Need advice on local search optimization
-
HI all,
I've found myself in a puzzling position and not quite sure which direction to push my current SEO project so if anyone who's done this particular type of SEO can offer some suggestions I'd be eternaly grateful.
I am currently working on a project for a Law Firm based in New Jersey. Lets say the town they are in is Garfield. What I really want to try and achieve is see them appearing in the number one spot whenever anyone within Garfield or the immediate area searches for a lawyer relating to the individuals need. E..g searches like "personal injury lawyers", "real estate lawyer".
The problem is I can see how I can easily make it to the number one position if people are specific and enter garfield in the search term but in reality they wouldn't be doing that.
An additional problem is that peoples ISP's in garfield aren't located in Garfield, in some cases they're as far away as Newark so when they're doing a search for 'real estate lawyer' google is bringing up results for the Newark based firms.
It seems using tools like market samurai to look at the traffic and competition is proving useless as searches like the ones I'm doing for local business are so closely tied to the ISP location I don't really know whether to target broad range searches like "Real Estate Lawyer", or to be really specific and include the town name in my page titles, H1 tags etc...
I hope I put across my dilemma and someone can help me chose which direction to go in..
Thanks
-
Another way to get authentic mentions of other areas without being spammy is to have testimonials from clients that include their city names.
"I had a wonderful experience using Joe Smith as my real estate lawyer. Blah blah blah
- Jane Doe, Nearby City, New Jersey"
You could also talk about how you are members of the greater Newark Chamber of Commerce or Newark Area Real Estate Lawyers who Lunch or how you support the Nearby Town Little League.
-
Hi David,
We're going through old unanswered questions and seeing if people still need help, or if you've gone ahead and implemented something and have anything interesting to report. Could you give us an update, or mark this question as answered? Thanks!
-
Hi thanks for your replies.
I've been adding the county name to my page titles thinking that would potentially bring in more traffic for searches from the outer areas.
Perhaps instead, adding the City name to the 'home' page title should be what I'm doing, but as I said I can't see people in Garfield searching for 'garfield attorney, or garfield lawyer' but if having the city name in in the title will affect the places result and indirectly the organic results then I'll give it a go. Well I'll try and keep the city and state on the title at least.
Last week I had my client pay for directory inclusion into a few of the BIG legal directories which hold a lot of authority so when google finally realises we're indexed on those, hopefully that will have a knock on effect too...
-
Target the actual location on your site. If you can fudge a few other related geographic keywords into your content in a non-spammy way, do so, but focus on building up local search (listings and citations). As your local search rankings take hold, you will start appearing for proximity searches on Google Places.
Newark is a bit out of range - nothing much to be done about that. BUT if they search for "real estate lawyer Garfield" or surrounding towns, you want to show up in that Places map.
Great local search resource: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml. There was also a WBF on optimizing for local a few months back.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi David,
I would definitely start out with the town name in the targeted keywords. For starters, it will get the ball rolling, and secondly, they're good keywords to optimise for - sure, they won't bring as much traffic as the more general non-geo terms, but they will likely have far less competition and be easier to rank for.
The ISP location targeting isn't really a variable you can influence, so it's best to put majority of your effort into that which you have a good level of control over (geo keywords). Additionally, it would make sense to mention that you are a Garfield firm regardless of whether you are using geo-keywords, so optimising for the geo-keywords really can't hurt.
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
-
Bolded words in search results
are those synonyms or semantically related keywords ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Advice for structuring hotel website
Hey guys, I am currently setting up a hotel booking website and I'm not so sure how to structure it. I have landing pages for: 1. Cities
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | baresound
2. Sights
3. States The main keywords are mainly "Hotels in Cityname" or "Hotels near Sightname". What would be the best SEO friendly way of structuring the url? https://hotels-example.com/hotels/cities/cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/sights/sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/states/statename or https://hotels-example.com/hotels/cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/statename or https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-statename Or are there better ways of structuring it or am I just overthinking it? I would greatly appreciate any advice and suggestions 🙂 Best, Max0 -
Wrong Search words coming in search console
Hey there, My website All good but, in webmaster Search console some bad Queries(search terms) coming which is totally different from website. I want to make sure, is that harmful for my website traffic, as well as keywords Ranking?? How should i stop them to be crawl, ?? can any help for this query.?? i have attached screenshot of that, please check & help out, http://prntscr.com/cmusoq Thnx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojaverify060 -
Multi Store On Page Optimization
We have an online multistore which is running in three different countries. For Example: yourdomain.com yourdomain.com/us-en/ yourdomain.com/wo-en yourdomain.com/ch-fr/ Should I create different meta tags for different stores or should I just use Hreflang Tag? Should we create meta tags for individual store?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Envisionecommerce0 -
Pages Disappearing from Search
Hi, We have had a strongly ranking site since 2004. Over the past couple of days, our Google traffic has dropped by around 20% and some of our strong pages are completely disappearing from the rankings. They are still indexed, but having ranked number 1 are nowhere to be found. A number of pages still remain intact, but it seems they are increasingly disappearing. Where should we start to try and find out what is happening? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Google+ Verification - Site Speed Optimization
So the Google+ Badge verifies our site for Google direct connect. However, the javascript code for the badge itself causes the page to load 3 to 4 seconds longer, which is a big deal. Any ideas for a work around?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inc.com0 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90 -
Any advice for setting up a Job Board?
Hi- I've got a big client who is setting up an in-house job board, ie. as part of their own site. They are a diverse company that offers a wide variety of roles across the whole country. The software they have chosen to use is not in any way SEO-focused. Therefore I'll need to recommend some modifications to the sitemap created by the web design team, within the time and budget available to me. At this stage I am thinking along the lines of determining the major geographical areas and job sectors and creating summary (landing) pages such as /jobs/california/electrical-engineering which contain any currently available roles for that geo+sector. I've tried to find guidance on job board SEO optimization or even case studies but haven't found much at all. This seems useful though: http://www.jobboardmount.com/cm/features/seo_dashboard Does anyone have any tips or links to useful information on job board SEO? Thanks in advance! Jules
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Juller1