Do references to neighborhoods and local attractions in body copy provide any benefit to geographic rankings for the city in which those neighborhoods/attractions exist?

[Mjesse]

A few years ago, some SEOs encouraged the mentioning of local points of interest in the copy of a page to improve localized rankings for the city in question.   The argument was that a page mentioning "Wrigley Field" (in a natural-seeming manner) would be more likely to be ranked for "Chicago" searches.   A similar argument promoted the use of maps (assuming they have a meaningful purpose) because of the neighborhoods, streets, etc mentioned on the map.  Was this ever actually a benefit, and if so is it still?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Mjesse,

I think you can't go wrong removing anything that doesn't seem to make sense on a page. Obviously, I'm not looking at your actual website, but if you are feeling that some content on a page isn't user-centric, then yes, I'd remove it and replace it with something superior for that user group.

[Mjesse]

Thanks, Miriam:

That is absolutely good advice for how to use localized information to make the on-page content and more relevant to actual humans visiting the page -- and naturally our priority should always be the actual human.  So if I were creating this page from scratch and my target audience was similar to what you described, I would not bother mentioning "Disney World" on the Orlando page  because my audience doesn't care about that.

However, I need to decide whether to edit out localized references such as "Disney World" from existing content that already has some fairly good rankings for "Orlando."  (And many similar situations elsewhere in the country).

At the moment, my thinking is that I'll simply move the travelogue text to a different part of the page under a header such as "About the Orlando area," and write more relevant introductory text for the page to display at the top (similar to what you have suggested).  That way, just in case "Disney World" is helping existing rankings for "Orlando" I would not be breaking anything that might be working.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Mjesse,
Great context you've provided, thanks! Now that I've understood the business model better, here's what I would suggest:

I would include this type of hyperlocal content, but I'd be extremely specific. Homeowner needs are going to be different in different communities. I'm being totally speculative here, but let's say your client builds a development meant to appeal to retirees in a moderately-sized city in Florida. You'd be asking yourself the question,"What would our typical purchaser most likely want to be able to do in this city?" You do some research and discover that retirees care most about:

• Distance to medical care including hospitals and pharmacies
• Distance to restaurants
• Distance to affordable grocery shopping
• Distance to golf courses
• Distance to casinos
• Distance to safe walking paths

You then compile a list of a) resources within a short driving distance and b) resources within walking distance that fit these needs. You don't bother with mentioning major attractions (like Disneyworld) that are miles away and may not be go-to resources for this base of retired home buyers. You then work up your list into a couple of paragraphs of travelogue-type writing that explicitly describe the distance to specific medical centers, supermarkets, eateries, golf courses, casinos and nice places to walk that will immediately accessible to anyone buying a home in this development. It will lend to the appeal of the development, and will simultaneously hyperlocalize your content if all of these resources you're mentioning are in a desirable neighborhood or district of a given city.

This approach could have an excellent impact on conversions, but, as far as its impact on actual organic rankings, that remains speculative. It's something you have to sort of suss out in scenarios. So, for example, someone considering moving to Florida finds your page on the housing development so useful that they link to it, spend a lot of time on the page, click on it more from the SERPs because it has an exciting meta description, etc. These things could boost the rankings of the page over time, but I would personally consider that a secondary consideration to making the page so useful that it converts at a high rate.

Does this help?

[Mjesse]

Thanks, Miriam.   Just to clarify, the home builder in this example is not my own company but a client I'm doing some work for.  The company has a presence in a dozen or so major markets, and at each one of these it maintains a permanent sales staff.  They sell directly to home buyers.

Like many companies that do business in multiple locations, they have the challenge of writing meaningful local copy to accompany their listings.   Potential customers might be searching for "new homes in Boston" or "home construction in Orlando," so the objective is to earn rankings for those local place names in connection with a set of real estate keywords.   In pursuit of this, they have previously written content blocks describing each city in a travel guide style -- name-dropping various local attractions associated with that city.  The strategy is clearly to convince Google that the page MUST be about this city because gosh look at all the landmarks, sports teams, etc that it mentions!   My impression is that this  kind of localization strategy DID work at one point in time, but I don't know if it still works.

My inclination is to replace the intro text with something more relevant to the company and how wonderful it's homes are, but I'm afraid to remove the travelogue-style content entirely because it might actually be doing something. I've been trying to research this, but haven't found anything addressing it.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Mjesse,

Great conversation you're having with EGOL, whose advice is always excellent.

The details of your scenario matter a great deal here. If you owned a restaurant, mentioning on the website that you're located 1 minute from the Chicago Children's Museum and have a great kids' menu, or across the street from Adler Planetarium and open for late night food could, indeed, help you to highly localize your content. This could lead to a variety of positives, including either direct or indirect impact on your local-organic rankings, which could, in turn, impact your local pack rankings. These types of landmark/neighborhood-oriented descriptions can also be extremely helpful to visitors to the area.

But, as you are a home builder, what I'd like to understand is the exact nature of your business model. Would you be able to answer a couple of questions:

1. Are you building housing developments and, if so, do they have a staffed office on the property, at least until all of the homes have been sold? Who occupies the office? Your company or a third party? And, do you meet with consumers at this office?

2. Do you sell the homes directly to the consumer, or are you just constructing them?

Please, let me know! This is a very good topic.

[Mjesse]

Right.  We have the homes and their addresses, but were debating internally about the value of adding the additional geographic references.  For example, on the main page of each market we could have a text block directed at people outside of that market that describes the various benefits of living in this particular city -- mentioning whatever museums, zoos or whatever it is most known for.  I've seen that on other sites, but was not sure of it's value.

We also have existing maps showing the locations of the client's various developments, and were considering adding to that map some of these points of interest using a different color marker.  Again, we want this to be beneficial to the human user, but we also want to do what we can to get Google to up our rankings on the geographic front.

[EGOL]

I think that you have a good approach.

If you are a homebuilder then you could get photos of homes in the actual neighborhoods and post them on the website with street address and nearby landmarks.  Doing this will build a portfolio of homes that people can view online or drive-by.

[Mjesse]

Thanks.  In my case, it's a home building company with a presence in multiple markets where it also has strong competition from other home builders.  Some potential customers may already live in these markets while others may be searching from elsewhere because they are planning to move.  So if the market is, say, Des Moines, some searchers living in Des Moines might just search for "new homes" or "home builders."  Meanwhile, people living elsewhere might search "homebuilders in Des Moines."

Either way, I'm hoping to strengthen the "Des Moines" elements by mentioning neighborhood, shopping centers, schools, and touristy places of interest that are in the vicinity of a particular housing development.  This would, of course, always be legitimate information that is good for the user, but my hope is that doing this would improve localized rankings relative to competitors.

[EGOL]

It can be kickass if you are writing for a real estate site or a tourism site or a site about the local community.

If you are writing a page for a welding service in Chicago it will probably not be as valuable.

If your service is all about the city of Chicago, these words on the page make your page relevant for the city.  They support the fact that you wrote unique information for the page and probably know a bit about the area.  They can also combine with other words on the page to bring in long tail traffic.

The most important thing to know before you do this, is that these words need to be incorporated into information that is valuable for your visitor and they engage the content.  It might keep visitors on your page longer, cause they to share the page.  This is why you don't want to hire an oaf to produce these pages.  They gotta be good.

This stuff will not produce miracles.  You gotta have a good site that is valuable to visitors.