How can I rank a national site for local terms
-
Hi All
I have a website that covers all parts of the UK and I wish to be found for terms such as "car for sale London" "car for sale Manchester" and so on.
In the past I have created separate landing pages for each town and city but with the quality score of a page becoming more of a ranking factor it is hard to make 300 + town pages interesting and useful.
Is it best practice to do what I am doing and improve the quality of each of the pages or would I be better off removing the old pages and using some other technique to rank for the local searches?
Thanks for your help
-
Ask yourself if you really think that multiple city pages are different enough in nature and content to bother. Are you legitimately offering those services in those cities or are you just being greedy with traffic?
If you really think it makes sense, I would start by building out the top 5-10 term+city variations and spending a LOT of time on each one making it truly different from the others. Claim and optimize your Google maps listing in each city, build up content relevant to that city alone, build links from local sources like Yelp or other websites that will portray a strong local connection.
I do not recommend building out 300+ term+city pages. Start with 5 and see if it really makes sense.
Two articles I recommend you read in full :
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site Speed Testing Tools For Production Sites
Hi Guys, Any free site speed testing tools for sites in production, which are password protected? We want to test site speed before the new site goes live on top priority pages. Site is on Shopify – we tried google page insights while being logged into the production site but believe its just recording the speed of the password page. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup1 -
Home Page Disappears From Google - But Rest of Site Still Ranked
As title suggests we are running into a serious issue of the home page disapearing from Google search results whilst the rest of the site still remains. We search for it naturally cannot find a trace, then use a "site:" command in Google and still the home page does not come up. We go into web masters and inspect the home page and even Google states that the page is indexable. We then run the "Request Indexing" and the site comes back on Google. This is having a damaging affect and we would like to understand why this issue is happening. Please note this is not happening on just one of our sites but has happened to three which are all located on the same server. One of our brand which has the issue is: www.henweekends.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
New Website's Not Ranking for Branded Term
Hey Friends, I can't seem to figure out why https://feello.com/ isn't ranking on Google for it's branded term (Feello). It's ranking in 1st position on Bing and Yahoo but on page 2 (16th or so) on Google. Going through the list and can't come up with an answer. Metadata: Yes Indexed to Webmaster: Yes, Fetched pages: Yes Google cache on May 27, 2017: Check Using canonical and redirecting for non-www and HTTPS version: Yes & Yes Feello in domain name: Yes Set up social profiles and GMB: Yes Driving traffic: Yes, some email and ads Checked robots.txt: Yes, not created yet Created and Submitted Sitemap: Yes - https version Checked for blocked resources: None. The list goes on...Any ideas would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GarrettDenham0 -
How to answer for question "why xyz site is ranking for abc keyword" and not our website
Hi All, This is a layman question but would like to get a concrete answer for. I would like to know how to answer the questions like "Why our competitor is ranking for keyword ABC but not us"? What metrics or data can I showcase that gives logical answer. Please help in this regard. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avin1230 -
How can a website have multiple pages of duplicate content - still rank?
Can you have a website with multiple pages of the exact same copy, (being different locations of a franchise business), and still be able to rank for each individual franchise? Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OhYeahSteve0 -
Why is my blog out-ranking my main site?
Please see attached ranking history chart. On June 5th the chart shows that my main site is not coming up under our main keyword "door hangers" From then on, our blog took over. Any ideas why? Thanks Andrea lpEBciu.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Can you explain why the site is dropping off Google every other week?
Can anyone offer any insight into why since the Google Panda update www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com has been fluctuating on Google so much? One week it's ranked as it used to be, the next it's nowhere to be seen? If you take a look at the screenshot of our traffic, this is the traffic after 75% loss (dropped in two stages) you'll see we get traffic for a week and then nothing. This has been happening for months. Some points that might be involved: Around the same time the SEO guys suggested setting the canonical url to www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com (before there wasn't one so traffic was coming from www. and non-www). A lot of the original urls have been consolidated and rel="canonical" added throughout The "pages" of results all have had a rel="canonical" set to page 1 Could it be that the www is competing with the non-www despite the 301 redirects. We're doing everything we can to help this client (and have reduced their site errors from the millions to low tens-of-thousands) so it's not filling them with confidence when their site just keeps plumetting! What's also irritating/odd is that some of their competitors -who used to be ranked lower and have sites which contradict every rulebook still rank high. Hopefully you can spot something we've missed. Tim I8PNL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimGaunt0 -
Local Searches done from outside of local area better than searches from within local area
Here's a strange one: I am working on a site for a local business and targeting local searches. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Various keyword position tools show the site ranking very well for searches like "Anytown Widget Store". Doing the same Google search from a browser in Anytown, the site shows up much lower. So I tried changing the location in Google to other cities, using a variety of browsers and it comes up much higher out of town than in town. I have seen plenty of geographic discrepancies before, but usually they went the other way - searches from the actual local area did slightly better than the same searches done elsewhere, which would make sense. Any thoughts on why this would happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nick_Ker0