I didn't think about the confusion from the customer or Google side, in terms of creating pages that focused on locations other than my own.
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I didn't think about the confusion from the customer or Google side, in terms of creating pages that focused on locations other than my own.
Thanks for passing this question on to your staff.
Yes Miriam. I was referring to lead generation. Being that I can't fulfill these service requests (as I'm not physically located in these areas). I am in the process of building a service provider network, which will allow me to continue to market these services, while the service providers do the fulfillment.
So, going back to the original question, I was thinking about options that would allow me to serve the localized page of their respective service provider when the customer seeks services. I figured an immediate redirect could have been construed as a door way page. So, now I will customize my home page to add a section that allows them to search for service availability in their area, which will then take them to that local page.
This is my thinking now.
Rishi & Miriam thanks for the feedback.
Sorry about the vagueness of the question. I was pressed for time when I wrote this initially. To give you a better idea of what my situation is, our business is located in South Florida. We provide automotive related services. Our industry is pretty competitive, but the players in this industry don't really have a strong grasp on the varied aspects of digital marketing, outside of the customary G Plus Local pages.
We've been in business for quite some time and we have done all the on-site optimizations, citation building, locally focused pages, content creation, etc. About 6 months ago, I noticed we were getting more mobile traffic coming to our site and there was an increasing number of keywords that contained "best" and "near me". So, I decided to add our particular service keywords along with "best" and "near me" to our title tag. Up to this point, 70% of our traffic was coming in via paid search & desktop traffic accounted for over 70% of traffic as well.
Over the last few months, I began to notice that we were receiving calls and online bookings from NJ, Ca, Tx, Philly and a few other places. I thought that I may have made a targeting mistake on my ppc campaign. After further investigation, I saw that all of this traffic was organic. At this point, 70ish% of our traffic was coming from organic and mobile accounted for over 70% as well. About a third of this traffic was coming from outside of our geographic service area.
When I realized this, I took to the serps and saw that no matter what location I searched from in the continental U.S. our website showed up in the number 2 organic spot for 2 of our core keywords with "near me" associated with it.
I believe this is because, our company has some "brand equity" and although this industry is competitive, it isn't from a digital marketing perspective. So, there is a great opportunity to get out ahead of these guys in these other regions.
So, long story made even longer, I realized that if I had potential customers seeking our services from areas where we weren't physically located - I had an opportunity to find a mutually beneficial way to provide these services. I was just thinking about the best way to go about it.
One thought was to redirect traffic that came to my site to a locally focused page, but I didn't want G to think I was setting up my homepage as a doorway. I also mulled the idea of a zip code overlay that would prompt the visitor to enter their info and would send them to a page focused on providing services in their local area.
But, overall (and the reason for the initial question) I wanted to know if redirecting a visitor based on their location would be cause me problems in the future. But, since the initial post, I've abandoned that idea for something more efficient.
I run a local service based business. About 6 months ago, I updated my homepage title tag to incorporate the phrase "near me" (I performed other optimizations as well). Over the last few months, I've noticed increased traffic, calls and online bookings from different areas around the country. I was perplexed, I thought I may have mis-targeted my ppc campaign.
After some digging, I found out that my home page ranks #2 in the organic listings for a couple core service keywords with the "near me" phrase added. Of course, my bounce rate, from these visitors outside of my local area, is pretty high (65%). Also, the majority of these visitors are using mobile devices.
I see an opportunity here to possibly provide relevant information to the searchers, based on their geographic area. The problem is that, I can't risk modifying my website for the sake of this "out of area" traffic.
If I were to provide a page to a visitor based on their ip, could that be considered a black hat tactic? I don't want to do anything that will compromise my core business.
Any advice will be welcomed.
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