How to balance International and Local Search targeting?
-
Hi guys,
A local company provides tourism services in Spain but its potential clients reside abroad in USA mostly.
This means we have 2 search potentials:
1. For reaching international clients via international search in advance before they arrive (preferred).
2. Last minute booking potential for local serach when they have already arrived and seek a service while already here.So far we have targeted USA and international searches solely and ignored local search. We have tried to target our website to USA in GoogleWebmasterTools and link building location mostly.
But what about local search? Would establishing ourselves in Local Search (google places and maps etc) be a confusion for Google and mess with our good rankings in US? Or would it add to our potential of additional last minute local seaches?
What's the best approach in a situation like this? Is a happy medium possible?
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Again Emerald,
I hope we are all understanding your question better after the further details you have provided. As you answered all of my 4 questions - positively - for your city in Spain, then there is no reason why you cannot engage in a Local Search campaign. When I search, from my computer in the USA, for 'travel agency madrid, spain' Google shows me local results for that city. So, yes, it is certainly possible for you to do this.
You will want to make sure that your website has basic local optimization in place and then get the business listed in Google Places and other relevant local business indexes.
On a final note, I need to mention that I would not recommend setting up any virtual offices either in the USA or Spain as this would violate Google's Places Quality Guidelines. See: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528
Hope this helps!
Miriam
-
Thanks for your responses. I had meant whether we should go after Local Search Spain rather than US for last minute bookers?
Do you all mean therefore that it's only applicabe for going for local search in USA as our clients reside in USA (this could be true for advance bookings like situation 1, but what about my last minute situation 2 above)?
So I shouldn't bother with Local Search ideas for Spain (last minute US clients already in Spain searching for last minute tour etc).
I guess this is more complicated because of the international situation - would love advice for our particular international situation, unless I misunderstood.
Miriam to answer your question:
1. We have a legal business name in Spain.
2. Our real physical location in not in US. We do not have US PO box. We reside and operate from a city in Spain.
3. Our local area code phone number will be in our city in Spain, not US.
4. Last minute bookers can call into our office in Spain.But again our incoming clients are Americans from USA, hence the question on how to approach this.
-
Greetings, Emerald!
Thank your for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. While a local campaign in highly unlikely to injure your international results, you must be able to answer yes to having ALL of these items in place in order to qualify as a local business:1. A legal business name.
2. A real physical location in a city in the US (not a virtual office, P.O. box, shared space or any other substitute)
3. A local area code phone number in the city of location (not a redirected phone number or toll free number)
4. You must either be the sort of business to which clients come to do face-to-face business in your office in this city, or, you must have staff that goes out from the office to the clients' homes or businesses. If business is conducted virtually, it does not qualify as local in the eyes of the search engines.If your client can answer yes to all 4 of those things, then they can certainly engage in some Local SEM. You would want to have a good landing page on the cite for the city in question, and also include the complete NAP in the website footer site-wide. You would want copy that speaks to the geography of this physical location. Additionally, you would want to get your client correctly profiled at Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local and other relevant directories.
Sincerely hope this answer helps. Good luck!
Miriam -
I would go as far as to invest in a local phone and address with a virtual office for a few months to build with the page.
-
In order to build the local search. Create a page for each city. I would do 5 at a time and personalize it. Go where you get the most clients first. So Spain. Travel to Spain. Have a page for NY, LA, Chicago, Houston And Philly first., Customize it for the city and build from there.
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
-
Does having a lot traffic off branded search terms boost non-branded terms?
A site I work for has tons of organic traffic coming from branded terms like BRAND, www.brand.com, BRAND + Product, BRAND + question, etc. They also have a lot of non-branded terms, coming through. Overall a strong site. I've also seen websites for lawyers on TV with plenty of spammy links, almost no good ones, but nonetheless they rank well for their terms. My intuition says these are related, that the more people search for your brand, the more Google recognizes your authority relative to your keywords. Is this possible, or am I misguided?
Branding | | krausdigital0 -
Community Discussion: Do you agree that brand recognition has an empirical impact on organic search rankings?
And could hard metrics — such as search queries, citations, traffic, and click-through rates — influence organic search rankings? Tom Coad “StickyEyes” tackles both these questions in this post for YouMoz. Take a peek at his research, and let us know how it compares to your own findings. If you haven't done any research yourself along these lines, I'd love to hear your answers to these same questions based on your more casual observations and analysis of the brands you monitor in the SERPs.
Branding | | Christy-Correll6 -
How to get an Updated Logo in Search Results?
I'm having trouble getting a new logo in search results. My company, RealSelf, updated our logo over a year ago and both Google and Bing continue to show our old logo in image results. Worst of all, this means that when people look for our logo, they find the wrong one and include that in new, external content. Here's a list of what we've tried: We've modified all the logos on our site with the new one (not including a few PDF whitepapers from before the redesign Added schema.org logo and organization markup Featured a high resolution image on our "Logos" page (top result for "RealSelf logo") Verified wikipedia has the proper image Modified all social profile logos: Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc.. Begun outreach efforts to have high ranking image results update our logo I'm wondering if there are other ideas besides getting more creative/successful with our outreach tactics?
Branding | | RealSelf0 -
Google +1's and Google+ Local
Hi fellow Mozers, I manage 5 brands at the national level, each with their own Google+ profile and then under each brand, there are several hundred physical locations, each with their own Google+ Local page. My question is, should we be encouraging visitors of each location's Google+ Local profile page to +1 the page? Does it have an influence on local rankings and overall SERP results? Our goal is to ultimately get our local websites to rank better than our less targeted brand sites and have our Google+ Local pages show in search results as much as possible. Our local businesses convert to leads, where our brand sites are one step out from that and are used to feed into a "find a location" result that takes the visitor to the local site.
Branding | | dsinger0 -
Local SEO - Review's Strategy
I'm trying to brainstorm some ideas for obtaining positive reviews for a my client who's a local business on Yelp and Google+. I think it's best to capture a customer in the "happy moment" after a successful transaction with that business. I'm thinking integrating the option for customers to leave a review on Yelp or Google+ during the transaction process would be best. Do you have any suggestions or experiences on the best way to integrate this into a transaction process where a customer physically walks into their business to make the transaction? (it's an Auto Body Shop BTW) Also any other strategies for getting customers to give reviews? Much appreciated!
Branding | | reidsteven750 -
Legacy Locations and Google Local - How to Handle
Hello - I'm working with a client who has some transitioning brands - and they're hesitant to change the legacy branding in Google Local and on their website because they're afraid of losing traffic from the old brand. Is there a standard practice for keeping traffic on the old brand terms, while still adjusting to the new branding on Google/Yahoo/Bing? Thanks,
Branding | | WebTalent0 -
What tools do you use to submit a site to local yellowpages?
Hey all, two part question for you. Do you use any tools to automatically submit websites to local yellowpages (example: http://business.intuit.com/directory/marketing/100_syndication_sites.jsp)? and if so, what one and why? Are there any dangers to doing it this way? It seems that this might save a lot of time and be incredibly helpful to manage your brand profile pages in a centralized location. Also some tools that I am seeing incorporate brand monitoring (which you can do through a variety of tools I know). Anyways, thoughts? comments? tips?
Branding | | prima-2535090 -
.us domain extension for US locales
I have a large US travel site and am looking to make targeted pages for specific locations, attractions etc around the United States. With many of the TLD's already purchased for these niches, I thought about using the .us extension as it seemed relevant to the topics. Does this hurt seo possibilities or does the .us extension come across as spammy?
Branding | | Millibit2