Does having the local area name in a domain effect your results when branching out?
-
We have a domain which performs well within the local search and has got good authority and trust but we are now moving further afield to rank for keywords country wide. Our current domain contains our local area, does this effect your chances of ranking for broader searches? You don't seem to see many general searches bring domains up with the location keywords within their domain.
-
Ryan's point about localized search being drastically different. So the real question is whether you offer products or services that require localized identification. If so, having your initial local area in the domain will definitely not help your effort.
As for the example of the New York times, they can get away with showing up when not searching for local specifics because they're one of the biggest sites with some of the highest SEO authority from 3rd party sites on earth. So of course they can get away with it. If you want to achieve the same (for non-local search phrases), you'll need to go to extreme lengths to build your site's SEO authority as well.
Personally I'd say that if your site depends on local related search, you'd be better off with a domain that doesn't have the local aspect in the name. Build out content in a locations funnel - starting with the geographic areas you determine to be a mix of the most important and some that are semi-important (and thus easier to rank for over time).
That way, you can create individual pages (or ideally sections) that have each geographic location in the URLs. This is much less challenging to get ranking for over time than the root domain being about just one location, because the root domain placement of a keyword is much stronger than a sub-folder.
High quality SEO will be key in the geographic funnel. Citations from other sites in each of those locations will be really helpful as well.
-
Our current domain contains our local area, does this effect your chances of ranking for broader searches?
No.
If I type "newspaper" in to Google, the first result is New York Times. Since I live in California that is definitely not a local result. You can definitely rank well for broad searches with a localized name.
The moment a user adds a local name to their search, the results will drastically change. If I add the term "California" to the newspaper search, the New York Times is no longer even on the first page. I probably would have to go quite deep to find them.
How you expand depends on the nature of your business. I would recommend a press release or other announcement which generates publicity around your recent expansion. "London Cable Installation now offers service in the Liverpool and Manchester areas". This will help you rank better for localized searches in those areas.
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 change recommendations
We recently migrated one of our websites to a new domain. Obviously we were expecting a decrease in traffic initially, but it has actually gone down by 70% week-over-week since we made the switch. We set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain, changed all internal links to the new domain and changed all inbound links that we owned to the new domain. Our research suggested the best way to approach a domain change was by keeping it simple and not making too many changes at once. So my questions are: 1. Are these the kinds of results we should expect initially after a domain change? And if not, 2. What are the steps we should take from here? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | gouldtr0 -
Page Name vs Header
Hi! I was wondering if one of our knowledgeable community members can help me out: I use the drag & drop Intuit Website Builder. For each page, there is a field for the page "Name" and for the "Header". I understand the header is a standard element in a page. What exactly is the page "Name", how is different from the header and can/should I use the same text for both? Your input for a beginner like me is appreciated! I also have another question if you guys will indulge me: Intuit's support is terrible. You cannot get assistance over the phone, only through an annoying "chat" system. Wordpress has been recommended to me by multiple people. Are they really that good? how is their support?
Technical SEO | | Jorge1110 -
Competitor in 70% of results?
I'm trying to rank in the UK for a keyword where one of the competitors takes up around 70% of the top 100 positions. How is that possible? Is this google really giving the most relevant results to searchers? I can't think that a user wants to be presented with the same site on nearly all of the top 10 pages?
Technical SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Change of domain name?
Hello, We are currently developing a new site for an existing online clothing retailer. The existing site is on a .co.uk domain, however we are targeting a global market and wondered whether we could/should launch the new site under a .com address and whether this would be beneficial? Most of our back links come from Affiliate blogs and we could quite easily change these to the new URL. Thanks Bilal
Technical SEO | | PLP1 -
Domain that ranked 4 has now disappeared from search results
Hi Guys, I have a website for a realestate property, it use to rank 4 but has now suddenly disappeared from search results altogether, a search for the domain 1boydstreetalbertpark.com will bring it up (so I assume it has not been blacklisted), but if I search for '1 boyd street albert park' (it use to come up at 4) it doesn't seem to come up at all anymore. I know the content is not original and it is the same on other sites (it is the same content the real estate agents send to everyone) but why it suddenly disappear and I would of thought having the actual search term in the domain would help it at least appear in the results. Any Idea?
Technical SEO | | mypropertyaddress0 -
I think I have a penalty on my domain...
my domain is www.brighttights.com it is an affiliate marketing website in the niche of tights and lingerie. A few months back my traffic was pretty good, doing about 500 hits a day from product search terms only. After the panda updates I blocked all the product pages from google as they were duplicate content and I am now working on a program of seing for the category and homepages instead. I am using much more generic, and high volume, keywords for these. Several months later I seem to not only be down to 7 people a day on my website but i'm not even ranking for terms such as "bright tights". I used to be no1 for this. I have domain authority of 27 so it's not terrible, competitors on the first page range from 45 to 9. This lack of ranking for the sites name/domain name term is leading me to wonder if I have a penalty on the site. Any feedback would be gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Referrals from widget domains
Let's say you are doing seo for a company that sells 5000 widgets. Let's call their site www.mainsite.com ... They have already set up ( purchased ) many domains such as www.widget1.com which is one of the widgets they have on their main site. so they might have several hundred of these domains. What is the best use of these domains? Would it be : Have those pages be landing pages with content and pictures and optimized with a link to their main site widget page? Or have that domain have a 301 redirect to go their main site, to the particular page showing that widget for sale off their main site? Miscellaneous sidebar question - Since both the main site widget page and the widget domain might be in competition and might have duplicate content, what are the ramifications of not using the canonical tag, and what other considerations might there be? How much must be duplicate content before considering using the canonical tag?
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites0 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0