Localized SEO for Restricted Niches
-
Sorry for the hypothetical, it's a sticky subject!
Suppose I work for a company that offers Online Widget Counseling. Due to the fragile nature of Widgets, this service is only legal in one state and must be administered by a registered and regulated Widget Counseling company. Widget counseling is only available online so there is no competition from bricks and mortar stores.
Unfortunately the SERPs are dominated by unscrupulous black market outfits offering Widget Counseling illegally.
If we were to use intensive and strong local signals, could we expect the SERPs to favor our pages for searches "in or about" the state in which we are registered?
Thanks for your help
-SEO Newbie
-
I'm going to take a stab in the relative dark and say this:
1. Building local links and citations should help as it would with any site.
2. It is unlikely that Google will assist you further than that. They appear to penalize broadly illegal sites, but they do not appear to get into the details beyond that. If you feel businesses are illegally offering a service, it seems like that would be more of a legal / regulatory issue than an SEO issue per-say.
-
Hi Benjamin
It's rather a question full of riddles, but as far as I see it the search engine only cares about providing the most relevant pages for the search.
Just because the widget counselling service is only available online doesn't really matter to the search engine. If someone searches for "widget counselling boston" and there's a website run by a company showing that they are based in Boston, then it's more than likely that company's web pages will rank highly. Unless of course, there are many other widget counselling companies in Boston!
I'm not sure that answers your question, but I hope it helps.
Peter
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
-
How long should the Image Alt Text be for SEO?
When it comes to creating the alternate text for images, what is the character length that I need stay under to rank well?
Image & Video Optimization | | Ytellsocial0 -
How do I increase my client's Google Local listings?
Hi Guys, I have a hypothetical question for you. Let's say I live in a town that has two pizza places and in the maps section of a Google SERP the other place outranks my client when I type in "Pizza Place Smalltown NY." What would be a list of things that I could do to make "Pizza Place Smalltown, NY" rank better in that portion? Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | oomdomarketing0 -
Is city name really a no-no in Google+ Local description field?
I know that adding one's city name in the business name and category tags for Google+ Local is a no-no. And Google says so in its quality guidelines. But what about in the business description? I don't see that in Google's guidelines. Can anyone clarify?
Image & Video Optimization | | HammerandHand0 -
Youtube vs Vimeo for better SEO
Hi i am starting to make some videos for my company like a tutorials for our products and i have some questions! What low budget service to choose for video hosting to have the best results for seo? I start with youtube because is google friendly but the ads are very big problem for me! Then i had start to thing about Vimeo but I am worried if my videos gone lost from search results! What you thing about it?
Image & Video Optimization | | petrospan0 -
Local SEO: How to optimize for multiple cities on website
Hi, I couldn't find any reference to this, so if the answer is already here, I would appreciate a link to the answer. That said, my question is this: When a local business services a large geographic area, I wanted to know how to optimize for the multiple towns? I already have the main city in my title tags, but there are at least 40 areas that surround this town. Should I have a "Services Area" page, and place all the towns there, or should they all be in the footer? I saw this one guy - in the same niche who put all the towns in his meta keyword section - but I think that's incorrect, especially since Google doesn't look at that particular meta tag. Any help would be appreciated.
Image & Video Optimization | | jayestovall1 -
Youtube Channel, Video SEO
I am providing some SEO consulting for a friend's company. They are an Investment Research and Portfolio Management firm. They started a blog about a year ago with most of their posts being short Youtube videos between 3 to 10 minutes in length, providing their take on what is going on in with the markets at the moment. Additionally, they've created a youtube channel which has a little over 1,500 subscribers. The videos do fairly decent getting between 1,500 to 20,000 views (the later happens when a big financial blog links to them) but they are not taking full advantage of this great content in my opinion i.e hosting videos with a 3rd party like Wistia. I think they should begin using Wistia or Vimeo Pro to maximize the SEO benefits as well as gather analytics about views. Then after they've milked them all they can put them on their youtube channel and target them for different keywords. My question is, should they go back and switch out the videos on the old posts with videos hosted by a 3rd party, submit sitemaps, etc. or should they just leave them the way they are and only host new videos with a 3rd party? I think they should switch out the old youtube videos but am not sure if this could cause any negative repercussions.
Image & Video Optimization | | TVI0 -
Page Extension for SEO Post Penguin
I am setting up pages for an SEO campaign. This campaign will focus suburb/area focused keywords to the home page and an inner page talking about the local area. My keyword I am targeting is "flower delivery brisbane" The keywords pointing back to both pages will be made up of brand and variances of the keywords so that is ok What I would like to know, am I know over optimizing the inner page extension "flowers delivery brisbane" as it is an exact match of the main keyword to rank since google penguin. I did this prior to google penguin and it worked well. the site address is
Image & Video Optimization | | VivaArturo
simpleflowers.com.au inner page is:
simpleflowers.com.au/flowers-delivery-brisbane Would love to hear your thoughts0 -
How far away does your Google Local Listing Show up - and how to improve.
How does google decide if a listing from one city shows up in another? When I do a search for a lawyer in my city my competition from another town shows up - but I don't show up when I search their town. Only 3 listings show up for both searches - so it's not necessarily a rank thing. Any ideas on improving the distance your listings show up for? Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | musillawfirm0