Should we add the city to our keywords for a site that is only local?
-
This is one of those things I have done for a long time and all of a sudden asked myself was it necessary: For our local clients, we add the city name (Houston, KC, Birmingham) after each keyword. An example would be TestSite.com/big-tester-houston
A Title Tag might be Big Tester Houston | Test Site, etc.
Where appropriate we do the same with H1 or H2's and occasionally in the content we will use the city name.
The thought being that since the site is only for a given city, it will be deemed more relevant than a site from outside.( I understand there are other factors in SEO; this is a specific question around adding the city). Yes, we also optimize with local directories/citation sites.
Is this overkill, is it even worthwhile? Is there any evidence one way or another?
I would love some strong opinions backed up with something other than anecdotal evidence where possible.
-
Hi Robert!
Nice to see you. I would recommend that you read this post from Mike Blumenthal from a couple of weeks ago if you haven't already:
Some of Mike's readers found the advice regarding the use of geomodifiers to be controversial and this led to an extremely long discussion between Mike and readers on this topic. I think you will find it to be relevant and extremely interesting, but you'll have to make up your own mind what you think!
-
Depending the scope and type of business the website is promoting adding the city name to your page content can be great. I have done it with two websites and it worked quite well.
For those sites, I placed contact info toward the top section of the pages.
That said, some people do not like to set page content up that way..... it worked for me though.
Give it a try, it may work for you, if not, the beauty is, changes can easily be made.
Thats just my two cents... good luck! and happy holidays
-
I do know that in the past year Google has weakened the power of keywords in the domain name, however, I don't believe that applies to file names. In this video: Matt Cutts does point out that this would be a very easy thing to test.
And I believe from my personal anecdotal experience that using the name of the locality in file names is useful for SEO.
-
We did this for a local client 2 years ago and had dramatic improvement. That said, we also followed it up with a link building campaign (of course). Try it for one of the pages and track any improvements, then roll it out if it works
Does this help?
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
-
Site property is verified for new version of search console, but same property is unverified in the old version
Hi all! This is a weird one that I've never encountered before. So basically, an admin granted me search console access as an "owner" to the site in search console, and everything worked fine. I inspected some URL's with the new tool and had access to everything. Then, when I realized I had to remove certain pages from the index it directed me to the old search console, as there's no tool for that yet in the new version. However, the old version doesn't even list the site under the "property" dropdown as either verified or unverified, and if I try to add it it makes me undergo the verification process, which fails (I also have analytics and GTM access, so verification shouldn't fail). Has anyone experienced something similar or have any ideas for a fix? Thanks so much for any help!
Reporting & Analytics | | TukTown1 -
Two long established sites with similar audiences, what do we do?
Hi guys, We operate two long established and reasonably well ranking sites — our company website which was built on a keyword domain: market-stalls.co.uk (approx 15 years online) and our online store which was established several years later on a different domain: tradersupplies.co.uk (approx 9 years online). (At the bottom of this post I've attached real world traffic and turnover figures that demonstrate the issue we're facing) The problem is... The above sites target very similar audiences and keywords and both rank fairly well but I know are likely competing against eachother We're a small company (8-10 employees) and we (or rather, I) don't have the time or resources to blog, build back links, manage opseo and all the social channels etc for both sites. I'm struggling to cope with one. The question is... Do we abandon the original company site (market-stalls.co.uk) in favour of pooling all our resource in to improving rankings for our online store (tradersupplies.co.uk). All our social media presence relates to tradersupplies.co.uk. We don't have any social channels for market-stalls.co.uk. Ironically, the only blog we have is established on market-stalls.co.uk — set up a couple of years ago in the hope to pull ourselves back up the rankings — but it hasn't been updated in over a year due to time restraints. Or do we attempt to keep both sites operational, despite a lack of resource? That would likely include a fairly sizeable overhaul of market-stalls.co.uk to bring it up to date with modern design standards, establishing social media channels for market-stalls.co.uk, creating a blog on tradersupplies.co.uk, and regularly updating two blogs and two sets of social media channels with unique content. Sounds like a pretty huge job right!? Obviously, had we been setting up our business in 2017 and having read the many community posts on the subject of multiple websites, we wouldn't be splitting our time between two websites and would be focussing solely on building one highly ranking site. But unfortunately we're not in this position and we're in a quandary because we don't know whether or not we should let our original, highly ranking company site drop off the radar in favour of focussing on building traffic to our online store. This situation arose out of a decision to establish our online store on a different domain to our company website. Back in 2007 I rebuilt market-stalls.co.uk and spent a lot of time optimising it. The site blew up and we were ranking very well for all kinds of keywords related to market stalls In 2009 we opened our online store tradersupplies.co.uk which sells all of the products advertised on market-stalls.co.uk and then some By using "buy now" buttons on market-stalls.co.uk which redirected to tradersupplies.co.uk, our original site was driving a large amount of traffic and sales to tradersupplies.co.uk. At it's peak it was driving almost £6,000 GBP a month in sales. This has since dropped to around a third/quarter of this total. As the business grew we began to run short of time to maintain market-stalls.co.uk and it has inevitably slipped down the rankings This has also had a direct impact on the referral traffic and resulting sales on tradersupplies.co.uk. I've attached below the analytics which show the drop in referral traffic to tradersupplies.co.uk and the drop off in sales. I have a feeling I know the answer to this debacle but I'm keen to hear the opinions of those that may have found themselves in this position before! UPDATE: I've just had a call with our Magento developer halfway through writing this post ... he has suggested we transfer all content from market-stalls.co.uk over to CMS pages on our Magento powered online store, and create 301 redirects. Apparently this will carry the weight of market-stalls.co.uk over to tradersupplies.co.uk. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? turnover.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | tinselworm0 -
We have a client that wants to apply UTM URL tagging to track local organic traffic in Google Analytics. Is there any benefit in doing this?
One of our clients requested that we apply UTM URL tagging to better track organic traffic in Google Analytics. We found this to be an odd request because we are most familiar with UTM tracking for special campaigns (referral tracking, PPC, email tracking, etc). Is there any benefit of applying UTM tags to urls to analyze local organic traffic in Google Analytics? Are there any resources out there about this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
How do I find links on my site
I'm looking to find a certain type of link on my site. A link that we're directing out of the site. We have a lot of subdomains though and I was wondering if there was a way to find all the links on each subdomain without screaming frog them all?
Reporting & Analytics | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Tracking Clicks on a Global Header Across Multiple Sites
Hey All, A particular client has multiple websites and we're planning on implementing a global header across 15+ sites. I've been looking for a way to track the clicks on this global header across all sites (that is that they are summed up), what's the best way to go about this if I am using Google Analytics (I know Adobe site catalyst could do this no problem with some advanced tweaking), any ideas? I could do the general click tracking route and tag every link but that will only help me if I do that for each site (that being said, if the global header for all sites pulls from a single HTML, then tagging it would technically count all the clicks from all the sites, the only caveat being that I'd have to pick which Google analytics profile I'd want to track the header with). Thoughts? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | EvansHunt0 -
Dip in traffic from Pune for our sites in Google Analytics
Hi, We have noticed dip in traffic from Pune after 6th May'14 in our Google Analytics account for few of our sites. Did anyone noticed the same for your site. Kindly let me know if you have any idea. Thank and Regards
Reporting & Analytics | | vivekrathore0 -
Google Analytics - Keywords (not set) or ( not provided) WHY???
In Analytics, most of my visitors are landing on my home page, but when trying to see wich keywords they use, most of them are: (not set) or ( not provided) See screencast: http://screencast.com/t/AKwPW76qLVsN Can you tell why? What is going on? Is there a way to solve this? Thank you, BigBlaze
Reporting & Analytics | | BigBlaze2050 -
How do I track comparison shopping engine traffic with keywords?
I want to track comparison shopping engine traffic with keywords in Google Analytics. So, How can I get it done? I am using Google Analytics URL Builder to track traffic which are associated to comparison shopping engine. My product page URL load with following format when some one click on comparison shopping engine. Please, see format of product page URL Now, I have problem with tracking as follow. Please, see this Google Analytics traffic sources screen shot to know more. Comparison shopping engine traffic is going to track with other section and not indicate keyword. I want to track keyword which help me to understand more about my product feed performance. It will help me for better understanding regarding keywords which was searched by my customers to land on my website.
Reporting & Analytics | | CommercePundit0