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.
What is the importance of exact match keywords for local SEO in service industry businesses?
-
I am working with a local service contractor. Several of his competitors have domain names with exact match keywords. Audits of competitor sites and use of other research tools reveals that their sites are behind in content and technical SEO. The competitor sites consistently rank higher in organic search results.
I am new to SEO and I understand that some of my lack of clarity here is a result of not understanding the value of key word use in local SEO vs. wider efforts.
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
-
Relevant but not-relevant keywords impact to SEO
Hello, I would like to know if the selection of individual keywords(that are not primary, secondary or tertiary) are important for SEO regardless of the relevancy to the page topic. I am wondering how much of a contribution a non-P1/P2/P3 can make in terms of SEO? For example it is a product page and I have built my content with P1,P2&P3 based only on the product and its properties itself. Do you think that a content gap for the page could be the production process of that product? So even if it is a product and its properties page, I can add 2 sentences about the production, so that I can drive more traffic by including these 2 informative sentences.? EXAMPLE:
Keyword Research | | Siir
So lets' say my topic is "hair types" (P1) and my subtopics are "Straight," "wavy," and "curly"(P2s) which I used as subtitles. But throughout the page, I am planning to add some relevant but not-directly-relevant keywords here and there since they have high metrics and volumes. For example a potential sentence I can add: "innovative hair products these days can offer amazing results for the desired hair types". It is not specifically about "hair types" but I am using the keyword "innovative hair products" (good metrics keyword) which may help for the traffic... Another potential not-so-direct sentence can be: "For all hair types, the hair damages are common: heat damage, chemical damage and mechanical damage". Would adding this extra sentence where I am not specifically talking about "hair types" (my topic) but "hair damages" and damage examples (off-topic high metric keywords) help me to drive traffic to my website? And how much of an impact would it be?0 -
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 -
Are These Urls for Targeted Cities OK?
I am working for a waterproofing company out of long beach that wants to rank for other neighborhoods around the area. But I just noticed that their URLs are targeting two locations. They have the cities built on the URLs after the long beach part. Will that affect rankings? Not be as potent as a truly SEO friendly url like example.com/services/mold-remediation/mold-remediation-brooklyn-ny? Here is an example: https://zavzaseal.com/mold-remediation-service-provider-long-island-ny/mold-removal-pro-in-copiague-ny-11726/ Another thing is the URLs say "mold removal pro" if I am targeting "mold removal copiague, NY" will that matter to rankings that the URL has pro in it?
Local SEO | | ThisTimeWereOn0 -
How does changing sitemaps affect SEO
Hi all, I have a question regarding changing the size of my sitemaps. Currently I generate sitemaps in batches of 50k. A situation has come up where I need to change that size to 15k in order to be crawled by one of our licensed services. I haven't been able to find any documentation on whether or not changing the size of my sitemaps(but not the pages included in them) will affect my rankings negatively or my SEO efforts in general. If anyone has any insights or has experienced this with their site please let me know!
Technical SEO | | Jason-Reid0 -
SEO value of InDesign pages?
Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset. If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?
Technical SEO | | TheaterMania1 -
301 Redirect with an Exact Domain name Match
My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop. Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match? Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons? Much thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | TrevorMcKendrick0 -
Iframes & SEO
I've got a client that wants a site with all content in iFrames. They saw another site they liked & asked if we could do it. Of course we can technically. How big a negative hit would they take with SEO? Is there anything we can do to mitigate it, such as redirects, etc? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0 -
Can local SEO harm national rankings?
Today I met with a firm called Localeze that provides local directory submissions. I understand the importance of this service if your site is competing locally, however I'm not sure the effects of local SEO for a national brand. Our firm gets most of our traffic from across the country, not just one location, and our business is scattered (which is a good thing). We rank for service related keywords that are not tied to a location. We do not show up for local results so our business in our immediate location is weak. We would like to increase our local presence in search engines but I want to make sure that this will not take away from our national presence. Will optimizing a site for local search negatively affect general rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | KevinBloom1