Will local optimization effect international ranking?
-
Lets say a company serves Canada and US customers regularly, but they are based in Canada. They currently have no local optimization or confirmation of their location on their website.
If I were to begin local optimization (google my business, local content, link building, schema etc), would Google recognize this website as a Canadian business and remove rankings in the US that it is currently appearing in now without any locational information?
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for your great reply. It is a fairy tricky situation. In this case, we're dealing with a B2B manufacturing company and currently the lions share of their business comes from the US. Rankings on important keywords are roughly the same in the Canada and the US.
We're currently trying to weigh the benefits of whether establishing the location of the firm and building that credibility would out out-weigh the potential risk of Google then penalizing ranking in the US.
Thanks again for your help!
-
Hi Aaron,
This is a bit tricky, actually. Let's say you are Whole Foods - an international corporation. Your corporate headquarters are in Texas, but you've got stores in the US and Canada. Being headquartered in Texas does not prevent your branch in Calgary from showing up in Google's local pack of results because you have a physical location there. No sweat!
What you are describing is a different situation. It sounds to me as if you are offering virtual services to US-based customers from your headquarters in Canada. Is that correct? If so, then there is some chance that strongly localizing your business to a particular city in Canada might in some way alter Google's perception of you business as a best answer for US-based-or-related queries. We're talking about organic queries here, presumably, rather than local ones, though, because if you don't have US offices, you're not ranking in the local packs for US-based-or-related queries. So, in the long run, if your organic content and authority are currently strong enough to show up for searchers in the US, chances are, they will continue to do so, but it is not out of the question that strongly localizing your business to a city in Canada might in some way impact this.
I'm afraid I've never seen a trustworthy study done to prove how much impact, if any, this type of marketing might have on a business in your situation. In your shoes, what I'd do is try to find a comparable business - one that is headquartered in Canada but also appearing for US-searches and see if they appear to be doing well both on the local level for their city and on an organic, international level with their general content. My gut feeling is that the impact would not be very big, but I wouldn't rule it out completely.
It would be great if a community member who has been in Aaron's situation could comment on their own experience!
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
-
Hotel SEO / Rank Conundrum
Hello Mozzers, I am having an issue with a particular client and wanted to throw it out to the forum for feedback. We work with many resorts and hotels. One, in particular, is a large condo-hotel property with several individual buildings. Each building has a unique name. While the property management company owns and operates most of the units within each building, there are units that are individually owned. The property management company runs the branded resort website, all local pages & listings, etc. One savvy unit owner, however, has built a website that is branded with the individual building name for one of the buildings. He has also taken ownership of the building Google Plus page, Facebook page, etc. He only owns a handful of units in the building. We have retroactively tried creating a new site but are struggling to gain traction from a ranking perspective. We did temporarily change the website address that was listed for the Google local listing, via the "edit" button, and were actually starting to increase rank (presumably somewhat related to the increase in website traffic), but it was quickly fixed to the other website. The management company has reached out to the owner but he continues to refuse to give up any rights to the Google local page, etc. We have also created a new (technically duplicate) page just to see if we can knock the other one off, though we are having issues getting the verification post card from Google. Any advice on how we can gain access to this Google local page? Or any other tips on how to get a relatively small, new site to overtake an existing site? I know URLs / examples are helpful in these situations but we'd prefer to keep the client names anon.
Local Listings | | mbochic0 -
LOCAL (city of 500k) Keyword Research - am I just wasting my time?
I have tried numerous tools, my team of freelancers, (fiver I admit) and a couple people from Upwork and still not getting a GOOD response to - How much search volume is there for "home builders" JUST in WIchita, KS (for example) I get local results like that are challenging because a lot of them show no search volume. Am I missing something? Can recommend a resource? I would be really grateful! 🙂 I am trying to figure out a nice long (ideally) list of keywords for 'plumbers, wichita ks', 'dentist, wichita ks' - Local service businesses and everything I try shows next to nothing. Thanks for ANY advice! 🙂 Matthew
Local Listings | | Mrupp441 -
How to set-up international URL structure for e-com shop?
Hi There We're currently running a successful international online store on a .com domain. We are located in Europe but most of our visitors are coming from the U.S. We display all the prices of our products in USD to all our customers. We are considering to set up multiple stores for different regions, so we can display different currencies per region, shipping methods, banners etc. We were thinking about the following set-up: eu.domainname.com (for EU excl. UK, currency €) uk.domainname.com (for UK, currency GBP) www.domainname.com (For rest of the world, currency $) All shops are in English. Would this be a good set-up? What should we take into account to avoid duplicate content? Kind regards Jerome
Local Listings | | JeromeEcom0 -
What's the 20/80 rule in local SEO as it relates to health care organizations
Hello all, I'm in charge of local SEO for a health care system that covers the entire state of Nebraska, with dozens of clinics all over the state, but mainly Omaha and Lincoln. I'm trying to build a cohesive local strategy for our organization, and a big part of that is figuring out what are the 20% of the actions I could take that will get me 80% of the benefit. Based on your experience as a local SEO specialist or ideally someone who does local SEO in a health care setting, what are the key things I should focus on? I'm not new to local SEO (just new to health care). My guess would be to focus in on getting a good local page on our website for every clinic/location etc., and getting a good Google Page listing for each one as well. But I figured I'd seek out advice on this before I plunge ahead.
Local Listings | | Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine1 -
Creating a new Google local business page vs. adding additional locations to an existing Google business page?
We are a service company that both travels to customer locations and serves customers at our business location. The split is about 80/20 (travel vs. serve customers on location). We just opened up a new office in a city about 1 hour away from our main location. The question is, should we create a new business page and account on Google local or should we add the new location to our existing google local account? The new location has a separate website, phone number, email etc. My inclination is to create a new local business account/page on Google. Has anyone experimented with both solutions and tested which option creates more powerful local signals for ranking?
Local Listings | | Vspeed0 -
What to do with duplicate Listings for Business in Moz Local Tool?
Hi Everyone! Just another newbie Local SEO looking for a solution. I was searching my business listing in Moz Local and it returned two addresses.
Local Listings | | psuh528
Listing #1: 925 B Street #402 San Diego, CA 92101, 67623
Listing #2: 925 B St, #402, San Diego, CA, 92101 Do I need to remove the listing with two zip codes showing up? (I don't see any of my profiles showing up with two zip codes though.) Listing #2 is accurate yet the local moz tool tells me that my Google+ page is 69% complete. How is it possible that Listing #1 scored a 97% complete on Google+? Would you recommend putting the suite number in Address Line 1 or separated in Line 2? Does it even matter? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!0 -
Local Optimisation without Local Pages?
What is the best and latest technique to optimise a website target lots of multiple local areas - I have a site where we want to target 10-15 local areas - at the moment the content mentions the local areas but not all of them as I felt it was going to turn into a list or keyword stuffing.I still see sites creating individual pages for each local area and including the areas in the url - the client wants to try and resist this as they do not want a lot of "bullsh*t" pages - (there exact words). What are the latest techniques or options? What have people tried and been successful with or equally failed with?
Local Listings | | JohnW-UK0 -
Local Listing Question for Vet Office
We have done the off-page directory listings work for a veterinary office (submitting to the main data-aggregators, as well as sites such as CitySearch/Manta/Yelp) & now want to supplement those with submissions for each individual doctor. There are 8 doctors at their practice. The plan was to submit them to only 3 sites - the main data-aggregators of LocalEze, ExpressUpdateUSA & Factual. They only have one phone number (their main number) to use for listings. So can we submit the doctors all with the same number? Or is that a total waste of time b/c listings will end up being duplicated/merged down the road? What do you recommend that we do?
Local Listings | | JohnWeb120