How to compete with business names and urls that include location?
-
I have several instances of competitor businesses that rank high in the local pack while I'm struggling to get in there at all. Here's a specific example: Keyword is "name-of-town chiropractor" and the competitor business name is "name-of-town chiropractic".
Google doesn't seem to exclude "name-of-town" because these businesses don't rank the same if you search for only "chiropractor" However, search volume for "name-of-town chiropractor" is significantly high!
I'd really appreciate some input on this.
Thanks so much in advance,
Jarod
-
My great pleasure, and yes, report those listings!
-
Thanks, this is really helpful. I advised the client over a year ago that we should not stuff his website and profiles with "city name" because it won't benefit in the long–term.
I know that two of these competitors don't actually have the city name in their official business name, so maybe it's time to report them.
Thanks again, I sincerely appreciate your response.
-
Hi Jarod!
What you're experiencing is quite real, and one of the things I personally view as a lack of sophistication in Google's algo. While one can argue that a business named Boston Chiropractor is certainly signalling that they do chiropractic work in Boston, thereby signalling relevance to a query like "chiropractor boston", a business name doesn't automatically equal superiority/authority. So, yes, it can be frustrating when it appears that Google is heavily weighting this signal in a given local pack. Barring changing your business name, here's what you can do:
-
Check any competitor to be sure that the name they are using on their GMB listing is, indeed, their legal business name. Does it match the logo on their website or have they added the city name to Google even though it doesn't exist in their real world business name? If you discover that they have falsely added a geo-term to the business name, report this to Google as a guideline violation. But, if their legal name or DBA genuinely does include that geo-term, then they are guideline-compliant and there isn't anything you can do to overcome this particular ranking factor. But...
-
Bearing in mind that this is only one of several hundred signals Google is believed to take into account in determining rankings, you need to focus on all of the other signals where you can compete on an even playing field. For example, how do you stack up to the folks outranking you in terms of:
-
Age
-
Website Authority (content quality and velocity + links)
-
Website optimization (both traditional and local SEO)
-
Number of Google-based reviews
-
Completeness of your Google listing (particularly photos that generate high click-throughs)
-
Consistency of your citations across the major players (do a quick check on moz.com/local/search)
-
Authority and quantity of your unstructured citations (mentions on local/industry news sites, website, blogs, etc.)
This is a really simplified list. You'll find a more thorough one here: https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist
You'll need to compete on all of these things, because you can't compete on a somewhat arbitrary factor like the name of your business. Audit your competitors and audit your own presence and see where you can make meaningful improvements that might move the needle up a notch or two.
Good luck! I know the scenario is a tough one - and it's the very one that is causing untold numbers of businesses to spam their GMB business titles with false geo-terms, because it's clear that Google continues to place emphasis on this signal. It could change at some point, but in the meantime, we have to pick the battles we can win, and for a business in your scenario, that would include the hundreds of other factors Google takes into consideration.
-
-
Google can tell how far away you are via your ISP IP address examples Comcast something like that and if you're on a mobile device they can measure distance from the person to the chiropractor's office. What's important is that you Optimize or chiropractic work and make sure that you use a tool like moz local this will get you into the universal services. I would also recommend a site audit to make sure everything is running smooth & googlebot not being blocked.
You can also use schema as well as on page signals to let Google know where you are located. Also fill out my business on Google.
I really don't think that the URL is going to make that much of a difference it may have a small part to play but if your site is better off my list you're going to win if you have more authority or if you're closer they could just be closer
hope it helps,
tom
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
-
What Should We Do to Fix Crawled but Not Indexed Pages for Multi-location Service Pages?
Hey guys! I work as a content creator for Zavza Seal, a contractor out of New York, and we're targeting 36+ cities in the Brooklyn and Queens areas with several services for home improvement. We got about 340 pages into our multi-location strategy targeting our target cities with each service we offer, when we noticed that 200+ of our pages were "Crawled but not indexed" in Google Search Console. Here's what I think we may have done wrong. Let me know what you think... We used the same page template for all pages. (we changed the content and sections, formatting, targeted keywords, and entire page strategy for areas with unique problems trying to keep the user experience as unique as possible to avoid duplicate content or looking like we didn't care about our visitors.) We used the same featured image for all pages. (I know this is bad and wouldn't have done it myself, but hey, I'm not the publisher.) We didn't use rel canonicals to tell search engines that these pages were special made for the areas. We didn't use alt tags until about halfway through. A lot of the urls don't use the target keyword exactly. The NAP info and Google Maps embed is in the footer, so we didn't use it on the pages. We didn't use any content about the history or the city or anything like that. (some pages we did use content about historic buildings, low water table, flood prone areas, etc if they were known for that) We were thinking of redoing the pages, starting from scratch and building unique experiences around each city, with testimonials, case studies, and content about problems that are common for property owners in the area, but I think they may be able to be fixed with a rel canonical, the city specific content added, and unique featured images on each page. What do you think is causing the problem? What would be the easiest way to fix it? I knew the pages had to be unique for each page, so I switched up the page strategy every 5-10 pages out of fear that duplicate content would start happening, because you can only say so much about for example, "basement crack repair". Please let me know your thoughts. Here is one of the pages that are indexed as an example: https://zavzaseal.com/cp-v1/premier-spray-foam-insulation-contractors-in-jamaica-ny/ Here is one like it that is crawled but not indexed: https://zavzaseal.com/cp-v1/premier-spray-foam-insulation-contractors-in-jamaica-ny/ I appreciate your time and concern. Have a great weekend!
Local SEO | | everysecond0 -
New business / content marketing
Hi all SEO experts, if a website is brand new, so published in the last 3 months- new domain name and website design. We have rebranded recently, using a new domain as entered new business partnership, there doesn’t seem to be much guidance on this at all, from various SEO websites, so our question is would you delay publishing new blog posts / content marketing as frequently because the company website is brand new? So would SEO’s decrease the frequency of publication of blog posts, because the website is new? Or perhaps it does not matter, and would still post every week as you would if the website has been live for a long time? So, in nutshell, what we are wondering is, is the “Google Sandbox” still in use?
Local SEO | | Ryan070 -
What markup/schema is "responsible" for location pin in mobile rich snippets?
Howdy, Saw this new(?) feature in mobile rich snippets (attached here). Anyone knows what part of schema (or whatever else) is making this appear? P.S. From all responses, and some thinking, it looks like the answer would be "who knows", as usual with Google. But most likely it would be related to usual LocalBusiness addressLocality itemprop. 0739Z5v
Local SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
How valuable is non-local organic traffic for local business?
Hey friends! I work for a local digital marketing agency in Greenville, SC – serving primarily local small businesses. Over the past six months, we've increased our monthly organic traffic by almost 100%. The majority of this traffic is coming to blogs we've written over the past year on industry topics and trends. I love seeing our traffic increase, but it hasn't necessarily translated to more quality leads. Conversion numbers have largely remained the same. I think one reason is that a lot of this traffic isn't local. Here's my question: as a local business, how valuable is content that ranks well and drives organic traffic, when the traffic isn't local, and from users we would never work with? A lot of this content has earned links and grown our authority, so I suppose we've seen benefit, but I'm struggling to convince myself that it's really that valuable. I know local content is key, but it feels like what we want to educate on isn't searched locally. Would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks!
Local SEO | | brooksmanley3 -
Domain Name Length "wiggle room"
So the general idea for domain names is around to keep it around 15 characters, but I'm considering getting a mycitywebdesign.com type domain specific to my location and it's 23 characters. No hyphens. The original site hasn't had any seo work on it, so the original won't lose any progress. What suggestions/experience do you have with this type of situation? Thanks in advance!
Local SEO | | blakewenloe0 -
Franchise Business: In competition with... itself!
I manage SEO for a franchise business that has multi-point markets like Toronto, where several locations are competing with one another for visibility. Assuming Google wants to give preferential treatment to businesses that are putting effort and energy into their unique website landing pages and their Google My Business pages, the exercise is like whack-a-mole. Put effort into giving visibility and ranking priority to one, another one gets upset. Also, it just so happens that the business is a competitive market (automotive repair) and so Google wants to show variety in search results; i.e. multiple businesses offering repair services in a given area. It tends to select one of four locations for a given multi-point market for the brand, which makes three out of four franchise owners upset. Anyone run into this before? I'm just trying to balance out the effort so that each of the locations gets equal visibility, but alas I have no control over what Google decides to display as the authoritative result for the geographical area. Looking for suggestions on how to manage client expectations and explain this issue properly. Anything I am missing?
Local SEO | | Treefrog_SEO0 -
I am ranking for local broad terms, but I am not ranking when geo-modifier is included.
I have noticed that my rankings for broad terms have dramatically improved in the area I service. But, when I put the broad term in my search query with a geo-modifier I notice I am still not ranking even though my domain authority and page authority is higher than the competitor who is ranking. Why might this be? I am not penalized, or have a manual action. I am also featured in more hyperlocal niche directories.
Local SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
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