Local SEO: How to optimize for multiple cities on website
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Hi,
I couldn't find any reference to this, so if the answer is already here, I would appreciate a link to the answer.
That said, my question is this: When a local business services a large geographic area, I wanted to know how to optimize for the multiple towns? I already have the main city in my title tags, but there are at least 40 areas that surround this town.
Should I have a "Services Area" page, and place all the towns there, or should they all be in the footer?
I saw this one guy - in the same niche who put all the towns in his meta keyword section - but I think that's incorrect, especially since Google doesn't look at that particular meta tag.
Any help would be appreciated.
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My pleasure, Michael!
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Thank you so much!!!
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(This is Miriam replying but I'm in Mozzer Alliance right now)
Hi Michael!
I think the most important thing here is for you to give yourself a crash course in Local SEO. This is a good place to start: <cite class="_Rm">https://moz.com/learn/local</cite>
It's vital to understand that your client's local pack rankings are going to relate solely to their physical location. So, if they've got 1 physical location, that means 1 Google My Business listing and 1 set of citations for that location only. You do not want to acquire extra phone numbers or virtual addresses of any kind. Only the real, physical location can be promoted as a contender for Google local pack rankings, unless you live in a very rural area or have a very niche business. Instead, you are in a competitive industry in a large city. So, main thing is to remember that physical address = local pack rankings. All other service cities = organic rankings.
So, yes, you do need a physical address. The phone number doesn't have to be local, but it's considered preferable by some. I don't see any mention of an address on the site right now, so that's something you'll need to address with the client. If the company does not have a dedicated public address, you can use the home address of the business owner and then, when creating the Google My Business page, be sure to choose the service area business settings that signal to Google to keep the address hidden. Regardless, it's advisable to have the complete name, address and phone number (NAP) of the business on the Contact Us page and the website footer.
The site architecture you'll be building out for the moving company will likely consist of basic pages (home, about, contact, etc.) a page for each service (moving, piano moving, what have you) and a page for each major city you serve. The content on these service city landing pages must be unique and of the highest possible quality you can create. This might include text content, video content, images, testimonials, tips, safety warnings, etc. But, again, be sure to warn the client that you do not want to use virtual addresses on these pages or anything like that. Don't be swayed by competitors who are seeming to get away with thin or duplicate landing pages. This is not the way to go and it makes them weak - you can hope to surpass them with a superior effort.
I'm not sure what you're describing about the links/press releases and blocks of cities. Google's Webmaster Guidelines do not want blocks of city names/zip codes anywhere on your website, so I'm not quite sure what it was that you saw.
Finally, yes, you may have a better chance of achieving higher organic rankings in smaller cities more quickly, because the competition is likely to be lower, but achieving this is going to be a combination of time + effort. It's much better to under-promise and over-deliver, specifically as this is your first job.
Hopefully the Moz Local learning center will get you off to a good start, and we have tons of great content in the Local column of the Moz blog. https://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo
Good luck with the project!
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Hello Miriam
as far as these landing pages.
what type of content is a good rule of thumb?
I'm guessing the purpose of a geo-specific landing page is to show relevance to an area for a site that is already an authority. I just got my first gig for SEO and it is for a moving company www.buyabuddyllc.com if that helps.
Should we get a local phone number and an address (local partner)?
Should we write about moving to the desired location and the best places to live there? Can you reference a good city landing page for a physical service company?Also one of the guides I have found focuses on a lot of back linking and press releases, then that SEO provider just drops a block of h4 cities. I don't understand why this works for him.
Is it a brute force thing? targetupinsurance.com is the site he did this on. Also, at getbellhops.com, they have these simple landing pages with duplicate content. I don't understand how this site is ranking so well with so much duplicate content.The site I'm working on is first on google for all of the most competitive keywords for the third largest city in our state. Would it be a good idea to target the next city down for quick results?
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Hi There!
I just responded over on your other thread, but wanted to include think link for you to a thread I started when Google announced their doorway pages update:
http://moz.com/community/q/how-google-s-doorway-pages-update-affects-local-seo
I hope you'll find that helpful!
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With the recent update to Doorway pages would you consider changing your original post? Or still go with that?
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Thanks Miriam, you really shared valuable tips how the multiple location should be treated and serve the BEST
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No problem! Thanks for the info!
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Hi Llewellyn!
So sorry, but I'm not at liberty to share that. I do recommend you check out the major retailer REI.com to see how nicely they create their various city landing pages though. A fav example of mine.
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Thanks for your helpful responses, Miriam! Would I be able to see a website or two where you implemented your two main types of pages( Service description and City Landing), so I have a little better picture of how it is done? Thanks again!
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[slaps forehead]
Nevermind. I was thinking Moz could detect if it was suspect, but that's just for duplicate content.
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Hi SEOSarah,
Duplicate content on multiple pages is not the same as repetition of something within a single page, so I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question.
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... and if your 5-city example did become a duplicate content concern, wouldn't Moz Analytics highlight it?
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Hi Trevogre,
Thanks for the further details. My advice is not to create blank pages on your website, regardless of nofollow. Similarly, my advice is not to create pages with nothing more than a form and call to action on them. If I saw a website with 10 pages on it consisting of nothing but a form and a call to action, I would consider that to be of low quality, regardless of nofollow.
Regarding Google's search results, unfortunately, our personal beliefs about what makes a high quality result do not always match Google's beliefs. I get what you are saying about making queries with the hope of being returned the highest quality page, regardless of location. The problem is, if Google doesn't understand your intent, they will show you things you weren't looking for. There isn't really any way for you, on your own, to influence Google's take on quality and relevance, apart from the fact that Google may personalize results for you based on your past search habits. So, I do get where you're coming from on this. There just isn't really anything I know of that you can do about it. Hope this helps!
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Hi Sarah,
That's a good question. To my mind, a block of text would just be a big chunk of city names, zip codes or what have you. You see junk like this on homepages and in footers all the time on over-optimized websites. I would, personally, consider this to be different than something like:
Our painters are centrally located in San Jose and will come to you in Dublin, Berkeley and San Lorenzo, too. Check out our latest projects in Mountain House and Cupertino.
There's probably some grey area here. If you've got 30 service cities, I wouldn't try to list them anywhere but the nav menu. If you've got five, I can't imagine it would cause any problems to mention them in the text of a page.
This is, of course, my take - not necessary Google's.
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"Why would you take the approach of creating blank pages to be filled out later?"
You would create "blank" pages, by which I mean templated pages that have calls to actions or forms, because if you are linking any pages into your site hierarchy they should make sense. So you wouldn't add a service areas page where you linked to some cities with good content but not others and left a broken index. Where you have a few cities that you embellish and others that you don't list or aren't links. I understand the seo caution, but if you create a site follow where your landing pages are actually linked in, the user that is wondering if you will services them would go to services areas, and then click their location if found and then fill out a request form, and/or read whatever local content you have drummed up to make that page good as a landing page.
So I suppose they wouldn't be blank page, but they would be duplicate in the sense that they would only server as request pages for a certain area. So if you do it this way, the question is if you can just no-follow the links so that you can have a site architecture that makes sense but still acknowledge to google that you don't have something unique for a given city/service combo (even though you really do want it listed).
I wasn't talking about local pack. What I'm talking about is location based organic. Where if you search for lawyer, you might get the local pack, but you might also get organic that is from high content sites that don't address your concern, and then put in a city + service to find what you are looking for in the organic results. In that case, location is completely relevant because the organic results will return pages optimized for a given city. Rather than a truly local service area result. So in those circumstances there is a bias towards the keyword as a word rather than a location / quality mix in organic that respects business type. For food you want food in a given city, for lawyers you want the closest lawyer to that city that is going to be expert in solving your problem. Not the guy who just happens have an address in that city. That is what the local pack is for (if I understand that properly). For when you want to find a business in a given location. Not when you want the best organic result around your location.
So I think that google isn't returning quality results based upon named keywords because they aren't parsing intent.
I have seen that in a few places where you analyze competitors and they have a lower page and domain authority, but still return before your site for the simple fact that they put the city name in the title or multiple times on the page. While that might be great seo, those are bad search results. As you get sites that are forced to be spammy by injecting geo targeted keywords. And you have the problem that everyone is addressing of making cruddy landing pages to get those searches rather than focusing on having high quality content.
My intuitive grasp of this is lacking. So maybe they are doing something I don't understand. But I would like to see results for a different city than the one I enter in some categories when those results have better content. This might further disenfranchise small town businesses, but it would also provide them with the opportunity to focus on quality content rather than geo-landing pages.
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So glad to come across this thread today - thank you for your help!
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The local community involvement is an excellent jumping off point for this. Totally agree!
Regarding evergreen vs. fresh content ... as we know, Google does love frequently updated pages, so where possible, that's a great way to go, but having a static, unique page is definitely an excellent start! Go for it!
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Those are great suggestions. I just found out that the team has already started some geo pages way back I was unaware of, and I'm giving them a look. Since we do a lot of volunteering/charity in each community, that may be a good hook as well. We're talking something evergreen, correct? We wouldn't have the bandwidth to keep this regularly updated. I could do a refresh one a year at most.
Thanks!
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Hi SEOSarah,
Therein lies the major challenge of this type of content development. You've got to define something unique about each service city in order to have something important and legitimate to write about. This is easier for some business models than others. For example, a house painter could show his beautiful work in San Jose on one page and his beautiful work in Santa Cruz on another, along with writeups of his projects. He could also do city-specific special offers, interviews, tips, etc.
A large company that is doing a good job of this is REI.com. Search for a location there and you'll see how they are putting different content on their different landing pages. Pretty good example.
But, as I've said, this can be harder for some companies than others if every branch of their business is an exact duplicate of all others. Something to consider for an industry like the one you've mentioned might be interviews with key staff members at the branch - people that the local customers could then meet in person to talk to about their finances. Putting a personal face on a "bland" business might help differentiate this company from competitors, and would simultaneously give you unique content for city landing pages.
Hope this helps!
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... and this concerns me because it seems non-manipulative and useful to the customer to see a list of service areas. Sure, there may be an SEO benefit, but I think in this example it shouldn't be penalty-worthy (although the verbiage clearly states this is the case).
Is it a distinction between a line of text and a block of text?
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Hi Miriam,
I hear this suggestion a lot for my company's website (dedicated page for each geographical location), and I'm having a really hard wrapping my brain around it, but I do want to try it out. For the city landing pages, what is the nature of the content? In my case, I work for a credit union with 70 branches in 3 states. Would it be something like "Hey Salt Lake City, we're here for you [insert local references, etc.] to provide [products, services, etc.]
My concern would be, if this is the case (and I could be totally off-base), what is the value of those pages to the user? It brings them in, but would the page seem disingenuous? And, the concern of the user above, that there could be duplication in discussing products and services (and if you're not talking about products and services, what do you talk about?)
In there an example you can direct us to?
Great thread - thanks for your insight!
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Hi Trevogre,
So glad to have you here in the forum. I'm not 100% sure I'm understand your initial question. You write:
So if I create a services areas page, with links to landing pages for each county/city that is serviced. And then I create the pages for each area, and leave the content blank but then pursue filling out the content. Is the absence of the content considered duplicate content? Would you get penalized for the essentially blank pages.
Why would you take the approach of creating blank pages to be filled out later? There is no benefit I can see in publishing blank pages. Don't create a page until you've got something to put on it. While I don't believe Google would see blank pages a duplicate content (simply because there would be no content on them), I do not recommend creating links in your navigation or pages to pages that don't yet exist. That could look spammy - like you're just putting up blank pages so that they can have service/city URLs/titles, but haven't bothered to put anything on them. So, I don't see why one would do this. Have I misunderstood what you're asking?
Regarding this:
Ultimately I think this leads to poor organic search results, because the ability to determine the quality of a small business has nothing to do with its location
It's important to understand that the local and organic algorithms are separate. Local rankings are those that appear in the local packs of results. They are determined by a combination of factors including geography and authority. Location, as a ranking factor, is only relevant to local businesses...not virtual businesses. I totally agree with you that location has nothing to do with quality, but this should only concern true local business models - not businesses that aren't physically based.
I feel like I may be failing to comprehend your exact concerns here ... do you feel that local businesses located outside the borders of neighboring cities are being dealt an unfair hand? Or is it something else? Please, feel free to provide further clarification!
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So, I haven't looked this up, I thought I'd just ask here.
So if I create a services areas page, with links to landing pages for each county/city that is serviced. And then I create the pages for each area, and leave the content blank but then pursue filling out the content. Is the absence of the content considered duplicate content? Would you get penalized for the essentially blank pages.
If so could you keep the pages but mark them as no-follow so that you are telling google that you want the page but don't consider it something they should index (and penalize you for).
You could put a from on those pages, which I would assume isn't considered "content". Or shouldn't be. and have the form preloaded with the location information for that service area.
The other issue that I see here is with the concept of "core" services. If you are a law firm and you have many lawyers and lines of business. You would then logically want to have each service area / line of business to have its own landing page.
So without complaining about the unique content problem, which I get, you structural want to build all of this out so that acts as a placeholder and exists in non-competitive areas, where despite the uniqueness of your content you are the only person with a given keyphrase. But you don't want to be considered spam.
So I'm not sure what the right answer is. I doesn't seem right not optimize for an adjacent city/service combination just because there is only so many things to say about that service.
The suggestion. "Service description pages" and "City landing pages", Is (I guess) a place where you can start.
Ultimately, I think this is a bias that google is supporting that is wrong. It assumes that an urbanized world is a positive because larger cities, while potentially more competitive because of the larger traffic, are going to have a unfair advantage over business is outlying areas. And non-location sensitive business (anything knowledge related) are going to be penalized for not being in urban areas. Ultimately I think this leads to poor organic search results, because the ability to determine the quality of a small business has nothing to do with its location. I suppose that it helps by allowing local business to be listed at all against stronger competitors, but I think it would be better to use a combination of signals. So that you show as local to the nears n people. So in a city like Seattle you might have an audience of a million, but in city of 50000 that runs into other cities of 50000 with 20 miles the definition of local should change.
I think when you break it down, geographic terms should always be parsed out so that cars seattle doesn't actually look for Seattle, but looks for cars (+ locations withing x miles of seattle) that also have high domain or page authority. I think that would lead to better results and would solve the problem of location based optimization so that we can stop wasting time on it.
It could start with a default service area size, but then calculate a services area based upon result density. So a search for a given business type would automatically return for three states away if the next closest business was 5 states away.
I'm sure some of this is already around, I'm just sharing my thoughts because this is a massively irritating and time consuming issue. But I suppose it just serves to push us further in the direction of content and link building. Equally unnatural pursuits for your average small business. Sometimes I feel like google should reward business that don't create content and somehow work on the less is more principle.
Is the best search result the one from a business paying crazy rents in a large city, or one in an adjacent city that is more affordable but equally qualified and doesn't show because they aren't in city limits.
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Hi Eric,
First, I need to make a small correction to my earlier statement. I meant to state that duplicating text across PAGES would = duplicate content. Footer content is excluded from this. Most websites have the same content in their footer from page to page. Sorry if what I wrote was misleading. So, duplicate content isn't the issue here, but...
While I agree that your devil's advocate argument contains horse sense in some ways, the footer is probably one of the most obvious places Google would look for spam. If Google goes out of their way to state that they don't want blocks of city names on a website, I think it's wise to take this at face value. And I think that, because footers are historic candidates for spamming, Google would be especially down on this type of content being placed there.
I may be a little bewildered by your client's goals. If they don't want to rank for their service cities, why include them anywhere on the website? And if the goal is to let visitors know the areas they serve, why not at least put that on the homepage of the website, shine a spotlight on it so it's totally clear? Make a custom map. Write a full description. Create unique pages and link to them from a top level menu.
Relegating this vital information to the footer, which many people won't even see, just doesn't make sense to me. The areas an SAB serves are critical data and should be highlighted in every way possible. When I develop websites for SABs, I create two main types of pages beyond the typical homepage, contact, about, etc.:
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Service description pages (one for each service)
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City landing pages (one for each major city served)
To me, these are the basics of any local business website, and I would be puzzled by a client who didn't 'get' this. I work primarily with small-to-medium local businesses, and I totally understand budget constraints, This is why creating a protracted timeline for getting all the necessary pages developed is often a good solution. To me, from what you've written, it sounds like your client may not have clear goals in mind in regards to how their website will serve them and their customers. Hopefully, as their marketer, you can help them create a plan that will take their website forward to becoming a true sales-generating asset. I hope these thoughts are helpful.
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Thanks Miriam for your detailed response. I passed along your ideas for ways to gradually create content rather than all at once. I imagine the slow method would also help this website by adding content continuously throughout the year, rather than a "set it and forget it" model. It is a heating and cooling business so there website is more of a description of services and who they are and less an SEO-driven portal for dynamic engagement.
With that said, I'll play devil's advocate for one second to get your take. The footer we are proposing, in my view, does serve a larger non-SEO related purpose. It is used to actually convey what areas the business represents. I recognize that adding this to the footer of every page can be seen as duplicate content, but it is intended as information for a prospective client. If we just put it on one page, it might get missed.
I don't expect the website to rank for those cities considering how competitive their industry is and because we are not mentioning the cities in the content or URL structure. We are not doing link building for those cities and the client does not want Local SEO services. The new website was conceived with modernization in mind, not SEO. The footer is merely a way to mention cities, not part of a larger strategy.
Thoughts?
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Hi Eric,
You are right to be wary of this tactic. Not only would you be creating duplicate content by replicating this statement from page to page, but you would also be going against Google's webmaster guidelines which state:
Keyword stuffing
"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
Examples of keyword stuffing include:
- Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
- Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for
(Bolded emphasis mine) See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en
Unfortunately, if your client lacks the funding to develop unique content for each of his service cities, then he should not expect to rank for them. In days gone by, the client would have needed to pay for phone book ads that highlighted his service cities. Lacking funding, he would have been out of the running. These days, because of Google's bias towards unique, useful content, funding comes into play when it comes to content development.
Perhaps you can find a good solution for this client in the form of an on-going contract in which you develop 1-2 new pages or posts for him per month at a reasonable rate. By then end of 2014, he would have added 12-24 new pages of content to his website, covering his cities and many of his services. He needs to be convinced of the value of this investment, and if you start with just a few of the cities and he begins getting more phone calls, it's likely he will see that this is an essential investment that is going to pay for itself over time.
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I am resurrecting this thread again as I have a question:
I am working on footer text for a client that serves a large swath of the SF Bay Area. I have separated the cities in the four counties they serve by population and have added the most populous cities into a sentence that will go on every page. Is this tactic tired? Is it played out? I've used it before with great success, but I am questioning it now with all the new guidelines/changes put forth by Google. Unfortunately, the client cannot afford to create unique content for each large city they serve so this is our attempt to get as many cities as possible mentioned multiple times. I am, however, apprehensive about this tactic.
Thoughts?
BusinessXYZ serves Oakland, Hayward, Berkeley, Vallejo, Fairfield, Walnut Creek, Concord, Daly City, as well as all SF Bay Area cities in Alameda County, Contra Costa County, San Mateo County and Napa County.
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Hi Taysir,
This is a good question and one for which there is no 'right' answer, in my opinion. Taking the approach suggested by your spreadsheet, your chief danger would be thin or duplicate content. After all, your services in Oakland are likely to be identical to your services in Fremont, or in the multiple cities in your service area. You can go this way, of course, provided you can find a genuine reason for creating this type of content and have the resources to make each page totally unique. Often, I've found that this is not the case, so I prefer to recommend this approach in most SMB cases:
You create 3 types of pages.
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City Landing Pages, one for each city, talking about the location and summarizing services. These pages would be optimized for your CORE service phrase + city name.
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Service Pages, one for each service. You can link to these from the city landing pages. These would be optimized for the individual service, but not for a particular city.
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Future Pages. I like best to give the client the ability to blog about their projects and news on an on-going basis, giving them the opportunity to begin building up content that covers a variety of keyword combinations, over time.
I find that this approach makes projects with SMBs manageable. We get really strong pages for each of their cities and each of their services onto the website, and then give them the power to begin showcasing their work in various cities via an on-site blog.
So, that's my typical project structure. I'm not saying that you can't go the other way - the way you've mentioned - just that there is an inherent danger in that approach with small, local businesses because they may be tempted to create a ton of content at once that is of low quality instead of being exceptional.
Hope this helps!
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Hi Miriam,
Quick question regarding the "cities we serve" in the main NAV. So are you saying that this item should display all the cities the business serve and each one of them would split up into their respective services with unique content.(see attachment)
Thanks for letting me know!
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My pleasure, Brittany!
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Thanks for the clarification, Miriam. I was pretty confident that's what you meant - just wanted to doublecheck. I appreciate your time.
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Hi Brittany,
Organic results are the old, traditional results in Google. Local results are those in Google's local pack of results, specifically containing local businesses. Because Google considers a local business to be most relevant to its city of location, such a business is most likely to achieve visibility in the Local pack of results for the city it is physically located in. If the business wants to publicize its activities/services in cities outside its city of location (like a plumber who travels to 6 cities to render services) then the plumber can build unique landing pages on his website for each service city. However, because of Google's bias toward putting city of location businesses in the local pack, these landing pages will typically show up in the organic results - not the local pack of results - because they are about where the plumber serves and not where he is physically located.
Does this help answer your question? Please, let me know.
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Hi Miriam,
I know this thread is a bit old, but I was curious about what you meant when you said that "results of this will be organic, not local, in nature." Thank you in advance for your time!
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Hi Instantly Popular,
As Keri has mentioned, virtual offices violate Google's guidelines which read:
Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist.
See:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528Google definitely does not want virtual offices in their index, and though you will see many businesses getting away with this practice, Google is getting better and better at fighting spam in Local and any business with this type of listing is in danger of being penalized...possibly even banned.
Building city landing pages on a website is a good practice, but typically, the results of this will be organic, not local, in nature. There are some exceptions to this, but they have been few and far between since the Venice update in early 2012.
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Miriam can give a more complete answer, but I believe this may be against Google's guidelines.
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Hey Miriam,
You are a rock star my dear. I was thinking to myself, "how do I do this...there's so many towns"...But you're right....you break it off in manageable pieces - going after the the towns that mean the most, then working backwards.
My Elephant of town will be eaten - 10 bites at a time.
So Thank you!
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Hi Jayestovall,
To begin with, it's important to understand that Google will typically see any local business as most relevant to its city of location. So, if you're located in San Francisco (i.e. have a dedicated local area code phone number and street address there) your prime location and best opportunity for achieving high visibility will be for searches that include the phrase 'san francisco' or performed by san francisco-based users.
You are in a very common situation in which you operate in a wide service radius. The typical process involves creating city landing pages for each of your main service locations, and though you typically will not be able to locally outrank competitors who are physically located in those service cities, you can strive for secondary organic rankings for these geo terms.
To make this manageable, make a list of your 10 most important service cities/towns. Develop unique, non-duplicate content for each of these 10 cities. Create a section in your main site menu labeled 'Cities We Serve' or something along those lines and begin listing the pages in this menu. If you don't feel you can create useful, creative copy, hire a copywriter for this important task. Then, move onto your next 10 most important service cities. Build it in manageable chunks and do your absolute best job on every page.
Beyond this, linkbuilding to the pages would be next steps.
Hope this gives you a plan of action that makes sense!
Miriam
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No worries .. If you happen to come across a better strategy .. do drop me a line . I would be interested to try it out ^_^
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Thanks a log Saijo! I was thinking about doing that, but dang, I didn't want to do that level of work. We have about 40 different areas. HA!
Thanks again.
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Ideally it would be individual pages for those cities with unique content. I would include the content to talk a bit about those suburbs + what you guys offer in those suburbs.
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Image & Video Optimization | | HappyOx0 -
Local Search Clean up Done. Now Best Way to Index?
I have spent hours doing some local search clean up and have a list of all the URLs to index, about 75. Is there a place I can dump these to get them all indexed quickly or do I have to wait for the hand of Google to come down and bless me with indexing. I don't want to dump all these to Google +, Facebook, or Twitter; that would just be wrong. Any ideas for fast indexing. I want them to all get indexed before the business address changes in a couple years 🙂
Image & Video Optimization | | photoseo10 -
What is the best way to optimise the website of a service area business websites for local search?
Service area businesses are a little caught in the middle when it comes to local optimisation and can really struggle to So what approaches would your recommend for optimising a service area business: Assuming the following, perhaps obvious, goals: Make sure your site visitors can clearly understand if their location is covered by your service areas Compete for search traffic for service + location searches (including those with an implided location). One common tactic that I see being used is to generate humongous lists of locations, maybe in a footer. Obviously the more areas you want to include the less relevant (and more spammy looking) your targetting looks. And of course, with loads of locations, you're not going to be able to get them all into your titles (even if you wanted to!) Maybe if you've got locations that are more inportant to you you might create specific landing pages for these location? If you've got the kind of business where the locations you target are determined by the locations you can reasonably get to during a working day it's really tough to find a realistic way to target specific location on your site. I'd be really interested to hear how you approach these kinds of sites.
Image & Video Optimization | | DougRoberts0 -
Does it affect SEO if my "Menu Label" is a shortened form of my "Page Title"?
This might be a very simple question, but I'm just trying to make sure I don't make Google think I'm trying to pull a fast one. For example, my page title would be "Bridal Fashions", but the menu label would be "fashions" to keep the navigation panel simple and streamlined.
Image & Video Optimization | | MassMedia0 -
Tips for local link building?
Hello Mozzers, Working on a site that has locations around the country and is targeting words like "city name+long tail keyword". They're fairly well optimized on-site, so we're working on recommending localized content but could use some advice for link building. Beyond Google places, what have you guys seen that works?
Image & Video Optimization | | RiseSEO0 -
What is the SEO benefit of embedding YouTube videos on a page?
Is there SEO benefit to embedding YouTube videos made my other people or companies on pages? The indirect benefit would be a better user experience and increased perceived value and usefulness of the page which could lead to more links. Are there any other benefits?
Image & Video Optimization | | ProjectLabs0 -
Local SEO: What is the largest Google Places bulk upload you have ever done?
Hi All, One of my clients recently requested my team at our agency to do a bulk up load of business locations. We did the bulk upload and it came to around 652 or so locations in the form. I have done some serious bulk uploads in the past around 500 locations but never this high. My question is to SEO moz what is the largest bulk upload or single upload you have done on Google Places?
Image & Video Optimization | | JamesNorquay0 -
Google local - is 7 pack really gone
According to a searchengineland post, Google has replaced "7 pack" results. But they are still appearing for local queries. Like for query "pizza restaurant new delhi" ( in Google.co.in ), i can still see 7 pack results. Has local and general search algorithms merged ?
Image & Video Optimization | | seoug_20050