Large scale geo-targeting?

[Piranha_Solutions]

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?

[AdiRste]

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?

[Piranha_Solutions]

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!

[glennfriesen]

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.