Getting Schooled in Local by 'Lesser' Brands?
-
Hi Moz!
First question I've asked here. I've been working on campaign for my company (regional solar installation company in Northeast USA) for close to 7 years, we've always done well in local search but recently have noticed sites that, for lack of a better word, we 'school' in terms of all the usual metrics - better/more consistent local listings, better domain strength, better backlink profile, bigger company (in the real world), brand recognition, etc...
However recently we have started seeing smaller competitors beat us in state-specific rankings, using stuff I would call 'old school' SEO that is no longer really tolerated, in theory - stuffing keywords onto page, keywords in domain, etc... domains of much less strength pulling #1 or #2 terms.
Based on data I don't actually think keywords like "solar + state name" are actually that powerfully but frankly it is bit embarrassing to get crushed by 1-2 person companies when you have a 150+ company with a three-person in-house digital marketing team. My strategy so far has consisted of building a better Google review solicitation process, adding schema markup to our project gallery, and some SEO 101 stuff like reworking keywords and title tags.
I've noticed a strong uptick on our site of leads from outside our territory (like folks from all across the USA who are NOT in our service territory) - I'm almost thinking I've done 'too good' a job of building a nationally relevant website and not enough state-specific options.
Has anyone ever experienced something like this? Any clever strategies beyond the obvious?
Can share more specifics if it'll be helpful.
Cheers,
Fred -
To pat myself on the back a bit, one of the cleverest things I think we did was set up a project gallery map that has indexable pages for each town where we've installed a solar project, replete with URL, title, meta tag, etc. e.g. https://www.revisionenergy.com/solar-projects/shelburne-new-hampshire/
These rank well for any of the town name + state searches, for the state level searches we are not as present as we'd like / used to be. We have pages like these to highlight our various locations (a local SEO play) - https://www.revisionenergy.com/locations/brentwood-nh-solar-showroom/
We tried to make state-specific solar guides, e.g. https://www.revisionenergy.com/locations/go-solar-in-new-hampshire/ however these seemed to perform less well (were poorly indexed and don't rank).
-
Yes, where I think this gets interesting is for players like ourselves let's say 'regional players' who are NOT major brands with massive marketing resources OR the super small 2-person company. In actuality we do actually offer a superior customer experience and resources than the small company has - and we actually probably have installed more local projects than the other company (which is why I recently set up schema metadata markup for Google to index our project map for local projects - perhaps that helps show that we are 'hyper local' even if our physical location is 25 miles away).
We used to completely dominate/crush these rankings but even in organic SERPS - not the local pack - we are being beaten by completely inferior sites I think because they 'read' more local than ours, even though it has a much deeper level of resources and a stronger brand. It's a challenging place to be - smaller than the big companies so not armed with those resources, but with substantially more overhead than the smaller companies and a legitimately superior customer experience.
But in the end as Robert said I think we're going to continue to focus on the key drivers of business (with all this said our web results and traffic are up) so losing a few spots in hyperlocal queries here and there does not stress me out tremendously.
-
Fred,
I have found that on local search smaller companies have an advantage over larger companies. Why? Local evens the playing field. These smaller companies have a strong presence in their communities and Google knows this. Remember Google's number 1 goal is to produce the most relevant information to its users for any given search.
So if a 2 man solar company is a block away from Bill who is searching for "Free Solar Panels...local city" The 2 man shop is more relevant to the search then the company 50 miles away but services the area in which Bill lives.
I think this is a trend that is going to be deeply rooted into the new mobile first approach. It clearly levels the playing field!
-
I understand your dilemma.
I think Robert's advice is excellent, but it's still worth thinking about why those other firms are beating you in the SERPS. I find that a tremendous amount of SEO and social media advice is relevant only for Fortune 500 companies. The only way to find out what works for me, and for my clients, is to take their advice with a grain of salt. Test what works for me.
What if you tried developing landing pages for your 5 biggest markets using somewhat old school methods? Not black hat but keywords in url, titles, alt tags, etc? See what happens.
-
Please do. And let them know I have been doing marketing for over 25 years. One thing you might show them is that you are focusing on:
-
Keywords that bring the most value to the company
-
Business types that bring the most value to the company
-
Customer/Client types that bring the most value to the company.
Early in any agency relationship and often before we even agree to engage we ask clients what parts of their businesses are the ones that make them the most money or move their strategy the farthest forward? We regularly find companies caught up in selling product that is well known and costs them $2 to make and that they lose a dollar on every time they sell one. Those same companies have other products that cost them a nickel and take little time or energy or manpower to deliver yet make them a lot of money. I would rather help them sell those!
Best -
-
Ha ha, you know what Robert, that is what I've been trying to tell all the stakeholders who have been quizzing me on this, "Why worry about what they're doing when OUR results are good and we're moving the needle." I'm going to quote you on that if you don't mind
- Fred
-
Fred,
I enjoyed your query here because it is something we have all faced either ourselves or when doing client work. NOTE: That your query is about Local but you immediately go to a State + KW which is not a Local issue. What you are doing in this respect is very good and keep it up. I will tell you a couple of things that we don't talk about as much that I think are very helpful as well: A quality meta description (please no one tell me about it not being part of the algorithm) helps you in that it brings traffic to the site. I stress with our team that you must always "answer the searcher's query" in the meta desc. Another key item is the URL structure in my opinion. If Solar Installation is important for ranking for you, I am going to do my best to have a URL with that early in the structure. But...
I think you answered yourself a bit when you said, "Based on data I don't actually think keywords like "solar + state name" are actually that powerfully but frankly it is bit embarrassing to get crushed by 1-2 person companies when you have a 150+ company with a three-person in-house digital marketing team." I would say a search for Texas Solar Installation would be worthless in Houston, TX. People don't search that way on the whole.
But the bigger thing is worrying about what the other guy is doing / where they are ranking and how many resources she or he has. I have had clients drive me up the wall because, "XYZ company is ranking above them for these 10 terms... " What is hilarious is the one that stands out the most was a large regional firm that we helped increase traffic, recover from huge Penguin issues, and increase revenues by double digits year over year and they could only focus on rankings for KW's.
I urge you to focus more on what you are doing and what business results you are achieving than worrying over where Bobs Solar truck ranks against you for Michigan Solar Guru.
Best
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
-
National services provider and localized SEO (no physical stores)
Doing work for a telecom provider who operates in over 25 states. They are not trying to drive traffic to their brick-and-mortar stores. They want their marketing website to show products/services/pricing dynamically when a user enters their zip code. Previously, we could not show this until the shopper was already in the purchase flow that began with their serviceable address. They want to move these location-based details more forward in the shopping experience. They would likely have a "default" zip and set of services/pricing displaying until a user changes their location. My question is how does Google treat local SEO on a site where all location-targeted content is dynamic? Will the website suffer in localized search, when a shopper, say, in Colorado, wants to search for Internet providers? Is it better to have distinct landing pages for each territory with services/pricing?
Local SEO | | sprydigital0 -
Outbound Links for Local SEO
I am working on building an area guide page for a local hotel website. The hotel itself has a lot to offer in forms of on-site entertainment and they are concerned about sending people away from their website (and their business). However, it's also important to write about the area and local attractions in close proximity to their hotel for many reasons, including building local authority. Is there any benefit to adding links to the Google My Business/map listing of the local attractions? Or can we just simply not include external links?
Local SEO | | triveraseo2 -
What is the best SEO tool for tracking local rankings
Hi Can anyone recommend what they think the best tool is to track local rankings. I want to manage several small businesses' visibility and I am not sure which one is the best. I have been told that "Bright local" and "SEO PowerSuite" are the best in the business. Is that true? or is there something better out there Thanks
Local SEO | | coolhandluc0 -
Local Search - Google Mobile Results (Web&App)
Hi, I have a client with multiple locations. One of the locations manager is searching for branded and non-branded keywords on his mobile phone and not able to locate the business (within the parking lot of the location). Our ranking reports via a local search platform and manual checks indicate the location is actually ranking well. and we're seeing progress in GA. Has anyone deal with something like this before? This is a location that recently opened to the public. The concern is around mobile web and app results. I'm looking for some guidance around how to approach the situation. I'm sorry I cannot provide more details on the client.
Local SEO | | burnseo0 -
How to globalize your brand if the name contains a geo-location modifier?
Hi Moz community,_**[Posting for one of our staff members 🙂 ] **_One of our clients has difficulty attracting a national and international market potentially due to their brand name including a geo-location modifier. We believe that it may be a combination of search engine algorithms incorrectly assuming that the brand is location specific as well as human users perceiving this. I can't reveal the brand but a similar example may be "Houston Cheese-makers". This company wants to attract national and international customers and not be restricted to just Houston. It appears that both search engines and human users are understanding the brand to be limited just to Houston. The client does not want to re-brand. The brand also has a Google Plus Local entity verified against their headquarters location in Houston. We have considered the following tasks to help alleviate this restriction: Changing site messaging to include modifiers such as "national", "USA" and "international" (title-tags, meta-descriptions, on-page text etc). Including a testimonial page that has testimonials from multiple international locations (eg "Joe Blogs from Sydney, Australia says..."). Changing the title tag format site-wide from "page-name | Houston Cheese-makers" to an abbreviated version such as "page-name | HCM" or "page-name | H Cheese-makers". Schema tags - is there any specific tags that can send a signal about the global presence of the brand? What other techniques can help alleviate this problem? Is the Google Plus Local page potentially hampering this as well? Has anyone had a similar experience and can shed some light?Thanks so much!
Local SEO | | AriNahmani0 -
Question about Multi-Locale/Lang Sitemaps
If you have one site with multiple language and locale variations how best should one approach the sitemaps. Here is what I believe the options to be: sitemap_index.xml which includes all of the difference lang/locale sitemaps on the site create 1 main sitemap that includes the rel=alternate href lang for ever alternate page to the main US version. Do the sitemap_index.xml for all the other sitemaps and also include the rel=alternate href lang in those separate ones as well. I have these in this order because it goes from least to most work....Thoughts folks?
Local SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Any Notable Change in Google's Location Based Results?
I've noticed with many of our clients that when searching for general terms, with obvious local intent, that Google assumes you are in the nearest metro area rather than the specific locality. Anyone else noticed this? Example: I have an HVAC client who has ranked a solid #1 for "HVAC Repairs" since January - if the user was in the small town we were targeting (Wake Forest) since January. However, now Google assumes users in this town are in the nearby metro area (Raleigh), and displays local and organic results for Raleigh instead of Wake Forest. I first noticed this change in mid-May. From what I've read about the Nov Hummingbird update, I don't see that playing a direct role. Any insight?
Local SEO | | Rusty_Shackleford0 -
If you have a product on your site that's only available in the US, is there a way to avoid it leading to a 404 error if a user in Canada accesses it?
A client has some products on their site that are only available in Canada. When a user in the US accesses the product listing, it results in a 404 error page. Are there any work-arounds for something like this? Thanks in advance!
Local SEO | | DA20130