Local Seo Service Url Best practices.
-
Hey Guys and Gals,
What's the best format for service urls for local seo?
http://www.example.com/basement-remodeling
or http://www.example.com/basement-remodeling-ashburn-leesburg-sterling-va/
-
Hey Jim,
Linkbuilding isn't really my area. One is always aiming for a natural link profile, but you might want to start a new thread about linkbuilding, and also, check these out:
https://moz.com/blog/link-building-outreach-in-a-skeptical-world-whiteboard-friday
http://niftymarketing.com/list-of-local-link-building-ideas/
Hope it helps!
-
Thanks Miriam for the awesome input, I will work on making these changes asap.
Another question (seems never ending lol).
Do you suggest I build backlinks to rank these pages higher? or should i be building backlinks to my main domain.
-
Hi Jim!
Nice of you to put these out for community feedback. You're off to a good start here, and while I don't have the necessary time to look at all of these, here's what I'm seeing on a couple:
-
Good amount of text
-
Text color is hard to read; it's too light
-
H1 Tag order of keywords might need to be rethought, putting business name at end instead of beginning
-
In the main body text, reconsider all of those 'it's important' statements. It makes it sound like 'I' am suppose to do all of that work before calling your company (inspect my house, look for leaks, etc.). If this is what YOU do, be clearer about that.
-
Some text is a bit over-optimized with basement remodeling and Ashburn terms. Example: How Long Does a Basement Finishing in Ashburn, VA Take? Unless it takes longer in Ashford than some other city to finish a basement, this type of text looks a bit awkward. Review the text for other instances and be sure keywords are being incorporated in natural language.
-
It's good you're getting testimonials, but I would scrap the rotating display. It's confusing that I'm on a page about basements reading a testimonial about blinds. Put basement testimonials on the basement page, bathroom testimonials on the bathroom page, etc.
-
Put a phone number in your call to action at the bottom of the page. Don't make people click unless they want to. Give them the number.
-
Title tag & URL look good
So, you're on a good path with this page. Some minor refinements could make it better!
-
Same comments regarding font color, H1 tag, call to action, testimonials etc. as above.
-
The text needs to be edited for grammar. For example:
Bathrooms need to be a place that makes you feel good, so that every day can be started off the right way.
- The text is not quite as creative as it might be. I feel like the copywriter was having a struggle thinking what to say.
Again, I see a good initial effort here, but with a bit more effort, there could be meaningful improvements.
I know it requires bravery to show work to the public, and the good news is here that you are off to a good start but that there are some SEO, UX and content matters that could be improved. Thanks for the chance to look at these. Hopefully what I've written above will be a starting point to evaluating all of your service pages. Good luck, Jim!
-
-
Hey Jim,
You could go either way with the description. I'm kind of a fan of putting a phone number in the description, myself! I'd rather have that there than the city names.
-
Thanks Miriam! I almost got it now.
Now I have a question regarding my "main services page"
Should I be mentioning areas under title and description on my main services pages (not local landing pages)
Service : Basement finishing
url: http://www.example.com/basement-finishing
title: Basement Finishing & Remodeling | company | Call 555-555-5555!
description: Basement Finishing & Basement Remodeling | Transform Unfinished Basements To Livable Square Footage. Ashburn | Sterling | Loudoun
Or should I leave the areas out of description under main pages and use those specifically for local landing pages.
Thanks Miriam!!
Basement Finishing & Basement Remodeling | Transform Unfinished Basements To Livable Square Footage.
-
Hi Jim,
While it won't hurt you, are you sure it would be useful for your clients in City A to click over to your City B page, or might that just add unnecessary clutter and confusion to the page?
-
Hey Guys
One More quesetions.
After I setup the pages to above format, on my local landing page can i cross link them with other local pages?
for example if im on basement remodeling ashburn page can i put other areas we serve section and cross link them to other landing pages?
-
Thanks Miriam! This makes more sense now!
-
Ah this makes more sense!
Another question if i am going to link off of those pages. could i just make the main url this?
basement-remodeling-va
kitchen-remodeling-va
and have the link silo like you mentioned from the post it self? or even service areas
-
I would have a main page about each service topic and then link off from that.
Bathroom remodeling page
Bathroom remodeling content
We do bathroom remodeling in: blah blah blah, linked page, linked page, linked page.
Or naturally in the content if possible, of course. Or even a list at the bottom:
Our service area includes: town(link), town(link) etc.
This works very well for clients I've had in the past with many suburbs & locations.
-
Hi Jim,
Don't worry, you're not being repetitive
It's very common for service area businesses to serve a variety of close-set cities, and best practice for this is 1 page per city. In fact, doing so could help you to outrank your competitors who are crunching multiple cities onto the same page.
If you offer multiple services in multiple cities, the choice here is whether you want to create:
a) a page for each city and a page for each service
or
b) a page for every possible combination of services and cities
If budget, time or inspiration are limited, option A may be best in which case, you'd have URLs like this for your services
domain.com/bathroom-remodeling
domain.com/kitchen remodeling
and domains like this for your services:
...with the city landing pages needing to feature geo-specific content for projects you've done in those cities.
If you have ample time, inspiration and budget, you can go with option B, in which case, you'd build a set of pages like:
domain.com/bathroom-remodeling-sterling-va
domain.com/bathroom-remodeling-leesburg-va
domain.com/kitchen-remodeling-sterling-va
domain.com/bathroom-remodeling-leesburg-va
etc.
It's really a matter of how much creative writing you commit to so that, with either option A or B, every page you publish is as helpful as possible to customers, is unique, and is of the highest quality you can produce.
This recent Moz Blog post may help: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
-
Hey Matt,
Thanks for the response, If i were to silo them. What would I put in my main navigation?
Wouldn't it look funny if my main navigation listed multiple of the same?
basement-remodeling
kitchen-remodeling
basement-remodeling
kitchen-remodeling?
Thanks!
-
If you do more than one type of thing per location, I would silo them:
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for the quick response!
The reason I am asking is where my business is located we have other citys near by literally 5-10 miles apart.
I've seen my competitor do a similar thing and they seem to be ranking very well. http://www.example.com/bathroom-remodeling-sterling-leesburg-herndon-reston-ashburn-va/
http://www.example.com/bathroom-remodeling-sterling-leesburg-herndon-reston-ashburn-va/
I guess my main question is can i setup the main services url to include those near by citys and state and create additional pages like
http://www.example.com/bathroom-remodeling-in-ashburn-va/ etc etc
so main services would look like
basement-remodeling-ashburn-sterling-leesburg-va
bathroom-remodeling-ashburn-sterling-leesburg-va
and have lead capture pages like
bathroom-remodeling-in-ashburn
bathroom-remodeling-in-sterling and so on.
Sorry if my questions seem repetitive i am just confused with the whole local seo scene.
-
Hey Jim!
Normally, I would not recommend having more than one city modifier in the URL per page. So:
but not
domain.co/service-city-city-city
Ideally, you want a unique page per city. Hope that helps!
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
-
Google Local Result- Competitor Ranks without an Address. Why is this happening?
My client is in a fairly competitive local market and there is a competitor who has ranked locally for around 2 years, but they have no actual address on their Google business listing. Just city and state. The listing is always top three and it does have their website listed, but directions aren't even available as there is actual no address. The listing is extremely keyword dense (basically spam but they actually created a business with the spam name). Citation Example: Keyword dense business name, phone number, city and state only Have you seen this? Can you explain why this is happening? Is this against the rules/anything I can do? Thanks!
Local Listings | | mgordon0 -
Local Profile Struggling
Hi guys, we have a client that we are having some issues with. We have done extensive directory work for them, so this is unusual. Their Google My Business profile isn't ranking hardly at all, although they have decent organic rankings. Here is the company: https://plus.google.com/+ComfortAireHeatingCoolingPlumbingWisconsinRapids/about We have two possible reasons, but before we spend the time fixing these we were hoping for some reassurance from the Moz community. 1)Name in GMB looks spammy. This truly is their name, but we thought it may be an issue due to the keywords. 2)Address inconsistency: The client wanted us to use 880 Highway 73 South, Wisconsin Rapids, WI 54494 so that is how we submitted it to aggregators and directory sites. Google didn't accept that, they changed it to: 880 WI-73 Wisconsin Rapids, WI 54494. The USPS Zip code checker didn't accept either of these, they use 880 STATE HIGHWAY 73 S, WISCONSIN RAPIDS WI 54494. Do you guys think one of these is our issue, or could it be something else. Thanks in advance for your insights!
Local Listings | | JohnWeb120 -
SEO without a budget and Cheating Competitors
I have law clients in the atlanta ga area. I have worked with one client http://bestdefensega.com for the past 4 months trying to get him to the top. We blog 3 times a week, have manually built citations and legal directory profiles. My client doesn't have a large budget to purchase profiles on some of the larger legal directories like findlaw, lexus nexus etc.. With that said,
Local Listings | | underdogmike
Using Open Site Explorer I have discovered that his competition all have multiple business websites pointed back to their main websites.. So each law office has several really generic websites in addition to their main site. Other's appear to be receiving links from some type of link farm and really generic directory sites.
The domains of these guy's are older and more established. Where as, my client has a new practice and a new domain. How do I compete in the local market without a budget for the premium legal directories? So after 4 months my client appears in the local pack search results for only select keywords. Criminal defense attorney woodstock ga. His competition appears in the results for all variations, where my client only shows for this one term. How do I get me client in the local pack for all variations of Criminal Defense in my area? According to Moz, my site has a couple spam score issues and the explanations are not clear enough for me to make some types of changes.
**How do I make these changes to reduce the spam score? My site has more back links than Moz is reporting why?** All of the other sites that I manage perform well and my clients are realizing their ROI with relative ease. But criminal defense is a different beaat and it is starting to frustrate me. RAR! Thanks in advance!0 -
Local sites to make sure I'm listed in - which ones?
I'd love to know what sites this community deems most important when looking at whether my business & site are listed there. I know the obvious - Google Places, Yahoo Maps, Bing Local, Yelp. Foursquare. What others do you consider to be "mission critical" to the general market? Thanks!
Local Listings | | wcksmith10 -
Will local optimization effect international ranking?
Lets say a company serves Canada and US customers regularly, but they are based in Canada. They currently have no local optimization or confirmation of their location on their website. If I were to begin local optimization (google my business, local content, link building, schema etc), would Google recognize this website as a Canadian business and remove rankings in the US that it is currently appearing in now without any locational information?
Local Listings | | aaronleven0 -
Yext & Moz Local - Avoiding Dupliates
What happens if we are using Yext and Moz Local at the same time? I hear it can create duplicates. However if the NAP is exactly the same on both, why cant the aggregators/citation sources figure this out on their own? I need to develop a clearer understanding before i start submitting a select few of my clients through Yext. I do have the option to opt out of the Factual aggregator on Yext. Instead we would only update the sites that Yext has access to. End of day we are going to continue using Moz.com/local but yext saves us dozens of man hours while trying to clean up citations and fix duplicates (temporarily ofcourse until we contact them ourselves).
Local Listings | | waqid0 -
What to do with duplicate Listings for Business in Moz Local Tool?
Hi Everyone! Just another newbie Local SEO looking for a solution. I was searching my business listing in Moz Local and it returned two addresses.
Local Listings | | psuh528
Listing #1: 925 B Street #402 San Diego, CA 92101, 67623
Listing #2: 925 B St, #402, San Diego, CA, 92101 Do I need to remove the listing with two zip codes showing up? (I don't see any of my profiles showing up with two zip codes though.) Listing #2 is accurate yet the local moz tool tells me that my Google+ page is 69% complete. How is it possible that Listing #1 scored a 97% complete on Google+? Would you recommend putting the suite number in Address Line 1 or separated in Line 2? Does it even matter? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!0 -
How is a competitor franchise ranking all for all 3 Local results with unclaimed G+ pages in a search for the national corporation?
My company is an individual franchise of a national corporation - every franchise is operates as [National Corporate Brand Name] + a chosen descriptor such as "Premiere" or the names of the owners such as "Smith Jones". A logged-out Google search for just the national brand name returns the corporate website first, followed by the website of a competing local franchise and 3 Local listings for their offices. These listings are all unclaimed and unverified on Google+ and have no reviews or posts. The corporate Twitter is next, followed by my franchise's website. The corporate Facebook is the last result on the page. How can this competing franchise rank for all 3 Local listings with unclaimed pages? My company operates several more offices than the competitor in the same area and I regularly post to their G+ pages which I verified several months ago. Is it because the competitor's website just holds significantly more weight in Google than our own? A search for the brand name + the town where our offices are in does usually return our Local listing pages, but that limits our reach to those specific towns. Anyone have any insight on this?
Local Listings | | WGW0