Services in Atlanta, GA| TTRDATA TTR Data Recovery offers a comprehensive suite of data recovery services in Atlanta, GA including Hard Drive, SSD, Server and RAID/NAS. Get A Free Quote! #1 Best Data Recovery Services in Miami, FL | TTRDATA TTR Data Recovery offers a comprehensive suite of data recovery services in Miami, FL, including Hard Drive, SSD, Server and RAID/NAS. Get A Free Quote! Would this be already, or would it be better if we had a unique title and meta description for every location? We want to get the same message across and it would be difficult to change the wording 18 times. I look forward to hearing back from you guys. Thank you.
Local SEO | | Kiakh19870 -
How can I personalize content based on a state/region? Is it possible?
I'm getting a lot of traffic from different regions throughout the US. I need to personalize the content in my website or on a certain landing page based on the users state/region. Is it possible? For example, forwarding a user that lands on page "x" to page "y" if he's from California and to page "z" if he's from South Carolina. And of course, can this somehow affect my rankings in Google? Thanks!!
Local SEO | | OrendaLtd0 -
How to find best local websites?
For example, I'd like to type in a zipcode and get the highest ranking websites by DA/whatever metric the software uses, within a 25 mile radius? Does that type of service exist? I'm looking to build up our local links, but most of the websites have extremely low authority. I'm trying to find some good ones without having to manually check each one. Thanks, Ruben
Local SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
.ca for Canada-specific business currently using .com?
I work for a Canadian company and we are re-doing our website (corporate and branch sites) and the question has come up if we should change our current main domain from .com to .ca for local SEO benefits since we don't target an international audience. We own both versions but the .ca re-directs to the .com and we use .com in all our marketing materials. My understanding is that we can specify in Google Webmaster Tools that the focus of the site is Canada and I feel that switching to the .ca as the main domain isn't necessary, but I was wondering if there are real SEO benefits to make us seriously consider the change? Thanks, Taira
Local SEO | | ArborMemorial0 -
Has anyone any experience of Google pulling through random meta descriptions.
If you search "venn digital" then the correct meta description is pulled through, but if you search "venndigital" then it pulls through our twitter feed from the bottom of the page. My only suggestion is that it is doing it because there is no mention of " Venn Digital" in the body of the copy, so it is going to the twitter feed at the bottom of the page where Venn Digital is mentioned to pull this info through.
Local SEO | | AndrewAkesson0 -
Is there a tool out there that can help me determine how people in a particular area search for things?
I'm attempting to create geo-specific landing pages for a client. For example if I'm targeting southern Milwaukee very specifically I'd have to target Oak Creek, South Milwaukee, Bay View, etc. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to create landing pages for every one of those. Is there a tool to help with this issue? The tool I use right now is this http://www.5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php I like it for getting the names of every city/village/town in the area. However, it doesn't answer the nagging question ... how do people search for services in those areas?
Local SEO | | tunatraffic1 -
Using hreflang on multiple domains when one has been penalized
Hi, I have two sites. One is a new .co.uk site which contains duplicate information to a .ie site. Currently, if I do a search for the company name in Google.co.uk it returns the .ie site. The .co.uk site needs some localisation done and some links (really is brand new). I was going to place hreflang tags as follows on both sites:- The order would flip for the .co.uk site from the above order. However, just to make things interesting, the .ie site was hit by Penguin and it hasn't recovered yet (and won't recover for another few months while I fix the issues). So the question is, what should I do? Do I go ahead an let Google know for sure that these sites are linked despite one of them having been penalized? Or do I let Google think that there is a .co.uk site with duplicate content to another .ie site?
Local SEO | | Serpstone0