Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
In local SEO, how important is it to include city, state, and state abbreviation in doctitle?
-
I'm trying to balance local geographic keywords with product keywords. I appreciate the feedback from the group!
Michael
-
Hi Michael,
You're welcome. Regarding the use of brand names in title tags, we've had some good discussions of this here in the forum over the years (https://moz.com/community/q/include-site-name-in-page-titles-or-not)
You'll see opinions differ. My personal feeling is that, for a local business, the brand name should definitely be in the title tags on the home, about, contact and reviews page + city landing pages for multi-location businesses. Then, it should be included where you can on other pages (product/service for example). I don't think it's essential for it to be on every single page, but for the sake of branding, I like making room for it where possible. I hope you'll read that discussion I linked to, and you might want to research this further. Great title tags are so important! Worth the research and effort. To that end, I think you'll enjoy this Whiteboard Friday:
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for the detailed response! One follow up question. I see you included the company's name (ex - Progressive) in the tag. How important is it to include the company in the title tag? Many times I'm fighting to save space/characters. Would it be harmful to leave the company name out in order to include product keywords and geographic qualifiers?
Thanks again,
Michael
-
Hi Michael,
Great, thanks for the further details. Okay, so typically, for a single location local business, you're going to have a homepage, about page, contact page, testimonials page and set of pages defining the services the business offers. Multi-location businesses are more complex, but with just a single location, you'll want to be sure that the complete NAP of the business is on every page of the website, either in the masthead or footer. Be sure it's also the first thing on the Contact Us page, too.
While this provides good, strong signals to people and search engines about the locale of the business, it remains a good practice to optimize the title tags with your geo-terms as well. So, for example, let's say your insurance agency (Progressive) is in Oakland and offers fire, health, life, home and renters insurance. You'll have a page for each of these services, and the title tags might read like:
The fire insurance Oakland, CA residents trust most | Progressive
Oakland's most affordable health insurance | Progressive
etc.
Your tags will be better than that, but my point is that there will be variety of language, and that sometimes you may use both city and state names, and sometimes only the city. I don't believe state abbreviations are essential, with one very important exception: if the name of the city you live in occurs in numerous states, definitely do try to work in the state abbreviation when you can. For example, there are apparently 30+ cities called "Franklin" in the U.S. I continuously see Google assuming when I search for something in Fairfax, CA, that I'm actually searching for something in Fairfax, VA. It's very annoying. This tells me that state modifiers are important signals to Google, and so while it may not be necessary to always specify them, if your clients are in cities with analogs, I'd play it safe by including state abbreviations in as many title tags as I could. But, if the client is in San Francisco, it's a safer bet that Google (and searchers) are going to get where you are if you do business there, without the addition of CA to your title tags.
Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions.
-
Thanks Miriam.
Yes, I’m asking about including the city, state, and/or state abbreviation on home or interior pages for local SEO.
I say local because I’m working on an insurance agent and a lawyer website. I’m trying to balance the needs to include both a geographic qualifier and product/service keywords in the <title>to optimize for local searches and map packs.</p> <p>These are both single location businesses with a physical address.</p> <p>Thanks again!</p> <p>Michael</p></title>
-
Hi Michael!
Would you be able to provide a bit more context here so the community can fine-tune its suggestions? Are you asking about including these terms in your title tag for a local business website? If so, which pages of the site? What is the goal of the page you're optimizing? What is the business model (single location local business, multi-location local business, virtual business?). The more detail you can provide, the better of an answer you should receive here. Thanks!
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's your proudest accomplishment in regards to SEO?
After many years in the industry, you come to realize a few things. One of of the biggest pain points for us at web daytona was being able to give clients a quick keyword ranking cost estimation. After multiple trial and error and relying on API data from one of the most reliable SEO softwares in our industry, we were able to develop an SEO tool that allows us to quickly and accurately get the estimated cost for a given keyword (s) using multiple variables. Most agencies can relate to that story. It’s something my colleagues and I at Web Daytona have been through before. Finding the cost and amount of time needed to rank for a keyword is a time consuming process. That’s why it’s a common practice to sell SEO packages of 5-10 keywords for about $1000-2000 / month. The problem is not all keywords are equally valuable, and most clients know this. We constantly get questions from clients asking: “how much to rank for this specific keyword?” It’s difficult to answer that question with a pricing model that treats the cost of ranking every keyword equally. So is the answer to spend a lot more time doing tedious in-depth keyword research? If we did we could give our clients more precise estimates. But being that a decent proposal can take as long as 2-5 hours to make, and agency life isn’t exactly full of free time, that wouldn’t be ideal. That’s when we asked a question. What if we could automate the research needed to find the cost of ranking keywords? We looked around for a tool that did, but we couldn’t find it. Then we decided to make it ourselves. It wasn’t going to be easy. But after running an SEO agency for over a decade, we knew we had the expertise to create a tool that wouldn’t just be fast and reliable, it would also be precise. Fast forward to today and we’re proud to announce that The Keyword Cost Estimator is finally done. Now we’re releasing it to the public so other agencies and businesses can use it too. You can see it for yourself here. Keyword-Rank-Cost-Ectimator-Tool-by-Web-Daytona-Agency.png
Local Website Optimization | | WebDaytona0 -
How many SEO clients do you handle?
I work in a small web & design agency who started offering SEO 2 yrs ago as it made sense due to them building websites. There have been 2 previous people to me and I now work there 3 days a week and they also have a junior who knew nothing before she started working for us. She mainly works for me. My question is, how many clients do you think would be reasonable to work on? We currently have around 55 and I have been working there for nearly 5 months now and haven't even got to half of the sites to do some work on. I've told them the client list is way too big and we should only have around 15 clients max. However they don't want to lose the money from the already paying clients so won't get rid of any and keep adding new ones Their systems were a mess and had no reporting or useful software so I had to investiagte and deploy that, along with project management software. Their analytics is also a mess and have employed a contractor to help sort that out too. It's like they were offering SEO services but had no idea or structure to what they did. Meta descriptions were cherry picked which ones to be done, so say 50/60 on a site not filled in. So it's not like I have 45 or so well maintained accounts. They're all a mess. Then the latest 10 new ones are all new sites so All need a lot of work. I'm starting to feel incredibly overwhelmed and oppressed by it all and wanted to see what other SEO professionals thought about it. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | hanamck0 -
How to Do Local Keyword Research
I am familiar with how to do regular keyword research, finding opportunity based on competition, search volume, etc. For local search, do I go to all the trouble of finding hidden gems or just pick higher volume terms that have local intent. For instance: A search for "physical therapy" is a high volume term that Google thinks has local intent. If i pick a low volume national term, that has 11-50 avg searches per month, I have lower chances...and even less chance that someone is searching locally. What say ye? Nails
Local Website Optimization | | matt.nails0 -
301 or 302 Redirects with locale URLs?
Hi Mozers, I have a bit of a tricky question I need some help answering. My agency are building a brand new website for a client of ours which means changing the domain name (yay...). So! I have my 301's all ready to go for the UK locale, however, the issue I have is that the site will also eventually have French, German and Spanish locales - but these won't be ready to go until later this year. We will be launching in just English for September. The current site already has the French and German locales on it as well. Just to make sure I'm being clear, the site will be www.example.com for launch, but by lets say November, we will also have a www.example.com/fr/ and www.example.com/de/ site launched too. So what do I do with the locale URLs? As I said above, the exisitng site already has the French and German locales on it, so I don't particularly want to redirect the /fr/ and /de/ URLs to the English homepage, as I will want to redirect them to the new URLs in November, and redirecting more than once is bad for SEO right? Any ideas? Would 302s maybe be the best suggestion? Thanks! Virginia
Local Website Optimization | | Virginia-Girtz1 -
Is it worth it having different cities in your footer, each with a separate page?
I have been looking at the website of local web design companies and every single one in my area has a footer with links to a separate page for that local city. This seems like a bad idea to me, but everyone in the local pack has it. Does it work?
Local Website Optimization | | EcommerceSite0 -
Subdomain for ticketing of a client website (how to solve SEO problems caused by the subdomain/domain relationship)
We have a client in need of a ticketing solution for their domain (let's call it www.domain.com) which is on Wordpress - as is our custom ticket solution. However, we want to have full control of the ticketing, since we manage it for them - so we do not want to build it inside their original Wordpress install. Our proposed solution is to build it on tickets.domain.com. This will exist only for selling and issuing the tickets. The question is, is there a way to do this without damaging their bounce rate and SEO scores?
Local Website Optimization | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing
Since customers will come to www.domain.com, then click the ticketing tab and land on tickets.domain.com, Google will see this as a bounce. In reality, customers will not notice the difference as we will clone the look and feel of domain.com Should we perhaps have the canonical URL of tickets.domain.com point to www.domain.com? And also, can we install Webmaster Tools for tickets.domain.com and set the preferred domain as www.domain.com? Are these possible solutions to the problem, or not - and if not, does anyone else have a viable solution? Thank you so much for the help.0 -
Local SEO: City & County Pages
I'm working on developing some local pages for an HVAC company. They cover two counties, so I was planning on having two county pages, then linking them to individual city pages to keep the menu simpler and not cluttering it up with a couple dozen city pages for people to slog through. Has anybody ever done county pages before for local SEO? Or at least seen them? Just curious to see if there's any real benefit overall for have separate county pages, or if I should just stick to city pages.
Local Website Optimization | | ChaseMG0 -
Is translating my SEO meta data to new languages worthwhile?
When translating a website to additional languages, is it recommended, for Google SEO purposes, that the keywords, re-written URLs, meta titles and meta descriptions of each page be translated as well; or have those elements been completely depreciated?
Local Website Optimization | | sptechnologies0