Local Search without the user typing local?
-
Hi,
I'm a somewhat regionally based voip provider for businesses. So I'm not interested in getting the #1 ranking for voip, but I'd like to get the top for my region. So in this case asheville voip and related searches.
However, I know that alot of users in Asheville are not typing in Asheville voip when they google. They're just typing in voip or free voip, or cisco voip.
Here's my Google Insight Search: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=voip&geo=US-NC&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q
So what I was thinking about doing was in addition to my main site. Building several smaller 'educational based sites' about the benefits of VOIP. Based on google insights something like ashevillevoipphone.com. And use it to capture leads and link to my main site.
So my question is this: Is this a good strategy? If people in Asheville are just typing in voip phone, will ashevillevoipphone.com automatically have a better chance at a higher ranking?
Thanksd
David
-
So you can use the MozBar to set up local searches when you're not local.
I'd suggest building out content in subfolders on your site, instead of being microsites to link to your larger domain: www.example.com/asheville
Why would you want to put content on your microsites that people are going to want to link to and then only have one link pointing from them to your main domain? Additionally, Google is smart enough to realize that you own all the domains and you could get penalized. And, as someone who spent years in e-commerce, having more than one domain to maintain (when it sounds like you have one domain you're taking care of) is a pain in the butt.
-
Steve is correct you are better of promoting the one site.
As for local, when a searcher makes a query SE's know his ip and his location fromit, they will offere him local results, but are you local to Asheville?
I live in Perth Western Australia where it is thousands of miles to the next major city, so its easy for a SE to work out if you and the searcher are local. in the US your towns are much closer and there may be a lot of overlap, it may be a bit harder for a SE to nail you down to the one town.in short the user does not have to enter a location, but i would make sure your ip number is known to be from the ASheville area, I would also have a asheville address on your website marked up with microdata to make sure the SE understads it.
You can check your ip numner location on the web, do a search for ip number locations
-
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the response. The URL is www.ringfree.biz. However, there's nothing but a maintenance page there now. New stuff goes up this week.
What about buying those other domains (ashevillevoip.com) and pointing them towards the main page. Is there any use in this?
Thanks
David
-
Hi David
In my experience you'd be better off adding the educational content to your own site with the addition of local (Ashville) references within the content.
More experienced SEOmoz'ers may have a better answer
Building a very full and rich content base within your own site / domain with healthy links within the site that will provide the user a better experience has got to be the first target for any website.
be good to see the URL for the site too.
Regards
Steve
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
-
Optimizing A Homepage URL That Is Only Accessible To Logged In Users
I have a client who has a very old site with lots and lots of links to it. The site offers www.examplesite.com/loggedin as the homepage to logged in users. So, once you're logged in, you can't get back to examplesite.com anymore (unless you log out) and are instead given /loggedin as your new personalized homepage. The problem is that many users over time who linked to the site linked to the site they saw after they signed up and were logged in.... www.examplesite.com/loggedin. So, there's all these inbound links going to a page that is inaccessible to non-logged-in users. Thus linking to nowheresville. One idea is to fire off a 301 to non-logged in users, forwarding them to the homepage. Thus capturing much of that stranded link juice. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure you can fire off a server code conditioned on if they are logged in or not. I imagine you can, but don't know that for a technical fact. Another idea is to offer some content on /loggedin that is right now mostly currently blank, except for an offer to sign in. Which do you think is better and why? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Google related searches
Hello, Are the related searches, the words that I should use when writing my content. For ex : when I type online spreadsheet in google, in the related searches it list online spreadsheet open source and spreasheet download. Does it means that when writing content I should included those terms in order to be relevant on the keyword online spreadsheet ? because they are considered closely related by google ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How does Tripadviser ensure all their user reviews get crawled?
Tripadvisor has a LOT of user generated content. Searching for a random hotel always seems to return a paginated list of 90+ pages. However once the first page is clicked and "#REVIEWS" is appended to the URL, the URL never changes with any subsequent clicks of the paginated links. How do they ensure that all this review content gets crawled? Thanks, linklater
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | linklater0 -
Site: inurl: Search
I have a site that allows for multiple filter options and some of these URL's have these have been indexed. I am in the process of adding the noindex, nofollow meta tag to these pages but I want to have an idea of how many of these URL's have been indexed so I can monitor when these have been re crawled and dropped. The structure for these URL's is: http://www.example.co.uk/category/women/shopby/brand1--brand2.html The unique identifier for the multiple filtered URL's is --, however I've tried using site:example.co.uk inurl:-- but this doesn't seem to work. I have also tried using regex but still no success. I was wondering if there is a way around this so I can get a rough idea of how many of these URL's have been indexed? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrappleAgency0 -
Google Custom Searches with site CSS
Anyone good with GCS. I want to add Google custom searches in my site but with my site CSS.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csfarnsworth
I need results from GCS but want to display with my website CSS. Website is in OSCommerce and php.0 -
Block search bots on staging server
I want to block bots from all of our client sites on our staging server. Since robots.txt files can easily be copied over when moving a site to production, how can i block bots/crawlers from our staging server (at the server level), but still allow our clients to see/preview their site before launch?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueView13010 -
Getting backlinks without content marketing
Hey i have a client who currently has a large ecommerce store with over 50,000 hits a months. I've made the recommendation that they should consider adding a blog and invest in content activities. However they won't be able to do so for quite some time. In the mean time what are some ways i can get backlinks (whitehat only). I'm thinking guest posting on high DA blogs and sites is the best bet. Also sponsorship, CSR activties, and the occasional press release. Can anyone recommend any other ways, or methods i can use to obtain good quality links, or articles which discuss this topic. Thanks, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Duplicate titles but redirecting anyway (without redirects set up!!!)
Google has done a crawl of my site and is flagging up duplicate titles on my wordpress site. This appears to be due to the face that some posts are tagged in more than one category. I have just gone to make sure that each post just has one category and add redirects and I've noticed that all the duplicate title issues google has notified me about appear to redirect anyway. For example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/latest-news/live-music-boosts-australian-economy and http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/live-music-boosts-australian-economy have duplicate titles apparantly but the 1st url redirects to the 2nd one. I use the redirection plug in but have no redirection set up for that url so I'm a bit confused. And if they're redirecting anyway then why is google flagging up duplicate titles? Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK1