I think you should consider how your users are interacting with your website and how they search for your services/products/locations and follow that. For example, Yelp is focused on local reviews. People will filter first to their city, then the category naturally. You would never filter down to restaurants first, because if you're in Huntington Beach, CA you really don't care what's in Portland, OR. If location is secondary to your product, then it makes sense to start with the category. For example, let's say you sell ATVs and other off-road vehicles and gear, but some showrooms only have ATVs while others also carry dirt bikes. Customers who are looking for a dirt bike care more about reaching a showroom with dirt bikes, so that category structure would be preferable.

Note that I'm assuming in both of the above examples that your navigation is following the structure of your website for usability purposes. In terms of structure, one way is not inherently better than the other from a ranking/algorithm perspective, but if your structure is confusing it can be detrimental to SEO. For example, outreach is a lot harder if you have a garbage navigation that contributes to poor user experience on your website. Any piece of Google's algorithm that measures user satisfaction with your website (Rank Brain, pogo sticking, etc.) will either directly or indirectly affect you depending on how user friendly your website is.

One last thing: in both instances you have the geography in the URL, so if you're hoping for a boost for local phrases from an exact match URL I think you're already tapping that. EMDs are nowhere near as effective as they were in years past, so I wouldn't make that my focus.

Hi Jeff, I think I can help you with this, but to clarify, it looks like you have three separate questions:

1. What is best practice for naming different locations to optimize for local SEO?
2. What is the best URL structure to optimize for local SEO?
3. Should geo specific terms be used in blogs?

Be sure to let me know if I'm missing the mark. I'm also going to go heavy on industry jargon and assume you know what it means, so feel free to ask questions if I go over your head at any point.

1. For local SEO, it's important to start with a good foundation. This means you have citations claimed for each location with consistent NAP information on your GMB profile, your listings, and the landing page on your website for that location. So if your name includes the geo on the website, it should also include the geo on your GMB profile and citations. It's preferably to use the specific city name they are in. For example, if you're in Flower Mound, TX, be sure to use Flower Mound, not Dallas. Some local SEOs get tripped by targeting the metro area they're in and that can tank results. If some of your locations are in the same city, dividing them up somehow as North/South, East/West, etc. is fine. Google typically picks one or both in those circumstances to display in search.

2.  For URL structure, using subpages the way you have laid out is fine. For enterprise local SEO my agency uses a proprietary, scalable CMS to build unique, local websites that rank very well, so I'm more familiar with that structure, but one of the tricks we use is to include a geo variable in the URL, which helps rank for some terms like "glass repair dallas tx", because we can get picked up on the exact match. Every little bit helps.

3. For blogs, I would recommend you completely ignore the geo unless your blog is very unique and specific to the location. You should really only target the location when it's a page that you're trying to rank for local queries and you typically don't have that in a blog. For example, a blog about "what to expect in a hundred year old house" will typically not rank for keywords that trigger the local algorithm, so there's no reason to add the geo. It just gets in the way of the content, and inferior content doesn't rank well. Now a blog like "what to plant in your [location] fall garden" just may have some localization to it, because what you plant in the fall in Des Moines is different than Atlanta. But I find these cases to be few and far between.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have questions.

Hi seoman, it's definitely outdated and was never accurate to begin with. The "nofollow" attribute was always designed to be applied to external links and modern advice is to never apply a nofollow link to your own internal links. If you're concerned about passing authority from a page like your homepage down into your footer links instead of more important pages, you should know that Google tags the links on your site so that they're weighted differently, i.e. a link in your body content is worth more than a link in your footer, image links don't pass as much authority, etc.

In short, I don't think you're going to move the needle by altering your footer links to nofollow.

The new Google Search Console gives a ton of information about which pages were excluded and why, but one that I'm struggling with is "crawled - currently not indexed". I have some clients that have fallen into this pit and I've identified one reason why it's occurring on some of them - they have multiple websites covering the same information (local businesses) - but others I'm completely flummoxed.

Does anyone have any experience figuring this one out?

The simplest solution would be to mark every page in your test environment "noindex". This is normally standard operating procedure anyway because most people don't want customers stumbling across the wrong URL in search by mistake and seeing a buggy page that isn't supposed to be "live" for customers.

Updating your robots.txt file would tell Google not to crawl the page, but if they've already crawled it and added it to their index it just means that they will retain the last crawled version of the page and will not crawl it in the future. You have to direct Google to "noindex" the pages. It will take some time as Google refreshes the crawl of each page, but eventually you'll see those errors drop off as Google removes those pages from their index. If I were consulting a client I would tell them to make the change and check back in two or three months.

Hope this helps!

Hey Dave, thanks for the response! I should have updated my question earlier today, but I was able to find a better way to do this type of research using Moz Pro's page optimization tab. The section in there that was previously labeled "related topics" was renamed "content suggestions", but it worked great. I was able to double content length and put in some genuinely useful information (I hope) that should help it rank better (I hope).

It's a darn sight faster than what I was doing before, which was manually copy/pasting all body copy from the top ten sites for high volume keywords into an ngram analyzer and looking for patterns. The results were actually pretty similar, but good gravy, was it boring.

Like most of the folks here I'm a pretty big fan of the content that comes out through Whiteboard Fridays, and I try to apply the things I learn, but one of the WBF videos that I'm following along with does not do a stellar job of detailing execution using Moz KW Explorer.

https://moz.com/blog/related-topics-in-seo-whiteboard-friday

Now granted, this came out in 2016, but I still feel the core principle and strategy results in a higher quality piece of content and is still relevant to discovering and understanding searcher task completion requirements, and drafting content that fulfills those requirements. Towards the end Rand sort of mentions that you'll be able to do this with KW explorer, but I'm not really seeing the functionality.

The steps I followed were to enter in the keyword in kw explorer, went to keyword suggestions, and selected "based on closely related topics" and ran it, but received no suggestions - came up blank. I then selected "based on broadly related topics" and the same thing happened. I tried this out with the keyword r22, keeping it very broad to start but that didn't seem to work.

So what do you all do to perform this sort of research within Moz? Or do you even feel it's relevant in today's Rank Brain driven world?

Easy way to "buy" backlinks, in style, without running afoul of webmaster guidelines.

Step 1: curate a list of all the sites you want a backlink from
Step 2: get the emails of the webmasters there - lots of tools and methods for this, both automated and manual
Step 3: use customer match on Google or Custom Audiences on Facebook to upload your email list of webmasters you picked
Step 4: use targeted ads to get your content in front of this audience

This really only works if you don't have garbage content. But basically you advertise this content only to people who actually have a website and would consider linking to you and voila. You've basically "bought" backlinks.

Hi Edwyn, can you share some more details? If you're not comfortable with a link to the page, it would at least be helpful to know more like how often the keyword is mentioned on page.

Sometimes, that keyword count metric is just off. If you have a golfing ecommerce site for example, you probably have a ton of mentions for the terms "golf ball" or "golf bag", especially on category level pages, and that's beneficial to your business and the user experience. In a situation like that, the keyword count might be very high but it's not necessarily bad for SEO.

Now, if you've written a paragraph about golf balls on that same page, and you mention "golf balls" 17 times, then trim it back. If you want to know how often you should mention a particular keyword, here's an easy exercise.

1. Pick your target keyword and google it. 
2. Open the top 5 sites
3. Use the finder to see how many times those top 5 sites mention the keyword in their page

Using the golf ball example I just did this in about 2 minutes and came up with this:
position 1: 14 mentions
position 2: 131 mentions
position 3: 3 mentions
position 4: 74 mentions
position 5: 64 mentions

As you can see these sites have many, many mentions of golf balls on their top pages and include some big names like Dicks Sporting Goods and Amazon, and rank perfectly fine. A keyword count metric would probably warn them that they mention the target keyword too many times, but that doesn't appear to be the case. So go ahead, and try this with your target keyword. If you're coming in less than the top results for Google, then I wouldn't worry about keyword stuffing if your design legitimately uses the target keyword, such as in a product name or description.

Hope that helps!

I've taken the survey, but you may want to add another field asking for feedback on specific features. 2016 saw a lot of companies bring Business Intelligence in house with data display platforms taking a leading role in creating stories from data. Because of this my clients are a little more aware and want to do a lot more with data - which means I'm more critical of the data I can GET from an API.

It would be excellent if I could create an index of my keywords and the pages that are ranking, so I could identify which pages are ranking highly, and compare to the pages that are ranking low. Right now I don't have a method of compiling all the URLs that are ranking, or displaying which ones are hovering around position 11-13, which is low hanging fruit to bump onto page 1.

Most APIs don't offer the ability to draw out that information, which I could then create visuals and tables with. It would put Moz ahead of the competition to make more data points available via API.

Thanks Lisa, I appreciate the clarity!

Howdy fellow Mozzers,

We're tracking a client's keyword rankings in one of our campaigns and want to export that data on a regular basis to display in Tableau. Tableau let's us quickly match up different data sources and create visuals with the data. It's useful for marrying different data sources that don't normally talk to each other.

We know we can pull keyword tracking data manually, but we're hoping there's an API or scheduler that we can use to download the data automatically. Automating the process would be super helpful.

Thank you!