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Thanks everyone - some very useful feedback here and certainly food for thought.

We've got some locality-centric data we can draw on so we should be able to get some unique content for each area together. There are also some links pointing to the home page from businesses located in certain cities/towns - could changing these links to the relevant local landing pages negatively effect our national rankings?

John

Hi all,

When it comes to local SEO in 2015, I appreciate that having a physical location in the town/city you wish to rank is a major factor. However, if you're a national brand is it still possible to rank for local searches when you're based in one location?

The reason I ask is that, although our service is national, the nature of what we offer means that it is not inconceivable that people would search for a local variation of our top keywords. Other than the standard things - location in the content, the H1/H2s, title tag, meta description, url etc. - is there anything national businesses can do to help?

Thanks in advance.

John

Hi Jimmy,

Thanks very much for the reply!

John

Hi Tom,

Yes that's exactly right. The link from the About Us section goes directly to www.example.com/competition - it doesn't quickly redirect.

Thanks for putting my mind at ease!

John

Hi all,

As part of our content marketing efforts we have run a number of initiatives in the past and created pages on the website to go along with them (also where the links for these particular projects point to).

However, the URL structure isn't actually a reflection of where the pages sit on the site. Unfortunately I'm unable to provide a URL for reasons I won't bore you with, but here's an example:

We recently ran a competition that was very successful in generating links. The URL for this is www.domain.co.uk/competition.

However, the page actually sits within the About Us section - which is where all of our news and content marketing pages go - and uses a URL override.

How much of an issue is this in regards to A) Our SEO in general?; and B) Ensuring we receive as much equity from the links we earn as possible? A brief explanation of what URL overrides actually are would also be useful! (We have a digital marketing agency who handle most of our SEO)

Thanks in advance guys!

John

Hi Audrey,

There are all kinds of reasons why your landing pages may not be ranking for your keywords. When you say 'change my url' do you mean change the domain of the website (the bit in between the www. and the .com) or the part after the .com (.com/mylandingpage)?

Having the keywords in the the subdomain (the bit after the .com) can help, to a point, but as far as I'm aware having an exact match domain if that isn't the name of your business is a bit of a no-no nowadays.

John

I suppose you could look at it as:

Here's John Rooney writing about Content Marketing -> He works as a Content Marketer for this company -> Here's that company's website.

You could argue MAYBE that in this context the link makes sense from a human perspective. It's whether the algorithm can recognise that I guess.

John

Thanks for the replies guys.

I guess this is the answer I was expecting to be honest. Somewhat frustrating I can't link back to the company I work for when blogging about something I know about and work with every day - but I suppose I can't expect Google to make that connection, and in reality it's not a "useful" link for anyone.

Interesting to see from the tests Matt-POP conducted that even one strong off-topic link (at least I take it from that comment we're talking about a single link) can cause a negative impact.

John

No - not that awful kind of guest blogging Matt Cutts called time on - but legitimate blogging on quality websites. Just thought I'd get that out of the way first

I work for a legal services provider as a Content Marketing and PR Executive, and I have a regular spot guest posting on Search Engine People which I acquired in my previous role at an SEO agency. As I'm still working in the industry (in-house rather than for an agency) I thought I'd carry it on, not only because it's good for me personally, but because it'd also be a nice link building quick win from a good site with a strong DA.

My question is, with next to know relevancy between domain-domain, page-domain, page-page, is there much value in the link? To be clear, I'll be doing it anyway, but the answer might inform whether I do it under the guise of an employee of my company or just as myself.

Thanks all!

Thanks Massimiliano. That particular domain still has a DA of 43 so perhaps they haven't quite got around to it yet..

Appreciate the response.

Hi Massimiliano,

No, the competitor has replaced all of the old content with new content that is targeted towards their keywords. The website in question is this one:

http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/

It used to be a website dedicated to The Hutton Inquiry (funnily enough...) but is now just a generic blog called 'Personal Injury UK'. In total they've done this with 5 different expired domains, in the exact same way.

Is this just one of those things that Google claim - and may even usually - they'd discount but that might actually just slip through the net? The rest of their backlink profile is very poor and their rise through the rankings seems completely inexplicable.

John

Hi guys,

We've recently noticed a (very) minor competitor competing with us, as well as some of our industry's biggest names, in the Google SERPs - and the reason why has us absolutely stumped.

Aside from an awful website from an aesthetic/UX point of view, their on-site content is horribly over-optimised, with keywords on the homepage even STRONG TAGGED for crying out loud! A backlink check using OSE and Ahrefs found 19 linking domains - most of which were just trash - but there were 5 that boasted some decent DA, the highest being 43.

The thing is, these 5 sites are all very generic industry-relevant "blogs" that provide exceptionally poor quality content. The thing is, they have some very high quality backlinks (the BBC, the Guardian and CNN to name just three) acquired when the websites were something different entirely. The competitor has basically bought expired domains, turned them into basic websites related to our industry and linked them to their main domain.

My question then is: is this competitor benefiting from the very high quality links that are pointing at sites that are then linked to their main domain? I found an article from 2009 that suggested old links stop counting after being purchased by someone else, but we are stumped as to why they could be otherwise.

Thanks in advance everyone!

John