Large scale geo-targeting?
-
Hi there. We are an internet marketing agency and recently did a fair amount of working trying to optimise for a number of different locations. Although we are based in Preston (UK), we would like to attract clients from Manchester, Liverpool, etc.
We created landing pages for each of the locations that we wanted to target and each of the services - so we had an SEO Manchester page and a Web Design Manchester page for example. These were all written individually by a copywriter in order to avoid duplicate content. An example of one of the first of these pages is here: http://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/places/seo-blackpool.php
We created a 'where we cover' page and used a clickable map rather than huge long list of text links, which we felt would be spammy, to link through to these pages. You can see this page here: http://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/where-we-cover.php
Initially we gained a great deal of success from this method - with the above Blackpool page ranking #7 for "SEO Blackpool" within a week. However these results quickly disappeared and now we don't rank at all, though the pages remain in the index. I'm aware that we don't have many external links pointing to these pages, but this cannot explain why these pages don't rank at all, as some of the terms are relatively non-competitive.
A number of our competitors rank for almost all of these terms, despite their pages being exact duplicates with simply the city/town name being changed. Any ideas where we've gone wrong?
-
I'm from Burnley originally and I've worked in Blackburn and Manchester previously but now I live and work in Dublin, Ireland It's nice to see somebody local on here.
I would suggest Social Bookmarking the new pages that you have created and I think you'll be surprised at what will happen, something so simple. Have you updated your sitemap as well?
-
Thanks for the reply Glenn. I really can't see why we would have been penalised as everything we do is above board, although it does seem as if that might be the case. I certainly think that the QDF point you make is a valid one, although it could have been around the time of the latest Panda update too, so perhaps that might have flagged up something.
I think our next step might be to recreate the pages from scratch on entirely new URLs and see if that has any effect. We will certainly try and poach some of our competitor's links too!
-
It's possible that your site has been penalized, though I don't see too many reasons why it would be in reviewing your OSE report. From a cursory investigation, I'd say you've done a great job earning the links pointing to your site... though if any trickery was involved, you may be penalized, so you may want to investigate how to get out of that trap.
I suggest you investigate the link profiles of the competitors who rank for almost all of your targeted terms. If your on-page SEO is truly better than there's, it's likely that their external link profile is earning them the rankings you desire. Learn from their strategy.
Your initial high rankings could have been related to QDF.
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
-
Upgarded woocommerce 2 to 3 and saw a large drop in rank
Hi guys, I recently upgraded from woocommerce 2 to v3 and rankings have been plummeting. I have double checked all of the schema, markup, technical, speed, etc and it all seems to be the same. The on thing that I did find is that while there used to be about 400 images (products) there are now over 1500 images in the index as all of the thumbnails are not in the sitemap. Would / could this cause the issue? Can i remove all the thumbs from the sitemap? if so any suggestions on how (google returns very little to nothing regarding this). Should i alt text every thumbnail..... Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plahpoy0 -
Geo-Redirect: good idea or not?
Hi Mozzers, The background: I have this very corporate .com domain which is used worldwide. Next to that, we have another .com domain which is specifically created for the US visitors. Within the organic rankings, we notice that our corporate domain is ranking much better in the US. Many visitors are arriving on this domain. As it is a corporate domain being used worldwide, they get lost. My questions: I know there are ways to redirect by location. Would it be smart to automatically redirect US visitors for the corporate domain to the commercial US-specific domain? Is it possible to only redirect US visitors and leave the website as it is for visitors from other countries. Won't this harm the corporate website (organically) worldwide? If this would be a good idea, any recommended plugins or concrete procedures? Thank you so much for helping me out!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Sander0 -
Question regarding geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Tools.
I understand that it's possible to target both domains/subdomains and subfolders to different geographical regions in GWT. However, I was wondering about the effect of targeting the domain to a single country, say the UK. Then targeting subfolders to other regions (say the US and France). e.g. www.domain.com -> UK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TranslateMediaLtd
www.domain.com/us -> US
www.domain.com/fr -> France etc Would it be better to leave the main domain without a geographical target but set geo-targeting for the subfolders? Or would it be best to set geo-targeting for both the domain and subfolders.0 -
How to optimize on-page for a large service area?
Hello Everyone, I'm in the process of setting up a website for a plumbing company that services a relatively large area in Michigan. They have physical locations spread out across the area, but they want to optimize for other areas as well. Naturally, I set up pages on the site with unique content relating to the town/area. I understand that these may not rank locally, but we can at lest shoot for organic rankings in this area. My question here more relates to how to link these pages in the site. Should I have a bunch of footer links with something like city, state, zip as the anchor text. Or should I create an "Areas Served" page, and link out from there? I don't want to appear spammy, beaus this isn't what i'm trying to do, I just want to make sure this is done right. Thanks Zach
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seolinktools0 -
Could a HTML <select>with large numbers of <option value="<url>">'s affect my organic rankings</option></select>
Hi there, I'm currently redesigning my website, and one particular pages lists hotels in New York. Some functionality I'm thinking of adding in is to let the user find hotels close to specific concert venues in New York. My current thinking is to provide the following select element on the page - selecting any one of the options will automatically redirect to my page for that concert venue. The purpose of this isn't to affect the organic traffic - I'm simply introducing this as a tool to help customers find the right hotel, but I certainly don't want it to have an adverse effect on my organic traffic. I'd love to know your thoughts on this. I must add that in certain cities, such as New York, there could be up to 450 different options in this select element. | <select onchange="location=options[selectedIndex].value;"> <option value="">Show convenient hotels for:</option> <option value="http://url1..">1492 New York</option> <option value="http://url2..">Abrons Arts Center</option> <option value="http://url3..">Ace of Clubs New York</option> <option value="http://url4..">Affairs Afloat</option> <option value="http://url5..">Affirmation Arts New York</option> <option value="http://url6..">Al Hirschfeld Theatre</option> <option value="http://url7..">Alice Tully Hall</option> .. .. ..</select> Many thanks Mike |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
Get-targeted homepage for users vs crawlers
Hello there! This is my first post here on SEOmoz. I'll get right into it then... My website is housingblock.com, and the homepage runs entirely off of geo-targeting the user's IP address to display the most relevant results immediately to them. Can potentially save them a search or three. That works great. However, when crawlers frequent the site, they are obviously being geo-targeted for their IP address, too. Google has come to the site via several different IP addresses, resulting in several different locations being displayed for it on the homepage (Mountain View, CA or Clearwater, MI are a couple). Now, this poses an issue because I'm worried that crawlers will not be able to properly index the homepage because the location, and ultimately all the content, keeps changing. And/or, we will be indexed for a specific location when we are in fact a national website (I do not want to have my homepage indexed/ranked under Mountain View, CA, or even worse, Clearwater, MI [no offence to any Clearwaterians out there]). Of course, my initial instinct is to create a separate landing page for the crawlers, but for obvious reasons, I am not going to do that (I did at one point, but quickly reverted back because I figured that was definitely not the route to go, long-term). Any ideas on the best way to approach this, while maintaining the geo-targeted approach for my users? I mean, isn't that what we're supposed to do? Give our users the most relevant content in the least amount of time? Seems that in doing so, I am improperly ranking my website in the eyes of the search engines. Thanks everybody! Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THB0 -
Impact of Non-English target keywords in URL
Hi all, our site language is Farsi (Persian) so at first we tried to create URLs that contain our target keywords in Farsi too. The problem with this approach is that our URLs are not shown in a friendly style anymore: a bunch of unicode numeric codes instead of Farsi characters. Do you know which is the best approach? 1. Creating ugly looking URLs containing Farsi keywords 2. Forget about putting our keywords in URLs and have nice English URLs Thanks in advance for your time and help 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diki0 -
Is publishing a large quantity of content at once a bad idea?
If you plan on doubling the size of your site with original, unique content, is it better to publish it all at once or over a period of time? Is there any penalty for publishing it all at once?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1