Does anyone have stats or know where I can find stats on searchers who use geolocated queries versus geomodified?
-
My client is a franchise business and they want their location landing pages to rank for every one of their 60 plus locations nationwide. They are performing extremely well for geomodified terms. The argument is that people rarely ever search using the city name. Are there stats to back up whether this claim is true, and if so, do you know where I can get a hold of such data (outside of searching in Keyword Planner... unless that's the answer!)
-
Hey Kevin,
Mike & Phil would be good guys to reach out to, for sure. I'm glad if my reply was somewhat helpful and I'd love to see more recent data on this. Good luck with your client!
-
Kevin, Thanks for this, I did call Stat and spoke to them. They are more of an enterprise SEO solution and were not able to speak to the search data that I'm looking for here particularly. But I appreciate the comment and the lead!
Miriam, thanks once again for your thorough response, and for the links you shared. I think this is ultimately a very important study for local marketers, seeing as geolocated terms are a completely different play. Our solution was to build article/informative content for the query in question, and then use the Google Geolocation API on the website to guide the user to their nearest location. That way, we rank for people who are searching for the general geolocated query (we'll say "plumbing repair" to run with your example) and in most cases, the second organic result is the franchise location page for that city.
We're trying to convince the client of the value in ranking #1 with the article content page—but they're not convinced. They want the location page as the first result for geolocated queries in every city. Then of course, they want multiple results for cities where they have multiple locations, which is another story.
I'm going to reach out to Phil Rozek and Mike Blumenthal about a recent study regarding geolocated versus geomodified search data for local businesses, because I think it raises an important distinction. I personally always geomodify my queries—I don't leave the work to Google. I find I get better results. But I don't know if I'm in the minority, or not. As I say, my client is #1 for every city when the geomodifier is added to the keyword. It would be great to have data to back up the importance of having that real estate.Thanks again for your great feedback!
-
Hey Kevin,
I don't find that Keyword Planner is terribly helpful with local terms. Now, obviously, if your clients are hotels or other distance-type businesses like that, people are going to be using a ton of geomodifiers because they are located in one city but then looking for lodgings in another, but if the industry is plumbing, or something like that, likely you'd see less use of city names, in queries, particularly on mobile devices.
Your question has made me go searching around for any recent statistics on use of geomodifiers and what I'm coming up with is pretty old:
marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-seo-geo-modifiers.html
http://www.ngsmarketing.com/the-two-types-of-local-search-and-how-local-seo-should-reflect-them/
If anyone in the community has done or knows of a more recent study, please do link to it.
A very good indication that users use geomodifiers in looking up all kinds of local businesses can be seen in the 'related search' results at the bottom of Google's SERPs. For example, If I just look up 'plumbers', the related search results are returning me 8 suggested terms 3 of which contain city names. So, that would be something to look into for your client
Sorry not to be able to turn up any really recent data on this. It would certainly be good if someone would do a new study!
-
I talked to GetStat at MozCon this year and believe that they can help you out on this. No guarantees though. 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
-
Anything I can throw money at to get a quick boost?
I run SEO for a multi-location business. Most of our locations are great and others are still ramping. SEO is a long process but we have higher expectations for these stores. While all the normal stuff get going to boost our rankings, is there anything quick I can just throw some money to get a jump start?
Local SEO | | danieldaher0 -
Should I use LocalBusiness schema on my home page or Contact Us page?
I know I should only use Organization schema on one page of my site, but I'm not sure if I should use it on the Home page or use LocalBusiness schema on the home page. I was thinking of adding LocalBusiness schema to home page, Organization schema to About Us page and Corporate Contact Schema to Contact us page. Thoughts? Is there a best practice? I can't seem to find much information on what's best to use where.
Local SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Is using meta refresh as a redirect method bad for our SEO?
Our CMS creates Call-To-Action buttons that use a meta refresh to redirect and MOZ stops it's crawl. The MOZ crawler hits these redirects and is unable to pass to the desired URL and so reports issues. So could this be happening to other crawlers or will most indexing be unaffected by this method? Essentially, is using meta refresh as a redirect method bad for our SEO?
Local SEO | | BLUEvennMOZ0 -
From traction to non existent! What happened to my Photography site and what can I do to fix it?
Aloha guys, To start as I always do with the (awesome) Moz community I wanted to say thanks for the insight! This has to be one of the best online communities and help resource with great positive and concise help that really makes a difference, so many thanks everyone! PS I also do my best to relay what I learn here to fellow business owners and point them to SEO boosting avenues to help support the community as much as possible. Anyways... **My Photo website ** **Current top wedding website (I do enjoy her work!!!) ** Attached below is a link to some stats/graphs! The Problem! After the recent Google update last month I've had a drop in my site visibility from 5.8% and some change to now .7% of search volume.. Painful for my photo & video business here on Kauai to say the least. A few images are attached, is there also any correlations you guys can see or think may help to get my site up to the first page? I know we deliver some of the very best work here on the island and deliver great service too, its a bummer that we cant do more for folks visiting here that dont even know we exist! The question! Do you guys have any ideas on what can be done to get my page to gaining organic traction and doing great again? My goal is to have our business rank for Kauai Wedding Videographer, Kauai Wedding Photographer, and Kauai Family Photographer! My moz dashboard is still saying we're on the way for that but that my search visibility is way way down. Any clarity or ideas are greatly appreciated you guys! I would love to relay this to the wedding community as well! Warmest aloha from Kauai everybody and have a great day! NjELT NjELT
Local SEO | | Trey30 -
How Can i improve Domain "Moz rank and Domain moz trust".
Good Evening , I have few quick questions for you . Please find the attachment . 1.) How can i improve Moz rank and domain Moz trust ? 2.) if you see the numbers , Mine is 0 external links and 0 followed root links domains , How can i work on it to improvise my stats ? 3.) Mine domain is dental clinic ( dentalxyz.net ) , there are other dentalxyz.com and dentalxyz.ca . When i type my my domain name it's shows irrelevant information like other location office. In addition , my youtube channel and facebook name is also different , It's not showing on google search. 4.) I'm trying to upgrade my old nice to new niche. how can i use this moz keyword tool? Where can i use that keywords. 5.) Has anybody tried buying back links from blackhatworld ? Fkmu4am
Local SEO | | hemantt0 -
How can I personalize content based on a state/region? Is it possible?
I'm getting a lot of traffic from different regions throughout the US. I need to personalize the content in my website or on a certain landing page based on the users state/region. Is it possible? For example, forwarding a user that lands on page "x" to page "y" if he's from California and to page "z" if he's from South Carolina. And of course, can this somehow affect my rankings in Google? Thanks!!
Local SEO | | OrendaLtd0 -
When you think you know Google, but realise you don't
I've just typed "Private Investigator" into Google, location set to "Coleshill" (it's near Birmingham!)
Local SEO | | Solid_Web
The search results were surprising:
Position 6: <cite class="_Rm">birmingham-privateinvestigators.co.uk</cite>
Position 8: <cite class="_Rm">privateinvestigator-coventry.co.uk</cite> Both sites are the same source of information altered to suit the city - INCREDIBLY SPAMMY. They are just full of SEO text stuffing. No doubt any city you enter they will appear with [city]-privateinvestigators.co.uk..
How are they ranking with such old-skool dirty SEO tactics? You can't say they will be found eventually, because Google has released algorithm after algorithm updates to penalise sites like this. Could it be the importance of having a local phone number and (supposedly) physical address?0 -
How Can I Outlink Web Designer Link Building from Their Clients' Footer
_I used open site explorer to view the backlinks for a competitor of an agency I work with. They have ten times as many links, if not more, than we do, and I noticed there were only a few more domains linking back to them. As I dug deeper I noticed these links were coming from the footer tag they put on their clients' sites like "Site Designed by __." If a site had 20 pages, they had 20 links back...weird and annoying that it counts. They have more clients for web design than we do, so their bulk linking could continue to outrank us. Any suggestions on how we can outrank them locally? We are in the midst of redesigning our entire site to build out more pages and have much better internal linking. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks everyone!
Local SEO | | Michael4g0