Theory: Local Keywords are Hurting National Rankings?

[Joe.Robison]

I've read a good amount here and in other blog posts about strategies for national brands to rank locally as well with local landing pages, citations, etc.

I have noticed something strange that I'd like to hear if anyone else is running into, or if anyone has a definitive answer for.

I'm looking at a custom business printing company where the products can and are often shipped out of state, so it's a national brand. On each product page, the client is throwing in a few local keywords near where the office is to help rank for local variations.

When looking at competitors that have a lower domain authority, lower volume of linking root domains, less content on the page, and other standard signals, they are ranking nationally better than the client. The only thing they're doing that could be better is bolding and throwing in the page keyword 5-10 times (which looks unnatural). But when you search for keyword + home city, the client ranks better.

My hypothesis is that since the client is optimizing product pages for local keywords as well as national, it is actually hurting on national searches because it's seen as local-leaning business.

Has anyone run into this before, or have a definitive answer?

[Joe.Robison]

Thanks for the response Chris. My assumption is the same as yours in that doing some type of local SEO for just one distinct city shouldn't hurt broad national rankings. The interesting thing about this situation is the competitor site makes no note of any locality at all, they're not trying to scale local rankings nationally - they just don't mention it. While my client's site and a 3rd competitor focus on 1-2 cities and don't do as well as the non-local company. Thanks for your input and hope to continue to hear from others!

[Joe.Robison]

Thanks for your input Miriam, good to hear from your experience of having clients that double as a local shop with ecommerce not being demoted on national rankings.  Good to have your input as another data point!

[ChrisAshton]

It's always hard to say for certain without inspecting to the two domains but it may be that your client is optimised for that one city while the other site is more broad and suggests they have or regularly deal with multiple locations.

Local SEO won't inherently hurt your national search results but if you only have a single location and the entire site seems to focus around that and surrounding suburbs, it would make little sense for search engines to rank you for locations in other areas, especially other states.

Even if the client is limited to a single office, there are plenty of ways to spread their digital presence and begin pushing them up for other locations.

I was going to describe in more detail until I remembered that Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday on this topic about 12 months ago that does a better job of explaining it than I could in a comment. Hope that helps!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Joe,

I won't call this a definitive answer in any way, but, in short, no - I don't believe Local SEO harms national SEO if both are being done with enough strength. I can say, for certain, that I have seen clients with both local shops and e-commerce departments rank well both in the local packs for their physical location and nationally for their products. Neither effort should preclude the other, in my view, and I'm inclined to think there are other factors influencing why your clients is being outranked nationally, but again, I can't say that for certain. I hope you will get more feedback on this, Joe, but wanted to share my own experience with this. It seems to be that if both the local and traditional SEO are strong enough and clean enough, it's quite possible to rank well locally and organically at the same time.