Local SEO Citation Questions
-
I have checked out some great resources from Rand and others here on SEOMoz, as well as some other great articles written on YouMoz by you guys!
I have two questions when it comes to citations for Local SEO though.
I have heard that Google does not really take the address into consideration when indexing local citations. Instead it is a combination of the business name + phone number + area code.
On one hand this makes a lot of sense as far as Google crunching all the information. You can achieve a fairly accurate citation with just those three things and still weed out a lot of the "brand mentions" as citations. However this conflicts with a lot of what I have been reading and watching as far as whiteboard Fridays and blogs here on SEOMoz.
Can someone provide some insight or sources concerning this?
Secondly, in case of SEO and Web Design companies, such as ourselves, who do not receive the "One Box" for Google localized search, do citations play any lesser role in ranking for localized seo keywords?
I am not sure if there is a definitive answer to these questions or if they are open ended. Regardless any insight would be invaluable!
-
Thank you Miriam. I will consider speaking with a Local SEO provider
-
Hi Keith,
Thanks for the additional details. I'm trying to think of a business model I've worked with that matches your description, but I'm having trouble coming up with one. From what you are saying, it sounds like you have a national business with employees based in various cities and that the employees operate out of their homes and meet customer there. If that's correct, it sounds to me as if you would be able to build citations for those employees, provided they work solely for one company, and also provided that they aren't operating any other businesses out of the same address/phone, but I'm giving that advice tentatively, because I'm not exploring your unique business. If your company is considering whether a Local SEO campaign is right for you, I would recommend that you consult one-on-one with a high level Local SEO with whom you can share all the details of your company. That would be my best advice.
-
Miriam,
The business does have face to face transactions with its customers. It's a service based business where sales people are based regionally and have then in-home consultations with interested customers. It's a legitimate business and a well-respected national brand. It's not like an Amazon.com where it's solely based on the web and sends products to various parts of the country.
Thanks,
K
-
Hi Keith,
If a business doesn't have face-to-face transactions with its customers, whether at a physical office or at the clients' locations, then it is not eligible for local inclusion. A business that lacks in-person contact with customers needs to pursue organic rather than local rankings.
-
Do you believe the Web SEO firm nuance would apply similarly to businesses that are national brands but that do not have stand alone stores? There are sales offices in various regions, but the not a physical location a customer can go to and purchase.
-
Thanks so much! Exactly what I needed to know!
-
Hi Kesil Consulting,
I'm going to answer your questions in reverse order, because your industry falls under a special category of handling on Google's part. Google does not consider SEO and Web Design companies to be truly local and stopped giving them inclusion in their local SERPs at the beginning of 2010. You can create a local listing, but if you search for your search terms+ city in the main engine, you will not see Google returning any true local results. Everything will be organic. If you were a plumber or a lawyer, it would be a different story.
Because of this nuance, while you can certainly build citations if you wish, the effect other businesses could expect of this pushing up their local rankings will not be applicable to your company.
On your first question, all of local hangs on NAP (name-address-phone number) and each component is vital. I'm not sure about what you have read in regards to address not being important (feel free to show me a link to the article you read), but consistency of NAP is critical to any Local SEO campaign. Any variance in any of these 3 elements can cause disaster, so, when listing any company in any local business index, it's crucial that these elements be identical.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Domain and Sub-Domain Question
Hi, My company owns the domains www.NYSTATEMLS.COM and www.MYSTATEMLS.COM both of these sites are already on there way with a lot going on. I did just review video 5 on technical SEO and Rand was talking about how much harder it is to rank two websites. So i'm wondering what could be done in this area? Should something be done? The website nystatemls.com is necessary because it's dedicated to the state of new york & has been around for a long time. mystatemls.com came later because the business grew and we opened up to the national market. Looking for some insight. Thanks so much, Chris Farcher
Whiteboard Friday | | Cfarcher0 -
Long tail seo
Hi, I watched a video about long tail seo and it was mentioned there that finding keywords that have 0-10 search volume or no data at all may potentially have super high value for your specific business. Since opportunity score will tend to be high because there’s minimal searches or no data at all, the trick is to check the top 10 SERPs and if none of the 10 used your keyword then you may have found yourself a great long tail seo opportunity. Could anyone please clarify why that would be a great long tail seo opportunity? Thank you. -Michelle
Whiteboard Friday | | tanahoy0 -
I am planning to move our DNS to new hosting, but worry re: our SEO ranking will be jepordized; is that a valid concern?
If moving to new hosting causes SEO loss, what can be done to mitigate loss in SEPR?
Whiteboard Friday | | Chermak0 -
How to Build SEO Focused Pages?
Your help please as with so much kicking around about what is best practice us poor novices havent got a chance to keep up! My site www.over50choices.co.uk focuses on personal finance for the over 50s and one of the product sets is Funerals: I have c40 pages on the subject and 25 pages with the word "funeral" (eg funeral plans, how to arrange a funeral, funeral directors, funeral planning etc) in the URL, Title & H1 Tag - individually each page explains specific elements of the "process" and solutions to them eg purchasing a "prepaid funeral plan" all of which were optimised for specific Keywords (because thats what i was advised was best practice 6 months ago). Am I correct in thinking that in the new world ie post Hummingbird et al, that a better strategy is to use the "product home page" as the core landing page, with sufficient content to summarise what's on offer, covering all of the individual subjects from each pages in an umbrella/topic kind of way? And to still retain the linked pages from the core landing page, as they will contain the detailed information? Many thanks Ash
Whiteboard Friday | | AshShep10 -
SEO Implications when domain ownership and branding changes
I have a couple questions for the SEOMOZ community - and/or it's leader, Rand, if at all possible 🙂 It is very important for us to have good information. Scenario: Company A: National established leader in a niche product currently receives 49% of their traffic from branded keywords. Company A wants to protect and further grow it's gains that have been made in SEO even after it is acquired by Company B. Company B: Is a much larger company that acquires Company A. 1. What could happen to Google rankings when company A is bought out and Company B changes the registered owner and whois record? Could Google see this as a signal that the ownership has changed and then re-evaluate the ranking of Company A's website? 2. What would most likely happen if company B were to change the branding of Company A's established website? Company A currently receives about half of it's traffic from branded keywords. The acquiring company may want to change some of the SEO titles, ALT-Text, H1 tags, etc to also promote itself on the acquired company's site. Thank you all in advance for your help!
Whiteboard Friday | | follr0 -
GEO TAG Images for local SEO
Hello, In the pro webinar "All About Google Places – Do’s, Don’t, Best Practices and More" Benu recomends to geo tag pictures. I'm bad with coding and using joomla. Can somebody give me a step by step guide ? For now I use this code: What do I have to ad? I want to have the picture asociated with barcelona. What do you recomend? Use regional code Microformat I found this in wikipedia ; In case you recomend me to use this. Where does it go exactly? Thanks for help
Whiteboard Friday | | igrizo0 -
External Linking and SEO strategy
I run a business where we offer music lessons in student's homes throughout a local area. We currently rank for phrases like piano lessons + city, or voice lessons + city because we have a page specifically made for each keyword + city combination. The result is a very spammy looking site. I'm afraid that eventually this duplicate content will be penalized especially when we move into hundreds of cities throughout the US. With that in mind, I came up with a system that would give each page original content specific to the keyword + city. Whenever we hire a new teacher the teacher must fill out a short teaching philosophy which will be displayed next to their picture on pages where they can teach. I go through the teaching philosophy and add a keyword or two for search engines as well. For example someone who can teach piano lessons in Los Angeles would appear on the piano lessons in Los Angeles page. This way I have some more original content. I am also going to systematically ask for testimonials from all of our customers which will then be displayed on the respective pages as well. Therefore the more teachers and students we get, the more content we have available on our site. With that said, I'm still trying to think of ways to make a better user experience with more specific content on each page. Recently I was looking through whiteboard Fridays and found this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday I thought it may be a good idea if I went out and found perhaps local sheet music stores and added them to my database. Then I would link out to them on specific pages, saying "this is where you can go to buy sheet music" or "buy a trumpet here". It would be a lot more elegant than that, but hopefully you get the idea. My entire site is database driven so as soon as I put the new stores information in the database it could show up on the instrument/city pages within 10 miles of the store, or something like that. I'm posting this for opinions. Is this a good strategy? Some of my worries are that these other businesses almost all provide lessons in their store, so they would be direct competitors. I also really don't want to detract from what I'm selling, which are lessons. I'm worried about conversion rates mostly. The positives to the approach though may be that I can get some good linking to these individual pages from these stores (if they'll link to a competitor), which is something that would be very difficult to do for these deep instrument+city pages. Also I'm thinking if I included the stores physical address then perhaps search engines would be more encouraged that the instrument+city page actually represents a local service. Any ideas and thoughts are greatly appreciated!
Whiteboard Friday | | BrianJenkins1 -
Few questions regarding Rand's Over Optimization Video
I was just watching the Whiteboard Friday video and it was informative and good. Thank god, we always tried to stay natural and all of our websites are perfectly not in danger. Anyways, I do have few questions : He said about internal links on inner pages. One of our site has a sidebar with a list of 10 items, which are our main services and we want users always to have a access to it, so we have placed it on the sidebar and it appears on all pages. Is it wrong ? About the links, we have a list of social bookmarking sites, like 450 sites, and all of them are PR2-PR5 sites, etc. We submit each of our product to those sites . Is it wrong ? And how to know, which is a low quality site and we should not submit the link there ? We receive like 10+ link requests per day and we place their links and they place ours on resources page. Is it wrong ? We write eZine article for all of our products/keywords and submit. Is it wrong ? Looks like, the old school link building method are going to go down the pit hole by Google. Whats the new way to build links ? This is making me crazy.
Whiteboard Friday | | mageclub1