Local Map Pack: What's the best way to handle twin cities?
-
Google is increasing cracking down on bad local results. However, in many regions of the US there are twin cities or cities that reside next to each other, like Minneapolis-Saint Paul or Kansas City. According to Google guidelines your business should only be listed in the city in which your business is physically located.
However, we've noticed that results just outside of the local map pack will still rank, especially for businesses that service the home. For example, let's say you have a ACME Plumbing in Saint Paul, MN. If you were to perform a search for "Plumbing Minneapolis" you typically see local Minneapolis plumbers, then Saint Paul outliers. Usually the outliers are in the next city or just outside of the Google map centroid.
Are there any successful strategies to increase rank on these "Saint Paul outliers" that compete with local Minneapolis results or are the results always going lag behind in lieu of perceived accuracy? We're having to compete against some local competitors that are using some very blackhat techniques to rank multiple sites locally (in the map results). They rank multiple sites for the same company, under different company names and UPS store addresses. Its pretty obvious, especially when you see a UPS store on the street view of the address!
We're not looking to bend the rules, but rather compete safely. Can anything be done in this service based scenario?
-
Hi,
Two key factors are location and competition. If you are already ranking for your primary area, great. If you are ranking for other locations as an outlier, even better. Now to get the outliers to rank higher is tricky. Because of location and competition. If there are many other businesses in the area where you are an outlier, location is a much stronger metric then many others in this case. If competition was low your chances could be better.
Here are some ideas:
-
Go crazy and get all the local citations directories and creative means like citations in your relevent youtube videos and other assets. Basically create a stellar citation profile. See if this helps if not so much or not at all, that means location and competition are in the way here and are giving precedence to other businesses.
-
If you are showing up on local results as an outlier, if you are showing up that means eye balls are looking, yes you may be lower than other businesses, but if you can get significantly more higher end reviews. This could set you apart and give you that conversion despite an outlier position.
-
Try ranking for organic results for the city + industry you are going for, it might not be too competitive and this might be a better position than as an outlier
-
Increase social signals to your website, and Google local page.
Hope this helps!
-
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
-
Will including a global-site link in all 100 local-sites footer be considered spammy?
If I am a car manufacturer brand site(global), and I request all my location-specific domains include a link to the global site in their footers, would this trigger a red flag for Google? There are roughly 100 location-specific sites, but I would like to come up with a long term solution, so this number could be larger in the future. Is it best practice to only follow the footer link on each location-specific site Homepage, and nofollow the rest of the footer links on each site? Is it best to only include one followed link to the manufacturer brand site (global) on each location-specific domain? Is it best to not put this global link in the footer, but rather towards the top of the page only on the homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Why don't I outrank this site?
Hi Mozzers, I'm mystified. Why doesn't our site www.bosphorusyacht.com (ranked 15) outrank this site www.bosphorustour.com (ranked 5 and 6) for the keyword "bosphorus cruise"? Particularly for US based searches. We have far more links, shares, higher DA and PA and more related unique content on topic. Somehow they are even appearing with double listings in this search. Why is this? Am I missing something? Any ideas or suggestions appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | emerald0 -
What are effective ways of finding people to link to my blog post?
So I spent ages creating amazing content and have loads of interest in it from my social media and people visiting my site are reading deep into it. I have so far not been able to get anyone to link to it. What am I doing wrong???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
Why website isn't showing on results?
Hello Moz! Just got a quick question - we have a clientcalled and for some reason they just aren't showing up in the search results. It's not a new domain and hasn't been penalised (or has reason for penalty). All the content is fresh and has no bad back links to the site. It is a new website and has been indexed by Google but for even for branded search terms, it just doesn't show up anywhere on page 1 (i think page 4). Any help or advise is great appreciated is it's doing my head in. We are using www.google.com.au. Kindest Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kymodo0 -
Blog commenting - dos and don'ts
Dear Community, I'm getting into blog commenting heavily now for the relationships I'm building with other bloggers. I think the relationships I will build with these other influencers will be helpful. But I'm concerned that Google may penalize my site if I have a lot of links coming from blog commenting. If I sense that a blog is spammy, obviously I stay away. I've also noticed that a number of CommentLuv sites include a link to my latest blog post, and that has helped me greatly in promoting my posts and building readership. I am also interested in the follow links I get from it, but concerned in that regard that (1) Google won't count those follow links (won't pass page rank) and (2) Google will penalize me for some reason or in some way. What does everyone think about this approach of blog commenting, and in particular, including posting some comments on CommentLuv blogs. Thanks! Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
SEO best practice: Use tags for SEO purpose? To add or not to add to Sitemap?
Hi Moz community, New to the Moz community and hopefully first post/comment of many to come. I am somewhat new to the industry and have a question that I would like to ask and get your opinions on. It is most likely something that is a very simple answer, but here goes: I have a website that is for a local moving company (so small amounts of traffic and very few pages) that was built on Wordpress... I was told when I first started that I should create tags for some of the cities serviced in the area. I did so and tagged the first blog post to each tag. Turned out to be about 12-15 tags, which in turn created 12-15 additional pages. These tags are listed in the footer area of each page. There are less than 20 pages in the website excluding the tags. Now, I know that each of these pages are showing as duplicate content. To me, this just does not seem like best practices to me. For someone quite new to the industry, what would you suggest I do in order to best deal with this situation. Should I even keep the tags? Should I keep and not index? Should I add/remove from site map? Thanks in advance for any help and I look forward to being a long time member of SEOMoz.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BWrightTLM0 -
Best way to handle SEO error, linking from one site to another same IP
We committed an SEO sin and created a site with links back to our primary website. Although it does not matter, the site was not created for that purpose, it is actually "directory" with categorized links to thousands of culinary sites, and ours are some of the links. This occurred back in May 2010. Starting April 2011 we started seeing a large drop in page views. It dropped again in October 2011. At this point our traffic is down over 40% Although we don't know for sure if this has anything to do with it, we know it is best to remove the links. The question is, given its a bad practice what is the best fix? Should we redirect the 2nd domain to the main or just take it down? The 2nd domain does not have much page rank and I really don't think many if any back-links to it. Will it hurt us more to lose the 1600 or so back links? I would think keeping the links is a bad idea. Thanks for your advice!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | foodsleuth0 -
Anchor text penalty doesn't work?!
How do you think, does the anchortext penalty exactly work? Keyword domains obviously can't over-optimize for their main keyword (for example notebook.com for the keyword notebook). And a lot of non-keyword-domains do optimize especially in the beginning for their main keyword to get a good ranking in google (and it always works). Is there any particular point (number of links) I can reach, optimizing for one keyword, after what i'm gonna get a penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheLastSeo0