Question about Local / Regional SEO
-
Good Morning Moz Community,
I have a local SEO/regional SEO question. I apologize if this question is duplicated from another area on this forum but, a query of the term Regional SEO showed no results, as did similar queries.
Please preference this entire question with "Knowing what we know about the most recent changes to local search" I know what has worked in the past, my concern is Now.
Working with a heavily regulated client that is regional, mostly East Coast US. They are in Financial Services and state licensing is a requirement.
They are licensed in 15 states. Obviously, it would look foolish, in this day in age, to Title Tag individual pages with local modifiers and have numerous pages covering a similar topic with not much difference than localized modifiers in front of the keyword.
I've never found that SE's can understand broad regional terms such as New England or Mid Atlantic or Southeast or Northeast, if someone knows different please share. Aside from an exact match search.
The client does have 7 offices in various states.
Perfectly matching and consistent listings in G Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local was step one and all their locations are now in those services and there are many more smaller local citation listings are in the works. We have also successfully implemented a plan to generate great reviews from actual customers, for each location, they're receiving a few a day right now.
Their local places listings, where they have physical locations, are doing very well but:
1. What would the community's suggestion be on generating more targeted traffic in the 8 states where they have no physical location?
2. The client wants to begin creating smaller blogs that are highly localized to the states and major population centers that they do not have a physical location in. There is an open check book to dedicate to this effort however, I do a lot of work in this industry so I want to offer the best possible, most up to date advice, my concern is that these efforts will have two results:
a. be obscured by the ”7 pack" by companies with local brick and mortar
b. would detract from the equity built in their existing blog by generating content in other domains, I would prefer to continue growing the main blog.
3. As a follow up, it has been documented that Google is now using the same algorithm for local, personal and personalized, that being the case, is there any value in building links to you Places page? Can you optimize your Places page by using the same off site techniques as you would traditionally?
Sorry to kill you with such a long question on a Sunday
-
Brett
I did not mean tell client you will do anything for free.
What I meant was, assuming your client has an associate in city X where there is no presence by client otherwise, you get your client to agree that you will go to their associate with a proposal to do the local for the associate in city X for no charge. The client would pay you for doing the work, the associate will now have a quality local presence in city X, and your client will be the main portion of the Places, Bing Bus.Port, etc in the city.
So, your client is BigMoneySvc.com, in city X their address would be that of the associate in X. You can name the associate in the listing. If the assoc. has their own website, that would be a problem, unless you agree to have a landing page on client site that links to assoc. site. (Assoc. gets link juice). So BigMoneySvc.com/xcity-associate-site.
If you use subdomain, you will get no push from the main site. If you use sub directory you will: Mainblog.com/Charlotte. With this, links to Charlotte will help root domain over time and links from root domain will help Charlotte.
If you buy exact match domains with or without hyphens your only issue is starting at level zero. Soooo...... that you have to figure out. Start at zero with new domain or sub domain, crate a page on main site that could be helped by mainsite DA, etc.
Hope I was helpful for you.
-
Have you checked out blumenthals.com/blog? Mike's great at local. Maybe he might be able to answer this question if you get it front of him.
-
Hi Robert,
Thanks for the very helpful answer.
I'm curious what you meant by this?
"Those associates are in different cities and, if they do not have their own Places/BingBus.Portal, etc. pages, you might convince them that you would do their local for free if they let you set it up under you..."
Do you mean...I go to my client and say "You give me the contracts to do the local blog development, content creation and so on....and I'll handle your local seo on those blogs for you for free?"
If that's what you're saying, no problem or disagreement, just wanted to make sure I am not missing something.
Also...
(Local Blogs where they have a license but no brick and mortar) Would you suggest using sub-domains from their main blog, which is stand alone WP installation?
ex. - Assume an area they want to target is Charlotte, NC.
If so does this build value, PR, equity, whatever term we want to use in the Top Level Domain?
Or should I just go out and try to find KW rich Domains in those local markets?
Thanks again,
Brett
-
Menachamp,
Thanks for the info, I guess my concern is more going after the high traffic keywords with a local modifier. The client doesn't want an appearance of bad looking page titles that are ostentatiously targeting local KWs.
Thanks for the advice that I guess really means, USE YOUR HEAD AND GET CREATIVE!
I will get creative and come up with a local strategy for those non brick and mortar locations.
Best,
Brett
-
Dogflog,
As to ranking regionally, as of this moment I know of no way to rank regionally per se. So, you could set up an East Coast Financial services page and try to rank for that term....probably not a lot of queries though.
As to your local, you may want to check your Bing listings if they were set up a while back and insure they are ok with Bing Business Portal change.
On the Suggestions for 8 states where we have no physical location? Since it is a financial services firm, do they have any associate relationships in these states? I handle a firm in equities/investments/etc. and they have about 50 associates. Those associates are in different cities and, if they do not have their own Places/BingBus.Portal, etc. pages, you might convince them that you would do their local for free if they let you set it up under you...
As to 2.a. At the end of the day, if you have no way of having a local listing you will have to optimize it as much as possible and live with the "7 pack" issue. Hopefully you will rank right after it. One question is how much effort will go into the blog, how much info, etc. If it is a quality site, you might be amazed at what you could do.
As to 2.b. If you don't have it as a mere extension with the same content, but allow it to be its own "regionalized" blog with regional issue content, I don't think it will detract from main. Obviously, without knowing url, etc. this advice has a caveat or two.
3. I am going to choose not to opine on the**"it has been documented that Google is now using the same algorithm for local, personal and personalized,"** and, instead will answer your question regarding linking: I believe especially in the vertical you describe that insuring your clients are getting and using reviews in the citation sites locally is paramount. That is where I would focus. I would make sure they were in at least 10 to 12 directory/citation sites and that the reviews were being posted.
Good luck, sounds like a fun project.
-
I'm in a somewhat similar situation, and have not got this totally figured out either. But here's my two bits onthe subject.
First of all, you need to make sure that you're optimizing your local pages to their fullest in the 7 states that you do have locations in. Follow http://getlisted.org's guidlines and use whitespark's citation finder to build citations. Make sure that each location has its own page on your client's main site, with a complete and consistent NAP.
Second, I think this is a misguided assumption: "Obviously, it would look foolish, in this day in age, to Title Tag individual pages with local modifiers and have numerous pages covering a similar topic with not much difference than localized modifiers in front of the keyword." You need to think about what truly differentiates your client's service from state to state, and build on that. Are licensing requirements slightly different? I don't know any details about your industry other than financial services, but let's say it's home mortgages for example - the housing market in each state is different, people are moving in or moving away for different reasons, people are in different stages of their lives (Florida homebuyers are retirees, Boston homebuyers are just out of college (I guess? I don't know. You should).) Build landing pages for each state, and possibly for all the main cities. You shouldn't have trouble differentiating.
Good luck!
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
-
38% of SEOs Never Disavow Links: Are you one among them or the other 62%?
Hi all, Links disavowing is such a advanced tasks in SEO with decent amount of risk involved. I thought many wouldn't follow use this method as Google been saying that they try to ignore bad links and there will be no penalty for such bad links and negative SEO is really a rare case. But I wondered to see only 38% SEOs never used this method and other 62% are disavowing links monthly, quarterly or yearly. I just wonder do we need to disavow links now? It's very easy to say to disavow a link which is not good but difficult to conclude them whether they are hurting already or we will get hurt once they been disavowed. Thanks Screenshot_3.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Domain Migration Question
Lets say there is a brand that has one primary product type at different optional tiers. (Think something like SMB/Enterprise/Individual) Lets also say that 1 year ago this brand migrated from having everything under 1 domain (Domain A) to moving 2 of their product tiers to another domain (Domain B), a new domain. They have done some initial SEO work on this domain and had a pretty successful migration but it has also been decided that they are going to no longer offer one of these product tiers and they intend to eventually migrate everything back under the 1 domain (Domain A) They just are not sure whether they should do this now or later.
Algorithm Updates | | DRSearchEngOpt
During this next year or so there is also going to be some likely re-branding/design, etc...stemming from this decision, on the domain, meaning content changes and all that fun that goes into a migration/re-design/re-branding strategy. The timing of this has not been fully decided on. Here is the question: Should they a) Migrate back to Domain A first and then do the re-design or b) Keep 2 separate domains for now, figure out the re-design/re-branding, make content changes and then migrate Site A over in a year or so after all changes have been made? My concern with option a) is that they migrated a little less than 1 year ago and will be migrating back which I feel could have a negative impact on the content and the domain. The positive side I see here is that this impact could be just as large even if we waited so doing this now might be a better, more efficient use of our time if we can migrate and make content changes fairly close together or concurrently.
My concern with option b) is that the tier they no longer offer makes up the majority of that sites business and traffic, leaving us with not much in terms of content that ranks well and garners much traffic. Trying to optimize for the remaining product tier by itself on it's own domain could be quite hard and then having to migrate it in a year or so back to Domain A could negatively impact any small organic impact I can make on applicable pages/domain. Does anybody have any input here? I am leaning towards Option A and but wanted to get some other opinions. Thanks Everybody! Edit: So far, this has received a lot of views but no input. I am hoping to have a bit of a dialog on this so any ideas or input is welcome.0 -
New .TLD domains - SEO Value?
Hi all, I see that a new wave of domains are to be released soon. We are not talking or 1 or 2 new extensions, but more like 700 new extensions on a TLD level. What's your views on their SEO value? thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | bjs20100 -
SEO For sub locations for specific services
Hey Guys, I am currently creating a website for my business that will be marketing through SEO very heavily. I Live in NYC, and i'd like to rank up for the individual locations such as Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island and eventually if my domain authority and other long hall metrics kick in NYC. What I find very tiring is targeting these locations all separately, it means I need to create the same site 4 times with completely different and unique content. Should this setup work for me, and is there a risk that Google will see 4 web design pages, and basically say even though the content is unique your ranking up for web design with a location too many times? from my understanding this is not a problem now, but is this a future risk? It also becomes extremely difficult for site navigation with about us pages, contact us pages, and other pages that either have to be duplicated or all pages shown on sidebar for navigation. Please share your thoughts with me, THANKS!!!
Algorithm Updates | | tonyr70 -
Panda, Negative SEO and now Penguin - help needed
Hi,
Algorithm Updates | | mlm12
We are small business owners who've been running a website for 5 years that provides our income. We've done very little backlinking ourselves, and never did paid directories or anything like that - usually just occasional forum or blog responses. A few articles here and there with some of our keyword phrases for internal pages. Of course I admit we've done some kwp backlinks on some blogs, but our anchor text profile is largely brand names and our domain name and non keywords (excepting for some "bad" backlinks). Our DA is 34, PA 45 for our home page. We were doing great until last Sept 27 when we got hit by Panda and have been working on deoptimizing our site for keywords, we made a new site in Wordpress for good architecture and ease of use for our customers, and we're deleting/repurposing low quality pages and making our content more robust. We haven't yet recovered from this and now it appears we got hit May 22 for Penguin...ARGH! I recently discovered (hard to have time to devote to everything with just two of us) that others can "negative seo" a site now and I feel this has happened based upon results below... I signed up for linkdetox.com yesterday and it gives a grim picture of our backlinks (says we are in "deadly risk" territory). We have 83 "toxic" links and 600 some "suspicious" links (many are in malware/malicious listed sites, many are .pl domains from Poland, others are I believe foreign domains, or domains that are a bunch or letters that make no sense, or spammy sounding emd domains), - this makes up 80% of our links. As this is our only business, our income is now 1/3 of what it has been, even with PPC ads going as we've been hit hard by all of this and are wondering if we can survive fixing this. We do have an SEO firm minimally helping us along with guidance on recovering, but with income so low, we are doing the work ourselves and can't afford much. Needless to say, we are quite distressed and from reading around, not sure if we'll be able to recover and that is deeply saddening, especially from Negative SEO. We want to make sure we are on the right path for recovery if possible, hence my questions. We haven't been in contact with Google for reconsideration, again, no penalty messages from them. First of all, if we don't have a manual penalty, would you still contact all the toxic/malicious/possible porn looking sites and ask for a link removal, wait, ask for link removal, wait then disavow? Or just go straight to Google disavow? For backlinks coming from sites that are "gone" (like a message saying the account has been suspended), or there is no website there anymore, do I try and contact them too? Or go direct to disavow? Or do nothing? For the sites flagged as malicious (by linkdetox, my browser, or by Google), I don't want to try and open them on my browser to see if this site is legitimate. If linkdetox doesn't have the contact info for these - what are we supposed to do? For "suspicious" foreign sites that I can't read the webpage -would you still disavow them (I've seen many here say links from foreign sites should be disavowed). How do you keep up with all this is someone is negative SEOing you? We're really frustrated that Google's change has made it possible for competitors to tank your business (arguably though, if we had a stronger backlink profile this may not have hurt, or not as much - not sure). When you are small biz owners and can't hire a group to constantly monitor backlinks, get quality backlinks, content, site optimization, etc - it seems an almost impossible task to do. Are wordpress left nav and footer link anchor text an issue for Penguin? I would think Google would realize these internal links will be repetitive for the same anchor text on Wordpress (I know Matt Cutts said to not use the same anchor text more than once for internal linking -but obviously nav and footer menus will do this). What would you do if this was you? Try and fix it all? Start over with a new domain and 301 it (some say this has been working)? Just start over with a new domain and don't redirect? Thanks for your input and advice. We appreciate it.0 -
The Impact of Attribute REV in SEO
Hi, I'm looking for information about rev="" attribute in SEO. What do this attribute communicate to search robots? Does it Impacts in the positioning of pages / keywords? Does anyone have information that could help me?
Algorithm Updates | | webg0 -
Google has indexed a lot of test pages/junk from the development days.
With hind site I understand that this could have been avoided if robots.txt was configured properly. My website is www.clearvisas.com, and is indexed with both the www subdomain and with out. When I run site:clearvisas.com in Google I get 1,330 - All junk from the development days. But when I run site:www.clearvisas.com in Google I get 66 - these results all post development and more in line with what I wanted to be indexed. Will 1,330 junk pages hurt my seo? Is it possible to de-index them and should I? If the answer is yes to any of the questions how should I proceed? Kind regards, Fuad
Algorithm Updates | | Fuad_YK0 -
Yet another Panda question
Hi Guys, I'm just looking for confirmation on something..... In the wake of Panda 2.2 one of my pages has plummeted in the rankings whilst other similar pages have seen healthy improvements. Am I correct in thinking that Panda effects individual pages and doesn't tar an entire site with the same brush? Really I'm trying to see if Panda is the reason in the drop on one page or whether it could be something else. The page in question has dropped 130 positions - not just a general fluctuation. Thanks in advance for your responses!!!
Algorithm Updates | | A_Q0