Significant organic traffic increase from outside of my service area
-
I run a local service based business. About 6 months ago, I updated my homepage title tag to incorporate the phrase "near me" (I performed other optimizations as well). Over the last few months, I've noticed increased traffic, calls and online bookings from different areas around the country. I was perplexed, I thought I may have mis-targeted my ppc campaign.
After some digging, I found out that my home page ranks #2 in the organic listings for a couple core service keywords with the "near me" phrase added. Of course, my bounce rate, from these visitors outside of my local area, is pretty high (65%). Also, the majority of these visitors are using mobile devices.
I see an opportunity here to possibly provide relevant information to the searchers, based on their geographic area. The problem is that, I can't risk modifying my website for the sake of this "out of area" traffic.
If I were to provide a page to a visitor based on their ip, could that be considered a black hat tactic? I don't want to do anything that will compromise my core business.
Any advice will be welcomed.
-
From a not local perspective, redirecting based on IP is generally not the best idea. Early on at Distilled in Seattle, our I{ address was in Washington DC! IP Addresses are not reliable in the United States.
There is that problem, plus the fact that Google only crawls from California. Therefore, depending on how the redirect was set up, they might just see the San Jose area content.
Therefore, I am glad you decided against the redirect. I think your idea of letting people define where they are and find a new provider is perfect. The people in your area get the right content and others that happen on that page get to find a preferred vendor.
-
Hi Jim,
Yes, I think this is a serious consideration. But let's see what additional feedback you get.
-
I didn't think about the confusion from the customer or Google side, in terms of creating pages that focused on locations other than my own.
Thanks for passing this question on to your staff.
-
Hi Jim,
Well, from a Local SEO perspective, I wouldn't advise putting content on a local business website that reflects anything other than your own city or location and service area, due to confusion this could cause on the part of your customers and Google, but lead gen is not an area of expertise for me. I'm going to ask our staff for additional input on your question. It's a good one, for sure!
-
Yes Miriam. I was referring to lead generation. Being that I can't fulfill these service requests (as I'm not physically located in these areas). I am in the process of building a service provider network, which will allow me to continue to market these services, while the service providers do the fulfillment.
So, going back to the original question, I was thinking about options that would allow me to serve the localized page of their respective service provider when the customer seeks services. I figured an immediate redirect could have been construed as a door way page. So, now I will customize my home page to add a section that allows them to search for service availability in their area, which will then take them to that local page.
This is my thinking now.
-
Hi Jim,
Thank you for the excellent further details. I'm trying to envision your situation. You are an auto-related services company located in South Florida, and presumably, serving customers in that area. However, you mention:
"I had an opportunity to find a mutually beneficial way to provide these services."
Would this be along the lines of lead generation to businesses in other states that provide the same service you do but that are not part of your own company? Or, something totally different?
-
Rishi & Miriam thanks for the feedback.
Sorry about the vagueness of the question. I was pressed for time when I wrote this initially. To give you a better idea of what my situation is, our business is located in South Florida. We provide automotive related services. Our industry is pretty competitive, but the players in this industry don't really have a strong grasp on the varied aspects of digital marketing, outside of the customary G Plus Local pages.
We've been in business for quite some time and we have done all the on-site optimizations, citation building, locally focused pages, content creation, etc. About 6 months ago, I noticed we were getting more mobile traffic coming to our site and there was an increasing number of keywords that contained "best" and "near me". So, I decided to add our particular service keywords along with "best" and "near me" to our title tag. Up to this point, 70% of our traffic was coming in via paid search & desktop traffic accounted for over 70% of traffic as well.
Over the last few months, I began to notice that we were receiving calls and online bookings from NJ, Ca, Tx, Philly and a few other places. I thought that I may have made a targeting mistake on my ppc campaign. After further investigation, I saw that all of this traffic was organic. At this point, 70ish% of our traffic was coming from organic and mobile accounted for over 70% as well. About a third of this traffic was coming from outside of our geographic service area.
When I realized this, I took to the serps and saw that no matter what location I searched from in the continental U.S. our website showed up in the number 2 organic spot for 2 of our core keywords with "near me" associated with it.
I believe this is because, our company has some "brand equity" and although this industry is competitive, it isn't from a digital marketing perspective. So, there is a great opportunity to get out ahead of these guys in these other regions.
So, long story made even longer, I realized that if I had potential customers seeking our services from areas where we weren't physically located - I had an opportunity to find a mutually beneficial way to provide these services. I was just thinking about the best way to go about it.
One thought was to redirect traffic that came to my site to a locally focused page, but I didn't want G to think I was setting up my homepage as a doorway. I also mulled the idea of a zip code overlay that would prompt the visitor to enter their info and would send them to a page focused on providing services in their local area.
But, overall (and the reason for the initial question) I wanted to know if redirecting a visitor based on their location would be cause me problems in the future. But, since the initial post, I've abandoned that idea for something more efficient.
-
Hi Jim,
You've done a good job phrasing the details of your question, but this is one of those situations in which it may actually not be possible to advise you well without assessing your unique website/industry/geography/scenario. Businesses that operate in a non-competitive niche or geography often do rank for other cities beyond their city of location, simply because Google doesn't have much data to go on. For example, if you're the only tow truck company servicing a 50 mile radius in rural Kansas, you might very well show up for a variety of mobile and desktop searches for users who aren't located in your city or who are adding these other city names to your query. If, however, you are an attorney in Los Angeles, you are in a completely different situation and the fight for any kind of ranking is a tough one.
Are you familiar with the concept of developing high quality local landing pages for the various cities in which you serve? This is a common, effective strategy for service area businesses of all kinds. You can delve into this topic here:
http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
The development of unique local landing pages for each service city is going to be a more common strategical move than simply altering the title tag of your home page to reflect a bunch of other cities. Not sure if your rankings can be explained by having added 'near me' to a single title tag, but again, it would be easy to give inaccurate advice to you without actually auditing the website and its competition. This might be one of those situations in which you'd be best off hiring a pro and using a non-disclosure agreement if you're concerned about privacy. Alternatively, you can share your website address and further details here to get more on-target feedback from the community.
-
If you switch the page then there is a slight risk, although you are doing it for the right reason. One of the better and safer ways of doing this is to serve an image or a small block of text that directs users to the better matched section, and only geo serving that content on the page, not the whole page.
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
-
Do You Think the Distance Algorithm Has Less Weight for Local Service Related Businesses?
Hey guys, I wish Rand could answer this question, because I know he figured all of this out, or has at least thought about it at least once. Basically, I want to understand exactly how the local algorithms work. Do you think the Distance algorithm works differently for service related businesses that don't offer services directly to your car, or other moveable assets? (motorcycles, lawnmowers, small engines) For example, construction companies. We all know how boring their offices are. No one wants to go to one unless there has been a problem or to pay a bill, say at Trugreen or something. They don't sell products, and who wants to go to some construction company that will likely just be a receptionist and maybe a field manager on his lunch break with some field reps rotating in and out during the day getting new leads and entering sales? That's uncomfortable. Why not just call them? So, do you think Google's local algorithms know that and put less weight on businesses that fall into that category? Car shops, small engine repair, and say shoe repair shops are different because you have to bring them something to fix. Stores that sell products are different because you have to go shopping and pay them to take the products home. But remodeling companies, marketing agencies, etc. probably don't get a lot of foot traffic. (And it's because we know we can handle it on a phone call.)
Local SEO | | everysecond0 -
National services provider and localized SEO (no physical stores)
Doing work for a telecom provider who operates in over 25 states. They are not trying to drive traffic to their brick-and-mortar stores. They want their marketing website to show products/services/pricing dynamically when a user enters their zip code. Previously, we could not show this until the shopper was already in the purchase flow that began with their serviceable address. They want to move these location-based details more forward in the shopping experience. They would likely have a "default" zip and set of services/pricing displaying until a user changes their location. My question is how does Google treat local SEO on a site where all location-targeted content is dynamic? Will the website suffer in localized search, when a shopper, say, in Colorado, wants to search for Internet providers? Is it better to have distinct landing pages for each territory with services/pricing?
Local SEO | | sprydigital0 -
Company with multiple services | multiple locations/states
I have a company that rents, repairs, and sells product both new and used. They also have 3 locations in 3 states and service multiple cities out of the locations (ie... los angeles and orange county). Having a hard time redesigning the website so that it fits for customers to look around and for the best of Organic SEO. The issue seems to be fitting the locations in the mix in order to get the customer to the right area without being too confusing. In the end, I'm thinking well maybe the homepage should just be some content to get them to choose the location first then they can go into silos where they pretty much remain in the location for rentals, repairs, and sales but I'm not sure how having the locations on the home page would affect the site. Obviously, we would be trying to rank the silo locations more but they would be 2-3 pages in on clicks to get to the right section 'if' they started from the home page. We need to do this right from the beginning though because we are working on expanding nationwide one day. Thanks for any help on this manner. (PS> Thought about doing subdomains like locations.example.com or state.example.com and rentals.example.some and shop.example.com but I think that will dilute the rankings)
Local SEO | | Ryan_Marshall1 -
We're merging 2 separate websites into 1 but need to ideally rank service pages for both locations
I have a dilemma, we're merging 2 websites, one an Australian branch and one a UK one. We've decided to have a UK page and a AUS page so agency.site/uk/ agency.site/aus/ but what is the best tactic for the service pages? ideally, we'd like a web-design service page to rank in Australia and the UK but not sure if this is actually possible, or whether to duplicate the pages and localise them i.e. /web-design-leeds/ and /web-design-melbourne/ What's everyone's thoughts on this? localised landing pages with some duplicate content or one master page with both locations mentioned? Thanks!
Local SEO | | Unbranded_Lee1 -
Find high DA link opportunities in your local area
Hi, part of my link building strategy is ideally going to be from outreach to local businesses. I run a local service business operating in multiple locations (with no physical base). I have created local landing pages on which I'm showcasing local businesses and photographers (relevant not in terms of industry but location). Its my intention to show off their business as best I can, then get in touch to say "hey, we love what you're doing with X product/service, check out our site here [link]. We'd love it if you could link to us etc etc". Assuming that this is a valid strategy, what is the best way to find locally relevant sites with the highest domain authority?
Local SEO | | Cleanily0 -
Does blocking traffic from a country via a firewall affect my ranking?
The main conversion point on my site is a contact form completion. Approximately a third of my conversions last year were from an international country we don't sell our services in, and all those conversions were attempts to sell us services. We are considering blocking the traffic to the site from that country. I'm trying to figure out if that will negatively affect my SEO rank here in the US before we proceed with that plan. Does anyone have any experience with implementing this tactic?
Local SEO | | Bear.Group0 -
How to Best Optimize for Multiple Cities and Services Areas?
A business with offices in 3 major cities and loads of service areas hired us to build its website. Here's my internal debate regarding local SEO: Do I build one site with a thorough sitemap that utilizes one page per city and/or region for local SEO? Do I build a primary site with a limited sitemap and a subsite for each city (e.g. companyname.com/city) that essentially replicates the sitemap from the primary site? If I go this route, the content on each page of each subsite would be unique (not copied and localized versions of the content on the primary site), but what about the keywords? For example, should each subsite use the same keywords as the primary site (e.g. companyname.com/keyword-or-phrase and companyname.com/city-name/keyword-or-phrase OR companyname.com/keyword-or-phrase and companyname.com/city-name/variation-of-keyword-or-phrase). In the end, I suppose the question is, "Should I build one site with a more thorough sitemap and single pages for each city and/or region OR should I build a site for each city with less thorough sitemaps?" Budget constraints won't allow for option C, which is build a site for each city with a thorough sitemap for each. Thank you guys in advance for whatever insight you're willing to give!
Local SEO | | cbizzle0 -
Backlinking for small service oriented websites
I am a newby to the SEO world. We are a graphic/web design/development company that has been pulled into the SEO world. We work for a lot of clients that are sensing the need for websites but they don't have the capital to invest in a large website. So after building simple sites for them they come to us wanting to be ranked better in the SERPS. I can go through and do the basics of meta tag info but with small sites, there isn't a lot you can do. I feel I need to learn to do backlinking but am completely lost. When I read about backlinks a lot of people talk about blogging websites, not service industry websites. Does anyone have tips to learn backlinking for small service companies that want to target their local area? loggers, woodworking shops, landscape companies, cabinet shops, home cleaners, bulk food stores, etc. I'm interested in maybe blogposts, or tutorials to read/watch, or software to help me out, etc. Thanks in advance for your help!
Local SEO | | Olvtr0