Problem ranking page with a double name and an "&"
-
I have a client with a double name and a & like: Jones & Jones. I and using all in one SEO on a Wordpress site. Their home page is not ranking even though I have Jones, Jones & Jones and Jones and Jones listed in the keywords. Interestingly enough other pages where I did not list the home page rank when you do a serach for "Jones & Jones" I have not had this issue with other sites but have never had a name repeated and and & in between... any advice woild be appreciate.. I just signed up for a trial of MOZ...
-
Both Ryan and Linda have great answers for your specific issue.
As a new customer, I highly suggest signing up for our webinars that walk you through how to use the tools and real life examples with them.
-
When you say you have Jones, Jones & Jones and Jones and Jones listed in the keywords, what do you mean? In a keywords meta tag? That is not used by Google anymore. When you say "other pages where I did not list the home page", do you mean you do not use a keyword tag?
Neither a double name nor an ampersand should be a problem, though there might be a lot of competition for a common name. You could try the Moz keyword tool to see how difficult your term is to rank for.
-
Hi Alan. Welcome! I hope you get a lot out of your trial. As for the Jones & Jones problem, it could look like keyword stuffing to the search engines and thus the page may appear over optimized when it's meta keywords tag is, "Jones, Jones & Jones..." Etc. Imagine if a search engine saw the same behavior for a different word. It'd look like a spam attempt.
I would go through the site and minimize the business name mentions to something that reads naturally, delete the meta keywords tag (if anything it's a negative signal if not otherwise completely ignored by the search engines) and then submit Jones & Jones to a large number of business listing websites--local and otherwise--to solidly register the company as being named Jones & Jones. Cheers!
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
-
SERP: From page 4 to page 1 to page 4 again -_- ...
Hi there Moz Amigos! So I have this Website: campmusicaladagio.com Right now, our main target keyword is "camp de jour gatineau". The website was on WIX before. So, I created the worpress version and redirected the domain name to the new hosting server (outside of WIX). So before doing the changes, the website was on page 4... After the changes, it went in 1 week on page 1 (lol, WIX sucks so much). After 3 weeks on page 1, it went on page 4 again... I am so confused XD like what the hell happen... Any ideas?
Local Website Optimization | | Gab-SEO0 -
Leveraging the authority of a blog to boost pages on a root domain.
Hi! Looking for some link building advice. For some background, I work for a company that has over 100 locations across the US. So we are deeply involved with local SEO. We also do a ton of evergreen/ national SEO as well and the spectrums are widely different for the most part. We also have a very successful blog in our industry. It really is an SEO’s dream. I do not even need to worry about a link strategy for this because it just naturally snatches them up. I’m trying to find some unique ways to utilize the blog to boost pages on my main root domain, more specifically, at the local level. It is really hard, besides the standard methods for local link building, to get outside sources to link to our local office pages. These pages are our bread and butter, and the pages we need to be as successful as possible. In every market we are in, we are at a disadvantage because we have one page to establish our local footprint and rank, compared to domains that have their entire site pointed at that local area we are trying to rank in. I’ve tried linking to local office pages from successful blog posts to attempt to pass link juice to the local pages, but I haven’t seen much in terms of moving the needle doing this. Are there any crafty ideas on how I can shuffle some internal linking around to capitalize on the blog’s authority to make my local pages rank higher in their markets? Thank you! -Ben
Local Website Optimization | | Davey_Tree0 -
Is there a way to "protect" yourself from non-local traffic?
I'll start with the story, but the main question is at the bottom. Feel free to scroll down :-). I've got good news and bad news regarding a client of mine. It's a service area business that only serves one metropolitan area. We've got a great blog with really valuable content that truly helps people while firmly establishing my client's industry expertise. As a result, local traffic has spiked and the company generates more leads. So that's the good news. The bad (bad-ish?) news is that the client also gets tons of traffic from outside the service area. Not only that, people are calling them all the time who either live in a different state and don't realize that the company isn't local to them or are located out of state but are calling for free advice. On one hand, the client gets a kick out of it and thinks it's funny. On the other hand, it's annoying and they're having to train all their intake people to ask for callers' locations before they chat with them. Some things we're doing to combat this problem: 1. The title tag on our home page specifies the metro area where we're active. 2. Our blog articles frequently include lines like, "Here in [name of our city], we usually take this approach." 3. There are references to our location all over the site. 4. We've got an actual location page with our address; for that matter, the address is listed in the footer on every page. 5. The listed phone number does not begin with 800; rather, it uses the local area code. 6. All of our local business listings, including our Google My Business listing, is up to date. 7. We recently published a "Cities We Serve" area of the site with highly customized/individualized local landing pages for 12 actual municipalities in our metro region. This will take some time to cook, but hopefully that will help. "Cities We Serve" is not a primary navigation item, but the local landing pages are situated as such: "About Us > Cities We Serve > [individual city page]" **Anyway, here's my main question: **In light of all this, is there any other way to somehow shield my client from all this irrelevant traffic and protect them from time-wasting phone calls?
Local Website Optimization | | Greenery0 -
Which URL and rel=canonical structure to use for location based product inventory pages?
I am working on an automotive retailer site that displays local car inventory in nearby dealerships based on location. Within the site, a zip code is required to search, and the car inventory is displayed in a typical product list that can be filtered and sorted by the searcher to fit the searchers needs. We would like to structure these product inventory list pages that are based on location to give the best chance at ranking, if not now, further down the road when we have built up more authority to compete with the big dogs in SERP like AutoTrader.com, TrueCar.com, etc. These higher authority sites are able to rank their location based car inventory pages on the first page consistently across all makes and models. For example, searching the term "new nissan rogue" in the Los Angeles, CA area returns a few location based inventory pages on page 1. The sites in the industry that are able to rank their inventory pages will display a relatively clean looking URL with no redirect that still displays the local inventory like this in the SERP:
Local Website Optimization | | tdastru
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/New+Cars/Nissan/Rogue
but almost always use a rel=canonical tag within the page to a page with a location parameter attached to the end of the URL like this one:
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/New+Cars/Nissan/Rogue/Los+Angeles+CA-90001"/>
I'm having a hard time figuring out why sites like this example have their URLs and pages structured this way. What would be the best practice for structuring the URL and rel=canonical tags to be able to rank for and display location based inventory pages for cars near the searcher?0 -
Why a site just dropped out of ranks
I have a site i am working on link It was ranking fairly well and then I added content to the homepage to better optimize it for the keywords it was already ranking for. Ever since I did that the entire site is no longer ranking well. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Atomicx0 -
Local Area SEO - Directions Page and Multiple Use of Direction pages
Hello, We are looking to focus on multiple local areas and it has been suggested one way to mention lots of different locations on pages without doing lists or using grey SEO practices is to create directions pages. We are trying this with a client who has 2 business at the same address. The layout is:- Introduction - 2-3 sentences Directions by Car Park Parking info Directions by Public Transports Closing - 3-4 sentences - using clients keywords The hope is the having locations/areas and the clients keywords on the same page will capture some of the local areas with the clients keywords. I have some questions:- 1. If we use the same directions text and just change the opening and closing paragraphs on the different website will this be enough to not have a duplicate content issue. 2. Are the directions pages the best way to capture keywords and local area/locations on the same page. 3. Is there anything I am missing or could do instead? Looking forward to everyone's input....
Local Website Optimization | | JohnW-UK0 -
Has anyone had any success buying a local domain website, getting it on first page and then selling it to a local business? I have found some good domains that this might work for but I am wondering if anybody has tried this before.
I would like to buy a local domain like scottsdalepaintingcontractor.com and then seo it to first page before I sell it. Has anybody tried such strategy?
Local Website Optimization | | BWoods3 -
Local Business Schema Markup on every page?
Hello, I have two questions..if someone could shed some light on the topic, I would be so very grateful! 1. I am still making my way through how schema is employed, and as I can tell, it is much more specific (and therefore relevant) in its details than using the data highlighter tool. Is this true? 2. Most of my clients' sites have a footer with the local business info included on every page of their site (address and phone). This said, I have been using the structured data markup helper to add local business schema to home page, and then including the footer markup in the footer file so that every page benefits from the local business markup. Is this incorrect to use it for every page? Also, I noticed that by just using the footer markup for the rest of the pages in the site, I am missing data that was included when I manually went through the index page (i.e. image, url, name of business). Could someone tell me if it is advisable and worth it to manually markup every page for the local business schema or if that should just be used for certain pages such as location, contact us, and/or index? Any tips or help would be greatly appreciated!!! Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | lfrazer0