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
-
You are very welcome, Tony! Thanks for coming to Q&A. Miriam
-
Thanks Miriam - most helpful.
I think my challenge is that I want to get local businesses who also focus on national leads the most bang for their money. But your answers make perfect common sense - so thanks for taking the time to answer in full - most appreciated
-
Greetings Tony,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. While I have no hard data to share with you (haven't ever seen a conclusive study published on this) I think your guiding light should be deciphering the relative importance of your 2 target audiences. What percentage of the business occurs nationally and what percentage occurs locally? This figure might, then, dictate how much effort you should be putting into national vs. local efforts on and off the site.
Local SEO can certainly be done in addition to national SEO. It sounds to me, however, that you have heavily slanted all pages towards geographic terms. If local business is only a small portion of the rankings, I would be inclined to simply put the complete NAP (name, address, phone number) in the footer site wide, put it on the contact page and optimize perhaps 1-2 other pages on the site with local information...perhaps the about page (visit us at our offices). Then, get the business profiled in the various local indexes.
There isn't a template for doing this. Every business is slightly different, and the competitiveness of your vertical and nature of your products/services may create nuances that simply can't be answered with a broad 'do this'. For example, a company might offer plumbing services locally, but sell plumbing fixtures nationally. Different pages would need to be devoted to the different areas of work - the planning and organization is very important, so that those pages suited to neighbors have been optimized locally, while those that have a national focus are not being presented narrowly, as if they were only meant for neighbors.
Tracking and testing how people are using the site, once you've attempted to gear certain pages towards certain audiences, will be very important. This is what will tell you whether you are getting it 'right' or not.
Hope this helps!
Miriam
-
My own opinion, if you have your address in the footer seems enouth to make you rank for your city, while not tying you to it.
But thats my gut feeling only.
-
Hi Alan,
I'm wondering is there is a minimum SEO threshold for effective local coverage that doesn't detract on national rankings ie less focus on location to rank nationally but enough to also rank locally??
Thanks for your feedback.
-
ok then yes that is a dilemma, having your cake and eat it is not really possible I believe
-
Hi Alan,
My question centered on town / county vs national, not international or multi - country.
Thanks for your fast response anyway.
Tony
-
I believe to rank in moe than one country you need more than one web site, if you have a .uk and a .au website, you do not need to worry about duplicate content.
See Matt Cutts
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
-
Website not ranking
Firstly, apologies for the long winded question. I'm 'newish' to SEO We have a website built on Magento , www.excelclothing.com We have been online for 5 years and had reasonable success. Having used a few SEO companies in the past we found ourselves under a 'partial manual penalty' early last year. By July we were out of penalty. We have been gradually working our way through getting rid of 'spammy' links. Currently the website ranks for a handful of non competitive keywords looking at the domain on SEM RUSH. This has dropped drastically over the last 2 years. Our organic traffic over the last 2-3 years has seen no 'falling off a cliff' and has maintained a similar pattern. I've been told so many lies by SEO companies trying to get into my wallet I'm not sure who to believe. We have started to add content onto all our Category pages to make more unique although most of our Meta Descriptions are a 'boiler plate' template. I'm wondering.... Am I still suffering from Penquin ? Am I trapped by Panda and if so how can I know that? Do I need more links removed? How can I start to rank for more keywords I have a competitor online with the same DA, PA and virtually same number of links but they rank for 3500 keywords in the top 20. Would welcome any feedback. Many Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wgilliland1 -
Google Rankings Are Dancing What To Do?
I was been ranking on page no.3 for many of my keywords. Suddenly they all dropped to Page No.9& Page no.10. Now 10 days back one of my keyword got back to page no.4 & now suddenly today it went back to page no.9 again. I haven't done any changes to the site. My page speed is less than 4secs. Checked everything & all seems fine. No errors or manual actions notification in Webmaster too. Should i wait for the rankings dance to get over or should i start doing something. Currently i am planning to get fresh pages with good content added to the website for the whole month of July. Suggest me what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Negative SEO and big decrease in main keyword ranking
Hi about 4 months ago, I had ranking #1 to #4 for "SEO" in Persian in my country; but someone made about 1000 spam links to my site and some other industry sites. I disavowed the links when I see (after 2-3 days of OSE detection). But now I'm in the page 2 of rankings for the most important keyword I ever had. The point is, My visits increased in this months, but I lost my rankings for this keyword not others. The spammy links targeted my main keyword. Whats you idea to get my ranking back? I'm writing content about SEO, Marketing and blogging for about 4 years and I don't have any bad resume in buying links or stuffing keywords or ... All natural.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masoudfatemi0 -
Homepage not ranking in Google AU, but ranking in Google UK?
Hey everyone, My homepage has not been ranking for it's primary keyword in Google Australia for many months now. Yesterday when I was using a UK Proxy and searching via Google UK I found my homepage/primary keyword ranked on page 8 in the UK. Now in Australia my website ranks on page 6 but it's for other pages on my website (and it always changes from different page to page). Previously my page was popping up at the bottom of page 1 and page 2. I've been trying many things and waiting weeks to see if it had any impact for over 4 months but I'm pretty lost for ideas now. Especially after what I saw yesterday in Google UK. I'd be very grateful if someone has had the same experience of suggestions and what I should try doing. I did a small audit on my page and because the site is focused on one product and features the primary keyword I took steps to try and fix the issue. I did the following: I noticed the developer had added H1 tags to many places on the homepage so I removed them all to make sure I wasn't getting an over optimization penalty. Cleaned up some of my links because I was not sure if this was the issue (I've never had a warning within Google webmaster tools) Changed the title tags/h tags on secondary pages not to feature the primary keyword as much Made some pages 'noindex' to try and see if this would take away the emphases on the secondary pages Resubmitted by XML sitemaps to Google Just recently claimed a local listings place in Google (still need to verify) and fixed up citations of my address/phone numbers etc (However it's not a local business - sells Australia wide) Added some new backlinks from AU sites (only a handful though) The only other option I can think of is to replace the name of the product on secondary pages to a different appreciation to make sure that the keyword isn't featured there. Some other notes on the site: When site do a 'site:url' search my homepage comes up at the top The site sometimes ranked for a secondary keyword on the front page in specific locations in Australia (but goes to a localised City page). I've noindexed these as a test to see if something with localisation is messing it around. I do have links from AU but I do have links from .com and wherever else. Any tips, advice, would be fantastic. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdaptDigital0 -
SEO Ecommerce Keywords
Hi guys got a question regarding ecommerce seo do you think its a better idea to target more long tail terms and try get links directly to product pages, brand pages and categories. Rather than focus on short keywords that do bring in good traffic but are very broad, i will prob do both, but i would like a second opinion please about other users strategies thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
Internal page ranking
If I have a domain: Example.com I want this domain to rank for several keywords. I build a page on the domain called Example.com/glasses If I SEO the page Example.com/glasses with backlinks etc... will that URL come up on google or will it simply bring Example.com up on the SERPS. If I have three keywords, should I make a subpage for each page and SEO that page? Will that make the domain rank for all three keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790 -
Local SEO Best Practices
Hello Everyone, I'm new to SEOmoz, I'm looking to use this as a tool to really help me, and evenually I can help others. I am an Web Developer with some online marketing experience. I did Local SEO a Few Years ago, and things have really changed since then. I know this Panda and Penguin update really is putting a hurting on the directory submission. Google no longer has 'Citations" on their places page, and many other changes. With that being said, what are some best practices for Local SEO? I am a propeller head by nature, but am also very creative when I need to be. I have potental sites to market, anywhere from Holistic Medical Doctors, Plastic Surgeons Community Blogs, and Auto Repair Shops, Law firms (to give you some perspectic) I also read Danny Dover's Book, to learn some more about SEO, the one thing that is unclear is how to acquire quality links I would really appreciate any perspective on this, every little thing helps Zach Russell
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZacharyRussell0 -
SEO Correlation Between Code and Search Engine Rankings
I posted this on my blog and wanted to get everyones opinion on this (http://palatnikfactor.com/2011/06/07/seo-correlation-between-code-and-search-engine-rankings/) I’m always looking to see what top ranking websites may be doing to get the rankings they do. One of the tasks of any SEO I guess is to really analyze competitors, right? I want to really stress that what I am writing here is completely opinion based and have not (due to time) validated this correlation enough but would like to get the discussion started. Nevertheless, I did enough research to see that there may be a correlation between code validation and top ranking websites, at least for certain queries where the number of real big players/brands is limited or non-existent. So, what do I mean? http://validator.w3.org/ validates code on websites. This tool shows you errors and warnings that may be making it harder for search engines to crawl your website. Looking at top competitors for certain niches, I was surprised to find that top sites had very few errors compared to 2+ page rankings. That’s not to say that all the sites on the first page had fewer errors (cleaner code) than websites in the 2<sup>nd</sup> page plus. However, again, top ranking websites for keywords that I was looking at had cleaner code which may have a correlation in regards to organic rankings. What’s your take? Does this have any effect in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0