Local Sitelinks
-
Does anyone know how organic local site links work? The examples I'm looking at are from Yelp and Angie'sList. When you run a brand search, some sitelinks reference my current location and takes me to a regional landing page.
My company has landing pages for major cities across the U.S. but they never get picked up as a sitelink like this. I don't see local links anywhere on the AngiesList or Yelp homepages so I don't know how Google knows to prioritize these pages. We are also a national review site, so we have no interest in showing up in the local pack, etc. Any thoughts would be super helpful! Thanks
-
Hi David,
I've only seen this type of local sitelink for sites that are sending users to brick-and-mortar locations, so I think in part it would depend on what kind of reviews you're hosting. How different are the local/regional landing pages from each other? Do they feature local products or businesses?
-
Google local is for local businesses and yelp, Angies, GMB and all of the local citation businesses will link to a physical local address. It's extremely difficult to outrank local businesses if you are a national business and don't have a local address. Don't be tempted to create a local listing and cheat because you'll get busted by Joy the Spamhunter or #stopcraponthemap etc.
The landing pages will need to contain the area in the URL, local specific words in the copy and also have a strong local presence from hyperlocal and local citations to be picked up in local search.
I don't now what you're trying to achieve by having loacl citations point to your site if it's not a local site. They just won't do that without a local physical address. The Hawk, Kestrel (I think) and some other bird-named updates have made it very hard for national brands to rank locally now and I see more and more daily deal sites and comparison sites using ad words to reach their local audiences that they previously could have done without a local address.
Tell me what you are trying to achieve and what your strategy is and perhaps I'll be able to offer more insight. I am a local business and am coming at this problem from the other direction (ie trying to outrank the big national players) and it's becoming easier and easier because I have a local presence and google will always favour that. But I can tell you some of the ones who are still beating us and you could perhaps model their strategies?
Zocdoc seem to be picking up most of the search for 'find a doctor new york' and they have almost the same domain authority as you, so perhaps it's something on site that you can model from their site to yours by analysing the two.
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
-
Massive local + national disconnect in rankings (local deindexed)
I asked the question originally on webmaster central. I tried RickRoll's solutions (but it doesn't seem to have solved the issue). Problem below: I've been noticing for some time that certain pages of our site (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent) have been deindexed locally (or very low ranked), but indexed nationally (well ranked). In fact, it seems that the actual page isn't ranking (but the blog https://www.renthop.com/blog is). This huge mismatch between national vs local rankings seem to only happen for Boston & Chicago. Other parts of the country seem unaffected (and the national & local rankings are very similar). A bit of a background (and my personal theory as to what's happening). We use to have subdomains: boston.renthop.com & chicago.renthop.com for the site. These subdomains stopped working, though, as we moved the site to the directory format (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent). These subdomain URLs were inactive / broken for roughly 4 months. After the 4 months, we did a 301 from the subdomain to the main page (because these subdomains had inbound external links). However, this seems to have caused the directory pages to exhibit the national/local mismatch effect instead of helping. Is there anything I'm doing wrong? I'm not sure if the mismatch is natural, if the pages are getting algo penalized on a local level (I'm negative SEOing myself), or if it's stuck in some weird state because of what happened with bad sub-domain move). Some things I've tried: I've created webmaster console (verified) accounts for both the subdomains. I've asked Google to crawl those links. I've done a 1-1 mapping between individual page on the old site vs the new directory format I've tried both doing a 301, 302 and meta-refresh redirect from the subdomains to the directory pages. I've made sure the robots.txt on the subdomain is working properly I've made sure that the robots.txt on the directory pages are working properly. See below for a screenshot of the mismatch & deindexing in local search results (this is using SERPS - but can be replicated with any location changer). Note the difference between the ranking (and the page) when the search is done nationally vs in the actual location (Boston, MA). I'd really appreciate any help.. I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure this out (as well as experimenting). renthop%2Bboston.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lzhou0 -
Local Google Place Ranking loss
One of our clients lost rankings on the local map results. Last month we changed the phone number on the G+ page so the number is the same as on the website but it's still a call tracking number. We also changed the url to example.nl/plumber-newyork so it directly links to the local page and we made the local G+ author of the local page in the website. Can these changes have something to do with the ranking loss in google maps results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remkoallertz0 -
How do Nation wide business win Local?
Hi, What is the methodology for a nation wide e-commerce site to win local searches? If we take for example Flower Shops...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
How do companies like 1800Flowers, ProFlowers compete locally for searches like "Flowers New York", "Flowers Boston" etc.? Should they create a dedicated page (or pages / articles) per area ? Thanks0 -
Best practices for a local business move
My client is a chiropractic office that will be moving to the next town over in about 3 months. What are people's best practices on how to best accomplish this SEO-wise so as to not lose too much in terms of rankings, current organic traffic and citation listings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | easystreetint0 -
Local Coverage Strategy
Hi Mozzers, I've had some successful national and international campaigns but this will be my first attempt at local. The client is a landscape designer, services several cities within a 50 mile radius and has a rural address which is not located in any of the cities serviced. What's my best strategy for ranking in the desired cities considering the client's address is not located in any of them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Code to change country in URL for locale results
How do I change the code in my URL to search in Google by specific location?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Google local listing
I have a site and i registerd for local listing in google but i have not received any letter from google.It is second time i request for pin one month back and this time also did not received letter from google. what should i do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
How Does SEO Help Local Businesses
Hello, I recently took a position as a digital marketing manger with a advertising agency. Its my job to grow the digital marketing department. One of the issues I am running into is 90% of our clients are local businesses. When doing keyword research it is very difficult to find keywords with lots of search. For example, if I am optimizing for a Ford dealership in Hackensack,NJ there are not a lot of searches for this term. How can I justify a larger SEO budget when there is just not a lot of search volume for these keywords? This is nothing like Dog Training Videos or something similar. Am I missing something? Where can I pull traffic from for local businesses to justify larger SEO budgets? Thanks, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0