Well Ranked National Site - Need Local Rankings
-
We are a virtual company doing business in 30 states nationwide. All our business is done via the phone, fax, email and express mail.
Back in 2008 I optimized our small 8 page website for our key terms and was able to rank the site #1 nationally for our main keywords. (I did a 6 month consulting gig for the company). The site remained #1 in Google until last year when some serious competitors entered the space and knocked us down to the middle of page one.
Then with the Panda update #1 & #2 we have seen our traffic drop 50% mostly due to not receiving the City + Keywords rankings any more.
I have now been hired full time to bring us back but my question is this
- Do I need to build out city specific pages on the existing website?
- Do I need to buy keyword specific domains and create microsites?
- Do a combination of both?
I would love to do both but I have to prioritize my efforts.
Any thoughts would be great.
-
That is what I thought. Thanks for the reply. Now I need to find time to return the favor to the board.....pay it forward.
-
citykeyword.com is best for quick results, a new domain can rank quicly, but as time go on the advatage is dimished when you build up other signals.
but citykeyword.domain.com keeps the link juice in your site. As long as your subdomnains are well linked to the root domain google will see it as the same site.
-
In regards to the onsite optimization, I am still trying to slowly fix some of the issues. It is an old site not built well and done in tables. Once I get a bit more money, I plan to rebuild the website in wordpress.
A follow on question from above. Although you say the long term strategy is a single site with local city pages, which process would see quicker results? city specific domains + keyword or state.website.com/city + keyword.html ?
Just curious what you think. thanks.
-
City domain names is a good idea, but as you say, you will be splitting you efforts, so I say no. city landing pages is a better idea, try and get the city into your link text when you get links, local directories also will help
You also have a lot of on page issues, you have a lot of images with out alt text, I mean a lot, there is a good chance to put some city names, you also have a lot of non relevant link text, “click here” I would definitely fix them
You also have a lot of soft 404s, missing pages, or in your case mostly images that give a 200 instead of a 404. this is not helping, google has made a point about this recenly
Your code includes a lot of noise to content ratio, lots of script, flash and stuff, search engines like clean code.
How I see it a site with many violations needs many more links to rank than one that is violation free.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Urgent help needed for site move with major ranking loss
URGENT HELP/ADVICE NEEDED I am so stressed and worried about my website domain change. I desperately need advice as soon as possible. I will try my best to keep this as brief as possible. I have owned and operated my punk clothing business online at the URL toofastonline.com for 15 years now. And for a long long time we ranked #1 for punk clothing on Google & life was good. However, thanks to the arrival of several cheap marketplaces and other unanticipated changes our ranking dropped considerably. The last few years have been extremely hard on us, to say the least, we came really close to losing the business altogether. But finally after lots of hard work & long hours, things started to improve. Ranking went back up, and we were busy again. I had been toying with the idea of buying the domain TooFast.com for about 10 years, but I never had the money to do it until this now, so I made the leap and as of Jan 9, toofastonline.com became toofast.com. Unfortunately, I now know that I set up the domain change hastily, without doing any of the pre-work Google suggests to do. I didn’t know it then but I did it wrong. And our site which wasranking #7 for punk clothing on Jan. 8th is now number 51 and today is only Jan 24th! I AM PANICKING. I have looked for help, posting jobs on Shopify Experts site several times now, opening accounts with MOZ and SEM Rush, spending countless hours on the phone with GoDaddy, Shopify and even long chats with Google. I have spent all day everyday for the past two weeks trying fix everything to no avail. No one can start on my site issues fast enough. And I have been given so much wrong information that I feel like I have done irreparable damage. I was (am) not qualified to make this kind of a site change alone. Too much was done too fast and without any real working knowledge Google SEO. My brother was the SEO guy and since he left the business I have just been struggling along with it, just trying to keep my head above water. So now for the big question: Should I temporarily change my Shopify stores domain back to toofastonline.com? This way I couldstart at the beginning, fix all the 404 redirects, fix the 301 redirects, clean up code, get the site in top working condition, and then, as Google suggests in theirGoogle Search Console Change of Address Toolstart to do the change of address in small sections, I can not afford to make any more reckless decisions. I have started and stopped, updated, fixed, changed and tried to fix again too many times now. I dont want Google to think I am trying something shady.. I’m not, I just don’t know what I’m doing, and I need help. Here is as much info as I can think of, I am more than willing to pay for help or do the work myself, as long as what I am doing is the right thing. Any and all help/advice/offers are welcome! Maureen CONTACT DETAILS: NAME: Maureen Keough, Owner EM:<a style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Maureen@TooFast.com</a> PH: 856-599-1675 (W) DETAILS OF OUR SET-UP THE APPS & SERVICES WE USE: Google Admin / G-Suite User Gmail for emails Godaddy holds our domains Shopify hosts our storefront. My Shopify store was located at TooFastOnline.com for about 5 years Our Domain Changed From toofastonline.com to toofast.com on Jan 9 In Godaddy both toofastonline.com is being forwarded to toofast.com In Shopify I added toofast.com, made it my primary domain, but left toofastonline.com in there but it is just redirecting to toofast.com. STEPS TAKEN TO CHANGE | ADD | VERIFY THE NEW DOMAIN GoDaddy DNS Records Both Sites - Updated Pointing to Shopify’s IP Address GoDaddy Subdomains For TooFastOnline.com - Redirected But Causing SSL/HTTPS/Privacy errors GoDaddy Subdomains For TooFast.com - Added But Causing SSL/HTTPS/Privacy errors Google Admin - Updated Gmail MX Records TooFast - Added and Updated Gmail MX Records TooFastOnline - Unchanged Google Merchant Center - Updated TooFastOnline is now TooFast Google Merchant Product Feed- Updated TooFastOnline is now TooFast Google Ads - Finally got the New Feed Approved and It is Working Google Search Console - Updated I Think Sitemaps - Added and Asked To Crawl Google Analytics Added TooFast As A Property Seems To Be Working Google Analytics Tag Updated in Shopify Admin Google Search Console - Requested to Move TooFastOnline.com to TooFast.com, still not done. No Redirects were made prior to the “Move” All Social Media Channels Links were Updated By Us Mailerlite MX Records For Bulk Emails - Updated/Verified
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TooFast130 -
Search engine keyword rank - easiest way to check the keywords that rank across website
What is the best keyword ranking tool you have used? I have used various tools by which I am expected to identify and input the keyword I want to track... However, recently I was introduced to Searchmetrics, which I think automatically pulls in the keywords a website ranks for, without the need for manual input from the SEO (I haven't used this tool yet, so apologies if I am incorrect!). Do any other rank trackers work like this? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Is it Wortwhile to have a HTML site map for a Large Site
We are a large, enterprise site with many pages (some on our CMS and some old pages that exist outside our CMS). Every month we submit various an XML site map. Some pages on our site can no longer be found via following links from one page to another (orphan pages). Some of those pages are important and some not. Is it worth our while to create a HTML site map? Does any one have any recent stats or blog posts to share, showing how a HTML site map may have benefited a large site. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Switch hosting to be closer to site visitors, and 99% dropped from rankings?
Last week I decided to switch for a UK server to a US one at Hostgator since most of my visitors are from the US. About nine hours later 99% of my pages disappeared from google rankings, only a few non-relevant pages are at position 100-200. All decent (1000-2000 word) articles on specific topics, are gone. These pages were getting 2-3 minutes per user of readership and a low bounce rate, so I think they were pretty good quality. Does anyone think it's possible I got accidentally added on a blacklisted IP? Or why would something like this happen. Since then, I've tried switching back to the old IP for 3 days, that didn't work. Now I've filed a reinclusion request with the details. Has anyone had a similar experience? What can possibly cause this massive drop in rankings and traffic? Any help is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zpeti0 -
Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both
Hi All, For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page. My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them? Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated 🙂 Happy New Year Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tony-Dimmock0 -
Not ranking well after site was hacked
My site was hacked and that seemed to have a pretty big effect on search rankings. I'm pretty sure I've gotten the hack completely removed (as of 10/16.) During the hack and even now, all of my posts created after Aug 1 don't rank in regular Google searches at all even if I search for the titles in quotes. But I can tell they are indexed because I see them when I do a site search in Google. And I see that they are cached. Posts from before Aug 1 rank well in Google searches. The issue with August and after posts no longer appearing started in mid September. Prior to that the some of the August posts were actually performing very well. The September date corresponds to when we first started working on removing the hack. It looks like the August and after posts all have a pagerank of 0, whereas the mozrank is much higher. I've request reconsideration from Google and was told that no manual action was taken against my site. I know that's a lot of background, but I'm wondering how long do I need to wait before the August and after posts start ranking? Is there anything I can do in the mean time to address this pagerank issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris-at-Magoosh0