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Hey Jim,
Linkbuilding isn't really my area. One is always aiming for a natural link profile, but you might want to start a new thread about linkbuilding, and also, check these out:
https://moz.com/blog/link-building-outreach-in-a-skeptical-world-whiteboard-friday
http://niftymarketing.com/list-of-local-link-building-ideas/
Hope it helps!
Hi Jim!
Nice of you to put these out for community feedback. You're off to a good start here, and while I don't have the necessary time to look at all of these, here's what I'm seeing on a couple:
Good amount of text
Text color is hard to read; it's too light
H1 Tag order of keywords might need to be rethought, putting business name at end instead of beginning
In the main body text, reconsider all of those 'it's important' statements. It makes it sound like 'I' am suppose to do all of that work before calling your company (inspect my house, look for leaks, etc.). If this is what YOU do, be clearer about that.
Some text is a bit over-optimized with basement remodeling and Ashburn terms. Example: How Long Does a Basement Finishing in Ashburn, VA Take? Unless it takes longer in Ashford than some other city to finish a basement, this type of text looks a bit awkward. Review the text for other instances and be sure keywords are being incorporated in natural language.
It's good you're getting testimonials, but I would scrap the rotating display. It's confusing that I'm on a page about basements reading a testimonial about blinds. Put basement testimonials on the basement page, bathroom testimonials on the bathroom page, etc.
Put a phone number in your call to action at the bottom of the page. Don't make people click unless they want to. Give them the number.
Title tag & URL look good
So, you're on a good path with this page. Some minor refinements could make it better!
Same comments regarding font color, H1 tag, call to action, testimonials etc. as above.
The text needs to be edited for grammar. For example:
Bathrooms need to be a place that makes you feel good, so that every day can be started off the right way.
Again, I see a good initial effort here, but with a bit more effort, there could be meaningful improvements.
I know it requires bravery to show work to the public, and the good news is here that you are off to a good start but that there are some SEO, UX and content matters that could be improved. Thanks for the chance to look at these. Hopefully what I've written above will be a starting point to evaluating all of your service pages. Good luck, Jim!
Hey Robert!
Though I don't know the complete details of your scenario, you've done a good job providing some clues. Here is what I'd suggest:
These do sound like two distinct businesses. There is no obvious connection between a roofing contractor and a window washing company. So, good on this.
I am assuming the 2 companies are fully differentiated with different names, phone numbers, separate websites that don't interlink and totally unique content on the two websites. Any other approach would be problematic.
However, both of your business models are likely SABs (service area businesses) unless customers are actually visiting either company at the place of business. That seems unlikely for either a roofing contractor or a window washer. If both are SABs, you should be hiding the Google My Business listing address for both.
Providing you are doing everything in point #2 correctly, there is no reason not to include complete NAP on each website for the company. You don't need to hide the address on the website or on other citations. You only need to do that on Google, because it's their unique requirement.
Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any further questions!
Hi Ryan!
Great topic. Please, answer these questions to fully clarify this scenario:
Do customers come to this address to do face-to-face business with the company during stated business hours?
Do the brands each have their own front door, or internal forward-facing department? For example, in a car dealership, there would be one area for sales in the building and another area for repairs.
Do the brands each have their own phone number?
Do the brands each have their own landing page on the company website, or are their 4 different websites?
Even if you can't state what the brands are, can you give an example of what the brands are. For instance, are the products produced by the 4 brands totally unrelated (like vacuum cleaners, dog beds, shampoo and pickles) or related (like lawn mowers, edge trimmers, leaf blowers and hedge clippers)?
Your answers to these will help the community clearly envision the business model.
Hey Thomas,
By a happy coincidence, I just happened to write a blog post on this here recently:
https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
Hope it gives you some new ideas!
Hey Thomas!
Perfectly fine that they kept the number as long as you are working on getting every possible old citation cleaned up to reflect the new address/new number. Moz Local will help with this, but you may need to do some manual work as well. Good to know that no locations are sharing phone numbers. That can be a disaster!
Regarding duplicate content, you might want to check out this post, https://moz.com/blog/how-to-defeat-duplicate-content-next-level but if you've only got 6 locations, I would honestly recommend also doing a manual read-through of each of the 6 landing pages to be sure they are actually unique and helpful (i.e. not just swapping out city names or making a minimum effort in some way).
Good idea to make the Locations its own link in the menu. That could help!
Getting duplicates like these resolved is going to be very important: https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMk5leHQlMjUyMERheSUyNTIwRmxvb3JzJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyMjEwNDUlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjJOZXh0JTI1MjBEYXklMjUyMEZsb29ycyUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjY1MDUlMjUyMERvYmJpbiUyNTIwUm9hZCUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjIxMDQ1JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyNDEwNzQ0ODk1MCUyNTIyJTI1NUQ=
The shared phone number between your business and a business called Bill's Carpet Fair is concerning. I don't know if this stems from re-branding or something else, but this would be worth doing a full citation audit for to be sure Google is convinced that your business ... and not Bill's ... is located at that phone number.
On these pages, I recommend that you put the business name with the rest of the NAP. Right now, it looks like the name of this business is Columbia, MD Flooring Showroom and you have the address separate below with no name.
You might also want to consider putting the 6 locations in the footer.
Finally, the content on the landing pages is a decent start, but there's room for improvement, and if you want to convince Google that a landing page is more worthy of top billing than a homepage, assessing and improving the content could be an important step!
Hi Thomas!
I see what you mean regarding the homepage rather than the landing page coming up, though the knowledge panel to the right is correct for this location. 3 Quick Questions:
Are you sharing phone numbers between any of the locations
Is the text on all of your landing pages unique, or is any of it duplicate text?
I am not finding an obvious option in your menu to see all of your locations on the website. Something like 'Cities We Serve' in the top menu. What's going on with that?
Hi Faisal,
I'm so sorry that Moz Local doesn't support Canada at this time. For citation assistance in Canada, Whitespark.ca is probably the most high-regarded service. You might want to check out their offerings, and nice to know they are fellow Canadians.
Hey There!
Thanks so much for taking the time to contribute to this discussion. The geographic variations you mention sound normal to me, but the issue of the companies consistently ranking highly for no apparent reason is interesting. Are you saying the search is yielding a onebox (just one result) or a normal pack? Is the name of the business an exact or close match of the keyword phrase you're searching for? Is the business right in the middle of a cluster or similar businesses? Sounds like a good puzzle!
Hi Eric,
Local SEO is my area of skill, and what I can tell you from that perspective is that a directory like yours will not actually be able to achieve local pack rankings in Google, because those are entirely based on physical address, not on content. So, rather, what your goal should be would be to rank well organically beneath the local packs for your core searches. You will be competing against the likes of YP and Yelp and can use their structure as a guide for how to build a directory like theirs. But, beyond this, we get outside of my area of knowledge and so I hope you'll receive some more traditional SEO advice, vs. Local SEO advice.
Great question! Unless each doctor has his/her own phone number, then I would strongly advise against creating Google My Business listings for them. You've done a 100% excellent job up to this point of keeping your locations separate with unique phone numbers and unique landing pages. If you then begin to degrade NAP clarity by creating a whole bunch of new listings that share the practices' phone numbers, you will be dimming that clarity and putting the listings at risk for merging and potential ranking issues.
Is it a guideline violation for practitioner to share a phone number with the practice. Technically, it isn't, as the guidelines read:
Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible
So, Google is speaking specifically about locations here, rather than practitioners. They aren't stating that practitioners HAVE TO have a unique phone number, but later on in the guidelines, they do state this about them:
He or she is directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours
So, one can sagely infer from this that Google wants a person rather than a call center to answer the practitioner's phone number if called, but Google really doesn't spell this out in terms that are as black-and-white as I'd like.
Nevertheless, whether it's a guideline violation or not to share phone numbers, it's not a best practice, given the problems it can cause, so, unless the doctors are willing to have unique phone numbers at which they can be contacted directly, I wouldn't advise creating GMB listings for them.
Hope this helps!
Hey Jason!
So glad those tips helped you identify an industry centroid that may be a contributing factor. Way to go! Some thoughts on this:
Go into this knowing that it can be VERY difficult to overcome something like this and that your best bet here is likely to be a full, professional audit by a skilled Local SEO consultant. A good place to look for one is the Contributors box on the right side of last year's Moz Local Search Ranking Factors. Here are some questions for you to ask yourself, either for your own purposes, or to share with a consultant.
Are you 100% certain that you are located inside of the official city limits? As I mentioned on your other thread, do the Maps lookup of your city name and be sure you are inside of the pink city border instead of outside of it. If you're outside, then the goal of ranking in the Local pack for that city/keyword combo is likely out.
If you are inside the city borders, how far are you from the industry centroid? Are any other players as far away as you are and still ranking in the top 10 or so results?
If so, do an audit of any competitor that is as far away as you are, but is managing to rank in the top 10 on the Map. Identify every piece of information you can that might be contributing to their rank (age, domain authority, reviews, vibrant content, citations, etc.). Mine this data to see if there is a pattern or a weakness you can identify that you would be able to use to your advantage, with the goal of helping you get into the pack.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that the industry centroid is the sole cause of what you are experiencing. If you're outside the city borders, then, yes, that's probably the main cause, but if you're inside the borders, a business which is supremely strong enough should have hope of overcoming an industry centroid bias. But, remember, there may be multiple causes contributing to low rankings.
Finally, don't forget that user-as-centroid is likely to overcome industry-centroid bias, in that your customers who are physically closest to you on their phones may be seeing a different set of results, which do include you.
Just some quick thoughts. Hope they help!
Hi Janet,
As Laura has mentioned, unfortunately, virtual addresses of any kind are a violation of Google's guidelines and subject to punitive action on Google's part should they discover them. The only way your client should be marketing herself locally (meaning building citations and trying to earn local pack rankings) is if she has a legitimate physical address, whether in Skokie, Chicago, or any other city.
Lacking a physical address, the client should confine themselves to organic SEO efforts or PPC.
Hey There!
It's very important to remember that citations are just one of several hundred estimated factors that contribute to local pack rankings. In my earlier reply from March 3rd, I recommended some things any local business owner should consider when they aren't ranking in the local pack. I'd suggest you investigate all of these. Hope it helps!
Hi Stephen,
My apologies, but I am simply not very familiar with geographic designations in your country. In the US, Local SEO geared toward local pack rankings is totally hinged on cities, never counties. If counties are an important search term for your business, you can make an organic effort in that regard with content you build on your website to reflect these terms, but the core of your Local SEO will be city-based, not county-based, and will apply to the city/cities in which you are physically located.
I hope you'll receive further feedback from the community.
Hi Meier!
Very good feedback from the community, and scenario you are describing is why most Local SEOs would recommend the approach of a single domain with landing pages on it for each of the 7 locations. This way, every single thing that you do to build up the brand simultaneously benefits all the locations, instead of this requiring 7 separate efforts every time you want to make a marketing decision.
Hi Lance,
Just to clarify, I am not a getfivestars customer nor affiliated with them in any way. I know the owner, Mike Blumenthal, and did a test drive of the product and was very impressed with it. I'm afraid I have not tried grade.us. Perhaps if you do, you'd like to share with the community how you think it compares!
Hi Kristen,
Yeah, I just don't think Google+ really caught on the way Google might have hoped. But Posts could totally be interesting, if it becomes widely available.
Hi Blake,
What I'm suggesting with those links is that you need to do a thorough analysis of any competitor to discover whether their high rankings are a case of geography, organic strength, reviews, citations and a host of other factors ... or, if the pack in question has been spammed. If the former, you then know what the factors are that are contributing to rank and can identify which factors (if any) you can target to surpass the competitor. If the latter, then you can always report spam to Google. There are believed to be several hundred factors that contribute to rank, and a Local SEO or local business owner who is feeling astonishment over being outranked by what appears to be a weak competitor needs to sit down and put the time in to discover whether these high rankings are the result of strength that Google is responding to, or the result of spam that Google is failing to catch.
In the scope of a forum, it's not likely that a community member is going to be able to take the time to do a full competitive analysis for you, so I'm hoping the links I've provided will get you started on doing one. I totally get how frustrating it can be to find your business or your client's business in this scenario of being outranked, but fortunately, we can use skill to divine the probable cause of this outcome and, hopefully, figure out how to overcome any issues, whenever possible.
Hope this helps!
Hey Jim,
You could go either way with the description. I'm kind of a fan of putting a phone number in the description, myself! I'd rather have that there than the city names.
Hi Blake,
These 2 threads may help you diagnose competitors' rankings:
https://moz.com/community/q/do-you-know-what-s-triggering-your-local-packs
https://moz.com/community/q/top-local-organic-rankings-but-nowhere-to-be-found-on-google-snack-pack
Hope these help!
Hi Jim,
While it won't hurt you, are you sure it would be useful for your clients in City A to click over to your City B page, or might that just add unnecessary clutter and confusion to the page?
Hey Bob,
Thanks for clarifying, and this does not surprise me:
I added keywords to the business titles of Google My Business listings and I saw a big improvement on categories the business didn’t already appeared on.
Good to test this out, but also important not to leave it that way, as adding extraneous keywords is a guideline violation (one which Google may not catch for years, but which they will definitely red flag once they notice it). So, your test confirms what is very easy to see in the local packs - that business title spam is still very much a ranking factor and that Google is still not up the task of policing this.
On the advice from the Google rep, yeah, they really shouldn't have been telling you to post on Plus, given the divorce of local from Plus, unless they felt your business model fits the whole communities thing Google is now promoting with that. Plus has kind of died in terms of its usefulness to local businesses, unless they fit a very specific model. Personally, I'm feeling a lot more excited about this new Posts things. Have you seen this: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2016/03/04/googles-newest-social-sharing-environment-google-posts/
It's a limited test right now, but it could be game-changing. Thanks again for the detailed response, Bob!
Hey There!
I recommend that you get the landing pages straightened out before building citations. You don't want redirecting URLs on them and you don't want to have to do the work twice. Hope this helps 
Hey Brodie,
Thanks for following up with further details. I think it's really weird that neither you nor I can find a total number of Google reviews. Had I not been unable to find it, I would have bet the house that this data existed in some sort of quarterly report or something, but if it does, I simply can't find it. Our conversation has made me curious as to what that total number is, now
If you can find it, I'd love to see that data!
Hi Bob!
Thanks so much for joining the discussion. Are you saying you added keywords to the business titles of Google My Business listings and saw a rise in rank/visibility? Or are you saying you removed keywords? Just want to be sure I'm understanding.
Was the chat with Google support desk some months ago? Google has disconnected Plus from Local, so I'm concerned you may have received outdated advice from Google's support, if it's the case that they are still telling people to post on Plus.
I'd love to hear more, on both points.
Hi Cristina,
I can't say with 100% certainty, but it could be that Google is not looking at 'excellence furniture and office supplies' as a local search. Instead, they may think that's a generic search for 'excellent' furniture and office supplies. I have seen instances of this before, where the name of a business was worded in such a way that Google was perceiving a user's search for it as being a generic keyword search rather than a search for a brand. Another example of this might be if you owned a restaurant named 'Antique China'. If a user were to type that into Google, Google might perceive this as a search for old china dishes, rather than a search for a business brand.
The good news on this is that brands that become popular enough can overcome this issue, eventually convincing Google that a search for something like 'Whole Foods' here in the US has the intent of locating this popular grocery store chain, rather than, perhaps, an explanation of whole vs. refined food products. Prior to the emergence of this grocery chain, such a search might have yielded explanations of brown rice vs. white rice, wheat flour vs. white flour, etc.
Again, without fully auditing your business, I can't be absolutely certain that this is the phenomenon you are witnessing with your furniture company, but I think it's a very strong clue that when you add the city name, Google gets it that you're looking for a branded business in that city, rather than a list of various stores selling office furniture. Your business, your website and your citation building are all brand new. My advice is that if you want to keep the brand, rather than changing it, you should do all you can to market that brand in the coming months and years in hopes that it will become well-known and popular enough with online searchers that Google will begin to get it that people are looking for YOU when they do that search, and not for something more generic. Impossible to predict how long this may take, but your marketing really matters.
The alternative would be to consider re-branding to something that is unmistakably a brand name, like 'Basmayor Office Furniture'. With a brand like that, there is really no room for Google to confuse a search for the brand with a search for something generic.
Hope this helps, and good luck!
Hey Brodie,
Thanks for letting us know about the research you are doing. My impression of this could possibly be colored by the fact that I live on the West Coast and consistently see individual businesses having a greater number of reviews on Yelp than Google (and also by the fact that Google, in the past, has tried to buy Yelp to try to pay catch-up to them and control the game). In Q3 of 2015, Yelp reported a total volume of 90 million cumulative reviews, but interestingly, on a quick check, I'm not finding comparable data for Google.
Are you able to find that number for us? I'd like a reality check for myself on this if you can turn up 2015 stats for total volume of Google My Business reviews. My impression is that Yelp is still out ahead, but if you've seen something different, it would be great if you'd share what you've learned here.
Hi Jason,
So glad if this helped get your troubleshooting started! Regarding redirecting URLs, while I can't accurately state exactly how much the redirecting URLs might be causing trouble, they are something I would absolutely recommend cleaning up, partly for consistency purposes, but also to be sure your branding is cohesive across the board. So, yes, definitely put citation cleanup on your to-do list.
Cray-cray, indeed! Yelp's main appeal is the dominant role they have come to play in so many cities as the premium review source. The sheer number or reviews simply can't be matched - not even by Google. Could be Facebook will give them a run for their money, but I don't think we're there yet. Many business owners feel that they have to participate in Yelp or be left behind, and that's often true, particularly on the coasts. But there have been complaints since Yelp's early days about both their policies and their sales approach, so it's never been an unalloyed experience of joy for business owners.
As for cats, I don't have one myself, but I did have a wild rabbit in my yard yesterday, taking care of trimming the grass for me
Hi There!
My apologies, but at this time, Moz Local does not have multi-user access available. You would need to share your login information with the other person to whom you'd like to grant access. The alternative would be to sign up for reports and then email those reports to your friend after you've received them.
Hi Kristen!
Wow - yes! That's exactly the type of case I find interesting, too. Sadly, as you point out, the old keyword-stuffed business title can still boost a business, despite the guidelines (and, is, of course, something one could report to Google!). I like that you've noticed those authoritative links. Could be a real factor there. It would be interesting to know what would happen to these results if the naming violation were reported and acted upon. You could actually track that and see, then, if that had been the main factor, or if the authoritative links were still enough to keep the business ranking highly.
I'm very appreciative of you contributing what you've noticed, and hope we'll hear more from others
Hey To All My Local Pals, Here
Recently, I watched a totally fascinating LocalU video in which Mike Blumenthal introduced a hypothesis that there may be a way to analyze what, specifically, is triggering a specific local pack. Now, Mike is stating that correlation is not causation in explaining this, but basically what he starts talking about at around 4:40 in the video is that what you are seeing rank well in the local packs may be demonstrably caused by what you see ranking organically beneath the pack, or may be caused by totally different signals.
Mike says,
_"If you're seeing the top 10 results are all IYP industry sites, and there's a pack showing, and the highest local site is 24 or something in organic, it's unlikely that that's what's triggering the pack. And so then you want to look at third-party triggers and see if that's what's actually triggering the pack." _
Obviously, all of us who do Local are familiar with the idea that a tremendous variety of elements contribute to pack rankings, but I am particularly intrigued by the idea of looking at the organic result beneath a pack and determining that there is little or no correlation between them, and this then driving one to look elsewhere for contributing factors.
In a recent response to another thread here on Q&A, I discussed some common local pack ranking failure causes when organic rank is high. What I'd love to see is whether, if you look at some of your clients' desired packs, can you tell if organic signals are driving them, or can you see that it's not organic signals driving the pack, as Mike suggests. What, in those cases, does appear to be driving the packs?
I'd be so interested in a discussion on this. What do you see? What do you think of Mike's suggestions?
Hey Jason!
The most common reason for what you are describing is geographic. The high-organic-ranking-but-low-pack-ranking business is either outside of:
The user's centroid (where the user is physically located at the time of search)
Google's industry cluster (business is far from the industry centroid Google has assigned)
The business isn't actually inside of the city of search
Joy Hawkin's actually wrote a very good article about the 3rd issue over at Search Engine Land recently: http://searchengineland.com/rank-high-organically-not-locally-case-study-240692 I highly recommend reading that and doing a thorough study of any geographic limitations that may be holding you back.
Now, if it turns out not to be any of the above 3 things, the next thing to look into is whether something is wrong with the way the business is using Google My Business. Namely, if you've violated any guidelines, that can tank your local pack rankings.
Finally, if neither geography nor guideline violations are at play here, then you have to go back to the basics, like:
Organic strength
Citation consistency, spread and age
Reviews
etc.
Pretty much every case I've ever seen like the one you're describing can be diagnosed by investigating all of the above, and will it will turn out that one of the above things, or a combination of them, is the answer.
Hope this helps!
Super! So glad it helped. Spammers beware!
Hi Rachel!
Without being able to see this directly (it's totally okay if you can't share) advice here will have to be general rather than specific. Yes, you can get docked for having Google My Business listings that don't follow Google's guidelines. I recommend that you phone Google directly so that you can talk to them about what happened and see what your options are for closing out the listings, if appropriate. You can get on the phone with Google via the CONTACT US button here: https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639
Hi Eric!
You are right on that Bing's guidelines are actually pretty similar to Google's. Just wanted to take a second to mention, though, that the practice of creating fictitious suite numbers is not recommended and not necessary. Back in the day, Google did have the worst time parsing out individual practitioners or businesses at a shared address, with merged listings often resulting. This is no longer the case; Google has really improved in being able to parse this out, provided practitioners follow some basic safety steps like obeying naming conventions, having unique phone numbers, choosing different categories and ensuring that each practitioner has his/her own landing page on the website.
The recommendation to create fictitious suite numbers stems from the days when merging was such an issue, affecting thousands (millions?) of medical practices, legal practices, real estate firms, etc. in their ability to list themselves properly on Google. But, these days, it's much more important to be sure that you're only listing a real-world address, and you can do so with pretty good confidence that Google will understand that lawyers A, B and C all work at 123 Main St, and that the listings won't merge, provided you've followed all the guidelines to the letter.
Hope it helps to know this, and I hope you'll keep participating as we all continue learning Local together - a never-ending process!
Hey There!
Yes, I so agree ... Bing's guidelines are very spare, but they do allow practitioner listings, just like Google. Here's an example in the wild:
Best practice: just as with Google, be sure you've got a unique phone number for each agent (not shared with the practice or any other agent) and be sure you're linking practitioner Bing Places to practitioner landing pages on the website. Also a good idea to not share categories, whenever possible.
I'm with you in wishing Bing's guidelines spelled things out more clearly, as Google's do.
Hi Christy!
So, happy to see you here!
Yelp has, perhaps, the most stringent filter of any platform when it comes to trusting reviewer profiles. It's estimated that you have to leave something like 10-15 reviews before Yelp's filters start to lift, making it impractical for business owners to earn Yelp reviews if a customer isn't already an active Yelper. Filtering represent Yelp's effort to uphold the quality and trustworthiness of their content, but some of the consequences of this effort aren't widely appreciated!
Phil Rozek wrote an epic post last year on both oft-bemoaned and little-known facets of Yelp issues:
http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/04/23/20-plus-depressing-observations-about-yelp-reviews/
Totally worth a read!
Hi Richard,
Sounds like good old spam to me, from your description. Definitely report it. This should help:
http://imprezziomarketing.com/seo-blog/google-maps/new-way-to-report-issues-on-google-my-business/
Hi Jim,
Don't worry, you're not being repetitive
It's very common for service area businesses to serve a variety of close-set cities, and best practice for this is 1 page per city. In fact, doing so could help you to outrank your competitors who are crunching multiple cities onto the same page.
If you offer multiple services in multiple cities, the choice here is whether you want to create:
a) a page for each city and a page for each service
or
b) a page for every possible combination of services and cities
If budget, time or inspiration are limited, option A may be best in which case, you'd have URLs like this for your services
domain.com/bathroom-remodeling
domain.com/kitchen remodeling
and domains like this for your services:
...with the city landing pages needing to feature geo-specific content for projects you've done in those cities.
If you have ample time, inspiration and budget, you can go with option B, in which case, you'd build a set of pages like:
domain.com/bathroom-remodeling-sterling-va
domain.com/bathroom-remodeling-leesburg-va
domain.com/kitchen-remodeling-sterling-va
domain.com/bathroom-remodeling-leesburg-va
etc.
It's really a matter of how much creative writing you commit to so that, with either option A or B, every page you publish is as helpful as possible to customers, is unique, and is of the highest quality you can produce.
This recent Moz Blog post may help: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
Hi Charity,
Great topic. Unfortunately, in your industry, Google does tend to favor aggregators over individual businesses, and the ability of a business website to outrank these giants organically with temporary listings is going to be limited. They may simply have too much strength.
So, barnacle SEO is going to be important (ensuring that you are properly profiled on the major real estate aggregators that outrank you) but you may also need to resort to PPC and pay to be ahead of these huge competitors if it's essential to do so. Not ideal, but unless you can find a way to make your house listings somehow tremendously more relevant and popular, every time you list a house, than the same data appearing on the aggregators, chances are, the goal of outranking them is not realistic, and you might be better served by setting a different goal. At the end of the day, if your properties are at least appearing highly in the results of the aggregators and you are receiving conversions from that, you may need to shift organic goals to ranking other types of content well. This post from Bruce Clay is a couple of years old, but might have some good inspiration for your business: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/real-estate-seo/
I hope you'll receive additional community feedback.
Hey Jim!
Normally, I would not recommend having more than one city modifier in the URL per page. So:
but not
domain.co/service-city-city-city
Ideally, you want a unique page per city. Hope that helps!
I see! Thanks for clarifying. Appreciate it.
Hi Julie,
I agree with this, and believe many consultants would, too:
I still use Yelp and coach my clients on how to make Yelp work for them, but it's because you can't afford to ignore something that has such a big market share, not because they are pro-business.
It will be interesting if Kristen can let us know why she feels Yelp is kinder to big businesses than small ones. To me, the playing field in that regard has always seemed relatively level, but I'd be interested to hear other perspectives on that.
Hi Rosemary,
Apart from the basic route suggested by Kristen, you might just try this:
https://moz.com/community/q/have-you-used-twitter-for-google-my-business-support
Hope it helps!
Hi Kristen,
Yes, definitely interesting, and I hear ya on the concerns. In just this one little thread, it's clear that many have these reservations. Would you say that Yelp favors big business over the little guy? Have you had an experience with that which you can share?