Do references to neighborhoods and local attractions in body copy provide any benefit to geographic rankings for the city in which those neighborhoods/attractions exist?
-
A few years ago, some SEOs encouraged the mentioning of local points of interest in the copy of a page to improve localized rankings for the city in question. The argument was that a page mentioning "Wrigley Field" (in a natural-seeming manner) would be more likely to be ranked for "Chicago" searches. A similar argument promoted the use of maps (assuming they have a meaningful purpose) because of the neighborhoods, streets, etc mentioned on the map. Was this ever actually a benefit, and if so is it still?
-
Hi Mjesse,
I think you can't go wrong removing anything that doesn't seem to make sense on a page. Obviously, I'm not looking at your actual website, but if you are feeling that some content on a page isn't user-centric, then yes, I'd remove it and replace it with something superior for that user group.
-
Thanks, Miriam:
That is absolutely good advice for how to use localized information to make the on-page content and more relevant to actual humans visiting the page -- and naturally our priority should always be the actual human. So if I were creating this page from scratch and my target audience was similar to what you described, I would not bother mentioning "Disney World" on the Orlando page because my audience doesn't care about that.
However, I need to decide whether to edit out localized references such as "Disney World" from existing content that already has some fairly good rankings for "Orlando." (And many similar situations elsewhere in the country).
At the moment, my thinking is that I'll simply move the travelogue text to a different part of the page under a header such as "About the Orlando area," and write more relevant introductory text for the page to display at the top (similar to what you have suggested). That way, just in case "Disney World" is helping existing rankings for "Orlando" I would not be breaking anything that might be working.
-
Hi Mjesse,
Great context you've provided, thanks! Now that I've understood the business model better, here's what I would suggest:I would include this type of hyperlocal content, but I'd be extremely specific. Homeowner needs are going to be different in different communities. I'm being totally speculative here, but let's say your client builds a development meant to appeal to retirees in a moderately-sized city in Florida. You'd be asking yourself the question,"What would our typical purchaser most likely want to be able to do in this city?" You do some research and discover that retirees care most about:
- Distance to medical care including hospitals and pharmacies
- Distance to restaurants
- Distance to affordable grocery shopping
- Distance to golf courses
- Distance to casinos
- Distance to safe walking paths
You then compile a list of a) resources within a short driving distance and b) resources within walking distance that fit these needs. You don't bother with mentioning major attractions (like Disneyworld) that are miles away and may not be go-to resources for this base of retired home buyers. You then work up your list into a couple of paragraphs of travelogue-type writing that explicitly describe the distance to specific medical centers, supermarkets, eateries, golf courses, casinos and nice places to walk that will immediately accessible to anyone buying a home in this development. It will lend to the appeal of the development, and will simultaneously hyperlocalize your content if all of these resources you're mentioning are in a desirable neighborhood or district of a given city.
This approach could have an excellent impact on conversions, but, as far as its impact on actual organic rankings, that remains speculative. It's something you have to sort of suss out in scenarios. So, for example, someone considering moving to Florida finds your page on the housing development so useful that they link to it, spend a lot of time on the page, click on it more from the SERPs because it has an exciting meta description, etc. These things could boost the rankings of the page over time, but I would personally consider that a secondary consideration to making the page so useful that it converts at a high rate.
Does this help?
-
Thanks, Miriam. Just to clarify, the home builder in this example is not my own company but a client I'm doing some work for. The company has a presence in a dozen or so major markets, and at each one of these it maintains a permanent sales staff. They sell directly to home buyers.
Like many companies that do business in multiple locations, they have the challenge of writing meaningful local copy to accompany their listings. Potential customers might be searching for "new homes in Boston" or "home construction in Orlando," so the objective is to earn rankings for those local place names in connection with a set of real estate keywords. In pursuit of this, they have previously written content blocks describing each city in a travel guide style -- name-dropping various local attractions associated with that city. The strategy is clearly to convince Google that the page MUST be about this city because gosh look at all the landmarks, sports teams, etc that it mentions! My impression is that this kind of localization strategy DID work at one point in time, but I don't know if it still works.
My inclination is to replace the intro text with something more relevant to the company and how wonderful it's homes are, but I'm afraid to remove the travelogue-style content entirely because it might actually be doing something. I've been trying to research this, but haven't found anything addressing it.
-
Hi Mjesse,
Great conversation you're having with EGOL, whose advice is always excellent.
The details of your scenario matter a great deal here. If you owned a restaurant, mentioning on the website that you're located 1 minute from the Chicago Children's Museum and have a great kids' menu, or across the street from Adler Planetarium and open for late night food could, indeed, help you to highly localize your content. This could lead to a variety of positives, including either direct or indirect impact on your local-organic rankings, which could, in turn, impact your local pack rankings. These types of landmark/neighborhood-oriented descriptions can also be extremely helpful to visitors to the area.
But, as you are a home builder, what I'd like to understand is the exact nature of your business model. Would you be able to answer a couple of questions:
-
Are you building housing developments and, if so, do they have a staffed office on the property, at least until all of the homes have been sold? Who occupies the office? Your company or a third party? And, do you meet with consumers at this office?
-
Do you sell the homes directly to the consumer, or are you just constructing them?
Please, let me know! This is a very good topic.
-
-
Right. We have the homes and their addresses, but were debating internally about the value of adding the additional geographic references. For example, on the main page of each market we could have a text block directed at people outside of that market that describes the various benefits of living in this particular city -- mentioning whatever museums, zoos or whatever it is most known for. I've seen that on other sites, but was not sure of it's value.
We also have existing maps showing the locations of the client's various developments, and were considering adding to that map some of these points of interest using a different color marker. Again, we want this to be beneficial to the human user, but we also want to do what we can to get Google to up our rankings on the geographic front.
-
I think that you have a good approach.
If you are a homebuilder then you could get photos of homes in the actual neighborhoods and post them on the website with street address and nearby landmarks. Doing this will build a portfolio of homes that people can view online or drive-by.
-
Thanks. In my case, it's a home building company with a presence in multiple markets where it also has strong competition from other home builders. Some potential customers may already live in these markets while others may be searching from elsewhere because they are planning to move. So if the market is, say, Des Moines, some searchers living in Des Moines might just search for "new homes" or "home builders." Meanwhile, people living elsewhere might search "homebuilders in Des Moines."
Either way, I'm hoping to strengthen the "Des Moines" elements by mentioning neighborhood, shopping centers, schools, and touristy places of interest that are in the vicinity of a particular housing development. This would, of course, always be legitimate information that is good for the user, but my hope is that doing this would improve localized rankings relative to competitors.
-
It can be kickass if you are writing for a real estate site or a tourism site or a site about the local community.
If you are writing a page for a welding service in Chicago it will probably not be as valuable.
If your service is all about the city of Chicago, these words on the page make your page relevant for the city. They support the fact that you wrote unique information for the page and probably know a bit about the area. They can also combine with other words on the page to bring in long tail traffic.
The most important thing to know before you do this, is that these words need to be incorporated into information that is valuable for your visitor and they engage the content. It might keep visitors on your page longer, cause they to share the page. This is why you don't want to hire an oaf to produce these pages. They gotta be good.
This stuff will not produce miracles. You gotta have a good site that is valuable to visitors.
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
-
Page not ranking despite indicators showing should easily be mid-1st page?
I have many years old website selling a service. The main keyword is 47% competitive, and we used to be #1 page 2, occasionally page 1 couple years back. Domain authority is double of any of the competitors on 1st page, followed root domain links is many times that of 1st page competitors, infact against some of them almost 10 times as much, MozRank and MozTrust higher too. Infact, every metric is higher than competition. Only metric which isn't as good is Followed vs NoFollowed links metric, 95% of our links are NoFollowed, but we are still #1 in external followed links. Yet we are stuck on 4th page, and on some localizations we are not even in Top 50. This has happened slowly over time, not a overnight thing. Page we are trying to rank for gets grade A for optimizations, yet we have less significant pages ranking higher for that keyword. Further, newer pages tend to rank better than old ones. The whole site actually ranks quite low and we are not even getting search traffic for long tail keywords.
Keyword Research | | PulsedMedia
No problems reported on GWT, Analytics etc. Is this a google penalization or something of the sort? How can i troubleshoot this and get past this?0 -
Domain Change, Lost ranking on 1 keyword
Hey guys, Long time follower of the Q&A forum, but don't post too often. I'm having an issue I never came across. We changed a domain from mpbuilderscincy.com to mpcincinnati.com. We did the 301 redirect and all the SEO flowed through pretty well. Most pages didn't even change in file structure so we didn't need to do page redirects for the most part. Anyway, long story short, we are seeing the same rankings as we had before now (it's been about 2 months) except for 1 and only 1 keyword. It's "Home Remodeling Cincinnati". We dropped from page 2, to page 11 on Google and it won't budge. Now on Yahoo and Bing, we are right back where we were before already with that keyword. But Google just refuses to bump us back to where we were before the change. The Home Remodeling page: http://www.mpcincinnati.com/Residential-Services/Home-Remodeling.aspx has an on page grade of A for that keyword and we have it as one of our main keywords on the home page of the site (title, h1, alt tags, etc). No errors on the page. I mean it looks pretty clean for this page as far as SEO except for 1 notice that mentions the 301 canonical redirect. We uploaded the new sitemap right away. I just can't put a thumb on it and wondering if you guys had any tips. Thanks, Chris
Keyword Research | | Cincinnati_WebTec0 -
Understanding the Rankings report: Visits - what timeframe?
I just setup a new site in MOZ, rankings have run on 200+ keywords for two weeks. The report shows 14 visits for the keyword "google backup". Is that 14 visits since the last crawl or 14 visits all time since I have been tracking that keyword within Moz? Thanks!
Keyword Research | | nuash0 -
Informational pages, not product pages, are ranking for product-related keywords
My site sells products (+1000s) and we have a few pages about how-to's, tips, etc. But when you search for keywords that are relevant to the products, the guides show up as search results. For example, if we search for "red widgets", the page for "how to make widgets" shows in the SERP and not the "red widgets" product page. This doesn't make sense when most of the search results go to our guides and not to the product pages. How can I change this? Do I permanent remove these guides? Or rename the title, description? My guess is that other sites have linked to these guides so they are making our site more of a "guide" site as opposed to the products we sell. Any advice/recommended would be appreciated.
Keyword Research | | mof3kz0 -
Question on keyword rankings
Hi everyone Within our campaign it says that we rank number 35 for a specific keyword in Google in the Unites States but when we google the specific keyword we come up as number two on the first page. Can you help me understand what the current rank is based on as well as how it's results can be different from our Google search? Thank you.
Keyword Research | | DRTBA0 -
Big difference in rank on google.com and google.no
Hi Our E-com website went from 8th to 1st spot yesterday for our most important keyword (barneklær = childrens clothing) on google.no weirdly enough we arent ranking on first page at all on google.com . I find this very strange especially since the keyword itself is so country specific - mainly because of the norwegian specific letter - æ. The results are not due to personalization i ve check it with the keyword difficulty tool here on seomoz. The sites ranking higher then me on google.com are sites i am ranking higher then on google.no. Anyone got a good explanation ? The changes for my keyword in ranking i saw yesterday was alot more then i am used to see - almost like google made some sort of script change. we went from 8th to 1st. 1st dropped to 4th, 5ht went to 2nd etc - i am not used to seeing this big changes. Anyone got a clue to either of these 2 questions ?
Keyword Research | | danlae0 -
Keyword analysis/optimization for blog sites (avoiding self cannibalization)
Hi there, I work on a site that has regular blog and article posts (or at least, we're shooting for regular), and I'm trying to work on a fluid approach for keyword analysis and optimization. I am wondering...is it best to research new keywords for each new post? I am unsure of what the effect is of optimizing multiple pages for the same keyword. I've been using the SEOmoz report card tool to grade my on page optimization, and I noticed one of the criteria was to avoid self cannibalization. Will I be competing against myself if I optimize multiple pages for the same keyword? I'm worried about what will happen in a month or two when I run out of common keywords and have to start optimizing our latest posts around really obscure keywords. Am I thinking about this the right way? Thanks!
Keyword Research | | MikeQ-BACC0 -
Rankings are changing all the time
Hi there! My client has a webpage http://www.finlotto.fi. It's a lottery in the Internet. We are trying to dominate keyword "lotto". It's a high volume keyword that has over 135 000 local searches (exact) per month. However, it seems that there aren't much competition out there. We have only one competitor - Veikkaus.fi The issue: We usually have first page ranking only for 2 days max, then we got dropped to third page. Two days later we have first page ranking again. Then we got dropped again to third page. This happens all the time. the odd thing: when we are in the first page, there are a date in the beginning of the META description. When we got dropped to third page, the date disappears. I know this has something to do with crawling. Can you give me some answers considering this issue? I'd be VERY VERY grateful 🙂 BR, Teemu Kinnunen
Keyword Research | | TeemuKinnunen0