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 - Adding the location to the URL
-
Hi there,
My client has a product URL: www.company.com/product. They are only serving one state in the US. The existing URL is ranking in a position between 8-15 at the moment for local searches. Would it be interesting to add the location to the URL in order to get a higher position or is it dangerous as we have our rankings at the moment. Is it really giving you an advantage that is worth the risk?
Thank you for your opinions!
Sander -
Oops, above post was from me
Sorry, I was logged into a different account when responding. -
Hi Sander,
You are mentioning Local, but are also saying you serve a state. Local is city-related, not state-related, so I want to be sure I'm fully understanding your scenario. Are you saying:
-
Yours is a local business with a physical location in a specific city or multiple cities and in-person contact with customers?
-
Or, yours is a virtual business with no in-person contact, offering a product to an entire state?
-
You have one product featured on a single page and you want to add a city name (or a state name?) to that product page URL?
-
You have one product and are thinking of building multiple pages to cover multiple cities, adding them to the URLs for all cities in which you offer this product?
Some clarification would help, for sure!
-
-
Hey Sander,
Anders hit the nail on the head - but I felt I needed to add a bit of information. Be careful how you decide to add location to your URLs, as it could potentially hurt your rankings. There is much more involved in local search relevance than just a city or state name being included in a URL.
Also, it could seem "spammy" if your website becomes overrun with local tags. I would suggest setting up a structured URL, for exampls "www.company.com/Nevada/Las-Vegas/Products"
This way your URLs are serving 2 purposes - thoughtful organization and helping out with your keyword strategy.
Best,
Christopher
-
Hi Sander!
According to https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors it could be of some value to have some sort of geographic keyword in the URL, but I guess it would also be of value to have this as part of the onpage copy, in the title, meta description etc if it is possible to add i a ntural way, without making it look spammy.
If you have some contact information on the page, it could also be valueable to mark it up according to schema.org (same goes for the product information if not already done).
If you are changing the URL, also make sure to 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.
My 2 cents. Hope this helps
Anders
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
-
Areaserved json-ld schema markup for a local business that targets national tourism
If there is a local business that thrives on ranking nationally for people searching for their services in that location, do you target the business's actual service areas or target nationally? For instance, a hotel in Denver, Colorado. Would the areaserved markup be: "areaServed":[{"@type":"State","name":"Colorado"},{"@type":"City","name":"Denver"}] Or "areaserved":"USA" The "geographic area where a service or offered item is provided" would be denver, colorado. But we would be looking to target all people nationally looking to travel to denver, colorado. Or would it be best to target it all, like: "areaServed":[{"@type":"State","name":"Colorado"},{"@type":"City","name":"Denver"},"USA"]
Local Website Optimization | | SEOdub0 -
Is CNAME / URL flattening a bad practice?
I recently have moved a number of websites top a new server and have made the use of CNAME / URL flattening (I believe these are the same?). A network admin had said this is an unrecommended practice. From what I have read it seems flattening can be beneficial for site speed and SEO even if very little.
Local Website Optimization | | Dissident_SLC0 -
301 or 302 Redirects with locale URLs?
Hi Mozers, I have a bit of a tricky question I need some help answering. My agency are building a brand new website for a client of ours which means changing the domain name (yay...). So! I have my 301's all ready to go for the UK locale, however, the issue I have is that the site will also eventually have French, German and Spanish locales - but these won't be ready to go until later this year. We will be launching in just English for September. The current site already has the French and German locales on it as well. Just to make sure I'm being clear, the site will be www.example.com for launch, but by lets say November, we will also have a www.example.com/fr/ and www.example.com/de/ site launched too. So what do I do with the locale URLs? As I said above, the exisitng site already has the French and German locales on it, so I don't particularly want to redirect the /fr/ and /de/ URLs to the English homepage, as I will want to redirect them to the new URLs in November, and redirecting more than once is bad for SEO right? Any ideas? Would 302s maybe be the best suggestion? Thanks! Virginia
Local Website Optimization | | Virginia-Girtz1 -
Using geolocation for dynamic content - what's the best practice for SEO?
Hello We sell a product globally but I want to use different keywords to describe the product based on location. For this example let’s say in USA the product is a "bathrobe" and in Canada it’s a "housecoat" (same product, just different name). What this means… I want to show "bathrobe" content in USA (lots of global searches) and "housecoat" in Canada (less searches). I know I can show the content using a geolocation plugin (also found a caching plugin which will get around the issue of people seeing cached versions), using JavaScript or html5. I want a solution which enables someone in Canada searching for "bathrobe" to be able to find our site through Google search though too. I want to rank for "bathrobe" in BOTH USA and Canada. I have read articles which say Google can read the dynamic content in JavaScript, as well as the geolocation plugin. However the plugins suggest Google crawls the content based on location too. I don’t know about JavaScript. Another option is having two separate pages (one for “bathrobe” and one for “housecoat”) and using geolocation for the main menu (if they find the other page i.e. bathrobe page through a Canadian search, they will still see it though). This may have an SEO impact splitting the traffic though. Any suggestions or recommendations on what to do?? What do other websites do? I’m a bit stuck. Thank you so much! Laura Ps. I don’t think we have enough traffic to add subdomains or subdirectories.
Local Website Optimization | | LauraFalls0 -
Applying NAP Local Schema Markup to a Virtual Location: spamming or not?
I have a client that has multiple virtual locations to show website visitors where they provide delivery services. These are individual pages that include unique phone numbers, zip codes, city & state. However there is no address (this is just a service area). We wanted to apply schematic markup to these landing pages. Our development team successfully applied schema to the phone, state, city, etc. However for just the address property they said VIRTUAL LOCATION. This checked out fine on the Google structured data testing tool. Our question is this; can just having VIRTUAL LOCATION for the address property be construed as spamming? This landing page is providing pertinent information for the end user. However since there is no brick and mortar address I'm trying to determine if having VIRTUAL LOCATION as the value could be frowned upon by Google. Any insight would be very helpful. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB1 -
Call Tracking, DNI Script & Local SEO
Hi Moz! I've been reading about this a lot more lately - and it doesn't seem like there's exactly a method that Google (or other search engines) would consider to be "best practices". The closest I've come to getting some clarity are these Blumenthals articles - http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/ & the follow-up piece from CallRail - http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/. Assuming a similar goal of using an existing phone number with a solid foundation in the local search ecosystem, and to create the ability to track how many calls are coming organically (not PPC or other paid platform) to the business directly from the website for an average SMB. For now, let's also assume we're also not interested in screening the calls, or evaluating customer interaction with the staff - I would love to hear from anyone who has implemented the DNI call tracking info for a website. Were there negative effects on Local SEO? Did the value of the information (# of calls/month) outweigh any local search conflicts? If I was deploying this today, it seems like the blueprint for including DNI script, while mitigating risk for losing local search visibility might go something like this: Hire reputable call-tracking service, ensure DNI will match geographic area-code & be "clean" numbers Insert DNI script on key pages on site Maintain original phone number (non-DNI) on footer, within Schema & on Contact page of the site ?? Profit Ok, those last 2 bullet points aren't as important, but I would be curious where other marketers land on this issue, as I think there's not a general consensus at this point. Thanks everyone!
Local Website Optimization | | Etna1 -
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 -
Does building multiple websites hurt you seo wise? Good or bad strategy?
HI,rategy. So I spoke to a local Colorado seo company and they suggested to find whatever keywords is the most searched under my GWT's and put .com behind it and build other sites for other keywords. I was curious about this type of strategy. Does this work? This seo guy said I could just get a DBA bank account and such for each domain name etc. I am not wanting to mislead anyone, but I am curious if for the sake of promoting other services, if creating other websites with partial and EMD's are worthwhile? Another issue I worry about is if I put my companies phone number, then next thing you know there is 3 or 4 sites that use that same phone number. To me this does not build trust with Google. But being I am learning, maybe this is a common strategy, or doomed from the start. Just curious what you think. Would you build other sites to try and rank for other services? Or keep one sites and maximize it? Thank you for your thoughts. I just do not want to pay $3000 per site if it will hurt not help.
Local Website Optimization | | Berner0