I want to rank a national home page for a local keyword phrase

[virtuance_photography]

Hello -

We are a nationally available brand based in Denver, CO. Our home page currently ranks #8 (used to be 5) for "real estate photography in Denver" -- I want to improve this ranking, but our home page is generalized and not geared toward Denver, CO but to all of our markets. I'm trying to troubleshoot this and have a few ideas....

I would love advice on the best route, or a different route altogether:

1. Create a Denver-specific page -- _will that page compete with my home page that is already ranked in the top ten? _
2. Add the keyword phrase in the image alt attribute
3. Add keyword phrase into the content - need to make sure that viewers realize we are national

I already updated the meta description to say "real estate photography in Denver and beyond"

[MiriamEllis]

Hello There!

Using a rank checking tool set to the zip code of your business, I see you ranking #1 in the local pack and #9 organically for "real estate photographer Denver". Doing the same search from my location in California, I see you ranking #2 in the local pack and #7 organically. In other words, you've already achieved really excellent visibility.

I would question the path of making your homepage more optimized towards Denver, because I'm assuming Denver is only 1/50th of your customer base, if you offer a 50-state service. Right now, with your optimization exactly as it is, Google is still highly favoring your Denver location in the Denver-based-and-modified results. I would feel some concern that overdoing the homepage with Denver would be subtracting from your visibility in other parts of the country. At the same time, if you created a Denver-only page for the website and pointed your GMB listing to it, your local rankings would almost certainly drop as the new landing page wouldn't have the same DA as your homepage.

Your About and Contact pages can act as landing pages, of sorts, for your Denver location, but I still wouldn't advise pointing your local business listings at them. Nor does that seem at all necessary given that you're ranking #1 and #2 locally for this core term.

Rather, if what you're really hoping to do is get more business from Denver clients, I'd leave your website as-is and consider some of the following efforts:

1. Continue to hammer down on reviews. You're already blowing away your local pack competition in this regard, but I'd keep working on this. And keep up the work on Google posts. This is for your local ranking maintenance, of course.

2. For your organic goals, I'd work on links. Explore whatever Denver-based links and linktations you can get. This tutorial might be helpful: https://moz.com/blog/linked-unstructured-citations.

3. I would also work on social outreach within the Denver community, which actually corresponds with point #2.

Hope you'll get some more feedback from the community!