Help with local Seo?
-
Hi,
I am really struggling with current predicament i find myself in. I am a small to medium sized business based in Newcastle in the UK and am trying to rank well locally for the keywords that i feel my customers will be searching for locally.
I have got to the stage where i am on page 1 of google uk or nearly there but cannot compete against the national companies who have the search terms then just add pages for virtually every city in the country.
For example my main product is "Artificial Grass" and my city/town is Newcastle
This is where my office is and where my customers are. This is also where my google places page states.
Now theres a company that sells Artificial Grass called www.asgoodasgrass.co.uk
that are based no where near but use the power of there site to come up in every local search by adding a page "Artificial Grass Newcastle" as well as hundreds of others.
They rank 3rd and im 8th.
There actual Newcastle page is poor, where as i put everything into my page including pics, video etc.
Still no joy.
I feel i am always going to rank behind these big boys even though i am the actual local company and have no intention of working others area that are not local to me.
By the time i rank behind the above type companies and the likes of yell.com i feel i am never going to be seen and fall back on expensive adwords to help me along.
I am a complete newbie at this and would love any help or tips you could give to give me a fighting chance in my area.
My site is www.totaldrivewaysne.co.uk incase you want to look
as you will have gathered my other primary product is driveways for which also i feel like i have a million competitors!
many many thanks for any responses
John
-
Hi John,
I can tell you have actually already done quite a lot in order to make sure your site ranks well.
I won't repeat what others have stated before me, but just wanted to mention a couple of things that might help a little... and as we know, every little helps
- Use a structured format for your address Schema.org, or other microformat.
- Structure your URLs in such a way that the location is mentioned within the URL (make it easy for Google to crawl and for your customers to navigate). You might have to rethink the site architecture a little.
- Create content that is optimised both for keyword and location (separate pages for every combination) > Local Landing Pages!
- The above will also allow you to have optimised Title and Description tags.
- Try to obtain Reviews that actually mention the keyword of the service your are trying to rank higher for.
Hope any of the above helps?
Cheers
Greg
-
Hi John,
Searching for 'artificial grass newcastle' from my location in the US, I actually see your company ranking #1...not that this is of much help to you. I have some questions:
-
If your core phrase is 'artificial grass newcastle' is google showing true, pinned local results for this term when you search for it from your location in Newcastle? Or, is everything organic (no pins)?
-
If this is not your core term, what is?
-
Is there a term related to your business that does bring up pinned local results? If so, what is it?
I'm asking these questions because it's important to determine whether you need to pursue a local SEO strategy or a traditional organic one in order to gain high rankings. Can you provide further details, possibly screenshots of what you are experiencing? I'll check back.
-
-
Hi John, that's a really frustrating situation, especially when you feel that the national companies have thin content.
Unfortunately there's no quick way to leap frog those national companies - being big and reputable, their sites are considered to be authoritative and they have a good range of links. You'll have to build up authority and high quality links over time to overtake them. JakubMovic's advice about contacting local journalists is a good way to gain links from authoritative sources.
I also don't see a Google Local Business listing for your site - is this something that you have implemented yet? This can be a really great way for local companies to compete with national ones (with the listings often appearing first in the search results), and it's free. http://www.google.com/local/add/ If you do have a local listing it might be a good idea to review which keywords you're targeting so that you appear for the highest value keyword combinations.
Good luck - it sounds like you've made a great start and with a bit more time hopefully you'll reap the rewards.
-
Hi!
You need links, especially high quality links. Start from preparing your SEO strategy, in your case you don't need huge amount of links for your local keywords. If you'll plan everything wisely you will see progress.
You can start from directories that you can find at http://www.seomoz.org/directories this is good start for you. Think about intresting informations about your niche or about product you sell. Write short press release for local news websites maybe a few actual trends about that kind of business. Search for local journalists which are interested in local business or economy, if you give them interesting info about your business you have chance that they will use it and write something about it. And you will earn link!
You can also write an article to post on site like ArticleBase, remember that it must be unique and good content. Remember about social bookmarking sites, facebook page (i noticed that you already have it), Google+ page and many more.
Hope it will help you.
Good luck!
-
It looks like basically all of your inbound links are from low-quality directories and article marketing. If you want to move up, you're going to have to do some real linkbuilding.
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
-
Ecommerce SEO help
Hi I'm having difficulty managing our product pages for optimisation, we have over 20,000 products. We do keyword research & optimise product titles/meta of new products - however there's a lot to clean up but we have done a lot. I find we rank/convert better on product pages so they would be great to focus on - however when an old product is discontinued, the page is removed & we lose authority by creating new pages for similar products - does anyone have any ideas for managing this? This is something done automatically on the dev side in France. I then have the issue of trying to rank category pages - these are highly competitive areas competing with big brands. I'm finding it tough to know where to focus, the site is vast and I am the only SEO. I've started looking into low hanging fruit - but these aren't necessarily the areas which bring in much revenue. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Did .org vs. .com SEO importance recently changed?
I have seen previous answers in the Forum about this subject but Google has seemed to have again changed the playing surface. Within the past 30 days, we have seen a huge spike in organic search returns seeming to favor .org as domain authorities. Has anyone else noticed this shift and is it just coincidence or worth factoring in? If it is a shift, will Google punish those that have .org but have used.com previously for switching the redirects to serve .org first? Thanks, Jim
Algorithm Updates | | jimmyzig0 -
SERP Question - Site showing up for national term over local term recently
Hey Moz, This has been happening to me with a couple of clients recently and I wanted to kick it out to the community and see if anyone else has experienced it and might be able to shed some light on why. (Disclaimer: Both clients are in the elective healthcare space)
Algorithm Updates | | Etna
Scenario: Client's site is optimized for a fairly competitive "procedural keyword + location" phrase. Historically, the site had been ranking on the first page for a while until it suddenly dropped off for that query. At the same time, the page now ranks on the first page for just the procedural term, without the location modifier (obviously much more competitive than with the location modifier). Searches on Google were set to the city in which the client was located. Not that I'm complaining, but this seems a little weird to me. Anyone have a similar situation? If so, any theories about what might have caused it? TL;DR - Site ranked on 1st page for "keyword + location modifier" historically, now ranking on 1st page for "keyword" only and not found with "keyword + location modifier" TRQd9Hu0 -
Mini sitelinks in local-pack?
Recently after performing a search I noticed one result in the "7-pack" included several sitelink-type links. It stood out among the others to me, and I was curious if this was schema or perhaps Google playing around with their local results? I'll include a screenshot for an example, any insights or links to articles discussing topic this would be appreciated. Thanks Moz! ASLo4GF
Algorithm Updates | | Etna0 -
Title changed in local pack, unchanged in local plus?!
Google seems to have pulled the title from the homepage and put that as the title in the local pack in the SERP for my targeted keyword. The local plus page title remains unchanged. Any way to influence this back to the way it was? The local plus title looks much better in results (even though it's just the brand name (which is the same as the domain name) and not the city + industry).
Algorithm Updates | | Mozzin1 -
SinglePlatform's Restaurant Menu Across Web Properties vs "SEO-Optimized"
Surprised I wasn't able to find an existing answer given that SinglePlatform apparently serves 500,000 SMBs with menus that appear on over 150 publisher websites. Given Panda's razor-sharp intolerance for duplicate content, am I safe to assume that any claim of SinglePlatform's menu on a local restaurant being beneficial to your SEO is now spurious? If so, what's best way to handle this as a potential SEO liability while still having one of their nicely formatted restaurant menus on your site? For reference: http://www.openforum.com/articles/using-singleplatform-to-build-a-digital-presence Update May 7, 2012 Connected directly with the folks at SinglePlatform, and the answer here is a lot simpler than my over-thinking of it. The menu usually sits within an iFrame or widget so that's that. But the ability to truthfully show an up-to-date menu for any given establishment is a legit way to address the healthy amount of local search intent that seems to be directed at exactly that. Overall a pretty slick platform, looking forward to seeing how they grow into the SMB, local & mobile in the coming months, I think the space is ripe to benefit from products/services that take advantage of these sorts of economies of scale.
Algorithm Updates | | mgalica0 -
Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice
Greetings, Im a new SEO and really knew nothing until signing up to SEOMoz. After reading the SEO101 and gathering as much information in a short period of time things started to become a little clearer. So I started my first campaign used my new SEO knowledge and input all of my meta information. Then I waited a few days to see what happened with my search result. We had never ranked for a single keyword before mind you. So a couple/few of days go by and I started punching in my keywords and looking through the pages. There I was page three. I was SO happy. I read the entire SEO101 again, realized a little more about what I had to do. So I started changing everything up, adding pictures, I found out what a IMG ALT Attributes were in the HTML editor, bolded text and all the other things I missed the first time around. Three days go by and I move up again. I start to notice my traffic is increasing and I am actually getting organic hits through search traffic. This has never happened before. I am over the moon. But I realize that I have my main focus keyword as the second key word in my title tag. So I switch the two words around, wait a few more days. Here's why I ask my question. The original title tag was still showing up and I was on the first page for both keywords, and I could see both title tags when searching for either keyword. So; Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice ? Warmest regards, Michael S&M Warning: adult site, NSFW
Algorithm Updates | | Sexandmetal0 -
SEO Faith Shaker... help!!
Something has happened which is, well inexplicable to me... I'm stumped! We have a client that has two sites which compete for the same keywords. One is a .com, the other is a .co.uk. They have different content so there's no dupe worries. We have, for the past few months been carrying out SEO for the .com site. It's doing great. We don't do anything with the .co.uk site, which, incidentally dropped from 2nd (under the .com) to 9th after Panda for its main keyword. The owner of the site has switched the .co.uk to Wordpress and now that site, with the same content, same links, same social signals, etc... (nothing was done to it except the platform being changed) has suddenly shot up above the .com for not only its main keyword but most of the others too. What gives?? It doesn't even have a link from the .com site! So, the .com which has undergone SEO is now being beaten by the .co.uk which hasn't. The .com is still directly underneath it. It feels like all of the things we know about SEO, all of the ranking factors and everything are being totally undermined here, just due to a change to Wordpress. Surely that can't be it?? The .com is an older domain, has more content, has always done well, has more links and from better places, and all the social stuff surrounding the business is targeted at it. This isn't a penalization issue or anything like that, this is simply a matter of the .co.uk suddenly blasting above everything for no apparent reason. Any ideas?? I know that there "might" be a tiny, tiny, tiny advantage of the country TLD but that's not enough to do this, and the .co.uk always did worse before.
Algorithm Updates | | SteveOllington1