One Website - Local + National Ranking

[DirectionSEO]

If a client (e.g. a winery) wants to rank both nationally and locally, what are some best practices for doing this on one Website?

So the goal is to:

1. Rank nationally for their wines, wine varietals, etc.so they're found by restaurants, distributors, customers (could include national directories, content creation ,etc.)

2. Rank locally for their tasting room and wines for people looking locally or looking at that specific region (this could also include include Google places, local directories, etc.).

I'm wondering if the site would need to be subdivided (or "siloed") where one section is heavily focused on national and another is on regional? Also, for the home page, which focus would be most important (maybe national because it's harder)?

Thanks a for any ideas!

Tom

[DirectionSEO]

Thanks to everyone who responded with very helpful suggestions and ideas regarding doing both national and local optimization. - Tom

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Tom,

Both Richard & TomCraig are giving you some good ideas here. There is no reason your website can't be optimized for both National & Local SEO and the suggestions being given are ones I would agree with. In addition to this, you should properly optimize the footer site-wide for the local address/addresses using hCard microformatting and make sure your contact page is rich in content and well-optimized. Best of luck!

[Getz.pro]

If we are talking wine, then the location, or in wine speak appellation, is important (Chimney Rock from the Stags Leap area is my favorite)

I would highly optimize your tasting pages for local by providing address of the tastings and having local neighbors link to that page. Preferably an event page, or if that page expires it stays or 301s to another page as to not spill the link juice.

Restaurants are going to search by appellation or wine names or grape names, so I would optimize for this on the product pages.

Home page should be Brand - Appellation - Grapes - Grower

I hope this helps

[tomcraig86]

Tom,

It would make sense to target the home page at the National market, as it will generally require higher Domain Authority to perform well long term! You could have some local pages, with office addressess and relevant local terms and images embedded within it for the wine tasting rooms.

This way, the site would not necessarily be split, but it would be more of a journey for the user through the site. Most visitors would land on the home page, and those interested in local niche's can be funneled through to the sub pages via carefully places links/navigation.

Obviously the on page SEO would have to be considered, perhaps using vcard formats on all addresses, and optimising title and H1 tags, as well as monitoring keyword density, bold, emphasis, etc. (The 'Analyse' tool on the SEOmoz toolbar is good for this!)

Finally, the off page SEO will then have to be considered, such as local directory submissions, DMOZ, BOTW, JoeAnt, Yahoo Directory etc. Then following the top level obvious choices, get links form Blogs, Forums, and articles.

Try running online competitions and offering small online discounts to get lasting links to your site also

Tom