How do I not mess up a national seo strategy? All advice appreciated in advance!
-
Hello Moz Friends
So I have always worked on local seo, websites, and digital brand management.
But one of my clients wants to go national. They sell building materials and the competition is pretty fierce.
So here is my question and I thank you in advance for any advice:
How do I not mess up a national seo strategy, based on local seo efforts?
So for an example, say I put the NAP in the footer, but my client sells to 49 states, will this hurt a national campaign?
And on the opposite, would getting local links from say construction websites in California, if my NAP is from Florida, hurt or help?
I understand that most of this is seo 101, but I am so used to local seo, that I don't want to cause national issues by doing something local.
Thank you again Moz Friends
"Have a Positive Day"
Chris
-
Hey Chris
The main issue here is going to be authority - you could structure this perfectly and still see no dice with ranking these location / service pages. Factor in no location signals and this could be super difficult.
I would look to learn from the sites that already rank well in terms of structure and if the client is gung-ho to do this despite all the caveats then set up a few locations and get some ranking data.
You can then at least get an idea where these pages will sit. Remember though - we have no location signals so you are basically ranking these as location pages and all the unique content in the world will likely not get you over the authority hurdle here.
Ultimately you have to start small, do some testing and measure as you go.
Hope that helps.
Marcus -
Wow Marcus I hope to be at the level of knowledge that you are on day! Simply amazing answer.
So my client is local with one address for the main office where they ship the building materials anywhere in the U.S.
They have a network of contractors all across the same region who will in terms use the materials to build houses and garages etc. so most people will search for Garage Kits and then see my client also builds them.
So my fear is to limit the proper seo. But not sure if I add categories like website (Dot) com/garages/California would benefit a national level campaign, or if I keep the site/garages but add another silo of pages such as site/service-areas/California
of course I know that every page must be unique. It's not plug and play state and city names.
But I'm not sure which approach is better because do I need the specific modifiers like the item being sold, Garages, then the state. Or if the search engines are smart enough to know that we have products and our service area pages designate the areas?
but then look at craiglist, you have the city first then the categories.
I just don't want to mess anything up. I have complete freedom to do whatever I need to do.
I am here though as I know some of the best people in the world are in the Moz community!
Thank you again Marcus your awesome!
-
Hey Chris
The very first step here is to determine what is realistically achievable. Maybe if I give you some leading questions you can work through these and get a better handle on how to play this.
1. Are they a local business? If so - are you only targeting local results currently?
2. Do they only have a single physical location?
3. Are the results primarily for local businesses? Is this true if the keywords are used with and without location modifiers? ("buiding materials birmingham", & just "building materials")
4. What kind of companies are listed in the results? Big brands? Local businesses with a single location? National companies with multiple locations? Online players that play nationally?
I am in Birmingham, UK and have just done a few searches for 'building materials' and 'building materials birmingham'.
When I add a location the results are all for local companies as expected. These seem to be individual building suppliers and for larger chains with multiple locations. Even the larger chains seem to mention that they are the 'local' supplier and really push the fact they have a location that is local to the customer.
If I search for just 'building materials' I do still see local results, organic results for large multi location businesses and a few national online players.
I see a few national players so I would be looking to get a handle on the top three that mirror what your client is trying to achieve here. Get the domain authority and page authority and link profiles of these three players to get some figures behind what you are doing here. I would be looking at OSE, Majestic, aHrefs etc and pooling all that data together and comparing to where your client is currently. This is never as scientific as we would like but it gives you some figures to use in estimating just how much work would be involved here. Really dig into those link profiles to get a feel for what you will need to do here. Look what other advertising these big players do. Consider offline activities as well. TV? Radio? If you are in the US then this may be a much bigger market than the UK so again factor that in - the wider the market the larger the competition.
I would be looking to propose a strategy based on the available metrics to my client. Whether that means using the current site and building on that or setting up a new site or even getting local distribution centres. We can do our research and use the search engine results to help us determine what a realistic strategy may look like.
So you want to know:
- Situation - Where are we currently?
- Competition - What does the competition look like?
- Objectives - Where do want to be?
- Strategy - How are we going to get there?
- Tactics - How specifically are we going to do what we need to get where need to be (link building strategies etc)
- Controls - How will we measure success? What is our timeline here?
Simply put there are a lot of moving parts here and our job as consultants is to help the client understand the often herculean effort involved in being a national player. If you can give them a rough idea of what you think it will take based on some facts and figures you can design a campaign and manage their expectations.
Another consideration is whether you can be a local business and national business? well you can but it may make things confusing from a messaging perspective so you likely need to get that sorted first. I may even be tempted to look at splitting this out but I would always try to be led by the research.
I think it is really super important to know what is required and to explain that whilst this is not a perfect science these metrics give us an idea what needs to be done. From that a campaign can be designed to help the client get where they need to be and to move from a small local business to a national player may be something that needs to be tackled over 1, 3 or even 5 years. Let the data guide you.
Hope that helps - as ever there are no easy answers but don't be afraid to tell your client this. If you can shine a light on the path they can determine if they want to walk it.
Cheers
Marcus
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
-
Entities and SEO
How do you find the correct words (entities) to explain an entity ? The words (entities) that go together within a sentence seem to be based on the specific corpus (the keyword you want to rank ) and when they are million of results it seems impossible to find what word / entity is going to explain the entity / concept I want to explain. It seems that I got a better chance at the lottery 🙂 a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Do you have any advice or software that could parse and find the words that co-occure the most often out of millions of results !! Thank you,0 -
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
SEO Strategy - Content/Outreach/Links
Hi everyone I'm trying to prioritise my tasks for 2018 & wondered if anyone had any useful templates they use? In terms of SEO tasks, my priority was going to be content/outreach/links - Focusing on user guides/blogs onsite Then outreach articles/some PR that doesn't go against Google guidelines offsite. My struggle with the onsite content/blogs we produce is we have no real social media plan/manager so my content outreach always seems hampered by this. I've tried taking on some of the social stuff, but this ends up being too much for just me to do. I wondered if there were any other SEOs who face this issue and who have found some good solutions? I'm stuck in a bit of a rut and can't seem to effectively push forward with outreach/content writing. Thank you Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Robots.txt advice
Hey Guys, Have you ever seen coding like this in a robots.txt, I have never seen a noindex rule in a robots.txt file before - have you? user-agent: AhrefsBot User-agent: trovitBot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eLab_London
User-agent: Nutch
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: / User-agent: *
Disallow: /WebServices/
Disallow: /*?notfound=
Disallow: /?list=
Noindex: /?*list=
Noindex: /local/
Disallow: /local/
Noindex: /handle/
Disallow: /handle/
Noindex: /Handle/
Disallow: /Handle/
Noindex: /localsites/
Disallow: /localsites/
Noindex: /search/
Disallow: /search/
Noindex: /Search/
Disallow: /Search/
Disallow: ? I have never seen a noindex rule in a robots.txt file before - have you?
Any pointers?0 -
Ajax website and SEO
Hi all, A client of mine has a website similar to Pintrest. All in Ajax/. So imagine an ajax-grid based animal lover site called domain.com. The domain has three different Categories Cats, Dogs, Mice. When you click on a category, the site doesn't handle the URL and doesn't change the domain So instead of the domain going from domain.com to domain.com/cats, it uses the Ajax script and just shows all the cat pins. and when you click on each pin/post it opens a page such as domain.com/Pin/123/PostTitle It doesn't reference the category. However a page domain.com/cats does exist and you can go there directly. Is this an SEO issue for not grouping all pins under a category? How does Google handle Ajax these days, it use to be real bad but if Pintrest is going so well i'm assuming times have changed? Any other things to be wary of for a grid based/ajax site? I am happy to pay for an hour or two for a more in depth audit/tips if you can feed back on the above. Fairly urgent. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero1 -
Duplicate content mess
One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
SEO Provider
At the risk of opening the flood gates, I'm posting this in hopes of finding a SEO provider on this site. I'm currently a member, and have learned a lot through this site, but I'm still having issues ranking higher. Because of this, I have come to the conclusion that I need a dedicated SEO company/professional who can help our company reach the next level. I'm open to suggestions of companies that you have used, or please feel free to throw your hat into the ring. Thanks in advance! AW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheCTC0 -
Hiring an SEO company
I usually do SEO myself but now its time to move on to getting on with running the business. I have found a fantastic PPC company who ONLY focus on PPC and am looking for same but for SEO. Must be based in UK and have a great portfolio of mid/large tier companies with some real life stats to back them up. Pricing must be clear and transaparent. Results must be measurable. How would you find such a company? Ironically searching on Google doesn't seem to produce the right results 😞 Alastair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alastairc0