Service Area Landing Page Q&A
-
Good Morning,
I was wondering if some one could help me out with some questions I have regarding how to make my service area landing pages rank better. A majority of them are on position 11 right now, and I feel like there might be a few minor things I might need to do to make them rank better.
1.) Meta Description -
If I'm writing a meta description should I use an exact match for the keyword?
Something like "Hire us to do your dry cleaning in Topeka, Kansas today."
Or would I write "Topeka Kansas is in luck. We offer the best dry cleaning around" (I know this stinks from a call to action perspective, but it's the best example I could come up with off the top of my head).
2.) File Name -
Would I make the name "topeka-kansas.html" or would I make it "dry-cleaning-topeka-kansas.html"
3.) H1 -
should this be exactly the same as the title, or at least very close to it?
4.) Youtube Video -
Would putting a youtube video on the page act as a relevancy signal to Google?
5.) Images -
How many images would help on a landing page?
Does having original images help more?
6.) Length of Page -
Does the length of the page word wise help at all?
7.) Anything else -
What other tweaks can I make to a landing page to boost its rankings?
Thanks!
Charles -
Don't forget the importance of mobile when it comes to local landing pages!
-
Also you can obtain useful info for local SEO in http://www.whitespark.ca/blog or the local section in moz.com (http://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo).
-
Hey Charles
I would recommend reading the following resources:
On-Page Factors (Moz)
Meta Descriptions (Moz)
YouTube Ranking Factors (Moz)
SearchMetrics Ranking Factors Study 2014 (Moz & SearchMetrics)
Google My Business (Google)
Verify a local business on Google (Google)Reason being, you're kind of asking broad and loaded questions (and that's totally fine!), and you're going to get so much more out of the above information than getting direction on one off questions. All of the above have great information and will help you moving forward. If you have any questions or comments, let me know! Good luck!
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
-
Home page vs inner page?
do you believe that the advantage of targeting a search term on the home page is now worse off than before? as I understand it ctr is a big factor now And as far as i can see if two pages are equal on page etc the better ctr will win out, the issue with the home page is the serp stars cannot be used hence the ctr on a product page will be higher? I feel if you where able to get a home page up quicker (1 year instead of two) you still lost out in the end due to the product page winning on ctr? do you think this is correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Portfolio Image Landing Page Question/Issue
Hello, We have a client with a very image heavy website. They have Portfolio pages with a large number of images. We are currently working on adding more copy to the site but wanted to confirm we are taking the right approach for the images on the site. Under the current structure each image has its own landing page (with no copy) and is fed in (or generated on) to a Portfolio Page. While we know this is not ideal as it would be best to have the images on the Portfolio Page directly or even fill out the landing pages with copy; due to the amount of images and the fact these are only images (and not a 'targeted' page) that would not really be feasible. Aside from the thin content concern these individual landing pages were being indexed so they are showing hundreds of pages on their sitemap.xml and in GSC even though they only have a few actual pages. In the meantime we went into each image-page and placed a canonical tag back to the main Portfolio Page (with the hopes to add content to that page and have it as the ‘overarching’ page). Would this be the right approach? – We considered ‘noindex-follow’ tags but would want the images to be crawled; the issue is because the pages are not on the actual page are we canonicalizing these images to nothing? Any insight would really be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R0 -
Exact match .org Ecommerce: Reason why internal page is ranking over home page
Hello, We have a new store where an internal category page (our biggest category) is moving up ahead of the home page. What could be the reason for this? It's an exact match .org. Over-optimization? Something else? It happened both when I didn't optimize the home page title tag and when I did for the main keyword, i.e. mainkeyword | mainkeyword.org, or just mainkeyword.org Home Page. Both didn't help with this. We have very few backlinks. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Of the two examples of markup (microdata, schema) code below, which of the two is better designed for its purpose of Q&A, and what might be suggested to improve upon these lines of code (context: questions and answers within article content.
ANSWER SEEN 'WITHIN THE QUESTION' BRACKET So you ask, why is the sky blue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RedFrog
Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results 'QUESTION' AND 'ANSWER' IN 2 SEPARATE BRACKETS Why Is The Sky Blue? Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results Thanks, Mark0 -
Canonicle & rel=NOINDEX used on the same page?
I have a real estate company: www.company.com with approximately 400 agents. When an agent gets hired we allow them to pick a URL which we then register and manage. For example: www.AGENT1.com We then take this agent domain and 301 redirect it to a subdomain of our main site. For example
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet
Agent1.com 301’s to agent1.company.com We have each page on the agent subdomain canonicled back to the corresponding page on www.company.com
For example: agent1.company.com canonicles to www.company.com What happened is that google indexed many URLS on the subdomains, and it seemed like Google ignored the canonical in many cases. Although these URLS were being crawled and indexed by google, I never noticed any of them rank in the results. My theory is that Google crawled the subdomain first, indexed the page, and then later Google crawled the main URL. At that point in time, the two pages actually looked quite different from one another so Google did not recognize/honor the canonical. For example:
Agent1.company.com/category1 gets crawled on day 1
Company.com/category1 gets crawled 5 days later The content (recently listed properties for sale) on these category pages changes every day. If Google crawled the pages (both the subdomain and the main domain) on the same day, the content on the subdomain and the main domain would look identical. If the urls are crawled on different days, the content will not match. We had some major issues (duplicate content and site speed) on our www.company.com site that needed immediate attention. We knew we had an issue with the agent subdomains and decided to block the crawling of the subdomains in the robot.txt file until we got the main site “fixed”. We have seen a small decrease in organic traffic from google to our main site since blocking the crawling of the subdomains. Whereas with Bing our traffic has dropped almost 80%. After a couple months, we have now got our main site mostly “fixed” and I want to figure out how to handle the subdomains in order to regain the lost organic traffic. My theory is that these subdomains have a some link juice that is basically being wasted with the implementation of the robots.txt file on the subdomains. Here is my question
If we put a ROBOTS rel=NOINDEX on all pages of the subdomains and leave the canonical (to the corresponding page of the company site) in place on each of those pages, will link juice flow to the canonical version? Basically I want the link juice from the subdomains to pass to our main site but do not want the pages to be competing for a spot in the search results with our main site. Another thought I had was to place the NOIndex tag only on the category pages (the ones that seem to change every day) and leave it off the product (property detail pages, pages that rarely ever change). Thank you in advance for any insight.0 -
Parameter Strings & Duplicate Page Content
I'm managing a site that has thousands of pages due to all of the dynamic parameter strings that are being generated. It's a real estate listing site that allows people to create a listing, and is generating lots of new listings everyday. The Moz crawl report is continually flagging A LOT (25k+) of the site pages for duplicate content due to all of these parameter string URLs. Example: sitename.com/listings & sitename.com/listings/?addr=street name Do I really need to do anything about those pages? I have researched the topic quite a bit, but can't seem to find anything too concrete as to what the best course of action is. My original thinking was to add the rel=canonical tag to each of the main URLs that have parameters attached. I have also read that you can bypass that by telling Google what parameters to ignore in Webmaster tools. We want these listings to show up in search results, though, so I don't know if either of these options is ideal, since each would cause the listing pages (pages with parameter strings) to stop being indexed, right? Which is why I'm wondering if doing nothing at all will hurt the site? I should also mention that I originally recommend the rel=canonical option to the web developer, who has pushed back in saying that "search engines ignore parameter strings." Naturally, he doesn't want the extra work load of setting up the canonical tags, which I can understand, but I want to make sure I'm both giving him the most feasible option for implementation as well as the best option to fix the issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
Keywords going to Subdomain instead of targeted page(general landing page)
Why are some of my keywords going to subdomains instead of the more general/targeted landing page. For example, on my ecommerce website, the keyword 'tempurpedic' is directing to the subdomain URL of a specific tempurpedic product page instead of the general landing page. The product has a page authority of 15 and the Tempurpedic landing pages with all the products has an authority of 31. I have also noticed that my 'furniture stores in houston' keyword directs to my "occasional tables" URL! instead of a the much more targeted homepage. Is there something I am missing here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nat88han0