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
-
Need advice on overcoming a Google penalty
Here is the situation. Our website for our primary product (www.thetablift.com) has received a penalty by Google. Not long ago we had excellent rankings; (1st page) for some of our primary keywords, like "tablet stand". Now we are not in the index at all. Here is what happened (or at least what seems to have happened in my non-SEO opinion). Around October 2016, we had the "bright" idea to try and emulate a campaign that Eat 24 did, utilizing inexpensive traffic from advertisements on porn websites. The idea was a play on a joke we often hear about our product being perfect for certain activities where one needs to free one's hands while watching a screen. Of course this is not how we market our product (it is a best selling mainstream product), but we wanted to see if we could emulate the success of another mainstream brand that utilized this kind of non-mainstream advertising. The immediate result was a whole lot of traffic, but obviously the wrong kind, as it did not convert. So we pulled the plug after about 3 days. Flash forward several months later and we not only lost our great SEO rankings, but we were removed from Google's index entirely. I assume the reason for this is that somehow the website got dinged for being somehow related to porn. But of course it has nothing to do with that. So the question is: how do we go about getting un-penalized by Google? We had build up some solid SEO over the previous couple of years, and I'd like to get back to where we were, if possible. Oh, and this may or may not be relevant, but we also switched from www.tablift.com to www.thetablift.com a few months before we did this campaign. However, we used permanent redirects and did a textbook changeover, so I don't think that had any bearing. But I can't be sure. What are the steps to reverse this damage, if any? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csblev0 -
How do I optimize dynamic content for SEO?
Hello, folks! I'm wondering how I optimize a site if it is built on a platform that works based on dynamic content. For example, the page pulls in certain information based on the information it has about the user. Not every user will see the same page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geonetric
Lindsey0 -
What's the best possible URL structure for a local search engine?
Hi Mozzers, I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets. Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers. Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
Natural Fluctuation in Search Traffic
This is going to sound like a weird question... I'm curious to know whether there is a natural fluctuation in the actual number of searches being made online each week. It would be great to relate this to the performance of my own organic traffic each week. For example, if organic search traffic is down 10% week on week, is that because search in general is down 10%? Has anybody ever looking into this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ausmed0 -
Help: How to optimize my duplicate category pages
Hi all My category pages will showcase the same products how do I go about optimizing these pages so they don't show up as duplicate content? Would appreciate your all feedaback! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
303 Redirects Search Engine Friendly?
Do 303 redirects work more like 301s or more like 302s when it comes to passing SEO authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Local Listing Question
We will be starting local SEO efforts on a medical practice that has 4 locations & 15 doctors each location (so 60 listings total). I will submit each doctor & each location to InfoGroup, LocalEze, Axciom & Factual. Also, I will only submit each location (not doctors) to Google. The problem I'm seeing is the fact that each listing would have the same exact phone number - it all goes to one main routing center. What kind of problems could come of this? Do we need a separate phone numbers for each of the four locations (at the very least)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
Local and Organic Listings
Hi, My client has a number of stores across the country (UK) and ideally I would like them to appear in both the local and organic listings - at the moment I appear more often than not on page one for one or the other - I have noticed however that some pages appear in both. I understand that Google will not place a listing for the same page in both local and organic so I need to optimise a page on the site for organic and point my local listing to a different page (home page?). On some results though I am seeing my local result appearing with the home page URL listed but the actual link points to the internal store page which is the same page that is appearing in the organic listing (both on page one). Other local listings of mine appear with the store page URL showing in the result. I haven't set anything up differently for these stores. Can anyone explain why this is happening? Thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBirmingham810