Ways to expand your marketing area
-
I have a local business and put additional city names (7 of them) into the main title page along with the biz description in order to expand into these areas. I included these same cities on 3 other pages in the site as well, along with the custom descriptions for these pages. Is this overuse of city names in title pages? Will it negatively affect my rankings? What are the best ways to expand your marketing territory for a local biz?
Thanks for any and all responses.
-
Thank-you Patrick, good information. I appreciate your response.
-
Hi there
This could potentially be overoptimization of local SEO, I would be very careful, especially if the content on these pages are closely related with the names being switched out.
You can look into Google My Business Service-area businesses, as well as citations through services like Moz Local and Whitespark.
I would instead have an "Areas We Serve"-esque page that lists areas and any relevant contact information for those areas.
I highly recommend reviewing this piece from Moz called Get Your Multi-Location Business Ranking in Multiple Cities With One Domain, which says "Putting ANY Geo, City information in your home page title tags." is a No-No.
Lots of great tips there - hope it helps! 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
-
Is there any way to report a website that is not complying with webmaster guidelines to Google?
Like how we can "suggest an edit" in Google Business Listings, is there any way to report Google about the webmaster guidelines violation?
Local Website Optimization | | Alagurajeshwaran0 -
How to approach SEO for a business with three distinct focus areas
I have a client who has asked for the development and optimisation of three websites for a business located at one address. They offer specialised skin care, have a make-up artistry division and also a luxury portraiture/photographic service offered to clients. I have suggested one website, based on all I have read in this community (Possum etc.). Their concern is that they will seem like a "master of none" and envision three sites interlinked. Before I push back and categorically say that this is a poor idea, I wanted to gain some insight from those of you who may have dealt with this scenario before. I need to explain how one domain can be structured to present all three these areas as distinct, given that the home page will speak to all three. Any ideas regarding site structure and optimisation strategy would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | flashie0 -
Weird SEO Problem - No Longer Ranking in Some Areas
Hi Everyone, I’ve got a weird SEO issue that I hope you’ll be able to help with. I’ve broken it down in to the key points below: Impressions for our primary and secondary keywords dropped dramatically on 02.10.17. Impressions have only dropped on non geographical keywords. “UK” variants are still ranking well. Investigation shows we’re not ranking outside of London at all for primary and secondary keywords. Primary and secondary keywords are still ranking well in London, the city where we’re based We’ve looked at our competition who do rank for the primary keyword both in and outside London. We noticed we have our “postaladdress” in our schema. The competition don’t have their address in their schema. We updated our schema 2 weeks ago and now use the Yoast schema which is the same as our competitors use. Approx 1 week after removing the schema we started showing up for primary and secondary keyword again, but very low - fluctuating between page 15 and page 24. It’s been 2 weeks now and no improvement. AHREFS and google webmaster, both incorrectly detail that we rank top 5. Which is true to a degree, but only in London. Thank you in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | rswhtn0 -
Service Area Location Pages vs. User Experience
I'm familiar with the SAB best practices outlined here. Here's my issue: Doing local landing pages as described here might not be ideal from a user experience point of view. Having a "Cities We Serve" or "Service Areas" link in the main navigation isn't necessarily valuable to the user when the city-specific landing pages are all places within a 15-mile radius of the SAB's headquarters. It would just look like the company did it for SEO. It wouldn't look natural. Seriously, it feels like best practices are totally at odds with user experience here. If I absolutely must create location pages for 10 or so municipalities within my client's service area, I'd rather NOT put the service areas as a primary navigation item. It is not useful to the user. Anyone who sees that the company provides services in the [name of city] metropolitan area will already understand that the company can service their town that is 5 miles away. It is self-evident. For example**, who would wonder whether a plumbing company with a Los Angeles address also services Beverly Hills?** It's just... silly. But the Moz guide says I've got to do those location pages! And that I've got to put them high up in the navigation! This is a problem because we've got to do local SEO, but we also have to provide an ideal experience. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Greenery1 -
Service area local seo
Hello, everyone. I am struggling a little with the vast amounts of information about how best to get a local service area business ranking and the best practice. If I explain what I have been doing and then see how I can improve. I have created a couple of websites for window cleaners. These window cleaners offer several services like window cleaning, gutter cleaning, conservatory cleaning, pressure washing etc. They also cover several towns/cities so it's important for them to be able to target all these areas in search. They don't have multiple offices so only have one home/office address and by the nature of the job provide services at the customer's house/business. What I have been doing is creating a page for each service they provide then to cover the areas I have been doing two things. Creating a page on the site called areas covered with a list of the areas they cover and also adding in the title of the page the main one or two areas that are most important to them. From what I can gather this might not be the best approach?? Google may see the areas in titles as keyword stuffing? Google also doesn't like a list of areas in one go anywhere on a site which can also seem like keyword stuffing? So for an example, this would be a rough title structure of service pages Window cleaners in town/city, town/city and town/city Gutter Cleaners in town/city, town/city and town/city As I said I am not sure this is the best way to do this from what I read. I have read about area specific pages but i struggle to see how i could make each area specific page unique enough as the service is exactly the same in each area. I have also read that putting the most important keywords at the begingin of the the title is better so using the above example would this be better? town/city window cleaners - business name So from what i understand having pages like this might be better Window cleaners town/city1 Window cleaners town/city2 Window cleaners town/city3 Gutter Cleaners town/city1 Gutter Cleaners town/city2 Gutter Cleaners town/city3 and so on but like I say I am aware each of these area specific pages would need to be unique but being that the services are exactly the same in each area I am not sure how I could warrant creating all the pages. Writing about the specific area on the page seems a little odd in that the visitor who lands on that page doesn't want to learn about their area, they live there and know the area. They want to know what the service is and if they do in fact cover their area. In which case how can i best ensure all or most of the areas they cover are targeted and show in search? Some sites i have done cover around 20-30 towns around them so how can best ensure they rank for them? I have also been reading conflicting information about how to structure pages and urls. Some say don't use commas in page titles, some say don't use underscores and only use hyphens. Similarly, I have read that the URL should not contain any hyphens but I am not sure about this seeing as WordPress often adds hyphens between words in URLs. Some say you should always have an H1 on every page others say it's not all that important anymore. With images, i have also been giving them alts the same as the page titles thay are on, is this the wrong thing to do? Id be happy to private messge (if i can do that here) one of the sites I would be eternally grateful if anyone can help in firstly clarifying how I could best improve ranking for areas covered and secondly what best practice is to structure page content like H1's image alts etc. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | Gavpeds0 -
Is it ok to redirect users to a market-specific home page based on their previous selection?
I'm working with a real estate client currently that asks users to identify the market they are in prior to showing them properties. The markets are far enough apart that no user would conceivably be browsing within two separate markets. When the user selects their market choice, they are redirected to a market-specific home page whenever they login after the original home page loads. These market-specific pages are ranking currently (page 2-4) for market-related phrases, but before embarking on further optimization I wanted to get a second opinion on whether or not keeping this redirect process is even a good idea or not. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | jluke.fusion0 -
Pages ranking outside of sales area
Hi there Moz Community, I work with a client (a car dealership), that mostly serves an area within 50-100 miles at most from their location. A previous SEO company had built a bunch of comparison pages on their website (i.e. 2016 Acura ILX vs. Mercedes-Benz C300). These pages perform well in their backyard in terms of engagement metrics like bounce rate, session duration, etc. However, they pull in traffic from all over the country and other countries as well. Because they really don't have much of an opportunity to sell someone a car across the country that a customer could easily buy at their local dealership, anyone from outside their primary marketing area typically bounces. So, it drags down their overall site metrics plus all of the metrics for these pages. I imagine searchers from outside their primary sales area are seeing their location and saying "whoah that's far and not what I'm looking for." I tried localizing the pages by putting their city name in the title tags, meta descriptions, and content, but that doesn't seem to really be getting rid of this traffic from areas too far away to sell a car to. My worry is that the high bounce rates, low time on site, and general irrelevancy of these pages to someone far away are going to affect them negatively. So, short of trying to localize the content on the page or just deleting these pages all together, I'm not quite sure where to go from here. Do you think that having these high bouncing pages will hurt them? Any suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | Make_Model1 -
How can i optimize my pages for local areas if we are not in that area?
Hi Mozers! So I watched a video about Matt Cutts he talks about creating multiple web pages just for one keywords is an absolutely no go. So I was wondering we serve a clients in NZ Australia and USA, If we target phrase like Psychic Readings California, Psychic Readings San Diego etc (USA) Psychic Readings Melbourne, Psychic Readings Sydney (AU) Psychic Readings Auckland, Psychic Readings Wellington (NZ) What is the best practice or right way to go about structuring my pages to do this without going against googles guidelines. Many thanks
Local Website Optimization | | edward-may1