Optimizing for Local Terms

[csmithal]

I am just building my website and planning keyword strategy for my pages.

How much is too much in terms of optimizing locally?

So if I want "web design firm birmingham al," is it overkill to add that in the URL slug, title tag, essentially all the on-page optimization?

/web-design-firm-birmingham-al

much uglier than

web-design-firm

Obviously, would prefer to think big and believe it can go beyond one city to compete in other markets statewide or regionally, thus, optimizing for one city is too narrow (and there's the ugly url thing).

I'm working on offsite local optimization, so I'm thinking this will not be necessary.

Thoughts?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Again C Smith, Regarding this: "I bet there's a "best practice" implementation out there - perhaps an "Areas Served" channel, with the cities as sub-pages, and then some truly unique content on each page with some keywords seeded in." I recommend you take a look at this other discussion I'm having with a marketer whose client is a contractor in a service radius. View my very long, most recent comment toward the bottom of the thread to see my advice on how to do this legitimately (without being spammy): http://www.seomoz.org/q/use-schema-on-service-areas-page-for-local-business-2#post-123244 This is applicable to your business model, as well:)

[csmithal]

@Miriam, Owen:

I agree that a light SEO hand is best. As one who was a writer and journalist first, I despise over-optimization.

When you are just starting out with a new website, it's tough to know how aggressive one should be. When looking at the competition for local search terms, it does seem like most of my competition that ranks well does "over-optimize" for these local search terms like "birmingham alabama web design."

However, I need to just keep my head down for the next couple of months and blog repeatedly.

@Helen:

I've seen that done - creating a unique page for each locale - I'm not a fan of it. I'm not knocking your comment, but it does seem that in most implementations I've seen, the content seems to be bordering on duplicate with only the local SEO terms swapped out. I bet there's a "best practice" implementation out there - perhaps an "Areas Served" channel, with the cities as sub-pages, and then some truly unique content on each page with some keywords seeded in.

Curious to what others might think of this strategy?

[MiriamEllis]

Hello C Smith,

Like your avatar.

Okay, so here's the thing: 'web design' is not actually a local query, due to Google's handling of this niche. I believe it was in January of 2010 that they stopped showing true blended/local/pack-type results for web design queries, so your approach to this is basically going to be organic, in terms of SEO, rather than what you'd be doing if you were a shoe store in Birmingham.

If you're located in Birmingham and your goal at this point is to attract Birmingham-based businesses, then I would imagine your whole website (not just a landing page) would make frequent mention of Birmingham and the businesses you serve there.

But, as Owen has rightly pointed out, it is better to use a light hand in this. Don't go overboard. Write titles, tags and text that read naturally. Remember, you don't have to string your phrases together every time. In other words, you don't have to write:

Birmingham Alabama Website Design Services

over and over again.

A paragraph might contain the words 'Birmingham' and 'Website Design' and 'Services' and 'Alabama' within it, of course, but they don't have to be stuck all in a row with glue:)

Between Panda, Penguin and EMD issues over the past year, Google is very clearly moving towards a preference for naturalness. So, using a gentle touch is going to serve you better in the long run, both as far as human users and search engine bots are concerned.

[ORob]

I'd suggest starting out a bit more modestly. Follow SEO best practices as outlined via the SEOmoz tools and Google SEO 101. Present the keywords in a natural way which lets the user know what the page is about. If you find you aren't gaining traction in terms of visibility for those terms, and your competitive analysis tells you, you should, then perhaps increase the optimization.

Exact match domain value is something Google is looking with a sharper eye on now so don't overdo that just to rank for a city phrase out of the gate.

[WillaKenzieWines]

Hi- I'm not an expert but it seems like you could create a main landing page that includes links to all possible cities (maybe use a div tag for all that extra info.) at: web-design-firm, then create a specific landing page for each city: web-design-firm/birmingham then optimize that page. It's a lot of work for someone advertising to a lot of different locations, but you could use the opportunity to add really great locally-specific content that would help your users and SEO.