Unsolved Are my local pages watering down my website?
-
We operate in multiple cities, and for a number of years, have (mostly successfully) targeted each city with its own landing page. But lately Im seeing these pages drop in rankings,
If I ignored SEO tactics, and designed the site based on what I think would be most useful/helpful to people viewing the website, I would not have any location landing pages. I would have one strong page (eg, probably the home page), that says "and we operate in the following locations..." and then list them off.
The thing is, I dont really think these location specific landing pages have ever offered any real value to someone searching, other than just making it clear that we operate in their area (which doesn't need a landing page to make that clear).
They're basically variations of each other, key word adjusted for the location - done for the purpose of ranking locally. I mean, that sounds like spam.
But all the research says that I need landing pages for each location.
My question:
What would happen if I built one new page, and listed all the locations clearly on that page, and then 301 redirect the existing location landing pages to the new, single page.
Would I fall of the cliff?
-
@miriamellis my other concern with the way we're currently doing things, is that it's hard to amass reviews when we have multiple GMB listings.
Because our business is centrally organised, there is no real benefit to anyone reading a location specific review.
We're not like a pizza shop, where there's a myriad of factors specific to the location that could effect someones experience (eg, hard to get to, poor parking, oven burns the pizza, rude staff etc).
In our case, clients are basically dealing with the main location, but the equipment is dispatched locally.
-
@miriamellis For context, we do equipment rentals.
Pre-Covid, 90% of the time, we would either personally deliver, or ship the products to clients, but, they did have a option to collect from the location.
Post-Covid, with the exception of our main location, we now ship out or deliver 100%.
-
@blitzna101 Important question you are asking here. May I ask, do you have physical locations in each of the cities for which you've built a landing page and are you directly serving customers (face to face/socially distanced) or is your business model virtual, with no physical locations and no in-person customer service?
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
-
How can I check my website is not in spam?
I have a blogging website where I post about famous food, home remedies, and more. When I started my website's keywords were ranking on Google But Now a single keyword is not in the ranking list. That's why I have concerns about how I can fix it.
SEO Tactics | | worldviajar.com0 -
What Service Page Strategy Should We Use to Target City-Specific Local Intent Service Keywords?
Hey guys! We are targeting a number of cities in the Nassau and Suffolk County areas for foundation repair, insulation, and mold remediation keywords, and we were debating on creating city-specific pages for each location and service, or creating one service page for each type of service that contains all of the services and solutions within that service category for each city. Example: City-Specific Pages for Each Service: One page for say foundation repair, one page for foundation crack repair, one page for foundation problems, etc. (for each target city) Service Category Pages for Each City: One page for foundation contractors that lists all services on one page in sections. Which one do you think is better for local SEO and rankings? Both seem to have their advantages and disadvantages to me. Just to throw a couple out there, the category pages may not rank as high as the city pages for each individual service if our competitors have a whole page designed for that service and we only have a part of a page covering the topic. At the same time, they would save labor hours, technical issues would be less, and they would be condensed, and we would have WAY less mess on the backend. I appreciate your expert opinion on this one. The site is www. zavzaseal.com in case you want to check us out.
Local SEO | | everysecond0 -
Footer backlink for/to Web Design Agency
I read some old (10+ years) information on whether footer backlinks from the websites that design agencies build are seen as spammy and potentially cause a negative effect. We have over 150 websites that we have built over the last few years, all with sitewide footer backlinks back to our homepage (designed and managed by COMPANY NAME). Semrush flags some of the links as potential spammy links. What are the current thoughts on this type of footer backlink? Are we better to have 1 dofollow backlink and the rest of the website nofollow from each domain?
Link Building | | MultiAdE1 -
How to rank a website in different countries
I have a website which I want to rank in UK, NZ and AU and I want to keep my domain as .com in all the countries. I have specified the lang=en now what needs to be done to rank one website in 3 different English countries without changing the domain extension i.e. .com.au or .com.nz
SEO Tactics | | Ravi_Rana0 -
Unsolved Favorite Citation Building / Submission Services
Besides Moz.com/local and yext.com what other services do you guys use to fix duplicates and create more citations for clientele? I have a recent domain 301 and i cant seem to update some old brand listings for a campaign. I do also use bright local.
Moz Local | | waqid0 -
Odd one - dropping positions but traffic improving
Seem to have a bit of an odd one. For the last few months been running a backlink campaign for a 2/3 year old site, got good positions for some keywords/pages but seems to have plateaued the last 60 days or so with some keywords dropping in position.
Link Building | | seoman10
The odd thing is traffic seems to be still improving (according to GA and GSC). I am wondering if - have hit a niche ceiling
or rankbrain type thing i.e. google trying to work out what the site should be ranking for and messing with positions.
or because it is just a newish site. Any ideas?2 -
Shopify SEO - Collection or Blog post for ecomm seo?
Hi Moz folks, would love your thoughts on benefits of Shopify collection pages v blog posts for ranking secondary shopping keywords not suitable for existing shop pages - all help gratefully received, we are going down a rabbit hole on this one and need some sanity! So, we’re updating our site which already has a reasonable seo foundation and are looking to rank better for key shopping search keywords in our space (d2c sports nutrition). My question is should we prioritise store collection pages (category pages in Shopify terms) or blog posts for some of the main keywords not already covered by our core in-store collections/categories? Priority keywords already covered are things like protein powders, protein bars, energy drinks, etc. As context, we have a small product catalogue (10 products) and for easy navigation on site have these grouped into 7 collections/categories in the main menu and available from the homepage. All are quality high volume and high intent shopping keywords for our business. The secondary terms we are now looking to add content for are things like marathon nutrition, vegan sports nutrition, etc so now need to choose if we create product collection pages for these, or use blog posts to do the work. The advantage of collections, we believe, is that Google is likely to prioritise these in search. The disadvantage from a UX point of view is that more categories in store could make our simple and clear product range (10 products only) look complex or repetitive. Conversely, a blog post removes any UX confusion with too many categories, but we have a conversion rate issue with our blog. It performs well in search, but conversions are poor. We have addressed this with a new keyword targeting strategy and blog customisation, but we have yet to test this so while in theory it should work well, we do not know for certain. In summary: we want to rank key shopping keywords beyond our core ones we have - would you advise we use blog posts or product collection pages? All help gratefully received - thanks! Warren
SEO Tactics | | WP330