Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both

[Tony-Dimmock]

Hi All,

For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page.

My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them?

Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated

Happy New Year

Tony

[MiriamEllis]

You are very welcome, Tony! Thanks for coming to Q&A. Miriam

[Tony-Dimmock]

Thanks Miriam - most helpful.

I think my challenge is that I want to get local businesses who also focus on national leads the most bang for their money. But your answers make perfect common sense - so thanks for taking the time to answer in full - most appreciated

[MiriamEllis]

Greetings Tony,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. While I have no hard data to share with you (haven't ever seen a conclusive study published on this) I think your guiding light should be deciphering the relative importance of your 2 target audiences. What percentage of the business occurs nationally and what percentage occurs locally? This figure might, then, dictate how much effort you should be putting into national vs. local efforts on and off the site.

Local SEO can certainly be done in addition to national SEO. It sounds to me, however, that you have heavily slanted all pages towards geographic terms. If local business is only a small portion of the rankings, I would be inclined to simply put the complete NAP (name, address, phone number) in the footer site wide, put it on the contact page and optimize perhaps 1-2 other pages on the site with local information...perhaps the about page (visit us at our offices). Then, get the business profiled in the various local indexes.

There isn't a template for doing this. Every business is slightly different, and the competitiveness of your vertical and nature of your products/services may create nuances that simply can't be answered with a broad 'do this'. For example, a company might offer plumbing services locally, but sell plumbing fixtures nationally. Different pages would need to be devoted to the different areas of work - the planning and organization is very important, so that those pages suited to neighbors have been optimized locally, while those that have a national focus are not being presented narrowly, as if they were only meant for neighbors.

Tracking and testing how people are using the site, once you've attempted to gear certain pages towards certain audiences, will be very important. This is what will tell you whether you are getting it 'right' or not.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

[AlanMosley]

My own opinion, if you have your address in the footer seems enouth to make you rank for your city, while not tying you to it.

But thats my gut feeling only.

[Tony-Dimmock]

Hi Alan,

I'm wondering is there is a minimum SEO threshold for effective local coverage that doesn't detract on national rankings ie less focus on location to rank nationally but enough to also rank locally??

Thanks for your feedback.

[AlanMosley]

ok then yes that is a dilemma, having your cake and eat it is not really possible I believe

[Tony-Dimmock]

Hi Alan,

My question centered on town / county vs national, not international or multi - country.

Thanks for your fast response anyway.

Tony

[AlanMosley]

I believe to rank in moe than one country you need more than one web site, if you have a .uk and a .au website, you do not need to worry about duplicate content.

See Matt Cutts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo