Local area coverage
-
Hi Moz people...
I have a little one that i can't quite get my head into the best way of achieving the clients goals.
My client has a local business but also travels. His area coverage is around 50 miles from his base. He also has a few skills, all under the main discipline. When users search for his skills set, they would search for a specific skill against where they live ie. "skill1 in city A"
What is the best way concentrate on these locations, and make sure his is targeting them? I know int he old days dynamic pages where created for each location (now black hat?), but I don't think this is now the best way forward? Any help, tips or just 'look at this' would really help me out.
-
Hi Jimbo,
Ryan has highlighted some good ideas for you. I will add:
-
Yes, it's still forbidden to created Google Places/+Local page for service areas where the business has no physical location. Google's local product hinges on physical location.
-
I would create two sets of pages on the website. One set will contain a page for each of his major services. The other set will contain a city landing page for each of his main service cities. I wrote a pretty well-cited article some months back on the topic of city landing pages that I feel may be of some help to you: The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages
-
Then, once you've established the two sets of static pages on the client's site, I would consider following up with any or all of the following:
-
Linkbuilding
-
Blogging to showcase his projects in different towns
-
Social media with a local focus
-
Video marketing with a local focus
Provided the playing field isn't too tough, a path like the one I've described will enable most clients to gain quite a bit of visibility.
-
-
Set your radius on your local to a wider area when possible, but Google is really making this type of situation difficult because technically he doesn't have a "physical presence" in all of these places. I would say that you go ahead and create content around these seperate locations, but make sure the content is unique and good. Don't simply copy the same content and swap out "city1" with "City2" and call it good. Google has specifically targeted those type of things and something they do not want in search results. But having great content and information for each of those locations is an excellent idea.
1. One idea would be to house all of that content under a "service areas" type of page on the site. Then you list each area/town/city that he provides service in, with deeper links and content to each of those areas with unique content. Then you make sure to utilize breadcrumbs in the navigation with really good url structure i.e. www.service.com/plumbing/city1 and you could start to have the specialty skills as the topical/category high level pages, and then service areas within each specialty nested underneath. (hope that makes sense).
Just some ideas that have worked on my end with local. For sure check out he GetListed stuff and utilize those services as much as possible.
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
-
A Branded Local Search Strategy utilizing Microsites?
Howdy Moz, Over and over we hear of folks using microsites in addition to their main brand for targeting keyword specific niches. The main point of concern most folks have is either in duplicate content or being penalized by Google, which is also our concern. However, in one of our niches we notice a lot of competitors have set up secondary websites to rank in addition to the main website (basically take up more room on the SERPS). They are currently utilizing different domains, on different IPs, on different servers, etc. We verified because we called and they all rang to the same competitors. So our thought was why not take the fight to them (so to speak) but with a branding and content strategy. The company has many good content pieces that we can utilize, like company mottos, missions statements, special projects, community outreach that can be turned into microsites with unique content. Our strategy idea is the take a company called "ACME Plumbing" and brand for specific keywords with locations like sacramentoplumberwarranty.com where the site's content revolves around plumber warranty info, measures of a good warranty, plumbing warranty news (newsworthy issues), blogs, RCS - you get the idea...and send both referral traffic and link to the main site. The ideal is to then repeat the process with another company aspect like napaplumbingprojects.com where the content of the site is focused on cool projects, images, RCS, etc. Again, referring traffic and link juice to the main site. We realize that this adds the amount of RCS that needs to be done, but that's exactly why we're here. Also, any thoughts of intentionally tying in the brand to the location so you get urls like acmeplumbingsacarmento.com?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AaronHenry1 -
How do I write tags on a youtube video for a local Google search?
I've been reading into tags, and I would like to know what the best ways to do them for a local search are. Right now I have a title that reads similar to, "Keyword1 and Keyword2 in City X" Would I make a corresponding tag that reads "Keyword 1 and Keyword 2 in City X,"? Or would I do "Keyword 1," "Keyword 2," and, "City X," as separate tags? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | OOMDODigital0 -
Local Doorway Pages
Based on what I've read, setting up localized landing pages ie: /web-design-atlanta, web-design-nyc, /web-design-chicago, etc especially with duplicate content is a big no-no. Remarkably, 2 of our competitors are doing it, (they are just swapping out the locations), and it's working. They don't even have office addresses or local phone numbers listed. They are on the first page for multiple location based searches ("web design nyc", "web design atlanta", etc.). I thought Google penalized for this, or at least didn't index the content. What gives? Am I misinterpreting Google's AUP? Can I report them? If it's legal, we should be doing it as well.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Question about local SEO when you serve many more cities than you have brick and mortar locations
My URL is: http://www.mollysmusic.org for the record.I run a music school that serves in-home lessons to a whole slew of cities. Since I only have 3 brick-and-mortar locations, I can't make google local profiles for all the cities served, but I want to get seen by those people searching in their own cities. Right now, our biggest competitor, takelessons.com, is top ranked for every single city you can think of, because they have individual web pages for every city served. Their content is repetitive and scrapey, and to me, that says "doorway page" which supposedly can get you de-indexed. I'm reluctant to do that because I'm afraid I'll get banned, but I have to compete. I also want a strategy that can scale when we move into new areas. Is there something that makes TakeLessons's content NOT a doorway page? What's the best practice for getting ranked in multiple individual cities if you run a service? Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mollysmusic0 -
Same content, different target area SEO
So ok, I have a gambling site that i want to target for Australia, Canada, USA and England separately and still have .com for world wide (or not, read further).The websites content will basically stays the same for all of them, perhaps just small changes of layout and information order (different order for top 10 gambling rooms) My question 1 would be: How should I mark the content for Google and other search engines that it would not be considered "duplicate content"? As I have mentioned the content will actually BE duplicate, but i want to target the users in different areas, so I believe search engines should have a proper way not to penalize my websites for trying to reach the users on their own country TLDs. What i thought of so far is: 1. Separate webmasterstools account for every domain -> we will need to setup the user targeting to specific country in it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO_MediaInno
2. Use the hreflang tags to indicate, that this content is for GB users "en-GB" the same for other domains more info about it http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
3. Get the country specific IP address (physical location of the server is not hugely important, just the IP)
4. It would be great if the IP address for co.uk is from different C-class than the one for the .com Is there anything I am missing here? Question 2: Should i target .com for USA market or is there some other options? (not based in USA so i believe .us is out of question) Thank you for your answers. T0 -
New sub-domain launches thousands of local pages - is it hurting the main domain?
Would greatly appreciate some opinions on this scenario. Domain cruising along for years, top 1-3 rankings for nearly all top non-branded terms and a stronghold for branded searches. Sitelinks prominently shown with branded searches and always ranked #1 for most variations of brand name. Then, sub-domain launches that was over 80,000 local pages - these pages are 90-95% similar with only city and/or state changing to make them appear like unique local pages. Not an uncommon technique but worrisome in a post Panda/Penguin world. These pages are surprisingly NOT captured as duplicate content by the SEOMoz crawler in my campaigns. Additionally about that same time a very aggressive, almost entirely branded paid search campaign was launched that took 20% of the clicks previously going to the main domain in organic to ppc. My concern is this, shortly after this launch of over 80k "local" pages on the sub-domain and the cannibalization of organic clicks through ppc we saw the consistency of sitelinks 6 packs drop to 3 sitelinks if showing at all, including some sub-domains in sitelinks (including the newly launched one) that had never been there before. There's not a clear answer here I'm sure but what are the experts thoughts on this - did a massive launch of highly duplicate pages coupled with a significant decrease in organic CTR for branded terms harm the authority of the main domain (which is only a few dozen pages) causing less sitelinks and less strength as a domain or is all this a coincidence? Or caused by something else we aren't seeing? Thanks for thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Local Listing Spam - Why is Google Missing this?
I have a competitor that ranks in Google Search for a Top Dollar Keyword in the organic rankings with the normal result, however just below that it shows another result that contains the Local City Name followed by their business name. In the URL they have domain.com > Local and below the description data it shows a map for a totally different location as this competitor only has one location... Once clicking on the link I found that it has everything in the title, description and h1 and body content in footer that talks about the local area but not their product. and when you click the breadcrumbs you can go back to a directory of all the other cities and states they are targeting with doorway pages with the same layout however the anchor text is cityname+keyword How are they getting away with this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ben-HPB0 -
Can you set up a Google Local account under a PO Box?
I have a client that wants a Google local listing in a town he serves but does not have a physical location. Is it an issue to share an address with an existing company? Is is it better to use a P.O. Box? or is there a forwarding address company? Is this considered a black hat Local SEO tactic?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BonsaiMediaGroup0