Targeting local areas without creating landing pages for each town
-
I have a large ecommerce website which is structured very much for SEO as it existed a few years ago. With a landing page for every product/town nationwide (its a lot of pages).
Then along came Panda...
I began shrinking the site in Feb last year in an effort to tackle duplicate content. We had initially used a template only changing product/town name.
My first change was to reduce the amount of pages in half by merging the top two categories, as they are semantically similar enough to not need their own pages. This worked a treat, traffic didn't drop at all and the remaining pages are bringing in the desired search terms for both these products.
Next I have rewritten the content for every product to ensure they are now as individual as possible.
However with 46 products and each of those generating a product/area page we still have a heap of duplicate content. Now i want to reduce the town pages, I have already started writing content for my most important areas, again, to make these pages as individual as possible.
The problem i have is that nobody can write enough unique content to target every town in the UK via an individual page (times by 46 products), so i want to reduce these too.
QUESTION: If I have a single page for "croydon", will mentioning other local surrounding areas on this page, such as Mitcham, be enough to rank this page for both towns?
I have approx 25 Google local place/map listings and grwoing, and am working from these areas outwards. I want to bring the site right down to about 150 main area pages to tackle all the duplicate content, but obviously don't want to lose my traffic for so many areas at once.
Any examples of big sites that have reduced in size since Panda would be great.
I have a headache... Thanks community.
-
My pleasure, Silkstream. I can understand how what you are doing feels risky, but in fact, you are likely preventing fallout from worse risks in the future. SEO is a process, always evolving, and helping your client change with the times is a good thing to do! Good luck with the work.
-
Thank you Miriam. I appreciate you sharing with me the broad idea of the type of structure that you feel a site should have in this instance (if starting from scratch).
You have pretty much echoed my proposal for a new site structure, built for how Google works nowadays, rather than 2-3 years ago. We are currently reducing the size of the current site, to bring it as close to this type of model as possible. However the site would need a complete redesign to make it viably possible to have this type of structure.
I guess what I've been looking for is some kind of reassurance that we are moving in the right direction! Its a scary prospect reducing such a huge amount of pages down to a compact targeted set. With prospects of losing so much long tail traffic, it can make us a little hesitant.
However the on-site changes we have made so far, seem to be having a positive affect.And thank you for giving me some ideas about content creation for each town. I really like this as an idea to move forward after the changes are complete, which will hopefully be by the new year!
-
Hi Silkstream,
Thank you so much for clarifying this! I understand now.
If I were starting with a client like this, from scratch, this would be the approach I would take:
-
View content development as two types of pages. One set would be the landing pages for each physical location, optimized for each city, with unique content. The other set would be service pages, optimized for the services, but not for a particular city.
-
Create a Google+ Local page for each of the physical locations, linked to its respective landing page on the website. So, let's say you now have 25 city pages and 46 service pages. That's a fairly tall order, but certainly do-able.
-
Build structured citations for each location on third party local business directories. Given the number of locations, this would be an enormous jobs.
-
Build an onsite blog and designate company bloggers, ideally one in each physical office. The job of these bloggers would be something like each of them creating one blog post per month about a project that was accomplished in their city. In this way, the company could begin developing content under their own steam that would meet the need of showcasing a given service with a given city. Over time, this body of content would grow the pool of queries for which they have answers for.
-
Create a social outreach strategy, likely designating brand representatives within the company who could be active on various platforms.
-
Likely need to develop a link earning strategy tied in with steps 4 and 5.
-
Consider video marketing. A good video or two for each physical location could work wonders.
I'm painting in broad strokes here, but this is likely what the overall strategy would look like. You've come into the scenario midway and don't have the luxury of starting from scratch. You are absolutely right to be cleaning up duplicate content and taking other measures to reduce the spaminess and improve the usefulness of the site. Once you've got your cleanup complete, I think the steps I've outlined would be the direction to go in. Hope this helps.
-
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for jumping in.
The business model is service-based. So when i refer to "46 products" they are actually 46 different types of service available.
The customer will typically book and pay online, through the website, and they are then served at their location which is most often either their home or place of work. They actually have far more than the 25 actual locations, much closer to 120 I believe. However, I only began their SEO in February, AFTER they were hit by Panda. So building up their local listings is taking time, as the duplicate content issue seems far more urgent. Trying to strike a balance, and fix this all slowly over time to lay a solid foundation for inbound marketing, as its being diluted by the poor site structure.
Does this help? Am I doing the right things here?
-
Hi Silkstream,
I think we need to clarify what your business model is. You say you have a physical location in each of your 25 towns. So far, so good, but are you saying that your business has in-person transactions with its customers at each of the 25 locations? The confusion here is arising from the fact that e-commerce companies are typically virtual, meaning that they do not have in-person transactions with their customers. The Google Places Quality Guidelines state:
Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.
Thus, my wanting to be sure that your business model is actually eligible, given that you've described it as an e-commerce business, which would be ineligibl_e._ If you can clarify your business model, I think it will help you to receive the most helpful answers from the community.
-
You scared me then Chris!
-
Of course, if you've got the physical locations, you're in good shape there.
-
"It sounds like you're saying that your one ecommerce company has 25 Google local business listings--and growing?! It's very possible that could come back and haunt you unless you in the form of merging or penalization."
Why? The business has a physical location in every town, so why should they not have a page for every location? This is what we were advised to do?
"If there was no other competition, you would almost certainly rank for your keywords along with the town name"
I have used this tactic before, for another nationwide business, but on a smaller scale and it worked. Ie; they ranked (middle of page 1) but for non competitive keywords and the page has strong backlinks. With this site, the competition is stronger and the pages will not have a strong backlink profile at first.
My biggest worry, is to cut all the existing pages and lose the 80% long tail the site currently pulls in. But what other way is there to tackle so much duplicate content?
-
It sounds like you're saying that your one ecommerce company has 25 Google local business listings--and growing?! It's very possible that could come back and haunt you unless you in the form of merging or penalization. If not that, it's likely to stop being worth the time as a visibility tactic.
As far as whether or not mentioning local surrounding towns in your page copy will be enough to get you to rank for them, it would depend on competition. If there was no other competition, you would almost certainly rank for your keywords along with the town name but with competition, all the local ranking factors start coming into play and your ability to rank for each one will depend on a combination of all of them.
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
-
Local Sitelinks
Does anyone know how organic local site links work? The examples I'm looking at are from Yelp and Angie'sList. When you run a brand search, some sitelinks reference my current location and takes me to a regional landing page. My company has landing pages for major cities across the U.S. but they never get picked up as a sitelink like this. I don't see local links anywhere on the AngiesList or Yelp homepages so I don't know how Google knows to prioritize these pages. We are also a national review site, so we have no interest in showing up in the local pack, etc. Any thoughts would be super helpful! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | healthgrades0 -
Page speed - what do you aim for?
Hi Mozzers - was just looking at website speed and know the google guidelines on average page load time but I'm not sure whether Google issues guidelines on any of the other 4? Do you know of any guidance on domain lookup, server response, server connection or page download? Page Load Time (sec) - I tend to aim for 2 seconds max: http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/your-website-design-should-load-in-4-seconds/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
Server Response Time: [Google recommends 200ms]: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/Server Redirection Time (sec) [dependent on number of redirects so probably no guide figure]
Domain Lookup Time (sec)
Server Connection Time (sec)
Page Download Time (sec) Thanks, Luke0 -
Google is indexing wrong page for search terms not on that page
I’m having a problem … the wrong page is indexing with Google, for search phrases “not on that page”. Explained … On a website I developed, I have four products. For example sake, we’ll say these four products are: Sneakers (search phrase: sneakers) Boots (search phrase: boots) Sandals (search phrase: sandals) High heels (search phrase: high heels) Error: What is going “wrong” is … When the search phrase “high heels” is indexed by Google, my “Sneakers” page is being indexed instead (and ranking very well, like #2). The page that SHOULD be indexing, is the “High heels” page (not the sneakers page – this is the wrong search phrase, and it’s not even on that product page – not in URL, not in H1 tags, not in title, not in page text – nowhere, except for in the top navigation link). Clue #1 … this same error is ALSO happening for my other search phrases, in exactly the same manner. i.e. … the search phrase “sandals” is ALSO resulting in my “Sneakers” page being indexed, by Google. Clue #2 … this error is NOT happening with Bing (the proper pages are correctly indexing with the proper search phrases, in Bing). Note 1: MOZ has given all my product pages an “A” ranking, for optimization. Note 2: This is a WordPress website. Note 3: I had recently migrated (3 months ago) most of this new website’s page content (but not the “Sneakers” page – this page is new) from an old, existing website (not mine), which had been indexing OK for these search phrases. Note 4: 301 redirects were used, for all of the OLD website pages, to the new website. I have tried everything I can think of to fix this, over a period of more than 30 days. Nothing has worked. I think the “clues” (it indexes properly in Bing) are useful, but I need help. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MG_Lomb_SEO0 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Many pages small unique content vs 1 page with big content
Dear all, I am redesigning some areas of our website, eurasmus.com and we do not have clear what is the best
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eurasmus.com
option to follow. In our site, we have a city area i.e: www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla which we are going
to redesign and a guide area where we explain about the city, etc...http://eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla/guide/
all with unique content. The thing is that at this point due to lack of resources, our guide is not really deep and we believe like this it does not
add extra value for users creating a page with 500 characters text for every area (transport...). It is not also really user friendly.
On the other hand, this pages, in long tail are getting some results though is not our keyword target (i.e. transport in sevilla)
our keyword target would be (erasmus sevilla). When redesigning the city, we have to choose between:
a)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> with all the content one one page about 2500 characters unique.
b)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> With better amount of content and a nice redesign but keeping
the guide pages. What would you choose? Let me know what you think. Thanks!0 -
I have 2 keywords I want to target, should I make one page for both keywords or two separate pages?
My team sells sailboats and pontoon boats all over the country. So while they are both boats, the target market is two different types of people... I want to make a landing page for each state so if someone types in "Pontoon Boats for sale in Michigan" or "Pontoon boats for sale in Tennessee," my website will come up. But I also want to come up if someone is searching for sailboats for sale in Michigan or Tennessee (or any other state for that matter). So my question is, should I make 1 page for each state that targets both pontoon boats and sailboats (total of 50 landing pages), or should I make two pages for each state, one targeting pontoon boats and the other sailboats (total of 100 landing pages). My team has seen success targeting each state individually for a single keyword, but have not had a situation like this come up yet.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanMaster0 -
Should I make multiple landing pages for different cities?
I am trying to market my company to North Carolina & West Virginia. This is a bit of a challenge since the name is "Decorative Concrete of Virginia." My idea was to create landing pages for the specific areas (Greensboro & Raleigh, NC for now).... A new landing page them that I purchased came with a plugin that would allow you to generate a ton of landing pages with little effort by replacing some elements of the landing page, depending on the URL... For example, I have these two URLs set up right now: http://www.decorativeconcreteofvirginia.com/northcarolina/test/raleigh/nc http://www.decorativeconcreteofvirginia.com/northcarolina/test/greensboro/nc My question is... Is merely changing the city in each landing page enough, or should I change some of the other content too? I was going to create one landing page for NC, and then try to include all of the cities on that one page... but perhaps it would be easier to rank if I had one for each city. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timvroom0 -
What to do if the wrong page is ranking?
What to do if the wrong page of your website is ranking and you cannot 301 it? Apparently an outsourced company the previous manager hired build anchor text links to the homepage, when those links should have been pointing to a deeper page. As a result, the hompage is now ranking for that term. But I think we can convert a lot more of the visitors if the deeper page is there instead. Obviously, I can't 301 the homepage. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrep0