Keywords local and national
-
Hello everyone. I asked a similar question but still find myself a bit confused. I am a magician who is trying to improve my web presence. I found a list of keywords which I will list below. The results read from left to right the search results in the United States, and in Ohio ( where I am from). I found these results using google planner.
Magician 14800 390
Magicians 5400 170
Corporate Magician 170 10
Comedy Magician 140 10
Here is my question. Lets use the word Magician as an example. I see that there are 390 results in Ohio for the search term Magician. Would I want to key the phrase "magician" or "Ohio Magician". How does google work with this? If I key just the word "magician" and someone in Ohio google searches for Ohio Magicians or something similar, will it detect their location and put me on there radar? When I key in " Ohio Magician" in the planner the results that come back are 0 or less than 10.
I'm curious if google works on location and if I'm wasting my time keying in all of these cities that are showing no results. I began targeting "Cleveland Magician" "Columbus Magician" etc. Should I just stick with the main term Magician?
-
Good luck! So glad to be of help!
-
Awesome, thank you. I'm considering targeting the main keyword on a national level and then zeroing in on the each individual city. I am a national act and if I am able to rank for Corporate entertainment on a national level and local, awesome. Thank you so much for the help. I appreciate it.
-
Hi Jason,
Thank you for the additional details. To be honest, I have little or no faith in keyword tools for local research these days, so I wouldn't necessarily believe that no one in Pittsburgh is searching for a magician. It just isn't logical.
That being said, yes, you must create pages optimized for Cleveland to have a hope of appearing organically for relevant searches. You do have a chance, definitely! Create great content for your target cities and you do have a chance to gain organic visibility for these terms, though it will likely never outrank competitors physically located in these cities. You are understanding this correctly.
-
Miriam,
Thank you for your response. That is very helpful. Here is my current situation
I have established a local search marketing campaign. I'm located in Akron Ohio. I began by listing myself, which puts me right at the top of the list. I then wrote solid content for terms such as Magician, Magic Show, Kids entertainer, Corporate etc including the term Akron.
I guess my real question is in regards to other cities in my area. As I mentioned, when I search for the term Magicians ( generic no city after) I find results of 5,400 with a low competition rate. This is great. I'm interested in demoniating the market in Columbus, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. When I place the term "Cleveland Magician" Or "PIttsburgh Magician" into the keyword planner I'm receiving a return of 0 searches. BUT, if I change the targeting area to Cleveland and search just for the term " Magician" I'm getting a return of 10.
The question being this, do I still need to include the term Cleveland magician in a target pages which is trying to get me ranking in the Cleveland area? Even though the results for Cleveland magician comes back 0 and magician comes back 10, how should Id approach this? If someone in Cleveland search just for the term "Magician" would google recognize my targeted page of " Cleveland Magician", highlight the term "magician" and point them towards me? I know the local magicians in Cleveland will rank better because they are local, but if I give good content, I have a chance. Right?
-
Hi Jason,
Are you carrying out a Local Search Marketing campaign for the business? I'm assuming you travel to your clients to perform for them, right? And you do so within a certain geographic radius, I'm guessing. If this is the case, a campaign for you would typically look something like:
-
You'd need to have a street address (even your home address) that you'd be using to create your Google+ Local listing and then following the options within the dashboard to ensure that the address is hidden to comply with Google's rule about SABs (service area businesses) hiding their addresses. If you're physically located in Colombus, then your Google+ Local page would display that you are based in Columbus, OH, without actually showing your street address. Google would then consider as you a most relevant LOCAL result for queries like 'magician columbus' or searches for magicians stemming from Columbus-based devices.
-
You would also need to have a dedicated local area code phone number.
-
In addition to building your Google+ Local page for your city of location, you would be creating listings (called citations) for your business in a number of other local directories.
-
The main thrust of your website optimization would center on your service terms (magician, comedy magician, corporate magician etc.) + your city of location. So, in other words, if you're physically located in Columbus, you'd be optimizing the core pages on your website for 'Columbus Magician', 'Corporate Magician in Columbus', etc. I would consider this a much more typical way to handle the SEO for a local business than optimizing just for the state of Ohio would be. The point of all of the above is to earn high local rankings for the business where it has a physical address.
-
In addition to optimizing your core website pages for your city of location, you would likely be building out additional content on the website to showcase the additional cities to which you will travel to serve. So, if you serve in 10 cities within Ohio, then that would be 10 pages of unique, terrific content, optimized for your services in that specific city. A common way to approach this is to showcase your work in those cities, which should be easy for a magician to do. Just remember, the content must be unique on each page. The point of this work is to go after high organic rankings for cities in which you lack a physical location. You're unlikely to achieve local pack rankings for any city in which you're not physically located, but you can pursue organic rankings via a combination of content development, social buzz and link earning.
-
Google will personalize users' results based on their physical location whether or not they add a geo-modifier. If I search for 'pizza', Google shows me a local pack of pizza places in my city. But, this behavior is typically on a city basis - not a state basis, so that's an important distinction. On mobile devices, this type of city-based geo-personalization is even more pronounced, to the point that you'll get different results when you're at one end of town than you will at the other end of town for many queries.
So, basically, I think Local SEO is the area you need to be investigating and learning about. All Moz Members have free access to our new Moz Local Learning Center (http://moz.com/learn/local) and we have lots of great Local SEO blog posts on the Moz blog.
I hope this helps with your question.
-
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
-
I can see competitors ranking for certain long-tail keywords but cannot find them on web pages. What am I missing?
Hi there. I'm pretty new to SEO and I've been doing a fair bit of training but there is one aspect I have yet to grasp. When I carry out keyword research, I get all these results and I understand the metrics. What I'm not getting is, when a competitor is ranking highly for say "where can I buy fresh turkeys", I assume that that phrase must appear somewhere on the page, but it doesn't. I realise I'm just not thinking about this in the right way. Can anyone offer clarification, please? Kind regards, Bruce
Competitive Research | | BruceBarbour0 -
Ranking for Competitive Keywords vs. Less Competitive Keyword Variations
I'm curious about situations where a website ranks very well for query variations, but doesn't rank for the query itself (or the reverse of that). For Redfin (where I work), here is the situation with regard to keyword rankings on Google (searched today from USA, incognito)... real estate search - #4 real estate online - #4 real estate site - #5 find real estate - #9 get real estate - #16 real estate - #163 It stands to reason that a site ranking well for a competitive query should also rank well for less competitive query variations - especially query variations that are non-limiting and do not demand a custom landing page (for example, I would consider 'board games' to dramatically limit the query 'games' and be best targeted with a targeted page...not so with 'real estate site' and 'real estate'). So, my question is, what are some theories regarding situations like this? Why do some sites rank so well for competitive queries but not for non-limiting query variations? Why aren't the sites that are crushing us for 'real estate' also crushing us for 'real estate' variations (to be clear...the top sites are crushing us for both)? Is it anchor text? Is it social signals? Is it offline signals, co-occurrence, or citations? What about internal linking and site structure? I realize it's likely a mix of all this, but I'm hoping we can drum up some new ideas here. FYI, on Bing we also rank very well for 'real estate' variations, but leap up to 31st for 'real estate'. Thoughts?
Competitive Research | | RyanOD0 -
Ranking for long tailed keyword vs shorter keyword phrase?
I have a webpage http://freightmonster.com/free-freight-quote that currently ranks 19th in the Google SERP's for the keyword free freight quote. The keyword gets 59 exact match searches a month. Competition is high for this keyword. The keyword freight quote gets 8625 exact match searches a month and my home page http://freightmonster.com/ ranks 26th in the Google SERP for it. Competition is high for this keyword. Would I be better off creating another page http://freightmonster.com/freight-quote and doing a better job of on SEO optimization for it in the hopes of getting on page one, or given the fact that freight quote is such a highly competitive term should I just go after other long tailed keywords in my market like flatbed trucking freight quote, heavy haul trucking freight quote, RGN freight quote, etc? We have just started on SEO for organic keywords after spending over $500,000 on PPC in the last 5 years, which in our market niche is the norm. Thank you in advance!
Competitive Research | | FreightBoy0 -
Local/Geo-Targeted SEO Keywords
Hey everyone, I work for a local jeweler who only has one store and wants to rank for geo-targeted and local results. We want to rank for "jewelry Minneapolis", "Minnesota engagement rings" and terms like that, since we're not an e-tailer we don't need to rank nationally... just in the MSP metro. I've been trying to find a service that has accurate search volume information for local search. I want to see how many searches are being conducted for various terms so I know where to focus our time and effort to rank for these terms. Does such a service exist? Or something that is more geared toward a strictly local strategy such as ours? Thanks in advance for all of your assistance! Jayme
Competitive Research | | jpretz0 -
How a site only with Frame can be at #1 google in a competitive keyword?
Guys, I need help. I have a company in Brasil and due to lack of budget, I'm doing the SEO for my self. And for two years Im reading everything that I can to do my best in my website. I worked very hard, but the #1 in the most important keyword for my company is a very bad website only with frames. What they are doing? Could anyone give help? Keyword: "acampamento"
Competitive Research | | Naghirniac
Google Brazil (www.google.com.br)
#1 website: www.acampar.net My website: www.acampamentoaguiasdaserra.com.br Thank you in advance Miguel0 -
Local search
hi, Local search case i try to evaluate local competition on a local query such as "hairdresser + the city name" in Google for a merchant without website neither a google adresse listing. Top results : 7 google adresses pack : ok Organic results : SERP display only directories ! The first 10 pages are reviews platforms & local directories (qype, yelp, yellowpages etc..) except only 1 or 2 urls with personalized domains name. 1/ Would it be easy with to make a website + with a brand new domain name (myhaidresseShop.com) to dominate these serp (organics) quickly (first 2 months) ? 2/ Would it be better to first launch a targeted submission campaign (popularity) on those local directories with personalized data (first month) , and later on, to build a website ? 3/ Or ideally, from start, to make both a local campaign (Google adresse + submission) and launch a new website ? Tks in advance...
Competitive Research | | mlc0 -
Best methodology for creating local keywords when Google has no data?
Generally I'll look at data for specific geographical searches and incorporate the data from the other keywords, then track the metrics. I think there is likely a more efficient system but I'm not sure where to start.
Competitive Research | | DoriC0 -
How to compare my pages with a Keyword Difficulty Report
I'm very new to SEO, but know just enough to be dangerous. I've run my first full KWD report and formatted the results per Jordan Judson's blog post. Now I'd like to compare how related pages on my site compare to these results. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to accomplish this task. Any guidance would be very much appreciated. Thanks, Steve
Competitive Research | | SteveMaguire0