Local SEO - Page Titles

[easigrassne]

Hi Folks,

Complete newbie (well last 12 months) I have recentley added a blog to my site and have been doing quite a bit of quite word researching through google. I have found some good keywords that have up till now escaped me!

Heres my question because I trying for local traffic, mainly newcastle durham and sunderlanddo i go with one of the following two options

1. get two very similar keywords in my article and go for both and rely on google to bring up local listings for the end user in my area

e.g   Small garden design | Garden design from the experts.    (keywords bold )

2. or Garden Design | Newcastle | Sunderland | Durham | so I have geo locations in title

either way I will obviously have both keywords and locations in the artcle

Help please I dont want to write many hours and find I have missed a trick!

Many thank guys n girls!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Easigrassne,

Coming up in Google's local pack of results is dependent upon you having a physical location in the city you're hoping to rank for. If you want to rank in the local results for three cities, you must have a physical location in each. You can then build a landing page on your website for each of your three physical locations and link your three Google+ Local pages to the respective landing pages on your website.

If you do not have physical locations in each of the three cities to which customers come to do business, then you must go after organic rankings via developing content surrounding these locations and your services there. If your business is an SAB (service area business) like a landscaping company, a blog is a great platform for publishing this type of content. For example, you could write a post about lawn installation in City A, perennial border landscaping in City B, and pond building in City C. You can continue to showcase your projects on an ongoing basis, devoting a new blog post to each completed project and developing a library of work that can begin ranking in Google's organic results.

[AngelDigital]

I would go for option 2 if you're targetting local search, i.e. include the three areas you're targetting. Check out Moz's Local Search Ranking Factors: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors (I think it'd look neater to write Newcastle, Sunderland & Durham than have the separators, personally)

The first option - having garden design twice in the page title - is a little spammy.

From a user perspective, you might want to  consider having two pages - one for small garden design and one for garden design (i.e. covering regular/larger spaces), if you can show different examples and different considerations for the different space available.  I can see that people search for 'small garden design' specifically, as well as just 'garden design' - and you could fit 'small' into the title with the place names (it'd still be under 60 characters) but if that's your only page, it might put off people who have a larger garden and are interested in your services.