Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your response, John. That's good to know. I wonder why Moz lists bit.ly as the domain with a DA of 97 when it's just a redirect from another site. Shouldn't it list the actual url? (BTW, in the case I'm referring to, the shortened link was actually an article from our competitor's own website, so definitely not a backlink.)

In looking at one of our competitors in Moz today, I noticed in their linking domains report showed a bit.ly link with a DA of 97. According to Moz this is a follow link as well. Should I be using bit.ly links to take advantage of their high domain? I was under the impression that bit.ly links were not considered backlinks.

fRT2j5cRtXo3ARPq9

I concur with the other comments. We use Rank Tracker to track keywords for certain pages on our sites. This was an important part of our need for Moz, since the Campaigns tool does not do this. Given the exorbitant cost we pay for the Moz service, now that this isn't part of your service, we may have to look elsewhere.

Thanks for answering, David. Yes, our goal is to get both pages ranked for keyword phrases such as "self storage vancouver." We'd prefer to not just have a Vancouver landing page since we just manage many of our locations rather than own them. We've thought about the idea of having a Vancouver landing page with both locations listed and hyperlinked to their own location pages. This appears to be what a number of our competitors are doing. But we're are trying to avoid that if possible since that would require a complete overhaul of our site hierarchy with our other locations.

Any other ideas?

We are in the self-storage business and have locations through the Pacific Northwest. As we grow, there are cities where we've added multiple (2-3) locations. But we're discovering that we're having a great deal of difficulty ranking for all of these. For instance, we have two locations in Vancouver, WA. One is West Coast Self-Storage Vancouver, and the other is West Coast Self-Storage Padden Parkway. Both are in Vancouver, WA, but for the most part, only West Coast Self-Storage Vancouver is getting ranked. In fact, on those searches where Vancouver ranks, Padden Parkway doesn't show up anywhere. Not in the top 10 pages anyway.

Each location has an outer landing page and an inner details page. On each page, we've placed unique, city-optimized keywords in the URL, Page Title, h1s, content. Of course each location has a separate NAP. Each location also has its own GMB page. Each location has a decent amount of reviews across multiple sites (Google, Yelp, GetFiveStars.)

Both locations were previously on their own domain until a year ago when they were redirected to their current URLs. Both of those original domains were close to the same age.

With the Padden Parkway location, we've tried to be even more hyper-local, by including the address in the URLs and in the h1 of the outer page. We've also created an h2 that references local neighborhoods around the business.

We're also running into this situation in at least one other city, so I'm wondering if this has something to do with our url structure. Other businesses in our space use the URL structure of domain.com/state/city/location. We only go down to the state level.

What are we missing?

I concur with the other comments. We use Rank Tracker to track keywords for certain pages on our sites. This was an important part of our need for Moz, since the Campaigns tool does not do this. Given the exorbitant cost we pay for the Moz service, now that this isn't part of your service, we may have to look elsewhere.