Does City In Title Tag Inhibit Broader Reach?

[AWCthreads]

I use our city/state in the majority of our title tags and consequently we do very well locallly for the majority of terms on our ecommerce site.

I'm wondering however, if this "localized" optimization will inadvertently affect our keyword rankings outside of our city/state?

If a keyword query does not include our city or state, would Google interpret our titles as less relevent and therefore move other results ahead of ours?

The city/state is last in the string on the title:

Blue Widgets - Our Company in City, State

Thanks for any insight.

[AWCthreads]

Excellent BJ. Thanks for the input. The Geo landing pages are a great idea and I should be using them.

Would you mind giving us a couple of links to some Geo landing pages you think are effective - your own or someone else if you're not comfortable putting it here?

I'd like to see a good solid blog or two on building effective money-making landing pages.

[BrianJGomez]

I do a lot of local SEO and some national/traditional ecommerce SEO and In my experience, you are absolutely limiting your "national" reach by having geo-tags in your titles. While no one can say with 1000% absolute certainty that Google is devaluing your 'National' search engine results due to your local geo tags, you're at the very least reducing your KW density for your page titles, which undoubtedly will affect your rankings nationally.

What I have found to be a solid strategy for eCommerce sites seeking local and 'national' customers, is to build landing pages that are city based subdomains that are optimized for a particular city. Then have links within those geo landing pages to the main ecommerce site.

example:

Tulsa.Widgets.com

Page Title: Tulsa Widgets | BarnDoors.com

Notice I'll usually keep the root domain in the geo subdomain for branding purposes and to avoid consumer confusion when they are looking at the SERPs. The good part for these local subdomains, is you can typically achieve quick rankings in these mid-size and sometimes larger markets. Most importantly though, this frees up your root domain to try to rank for your highest trafficked keyword at a higher kw density.

This strategy has worked well for my clients who are doing the brick and mortar + eCommerce thing but feel free to shoot holes in it - I'm always looking for better ways to handle the whole local & national seo issue.

Lastly, I would also add the caveat that if you're already ranking 'nationally' with your geo infused titles, (for example, if "Tulsa OK Widget | WIdgets.com" is ranking for the keyword "Widget") I wouldn't change a thing until there are signs that you're slipping.

[Dr-Pete]

I'd also say that you have to consider the SERP CTR and CRO aspects. By prominently displaying "Oklahoma City" in your title, you're probably scaring off customers outside of that general area, especially organic search visitors. So, the small boost you get for SEO may actually be hurting you in final sales.

[MRCSearch]

I think you've gotten a decent diversity of opinion here, the rest is all just going to come back down to you and risk tolerance. As Dr. Pete said, there isn't a single right answer. It's going to come down to a try-and-see.

[AWCthreads]

Thanks Dr. M. We are like a Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Target and Feed Store rolled into one and we rank well locally across the categories.

I'm inclined to believe you are correct in that signalling city keywords would not automatically or significantly diminish ranking outside the city.

However, considering the input from others, specifically the volume of search as found in Google Insights/AdWords etc. and the length of the title and how it affects the other keywords, I'm inclined to think I should take the local tag off of those products that don't need to be sold locally - and we can identify those pretty easily.

Would others agree? Thumbs up if I should take it off or thumbs down if I should leave it as it could only help and not hurt.

[Dr-Pete]

I'm afraid there's no one "right" answer, and people have covered the issues pretty well:

(1) Local SEO in 2012 goes far beyond just keyword targeting, and is incredibly complex. Your TITLE tags are probably only a small part of your ability to rank locally.

(2) Any keyword you target, generally speaking, means not targeting some other keyword. If you put your city in the TITLE, you do send a signal to Google. In addition, the tag gets longer, which impacts the other keywords. That said, though, it's only one small part of the puzzle.

For traditional, organic SEO, I don't think signalling a city in the keywords automatically penalizes you for areas outside of the city. For local SEO, though, it's a different matter. If you strongly establish yourself in one area, it does imply that your less relevant for other areas. The trick is whether that's a 2% impact or 20%. Honestly, I don't think any of us could tell you in the scope of a Q&A.

[AWCthreads]

This thread still says answered and now its buried in the forum. I think we're done.

I'm still very curious about something more definitive on this before removing the local tags from national products.

[AWCthreads]

Will do. Thanks Miriam.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Again, AWC

Thanks for coming back with such complete information. I've re-set this thread as an on-going discussion, so hopefully that will stick and the topic can keep going. I agree, you should get 2nd and 3rd opinions on this, and I'm going to ask one of our traditional SEOs to step in as well with an opinion from that viewpoint of expertise.

My opinion is this: by putting local information on your product pages site-wide, you are sending a very pointed signal to Google that you deem your data to be most relevant to Oklahoma residents. If you're including the city as well as the state in all tags and text, you are sending a further signal that you consider your data to be most relevant to your own community within the state. Now, whether Google abides by the signals you have sent or not is where the grey area lies.

You are selling items out of state, as you say, but you've got them all, in a sense, labeled, as Oklahoma products. A truly national site wouldn't really take that approach with its SEO. And yet, there was real sense in your approach to start out small to get business locally because that cut your competition for product keywords down considerably. What you did makes perfect sense to me.

Now, with your question as to whether so boldly labeling everything on your site with state or city/state labels is going to be a detriment to you attempting to rank beyond state borders for the product, I honestly don't know. My gut feeling can be summed up in my observation that a national SEO campaign would not include those geo terms. That being said, Local and traditional SEO do not cross one another out. If going national is now your focus, you could trim back the heavy usage of city-related terms, and stick to spelling out your city in your footer site wide, on your contact page, about us page, home page and maybe a few other pages that talk about the ability for customers to do business with you in person. And, of course, you can list the local business in Google Places, Bing Local and all of the other relevant local business indexes.

State-related terms (Oklahoma) are not local, so that needs to be treated more as you would traditional SEO. You need to determine whether potentially losing some dominance for phrases that include the 'oklahoma' in them will be worth making the site look more truly national, in terms of its SEO. I haven't done any keyword research, but I'm doubting a ton of people are searching for 'barn kits oklahoma' or similar terms. My feeling is that they would either be trying to find one locally (in which case they would include the city name in their query) or that they would be comparison shopping on-line.

Bottom line: I think the decision rests with you as to whether your main SEO thrust needs to be truly local (city+state), statewide (in which case you'd keep optimizing everything with the state name) or truly national, in which case, you don't really want geographic modifiers all over the tags and text. You know your customer base and can look at your books to see what percentage of your business is coming from where (local vs. state vs. national). In situations like these, that is the best metric I can provide to help someone discern where their main efforts need to be placed.

Let's see what our traditional SEOs have to say! Sit tight.

[AWCthreads]

Hi Miriam,

Is there any way to make this thread active again? Somehow it got answered - perhaps when you put a staff approval on Nick's response? I didn't tag it as answered as I'd like more input from others if possible.

As to your question(s):

We sell a lot  of products such as barn kits, lumber, timbers, fencing, hay, etc. that customers can pick up at the store or we can deliver within our state with our own delivery trucks. These products are primarily for in city/state customers that cannot be shipped via traditional carriers such as UPS.

When we got the site off the ground, I optimized those in-state "non-shippable" products with an Oklahoma City, Oklahoma tag in the title for a couple of reasons:

1. so local customers within the state will find it and buy it and

2. in order to get money rolling in rather quickly and it did (local optimization will do that).

As the site grew, I only put local tags on those products that were not shippable and took the local tag off the products we could ship out of state via commercial carriers (UPS, Post Office etc.).

Suggestions were made I should optimize locally for even more products (our horse tack for example). We live in a state called the "Quarter Horse Capital of the World" with lots of equine events, rodeos, Cowboy Hall of Fame etc. So I put local tags on all of our horse tack.

Thinking it wouldn't hurt anything, I put local tags on all of our products so anyone in Oklahoma looking for our products will find them. Whether there are 100 searches a month in Oklahoma for our term, or only 1- at least we'll rank for it.

Again, we rank very well locally for the vast majority of our terms. I'm just now beginning to wonder if this approach could backfire in any way regarding reach outside of our state.

We sell to people all over the US, so I'm inclined to think we're okay, but I'm not certain.

As we grow in authority and can rank for more keywords, I thought we could rein in the local tags and remove them as we won't need the localization as much since we'll rank better nationally with a more authoritative domain.

Is this a flawed approach?

Is localized optimization compromising our reach?

Does Google attribute less relevance to our titles for keyword queries that do not contain our city and state and therefor move others ahead of us?

Thank you.

[AWCthreads]

Miriam, this is going to take some time so I will have to pick this up at home. In the meantime, feel free visit our store.

Thanks.

[MiriamEllis]

I'm just jumping back in here after reading your remark: "This store has been here 20 years." So, it appears you have a physical location at which you are vending products directly to people, but that you also have an e-commerce portion of your website for national/international sales. Is this a correct description of your business model, AWC?

[AWCthreads]

I'm a bit confused now. My question is: if "localized" optimization will inadvertently affect our keyword rankings outside of our city/state?

If a keyword query does not include our city or state, would Google interpret our titles as less relevent and therefore move other results ahead of ours?"

Nakul, what are you saying?

[NakulGoyal]

Based on my experience and a look of your site, I am inclined to believe that your local / GEO keywords associated rankings might not get impacted as much if you get rid of it from the Page titles. Test it on some pages and use more important/low hanging fruit/long tail relevant keywords and see what that does. Test it on maybe 10-20 of your pages which do not get any GEO traffic, but rank for non-geo keywords and see if those pages can rank for 1-2 additional keywords.

[MiriamEllis]

Hello AWCthreads,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and want to applaud the good response Nicholas has given you.

You have explained that your venture is an e-commerce site. Does this mean that the business is virtual (no person-to-person contact either at your office or at the homes/businesses of clients?). This is a critical point of information, because having a real physical location in your city/state puts you in a very different category than if you conduct all business virtually.

If you are doing business virtually, then, yes, I would say that heavily optimizing your website for your city/state is sending a strong signal to the bots that you hope to be viewed as especially relevant for 'blue widgets city state' as opposed to just  'blue widgets'. Is there a good reason for you to want to appear as most relevant locally? Does the thing you sell apply most to local people or is it a product used nationally? My question is a little vague because I lack information about what the product actually is.

Now, if the business is NOT virtual, and you have taken steps to optimize your website for it's local geographic terms, and have also gotten the business profiled in Google Places and other local business indexes, then Google is naturally going to view the business as most relevant for local searches. It is possible to run local and national SEO campaigns simultaneously, but different strategies will depend on the business model.

So, I would like to close with my question for you regarding whether there was some reason you heavily optimized your site for a local audience. What is the reason for/thinking behind this. Clarification on this point would be really help!

Miriam

[AWCthreads]

Hi Nakul,

Yes - the whole address is in the footer

Roughly 1,700 products (not sure how many pages that is)

The majority (probably not all) have the city/state target in the title

As far as Geo data is concerned, if I understand you correctly, Analytics Sources organic search and search engine optimization  queries show keywords with and without the city and or state. The overwhelming majority of keywords shown with city or state include the store's name. This store has been here 20 years.

I submitted to Dmoz but I can't find us on it.

[NakulGoyal]

Great response Nicholas. @AWCthreads, Do you have your city/station in the footer ? How many pages do you have in your site ? Do all of them have City/State targeting in them via Page Titles ? Do all of them get traffic from keywords with Geo data attached ? Does your website have a Regional Dmoz listing ?

[MRCSearch]

No worries. Yes, the x-pack is the local listing that sometimes appear in a SERP. X because sometimes it's3, sometimes 7, and occasionally I think there can still be 10, but not sure there.

When doing keyword research I'd recommend pulling numbers both without and with the geographic identifier, phrase and exact match. Use Insights for Search for some good geographic data, too.

[AWCthreads]

Thanks Nicholas. Sorry, I'm not familiar with the x-pack. What is that - the top 7 or so local listings that appear before the organic search results?

Also, when doing keyword research, should I include the city/state in the keyword?

Should this keyword search be done in AdWords or somewhere else such as Google Insights?

Sorry for the barrage of questions.

[MRCSearch]

I have a feeling there is going to be a lot of diversified opinion in this thread, but here is my opinion.

First, to answer your direct question, I do think localized optimization in <title>is going to slightly affect your non-geographic rank. You've got 10oz of SEO Juice to split up amongst however many keywords you've got in your title, and pulling a geo-identifier into that is going to dilute the non-geo a bit. Maybe. Possibly. Probably.</p> <p><em style="background-color: initial;">That being said</em><span style="background-color: initial;">, you have to consider what keyword you're targeting, and whether or not they're triggering the x-pack in a SERP anyway. This speaks to question #2. If you want to rank nationally and locally, and who doesn't, consider your separate search verticals. If your target queries aren't triggering the x-pack, then take into account search volumes on those geo-specific terms.</span></p> <p>If you want to focus on local, non-map placements, I'd use the following <title> methodology:</p> <p><em>pagesubject city, stateabv | brandname</em></p> <p>e.g Oil Change Plymouth, MI | Midas</p> <p>Of course there could be a substantially more in-depth exploration of this topic, and I'm hoping one of my fellow inbound marketers will expand upon the subjects I didn't touch.</p></title>