Local SEO citations: Do business description text variations matter? If yes how important is it to vary them?
-
I would like to see what is the consensus here about this stuff as virtually any automated service, be it yext or yahoo, will use one description text and use it for every available listing in their ecosystem.
In general what is your take on varying this business description text? of course, I would personally put a safer bet on avoiding any duplicate text between listings and the domain of the business in any case. but my questions is more between listing vs listing.
THIS IS BAD - WHY?
THIS HAS NO IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER - WHY NOT?
and in conclusion and hindsight, would one need to watch out for duplicate content across non-domain assets used by the business so long as none of the content is duplicated from the business domain? I tried my best googling this, but did not find a straight answer anywhere.
I would really appreciate some experienced and insightful comments on this one
-
I agree with what Miriam stated, but to play Devil's advocate, it would be interesting to do a study to see if things changed up (unique descriptions for each) would improve local rankings. I get that it could be on the IYP/directory to make the changes to better their site, but wouldn't it be on the business owner to have unique content there to ensure their listing ranks higher than others that are using duplicate descriptions?
For example, I work with an eCommerce company that sells over 50,000 products, most of which are on other affiliate marketing channels. Currently, our team members that run those channels pull the generic content that we're given from the manufacturer. As we're going through updating our content to be unique for our individual product pages, I've asked them NOT to pull that content through the feed (our developers have helped them manage this part). One of our team members, who's interested in SEO, asked me what would be the best way to help improve his listings on Amazon. In my opinion, he could keep the generic content that hundreds of other competitors are using (they also pulled it from the manufacturer) or he could write unique content for Amazon and maybe, just maybe, have a better chance of those pages ranking higher than competitors because it is unique content, i.e. it's the business taking the initiative here.
To take this back to local SEO, that unique description for top players in the IYP/directoy realm could potentially bring in better results. Again, this is only theoretical, I don't have solid proof around this, hence the reason for a study, but the person/company that does the study needs to think objectively here.
Great question by the way, I was wondering what others thought about this too, which is how I stumbled upon it.
-
Omid,
You could experiment with your own business. Build citations with varied descriptions to start, let it simmer for 4 months and record your local rankings. Then, go through and edit all those descriptions on the different sites to be the exact same. Let that simmer for another four months, and then check rankings again.
This will also be flawed because there are hundreds of other variables that you're not controlling for, but it might give some insight if there is a significant change in rankings.
-
My pleasure, Omid! And I'd love to see a post like that come through our YouMoz queue. I get to take the first look at all our submissions and would be happy to take a look at what you come up with if you do end up doing a study.
-
Oh wow! You are awesome Miriam!
I think I will go ahead and conduct a study on this anyway, this presents a perfect opportunity as i have two clean and fresh slates to work with, one, for a client which I will do varied to be perfectly safe, and one for our own redesigned website to be launched soon, which I can take all the risk for and just do one single copy and see and compare the effects. Although it will be apples vs oranges due to totally different industries, but I doubt one ever gets to compare the two routes for the same type of business unless you are lucky enough (or shady enough) to have access to competing clients data...
I really do appreciate your post and time spent, deserves all the thumbs ups I can give it and may well get me to do this albeit somewhat flawed study.
Not sure if I will have the time to setup a fully controlled study... but it will be nice to get some idea of how this works. Hopefully i can report back soon in a youmoz post. Thanks again
-
Hi Omid,
I'd love to see some in-depth testing of this topic done, but to my knowledge, I've never seen anyone delve into this deeply. Nevertheless, I've seen lots of people ask about this. Here's the basic premise:
We know Google doesn't like duplicate content, yet, when we publish a business description on a local business listing, there is a high likelihood of that description getting replicated across the web due to the way data is shared within the Local Search Ecosystem. Does Google care about this type of duplication? Can it harm rankings? Can having varied descriptions help?
My personal opinion is that duplication is baked into the local search ecosystem and is largely unavoidable. After all, your business NAP (name, address, phone) is duplicate content when it is published across multiple platforms and logic dictates that Google has no problem with this.
However, as I've said, I don't know of any real studies of this but your question prompted me to have a brief chat with Darren Shaw and Andrew Shotland and we were in pretty solid agreement about this.
Darren says: I have heard many people suggest that there are benefits to mixing up your description on your citations, but, it's unrealstic to imagine doing this on EVERY citation ... Maybe making 15 different versions and spreading those around.
I have not seen any evidence to support that there are benefits in doing this though ... just speculationAndrew says: If anything, it's the IYPs that need to worry about it, not the businesses ... basically the same as a bunch of ecommerce sites having the same SKU description
I think Andrew raises an especially valid point! If there were to be ANY penalty associated with duplicate descriptions (which I highly doubt) it would be something for the IYP/directory who is publishing the content to worry about...not the local business owner.
So, my take on this is that it would be very interesting to experiment with whether varying the business descriptions as much as you can had any observable positive effect on rankings, but that I highly doubt duplicate descriptions have any negative effect - certainly not on the business owner.
That being said - you Local SEO researchers out there - if you're looking for a study to do, this would be a fun one! Hope this helps, Omid!
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
-
What are the SEO challenges associated with private search engines, like DuckDuckGo?
I read recently that DuckDuckGo doubled in size in 2017. With their search engine, and other alternatives to Google, taking part of the search market away, how can SEO/Marketing/Web pros keep their websites optimized and get traffic from these private search engines? (Also, do any of you have experience with this? What portion of your search traffic is coming from private search engines?)
SERP Trends | | searchencrypt1 -
Houston Company Needs Help (Will Our SEO Work Be Destroyed While Site is Down?, Can Anything be Done?)
I'm a Moz member, mostly just lurk, and love the Moz community. I work at a non profit company that does benchmarking data and helps school districts improve process in education. Our building flooded and our site is currently offline, is there anything we can do to stop/lesson any SEO page rank drop between now and when we are back up? We have worked very hard to get these rankings. I know it is minor compared to all tragedy in Houston, but we have worked hard to get these SEO gains (YEAH MOZ!) and I'd hate to lose them because of Harvey. Any suggestions, assistance appreciated! Ralph
SERP Trends | | inhouseninja1 -
Site "Internal" Search Full-Text Indexing vs. Manual Tagging
I’m looking for recommendations on how to power site search in an efficient way. Ideally, I would like to get recommendations on platforms, tools, trends, technology and resources. This discussion does not really refer to SEO or site search optimization. It is more related to the technology used to power site search. I would like to get an idea on the differences between full-text indexing site search and site search that requires manual tagging.
SERP Trends | | burnseo0 -
ASO / SEO Training in Ny
Hi there 🙂 I´m looking for a respectable ASO ( App store optimization ) and advanced SEO courses in Ny, does anybody have suggestion 4 me? thanks
SERP Trends | | SeoMartin10 -
Google crawled "Cross Domain" links. Is this an issue? if yes then how we can remove it?
We have two sites. One site for US (site.com)and another is for India(site.co.in). Redirection is working based on ip address and location.So if I write US(site.com) site link in India location then it will automatically redirect to India site(site.co.in). We have given a link in the header of the site which will be used to open another country site. Example : Currently India site open in my browser so it contain US site link. and US site open in my browser so it contain India site link. We check on google web master and we found back links of cross domains so Is it an issue?
SERP Trends | | Shanil1230 -
Robots.txt blocking Metadata description being read
I have updated my Robots.txt file recently to fix the description snip-it on Google reading "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more". How can I have this updated to read my META data?
SERP Trends | | IMM0 -
Google Street View For Business
Does anyone know if there are any statistics that prove Google Street View For Business is worth a company investing in it? Any feed back would be much appreciated. Thanks Christina
SERP Trends | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Does google follow text links without the link?
Hi A short question. Lets say I have been mentioned in an article online like "also mentioned on www.domain.com is" but the url mentioned is not a link does that give any seo value at all to my site? Does it count towards building a brand i googles eyes by being mentioned a lot but not awarded a link? Hope you can help clarify
SERP Trends | | AndersDK0