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
-
Change theme or domain first?
I bought a new domain and I want to use it instead of my current domain for my website. I also want to change my theme. Which should I do first? At the time I have my new domain forwarded to my current domain.
Technical SEO | | tfuentez0 -
Geo Targeting a Country Domain
Hey Mozzers A customer of mine hosts an international web shop on a country domain (customer.ch) which is automatically targeted to 'Switzerland' by the Google Search Console. So far so good, the shops for Switzerland are all in a subfolders /ch/. However, there are 2 more shops in two more subfolders: /de/ (for Germany) and /row/ (for the rest of the world). Google thinks both /row/ and /de/ are Swiss shops which results in searchers on Google.ch currently getting /row/ with the wrong currency and language pair. Question: I can't set the targeting for customer.ch/de/ in the search console to Germany, it's set by the domain country to Switzerand. Also, the customer doesn't own customer.de. How can I still let Google know that customer.ch/de/ is the shop to be displayed only to searchers from Germany, but not to searchers from Switzerland? Thx!
Technical SEO | | ChrisCronimund0 -
Does image domain name matter when using a CDN?
Has anyone does studies on using a different CDN domain name for images on a site? Here is an example: or ![](<a)http://cdn.mydomain.com/image.jpg> mydomain.com ranks highly and many images show up in Google/Bing image searches. Is there any actual data that says that using your real domain name for the CDN has benefits versus the default domain name provided by the CDN provider? On the surface, it feels like it would, but I haven't experimented with it.
Technical SEO | | findwell0 -
How well do .ltd.uk domain names rank?
Hi all, do .ltd.uk domain names rank well? How well do they stack up against a .com or .co.uk? I'd really appreciate any feedback from people with any experience with these domains. Thanks John
Technical SEO | | john251810100 -
Should a 301 from a penalised domain to a new domain be removed?
A business traded on a domain let's say example.COM which was heavily penalised due to non-removable spammy back links. Their previous SEO advised them to set up on example.CO.UK but redirected example.COM to example.CO.UK. Example.CO.UK ranks very poorly, presumably due to being 'tarred with the same brush' i.e. attributed with the ills of example.COM. Will it do any good to remove the redirect or is example.CO.UK now doomed as well?
Technical SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy1 -
What is best practice for redirecting "secondary" domain names?
For sites with multiple top-level domains that have been secured for a business or organization, I'm curious as to what is considered best practice for setting up 301 redirects for secondary domains. Is it best to do the 301 redirects at the registrar level, or the hosting level? So that .net, .biz, or other secondary domains funnel visitors to the correct primary/main domain name. I'm looking for the "best practice" answer and want to avoid duplicate content problems, or penalties from the search engines. I'm not trying to game the system with dozens of domain names, simply the handful of domains that are important to the client. I've seen some registrars recommend hosting secondary domains, and doing redirects from the hosting level (and they use meta refresh for "domain forwarding," which I want to avoid). It seems rather wasteful to set up hosting for a secondary domain and then 301 each URL.
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
Switch domain from one account to another at domain registrar
We need to move our domain from one account to another at our domain registrar (which is Moniker). Both the "from" account and "to" account will be at Moniker. The "from" account currently has privacy settings enabled and we'd also put these in place for the "to" account. Has anyone done this and see any impact on SEO? Is there any big or common mistakes that I should be aware of? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | evoNick0 -
Redirecting root domains to sub domains
Mozzers: We have a instance where a client is looking to 301 a www.example.com to www.example.com/shop I know of several issues with this but wondered if anyone could chip in with any previous experiences of doing so, and what outcomes positive and negative came out of this. Issues I'm aware of: The root domain URL is the most linked page, a HTTP 301 redirect only passes about 90% of the value. you'll loose 10-15% of your link value of these links. navigational queries (i.e.: the "domain part" of "domain.tld") are less likely to produce google site-links less deep-crawling: google crawls top down - starts with the most linked page, which will most likely be your domain url. as this does not exist you waste this zero level of crawling depth. robots.txt is only allowed on the root of the domain. Your help as always is greatly appreciated. Sean
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0