Google Places Landing Page: Homepage or City-Specific?
-
What should you put in the “Website” field of your Google Places page: the URL of your homepage, or of one of your location pages?
-
Hi Alexander,
For multi-location businesses (that is to say, businesses with more than one, staffed physical office) it's generally considered a best practice to link to the location landing page on the website, rather than the homepage, because your Google+ Local page is then pointing users and bots right to a page that matches the NAP on the business listing. This practice may also lower the risk of merging happening, because Google's bots are easily able to see that everything matches on the designated page, rather than leaving them to scour around the website trying to pick the right location out of a handful of them.
You might enjoy reading:
http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
Hope this helps!
-
and its good to do for users...
-
It comes down to SEO or Users, the article points this out
"On the one hand, the homepage URL (AKA root domain) usually has the most page-authority – from any links the site has earned. Most of your links probably point there." - SEO
"On the other hand, a location-specific page by definition does a better job of “targeting” (I hate that word) the city you’re in. You’re talking about one city rather than several." - Users
Depends on what you want best, arguments for both really.
-
I found different opinion here - http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2014/05/13/your-google-places-landing-page-homepage-or-city-specific/
-
If you have a city specific page with all of the products and services available in the city I would put the City URL in place, however if the locations page doesn't have much relevant information on what's available at that location then Homepage may be preferable.
On any SEO, you have to see your site from the users point of view, because that's exactly how Google views you!
-
The one that's most relevant for that Google places. E.g if a user finds the your Google listing for a city they may want to visit the corresponding city page.
End of the day thought its preference, what would benefit the user the most ?
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
-
Non-optimised pages ranking higher than optimised homepage
I'm a developer working with a dating site and we're having what appear to be unusual ranking behaviour for the keyword "Ukraine Brides". When searching for "Ukraine Brides" we typically have the top 3 results in Google, however the homepage is almost never ranked #1. Other non-optimised pages appear ahead of it. I believe this is having a negative affect on our conversion rate, so wish to see this resolved. For instance, if you search here in NZ, the results are typically: Login page (/account/login) Search page (/search) Home page (/) Similar situation when searching in the US, but typically the top result is the search page. Is this unusual? We've spent quite a bit of time optimising the homepage, it has more external links, more internal links, better content that targets the keyword, more traffic, etc. Even so, the login and search pages appear higher. A side note, the average CTR for "Ukraine Brides" is significantly lower than "Ukraine Brides Agency" (20% vs 80% respectively), so I don't think that it's purely a 'brand keyword'. A few thoughts were: The search page is not accessible from the homepage unless you are logged in. Maybe this is causing some sort of linking/seo/ranking issue? Re: the login page being higher, perhaps many existing users visit the login page directly from this keyword in order to login straight away so Google pushes this to the top. I think this is less likely because most existing users will be logged in automatically (via cookies "remember me") and the homepage has a login form in anycase The site supports multiple languages. Maybe this is causing some canonical issues? There was an additional suggestion that we should noindex the login and search pages in order to resolve this ranking issue, but were nervous that we'd lose a large amount of organic clicks if we did this. Google must be doing this for a reason, so we wanted to resolve that underlying reason before dropping the noindex hammer. The fear is of course that we've done something wrong with our homepage which is causing it to perform poorly and thus these other pages rank higher. The hope would be that if we fixed that, that our rank for other keywords would improve also. It would be great if we could get some more eyes on this to hopefully confirm we're not doing anything silly, and are just generally after a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrew_uba0 -
How to get a large number of urls out of Google's Index when there are no pages to noindex tag?
Hi, I'm working with a site that has created a large group of urls (150,000) that have crept into Google's index. If these urls actually existed as pages, which they don't, I'd just noindex tag them and over time the number would drift down. The thing is, they created them through a complicated internal linking arrangement that adds affiliate code to the links and forwards them to the affiliate. GoogleBot would crawl a link that looks like it's to the client's same domain and wind up on Amazon or somewhere else with some affiiiate code. GoogleBot would then grab the original link on the clients domain and index it... even though the page served is on Amazon or somewhere else. Ergo, I don't have a page to noindex tag. I have to get this 150K block of cruft out of Google's index, but without actual pages to noindex tag, it's a bit of a puzzler. Any ideas? Thanks! Best... Michael P.S., All 150K urls seem to share the same url pattern... exmpledomain.com/item/... so /item/ is common to all of them, if that helps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Stuck on the 2nd page of google! Help
I run a McAfee Technical Support website. I has been 2.3 months since I have been practicing seo on it. It was slick until it appeared on the second page of google. But now it doesnt rank up as it's frozen. Can i get any advices and suggestions for my website to break the 2nd page cage. My website:-** mcafee.com/activate**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | six_figures0 -
Internal links from homepage and other pages
Hello, I'm curious what the difference is between internal links from the homepage and category pages. Make it sense to give some internal links from category pages (with a high PA) to an another page for a boost in the search results? Or is the link value too low in this case? Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarcelMoz
Marcel1 -
How to ask customers to +1 the page of the service/product they used and liked on Google+ of website
What format to use (how to write) to ask customers to +1 the page of the service/product they used and liked on Google+?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MasonBaker0 -
Rank on specific Google
Hi folks, a website is hosted with a TLD like .com in the USA. The content etc. is obviously all english but now we want to focus on a specific Google like .co.uk What must be necessarily be done to rank better? Is it enough just to buy a .co.uk domain and set the nameserver up or do we need to get a british hosting? Thanks in advance. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Howcome Google is indexing one day 2500 pages and the other day only 150 then 2000 again ect?
This is about an big affiliate website of an customer of us, running with datafeeds... Bad things about datafeeds: Duplicate Content (product descriptions) Verrryyyy Much (thin) product pages (sometimes better to noindex, i know, but this customer doesn't want to do that)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
HTML NAP Matching Place Page NAP
In David Mihm's article on Local Search Ranking Factors, he lists "HTML NAP Matching Place Page NAP". What is this exactly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougHoltOnline1