Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Local SEO for National Brands
-
Hi all,
When it comes to local SEO in 2015, I appreciate that having a physical location in the town/city you wish to rank is a major factor. However, if you're a national brand is it still possible to rank for local searches when you're based in one location?
The reason I ask is that, although our service is national, the nature of what we offer means that it is not inconceivable that people would search for a local variation of our top keywords. Other than the standard things - location in the content, the H1/H2s, title tag, meta description, url etc. - is there anything national businesses can do to help?
Thanks in advance.
John
-
Hi Caleb!
That's a good question. It's very important for me to state here that Moz Local is not a ranking tool. We do not guarantee rankings in any way. Likely, you already know this, but just wanted to be sure this was clear. Whether using a tool or working manually, citations are built for 2 main reasons:
-
To build up the 'trust' it is perceived that Google places in widely available, correct business NAP+W.
-
To help customers locate your business on a variety of platforms.
#1 is believed to help you with your Google local pack rankings and #2 is believed to directly market to customers on platforms they frequently use (like Yelp or Facebook). Citations are not widely recognized as a means for improving organic or national rankings.
So, in your case, as you don't really see customers between normal business hours, citation building may not be the most important investment for your business. On the other hand, if you have a B2B relationship and your business associates are coming to your office between normal business hours, citation building could help them find you in the local packs of results. Additionally, citations are normally listed in the organic results below the main result for a branded search, so, it could be postulated that this could help B2B customers feel more secure about how established your business is. But, it would not like help you rank better for your software keywords.
*However, there is one grey area related to this that deserves mention. The majority of citations include a link to the business website. So, in a sense, citation building is a form of link building. It would be possible, then, to parlay that out into thinking that earning citations means you've earned some new links for the business, right? And links do influence organic rank, right? But, it's my gut feeling that, because the links contain in citations are not merit-based (in other words, you're not actually earning them based on something great you've done) they probably do not have a ton of value in the current, more sophisticated Google environment. Could they help at all? My guess is that they might be of minimal help, but that you would likely benefit more organically from other efforts.
Hope this helps!
-
-
Great discussion, folks. I'd like to add a question, if I may. First, some background.
I'm the Marketing Manager for a software company who has a physical location, and occasionally clients come to visit, but no one just drops in. I'm interested in national rankings, not local. I cannot think of many (if any) examples where someone would search for our products and services in our city (i.e. guided selling tool in Richmond, VA).
Here's the question. Would submitting my company to a service like Moz Local help our national rankings? In other words, is there enough of a ranking boost from having our NAP and business categories correct across the web to warrant the fee and work, or does it not make a difference if I'm not interested in ranking for location-specific searches?
Thanks, all!
-
Thanks everyone - some very useful feedback here and certainly food for thought.
We've got some locality-centric data we can draw on so we should be able to get some unique content for each area together. There are also some links pointing to the home page from businesses located in certain cities/towns - could changing these links to the relevant local landing pages negatively effect our national rankings?
John
-
Hey John,
You're receiving good input from the community. I'll just summarize a couple of points here:
-
Without physical locations, no, you cannot rank in the local packs of results.
-
This leaves you with trying to rank organically via a combination of website content and optimization (see the landing pages article Patrick linked to) and trying to shore that up with things like link earning, social media, video marketing, etc. The main pitfall to be aware of in this practice is that many companies end up building a large number of thin, duplicate content pages for their service cities. This should be avoided. The main goal of this practice is to gain some organic visibility for local searches in the absence of being able to gain local pack rankings.
Hope this helps!
-
-
Hi there
I would check out Moz's post Local Landing Pages: A Guide To Great Implementation In Every Situation, particularly in the section National company desiring a local presence.
I would also take a look at Google's Service area maps resource.
Hope this all helps! Good luck!
-
Adding to this I found this https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors The comments by Nick Neels speaks directly to your question methinks.
-
I am sure you will receive more informed answers however I am facing a similar situation. I do know that local SEO greatly affects national rankings and recommend you optimize all local listings using a service like MOZ local (there are others too.) I track our rankings nationally and in a variety of markets where we compete or wish to compete.
I also recommend doing keyword research to determine your product is being searched locally (where to buy "your product" in washington dc) It may not be a large volume of searches but they could be very targeted meaning high value prospects. And the branding you get from it won't hurt either. And chances are those phrases will have a low difficulty as well.
I hope that helps and also gets more responses for you.
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
-
What's your proudest accomplishment in regards to SEO?
After many years in the industry, you come to realize a few things. One of of the biggest pain points for us at web daytona was being able to give clients a quick keyword ranking cost estimation. After multiple trial and error and relying on API data from one of the most reliable SEO softwares in our industry, we were able to develop an SEO tool that allows us to quickly and accurately get the estimated cost for a given keyword (s) using multiple variables. Most agencies can relate to that story. It’s something my colleagues and I at Web Daytona have been through before. Finding the cost and amount of time needed to rank for a keyword is a time consuming process. That’s why it’s a common practice to sell SEO packages of 5-10 keywords for about $1000-2000 / month. The problem is not all keywords are equally valuable, and most clients know this. We constantly get questions from clients asking: “how much to rank for this specific keyword?” It’s difficult to answer that question with a pricing model that treats the cost of ranking every keyword equally. So is the answer to spend a lot more time doing tedious in-depth keyword research? If we did we could give our clients more precise estimates. But being that a decent proposal can take as long as 2-5 hours to make, and agency life isn’t exactly full of free time, that wouldn’t be ideal. That’s when we asked a question. What if we could automate the research needed to find the cost of ranking keywords? We looked around for a tool that did, but we couldn’t find it. Then we decided to make it ourselves. It wasn’t going to be easy. But after running an SEO agency for over a decade, we knew we had the expertise to create a tool that wouldn’t just be fast and reliable, it would also be precise. Fast forward to today and we’re proud to announce that The Keyword Cost Estimator is finally done. Now we’re releasing it to the public so other agencies and businesses can use it too. You can see it for yourself here. Keyword-Rank-Cost-Ectimator-Tool-by-Web-Daytona-Agency.png
Local Website Optimization | | WebDaytona0 -
I want to rank a national home page for a local keyword phrase
Hello - We are a nationally available brand based in Denver, CO. Our home page currently ranks #8 (used to be 5) for "real estate photography in Denver" -- I want to improve this ranking, but our home page is generalized and not geared toward Denver, CO but to all of our markets. I'm trying to troubleshoot this and have a few ideas.... I would love advice on the best route, or a different route altogether: Create a Denver-specific page -- _will that page compete with my home page that is already ranked in the top ten? _ Add the keyword phrase in the image alt attribute Add keyword phrase into the content - need to make sure that viewers realize we are national I already updated the meta description to say "real estate photography in Denver and beyond"
Local Website Optimization | | virtuance_photography1 -
SEO and Main Navigation Best Practices
I've read a number of articles on SEO and main navigation for websites. I'd like to get a solid answer/recommendation to help solve this one. This is the situation. We're helping a local business that offers pest control and property maintenance services. Under each of these, there area a number of services available, eg, cockroach control, termite inspections or lawn mowing services, rubbish removal and so on. Is it best to have a main nav containing the top keywords for the services - Pest Control | Property Maintenance, with a drop down to the services under each. Or, a simple approach - Our Services > drop down to each - Pest Control > Termite Inspections, etc. My concern here is that they have quite a lot of services, so the nav could be way too long. Really appreciate any assistance here. Many thanks.
Local Website Optimization | | RichardRColeman0 -
Local Service pages guide?
There are a lots of Local landing pages guide on the internet. Is there any guide for Local service pages? How to create them, what to include?
Local Website Optimization | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Can PPC harm SEO results, even if it's off-domain?
Here's the scenario. We're doing SEO for a national franchise business. We have over 60 location pages on the same domain, that we control. Another agency is doing PPC for the same business, except they're leading people to un-indexable landing pages off domain. Apparently they're also using location extensions for the businesses that have been set up improperly, at least according to the Account Strategists at Google that we work with. We're having a real issue with these businesses ranking in the multi-point markets (where they have multiple locations in a city). See, the client wants all their location landing pages to rank organically for geolocated service queries in those cities (we'll say the query is "fridge repair"). We're trying to tell them that the PPC is having a negative effect on our SEO efforts, even though there shouldn't be any correlation between the two. I still think the PPC should be focused on their on-domain location landing pages (and so does our Google rep), because it shows consistency of brand, etc. I'm getting a lot of pushback from the client and the other agency, of course. They say it shouldn't matter. Has anyone here run into this? Any ammo to offer up to convince the client that having us work at "cross-purposes" is a bad idea? Thanks so much for any advice!
Local Website Optimization | | Treefrog_SEO0 -
Local SEO: City & County Pages
I'm working on developing some local pages for an HVAC company. They cover two counties, so I was planning on having two county pages, then linking them to individual city pages to keep the menu simpler and not cluttering it up with a couple dozen city pages for people to slog through. Has anybody ever done county pages before for local SEO? Or at least seen them? Just curious to see if there's any real benefit overall for have separate county pages, or if I should just stick to city pages.
Local Website Optimization | | ChaseMG0 -
Same blog, multiple languages. Got SEO concerns.
Hi, My company runs a small blog in swedish. Most of the visitors are our customers/prospects. We will write about generic concepts regarding our business and the occasional company news story. However, I have quite a few ideas for articles that could be interesting to a lot of people, and I'm tempted to write those in english for better exposure. I would love it if that exposure could boost my companies authority. How should I go on about this? Can I somehow tell search engines that a certain part or page of the site is in another language? Should I translate our entire site to english and post the english post in a separate blog feed? Any insight is welcome. Thanks in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | Mest0 -
SEO: .com vs .org vs .travel Domain
Hi there, I am new to MOZ Q&A and first of all I appreciate all the folks here that share their expertise and make everyone understand 'the WWW' a bit better. My question: I have been developing a 'travel guide' site for a city in the U.S. and now its time to choose the right domain name. I put a strong focus on SEO in terms of coding, site performance as well as content and to round things up I'd like to register the _best _domain name in terms of SEO. Let's suppose the city is Atlanta. I have found the following domain names that are available and I was wondering whether you guys could give me some inside on which domain name would perform best. discoveratlanta.org
Local Website Optimization | | kinimod
atlantaguide.org
atlanta.travel
atlantamag.com Looking at the Google Adwords Keyword tool the term that reaches the highest search queries is obviously "Atlanta" itself. Sites that are already ranking high are atlanta.com and atlanta.gov. So basically I am wondering whether I should aim for a new TLD like atlanta.travel or rather go with a .org domain. I had a look around and it seems that .org domains generally work well for city guides (at least a lot of such sites use .org domains). However, I have also seen a major US city that uses .travel and ranks first. On the other hand in New York, nycgo.com ranks well. Is it safe to assume that from the domain names I mentioned it really doesn't matter which one I use since it wouldn't significantly affect my ranking (good or bad)? Or would you still choose one above the other? What do you generally thing about .travel domain names (especially since they are far more expensive then the rest)? I really appreciate your response to my question! Best,
kinimod0