How to perform Local SEO for sites like Angies List/Task Rabbit or Craigslist
-
I have a new SEO client that has a business model similar to Criagslist and Angies List or Task Rabbit, Where they offer local based services nationwide. My first thought was Local link building and citation building etc. But the issue is they are a purely online service company and they don't have a phyiscal address in every city/state they will be offering their services in.
What is the best course of action for providing SEO services for this type of business model. I am pretty much at a stand still on how to rank them locally for the areas they provide services in. it's a business model that involves local businesses and customers looking for services from those local businesses.
-
That's good to know, thank you for the suggestion on creating geo based. I was hoping their was another way to rank locally for each city we provide services in. Maybe one day, i guess this type of business model isn't quite in Google's sites yet for local.
-
blogs, social media, comparison charts, infographics, something interesting. show me in a fun way how you are different than those well established brands.
That's some tough competition... Good luck!
-
If they don't have a physical address, they're not going to show up in Local Search (Craigslist/Angies List don't either).
Your best bet is to follow standard SEO practices and build good links & content. Create pages your site focused around each of the cities you are targeting, and make sure city name & zip code are in the URL, title, etc. Same thing for the individual business listings.
For on-page optimization, you can copy a lot of things Angies List is doing as far as SEO. For backlinks, get links from relevant local sites like local businesses, government websites, business associations, local news, etc.
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
-
Local SEO: Is an equivalent of "practitioner listings" allowed for tradesmen, such as plumbers - in GMB (Google My Business)
I note practitioner listings are in place for certain professionals, so you can list your business address and then your individual name - one under a "practice listing" - the other under a "practitioner listing". As detailed here: https://whitespark.ca/blog/best-practices-for-practitioner-listings-on-google-my-business-gmb/ But can a self-employed tradesman do the same - for example a carpenter may have their workshop and be available for onsite work, so can they list their "carpentry business/brand name" and then their "personal name" they are also known by? Even if it is the same address.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LukeRow0 -
SEO on Jobs sites: how to deal with expired listings with "Google for Jobs" around
Dear community, When dealing with expired job offers on jobs sites from a SEO perspective, most practitioners recommend to implement 301 redirects to category pages in order to keep the positive ranking signals of incoming links. Is it necessary to rethink this recommendation with "Google for Jobs" is around? Google's recommendations on how to handle expired job postings does not include 301 redirects. "To remove a job posting that is no longer available: Remove the job posting from your sitemap. Do one of the following: Note: Do NOT just add a message to the page indicating that the job has expired without also doing one of the following actions to remove the job posting from your sitemap. Remove the JobPosting markup from the page. Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 status code). Add a noindex meta tag to the page." Will implementing 301 redirects the chances to appear in "Google for Jobs"? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grnjbs07175 -
Massive local + national disconnect in rankings (local deindexed)
I asked the question originally on webmaster central. I tried RickRoll's solutions (but it doesn't seem to have solved the issue). Problem below: I've been noticing for some time that certain pages of our site (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent) have been deindexed locally (or very low ranked), but indexed nationally (well ranked). In fact, it seems that the actual page isn't ranking (but the blog https://www.renthop.com/blog is). This huge mismatch between national vs local rankings seem to only happen for Boston & Chicago. Other parts of the country seem unaffected (and the national & local rankings are very similar). A bit of a background (and my personal theory as to what's happening). We use to have subdomains: boston.renthop.com & chicago.renthop.com for the site. These subdomains stopped working, though, as we moved the site to the directory format (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent). These subdomain URLs were inactive / broken for roughly 4 months. After the 4 months, we did a 301 from the subdomain to the main page (because these subdomains had inbound external links). However, this seems to have caused the directory pages to exhibit the national/local mismatch effect instead of helping. Is there anything I'm doing wrong? I'm not sure if the mismatch is natural, if the pages are getting algo penalized on a local level (I'm negative SEOing myself), or if it's stuck in some weird state because of what happened with bad sub-domain move). Some things I've tried: I've created webmaster console (verified) accounts for both the subdomains. I've asked Google to crawl those links. I've done a 1-1 mapping between individual page on the old site vs the new directory format I've tried both doing a 301, 302 and meta-refresh redirect from the subdomains to the directory pages. I've made sure the robots.txt on the subdomain is working properly I've made sure that the robots.txt on the directory pages are working properly. See below for a screenshot of the mismatch & deindexing in local search results (this is using SERPS - but can be replicated with any location changer). Note the difference between the ranking (and the page) when the search is done nationally vs in the actual location (Boston, MA). I'd really appreciate any help.. I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure this out (as well as experimenting). renthop%2Bboston.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lzhou0 -
Putting my content under domain.com/content, or under related categories: domain.com/bikes/content ?
Hello This questions plays on what Joe Hall talked about during this years' MozCon: Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing. My Case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
So.. we're working out guidelines and templates for a costumer (sporting goods store) on how to publish content (articles, videos, guides) on their category pages, product pages, and other pages. At this moment I have 2 choices:
1. Use a url-structure/information architecture where all the content is placed in one subfolder, for example domain.com/content. Although it's placed here, there's gonna be extensive internal linking from /content to the related category pages, so the content about bikes (even if it's placed under domain.com/bikes) will be just as visible on the pages related to bikes. 2. Place the content about bikes on a subdirectory under the bike category, **for example domain.com/bikes/content. ** The UX/interface for these two scenarios will be identical, but the directories/folder-hierarchy/url structure will be different. According to Joe Hall, the latter scenario will build up more topical authority and relevance towards the category/topic, and should be the overall most ideal setup. Any thoughts on which of the two solutions is the most ideal? PS: There is one critical caveat her: my costumer uses many url-slugs subdirectories for their categories, for example domain.com/activity/summer/bikes/, which means the content in the first scenario will be 4 steps away from the home page. Is this gonna be a problem? Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂 Sigurd, INEVO0 -
Help article / Knowledge base SEO consideration
Hi everyone, I am in the process of building the knowledge base for our SaaS product and I am afraid it could impact us negatively on the SEO side because of: Thin content on pages containing short answers to specific questions Keyword cannibalisation between some of our blog articles and the knowledge base articles I didn't find much on the impact of knowledge bases on SEO when I searched on Google. So I'm hoping we can use this thread to share a few thoughts and best practices on this topic. Below is a bit more details on the issues I face, any tips on how to address them would be most welcome. 1. Thin content: Some articles will have thin content by design: the H1 will be a specific question and there will be only 2 or 3 lines of text answering it in the article. I think creating a dedicated article per question is better than grouping 20 questions on one article from a UX point of view, because this will enable us to direct users more quickly to the answer when they use the live search function inside the software (help widget) or on the knowledge base (saves them the need to scrolling a long article to find the answer). Now the issue is that this will result in lots of pages with thin content. A workaround could be to have both a detailed FAQ style page with all the questions and answers, and individual articles for each question on top of that. The FAQ style page could be indexed in Google while the individual articles would have either a noIndex directive or a rel canonical to the FAQ style page. Have any of you faced similar issues when setting-up your knowledge base? Which approach would you recommend? 2.Keyword cannibalisation: There will be, to some extend, a level of keyword cannibalisation between our blog articles (which rank well) and some of the knowledge base articles. While we want both types of articles to appear in search, we don't want the "How to do XYZ" blog article containing practical tips to compete with the "How to do XYZ in the software" knowledge base article. Do you have any advice on how to achieve that? Having a specific Schema.org (or equivalent) type of markup to differentiate between the 2 types of articles would have been ideal but I couldn't find anything relating to help articles specifically when I searched.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tbps0 -
Sitemaps / Google Indexing / Submitted
We just submitted a new sitemap to google for our new rails app - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/sitemap.xml Which has over 1,400 pages, however Google is only seeing 114. About 1,200 are in the listings folder / 250 blog posts / and 15 landing pages. Any help would be appreciated! Aron sitemap.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Site navigation menu in head of page for SEO
We are considering expanding our site navigation menu (horizontal) at the top of our pages. However, once implemented, this would include around 30-40 links at the top of the page; before the content of the page. How much effect (good/bad) would this have on SEO? Are their any other options? (perhaps rendering the menu after the main content with CSS)? Any thoughts, suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640