Targeting local keywords and service areas.

[pharcydeabc]

Hi,

I run a small photo booth rental business in San Francisco, CA that serves the greater Bay Area.  I've created different webpages for each location that we serve, ie: "San Francisco Photo Booth", "Oakland Photo Booth", "San Jose Photo Booth", etc....

I'm assuming that for each city, the strongest keyword would be "City-Photo Booth".  However, I also want to target different variations of the keyword, such as:

San Francisco Photo Booth:

-Photo Booth San Francisco

-SF Photo Booth

-San Francisco Photobooth

-San Francisco, CA Photo Booth

-etc....

Will adding these keywords onto the same webpage dilute the relevance of my main keyword "San Francisco Photo Booth"?  Also, is there any way to place these words within the text of the webpage so that it does not sound akward and unnatural to the reader?  Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Pharcydeabc,

This is a good question, indeed! I'd suggest you start a new Q&A for this under a new category so that our experts can help you with this new topic. We really enjoy your participation in Q&A!

Miriam

[pharcydeabc]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought when migrating to the new website.  And thanks for the link.  Another member recommended it to me last night and I read through the whole thing.  It's very easy to understand and just enough info.

I was wondering if you might chime in on another question that I had after reading that article.

I read in the article that Google takes into consideration, the popularity of your page.  This meaning that your website has a very low bounce rate.

I run a photo booth rental business for weddings and other social events.  One of the features that comes standard with every package is that all of the photos from the event are hosted on an online photo gallery.  We currently give the guests a business card at the event with our website address and on the website they can click a link that takes them to their online gallery, which is hosted on www.smugmug.com.

I wanted to see if there is a way that we could keep the traffic/visitors on our website longer vs. sending them to www.smugmug.com.  I also would like to see if there is a way that they can incorporate social media sharing, such as Google+ to share our website with their friend and family.

It seems that with the online gallery it's a great way to drive traffic to our website and also take advantage of social media platforms.  However, I just can't put finger on how to best go about this.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Again!

Unfortunately, though I'm a web designer, I'm not familiar with either product (we build from scratch) though I have run into weebly sites in the past, I believe.

In any case, I do think it's worth the effort to keep those city landing pages.

Regarding making sure you don't lose what you've built up, SEO-wise, yes, keep all URLs the same, if possible. If not possible, set up permanent 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. If your titles and tags are good and are helping you to rank, be sure you migrate those over, too. Be sure your new menu system doesn't create any crawling issues and that you are adhering to SEO-friendly design practices throughout development.

If you're feeling unsure about any of this, I think this would be an excellent time to refresh and solidify your understanding of good SEO by reading our detailed guide:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Best Wishes!

Miriam

[pharcydeabc]

Hi Miriam,

Regarding the redesign, I'm currently using Weebly, which is a website building software.  However, it's very basic and limiting in functionality, so my website is decent, but not to the level of professionalism that I'd like.

Adobe has just released the website builder "Adobe Muse", which is an amazing piece of software that allows for extremely intricat and professional website design without the need to code.  I'm planning on redesigning the entire website with this software.

Will a complete redesign using this software hurt the SEO work that I've already done?  Are there best practices when doing this, such as naming pages the same as the old website, etc....?

[MiriamEllis]

My pleasure to help!

1. I would be sure that your main geo keywords are on all your main pages. If San Francisco is your main city term, I would definitely include this on the homepage, contact page, about page and possibly other pages. I would not omit these critical geo terms on your important pages as they are vital to signalling to human users and bots where your booths and your business is located.

2. I would not abandon your method of having a unique page for each city. Especially considering how well this is working for you. I don't believe your alternate plan will work as well. Regarding the re-design, if you are using CSS, re-designing the visual look of the website should not have any effect on page content. Can't you just leave the contents of the city landing pages as-is and bring them into the new visual look with changes you are making to the CSS? This is what I would do. I would not want to lose those important pages under any circumstances.

Hopefully, this reply is useful to you. Good luck!

Miriam

[pharcydeabc]

Thanks Miriam!  What you suggest makes perfect sense.  In my mind, I had the dilema as to whether I should write keyword stuffed content for SEO or write well written informative content for the reader.  I guess that I need to mainly focus on good content and insert keywords where they fit naturally.

A few more questions if you don't mind.

1.  Should each page be aimed at one specific type of keyword?  For instance, the contact page would be focused towards location keywords, such as "SF photo booth", "Bay Area photo booth", "San Francisco Photo Booth", etc.....  And the homepage could be focused on more generic terms, such as "Photo Booth", "Rent Photo Booths", "Photo Booth Rental", etc...  Or should I just place these keywords throughout the website without regard to page?

2.  Our photo booth rental business serves most cities in Northern California.  I've currently created unique pages for each city that we serve, such as "Oakland Photo Booth", "Fremont Photo Booth", "Napa Photo Booth", etc...  It's been very successful and I rank for most all of the cities.  However, I'm redesigning the website and it's a ton of work to create a unique page for each city, so I'd like to try and avoid doing this again.

Instead I'd like to list the County, followed by the cities in that county on my "Contact Page" and write a small paragraph explaining that we serve these area and have different travel rates depending on city.  Would this work for SEO and would it be considered spam. ie: "Alameda County: Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, etc..."

[MiriamEllis]

Hello Pharcydeabc,

As Agents of Value has explained so well, you need not be concerned about diluting the relevance of the page with the type of keywords you are listing.

I would not advise putting any misspellings on the page. Remember, the quality of your copy counts. You don't ever want to look like you've got poor writing or sloppy typos in your copy. That being said 'photobooth' is not exactly a misspelling - it's more of a variant.

What I would not do is turn out a sentence like this:

Visit our photo booth San Francisco...

...just because people are searching that way. If it isn't good writing and it isn't the way people talk, don't use it. Remember, Google can pick out scattered keyword phrases from your pages. They don't have to be blocked together. So, a sentence like:

Take home a fun souvenir of your trip to San Francisco by visiting our photo booth....

...is still sending plenty of signals relevant to your keywords.

It's actually, in my opinion, better to mix things up in your copy because this more natural. What you don't want is copy that reads like this:

Visit our San Francisco photo booth because our San Francisco photo booth is the best photo booth of all photo booths in San Francisco.

This won't read well to human users - your target audience - and the needless repetitions won't impress the bots either.

My #1 rule as a professional copywriter reads:

"Write thoroughly and optimization happens naturally."

Keep your keywords in mind and write the most appealing, helpful and interesting page you can and you'll have a much better page than most of your competitors. Good luck!

Miriam

[AgentsofValue]

Sure - no problem.  I would optimize the pages for the main keyword, that has the most exact match search volume for it.  Put that keyword in your page H1 tag, the page title tag, as well as your meta tags.

In the body, even if you can't work the exact phrase in, you can try to put the keywords in close proximity, which seems to help.  Overall, I would optimize for user experience first, and I definitely would not advise keyword stuffing.

One 'pro tip' is that you can rank for a lot of these keyword variations, based just on the anchor text you use for your links to the page.  So, if you're building links, and having other sites link to those pages, or even on your internal links across your own site, work in different variations of those keywords.

Misspelling SEO is not so big as it was before.  Generally, Google shows the corrected version of what a user searched for, unless the spelling was too bad for it to make any sense of.

[pharcydeabc]

Thanks for the link!

For a lot of long tail keywords, there is really no way to make
them sound natural in the text of the website. For instance, "photo booth
san francisco", "photo booth sf", or misspellings such as
"san francisco photobooth", etc....

The terms themselves are awkward. It just seems difficult to
legitimately integrate the keywords into the text body. Is there another
method, such as stuffing them into the footer, or creating a list of keywords
on the page?

[AgentsofValue]

Having other keywords will not affect the relevance of your main keyword, as long as you optimize each of your keywords properly. Adding more keyword variation as well as landing pages for those keywords is a good thing because:

1. Targeting more keywords can increase your search traffic.

2. Landing pages with contents that are relevant to the keywords can also increase the conversion rate of your site.

When you add keywords in your content, make sure it will appear natural, like they are part of the sentence structure. Check out this video:

I know its an old video but some pointers there might help you.

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[MoosaHemani]

I can see where you are coming from… and to be honest this is not what I would prefer if I would be at your place.

Making keyword based pages is not really a good idea and it looks like you have build your website more for search engine and less for your users…

If I would be at your place I would have build services pages and tell my users in what areas I offer my services...

In order to gain top rankings from different location I would prefer the following strategy:

• Local Listings
• Yellow Pages and Aggregators
• Blog that will be updated frequently
• Social Medias

and I would have craft my link building activity that way that it allow me to gain top rankings and links from desired locations.