Localization without proper address?
-
Hi Mozzers,
recently I received a project to promote a hotel website in a third world country. They have no street names, no landline phone, no zip-code.
So far I tried to give a good address description in all social networks and on the homepage (footer) and signed into hotel directories.
Suddently a new website of another hotel came up on google and made it up to number 1. They put a fake telefon number (landline) on the website. Is that a good idea of localizing a business? Do you have recommendations for me how to enhance.
Thanks
-
Hi Miriam,
to get a grey pin you only need to mark a place somewhere in the world on google maps. Example: I have a hotel website for a hotel on a river in Nicaragua. The next village is 20 miles away. But still google localized the place and I can put a mobile phone number with it. Or another hotel is located at a deserted beach. I put the marker on the position and describe the position in the address fields as good as possible (e.g. Street name: Playa del Sol, City: Islandname, Zipcode: a random figure).
In my specific case we talk about the listing for "Hotel Little Corn Island" and "hotel bellavista corn island". Thanks for help...
-
Hi Falk, I'm stumped. I don't understand how you are seeing your hotel in the main results with a true grey/pinned local result if you have no address or phone number. Unfortunately, without being able to actually look at the listing, I can't get any further with this. What you are describing is not something I've ever seen before, and I have to wonder if Google is handling things very differently than one would expect, given the remoteness/other factors about your location. If you can share the listings, I'm happy to look at it. If not, I can't really provide any further insight.
-
First of all, thanks for the quick answers of you.
The localization works. There is a grey pin next to the hotel, thanks to google maps and/or Panoramio. Most of the people, when it comes to look for a hotel, they search for "cityname/area + hotel". That's how it works on the island here too. None of our island hotels had a telephone number so far until this one now which reaches number 1 on google within days. Can a telephone number make such a difference (even when the number is not valid on the island)?
The page of my competitor has nearly no content! Mine is full of content about the hotel and the destination. He hardly has backlinks...me too so far because it is a new website.
Thanks for further advice.
-
Hi Falk,
I agree with much of the advice offered by EEE3. Unfortunately, your client is not eligible for inclusion in Google's local products if they lack a physical street address and local phone number. The competitor's usage of a fake phone number is not advisable...he is misdirecting his own potential guests and, there is a good chance Google will see through this.
So, local inclusion just isn't appropriate for your client, meaning you will have to rely on Organic SEO rather than Local SEO to gain visibility for the hotel. I am presuming that if no one in this region of the world has a street address, Google isn't showing any truly local results for the area (no results with the grey, lettered pins on them). So, make the website as strongly optimized as you can for the town and region where the hotel exists and rely on traditional SEO techniques for gaining high organic visibility for the client. That would be my best advice.
-
Okay, so this may not be the answer you're looking for, but maybe another tactic would better serve this hotel?
What about a marketing campaign something like "So off the grid even Google can't find it"? There are lots of adventurous people on this planet--and though the true cause behind the lack of street name, landline phone or zip code may be due to poor infrastructure and not because it's in the middle of a jungle reached only by canoe--you have an audience there.
As far as tackling the local issue, Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm might have some resources for you on their websites and blogs.
http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/
Best of luck to you.
P.S. A fake phone number is not a great idea. If you do go that route, please make sure someone familiar with the hotel is able to answer it. I heard at Local U stories of Google calling phone numbers to check on the location and make sure they were accurate.
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
-
Doudle URLs without Canonical link and a change in keyword.: What are the effects on SEO?
I built my new website and i have two major worries. 1. My home page has two URLs. The one with a high PA though indexed by Google, is not submitted in the sitemap. I tried to place a canonical tag but the hosting service said it was impossible for me to place the canonical link. My concern is if the indexed page will be successfully optimized for SEO without it being submitted in the sitemap and what happens to the other URL for the same page which is also indexed and submitted in the sitemap? 2.I started my link building campaign for one of my pages. I acquired some good PA already for a particular keyword but later on discovered it will be very difficult for me to rank for the major keyword. I have decided to change the keyword. Will the acquired PA influence the SEO for the new keyword? I wish to know if i should dissolve the links to the page for the former keyword or should i maintain them and move forward with building links for the new keyword as well.
Technical SEO | | trevordocs0 -
301 redirects don't work properly
Hello all, I've been working on 301 redirects for a bit and normally it's no problem but some seem to be going wrong. Redirect 301 /3-zits.html http://www.bankstellenshop.com/banken/3-zits.html This one works properly but the following one gives a very strange result as it goes to http://www.bankstellenshop.com/bankstellen.html/u (no idea where the .html comes from) Redirect 301 /bankstellen/u http://www.bankstellenshop.com/bankstellen/u.html Any idea what I'm doing wrong or what should change? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Kapottefietsband0 -
Setting up addon domains properly (bonus duplicate content issue inside)
A new client of mine is using 1and1 hosting from back in the dark ages. Turns out, her primary domain and her main website (different domain) are exactly the same. She likes to have the domains names of her books, but her intention is to have it redirect to her main site. Unfortunately, 1and1's control panel is light years behind cpanel, so when she set up her new domains it just pointed everything to the same directory. I just want to make sure I don't make this up, so please correct me if I'm wrong about something. I'm assuming this is a major duplicate content deal, so I plan to create a new directory for each add-on domain. Since her main site is an add-on itself, I'll have to move all the files into it's new home directory. Then I'll create an htaccess file for each domain and redirect it to her main site. Right so far? My major concern is with the duplicate content. She's had two sites being exactly the same for years. Will there be any issues leftover after I set everything up properly? Is there anything else I need to do? Thanks for the help guys! I'm fairly new to this community and love the opportunity to learn from the best!
Technical SEO | | Mattymar0 -
Linking without loosing link equity.
Hi, I was wondering if anyone had a solution to linking without loosing link equity? From what I have read using 'no follow' on both internal and external links DOES NOT pass any equity across the link to the link target, but also, the latest thought goes that it DOES loose link equity (as if it were a FOLLOW' link). So is there a method of retaining link equity using another method? Thanks
Technical SEO | | James770 -
Domain structure for US Local Sites
We are planning on opening localized versions of our website throughout the world and in the US. For countries these websites will be: www.site.co.uk www.site.fr etc.... For the US would it be better to add the states onto part of the domain name or use a sub-folder. What is the advantage/disadvantages of each? Meaning, should it be: nj.site.com or site-nj.com
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Removal request for entire catalog. Can be done without blocking in robots?
Bunch of thin content (catalog) pages modified with "follow, noindex" few weeks ago. Site completely re-crawled and related cache shows that these pages were not indexed again. So it's good I suppose 🙂 But all of them are still in main Google index and shows up from time to time in SERPs. Will they eventually disappear or we need to submit removal request?Problem is we really don't want to add this pages into robots.txt (they are passing link juice down below to product pages)Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
How much will changing IP addresses impact SEO?
So my company is upgrading its Internet bandwidth. However, apparently the vendor has said that part of the upgrade will involve changing our IP address. I've found two links that indicate some care needs to be taken to make sure our SEO isn't harmed: http://followmattcutts.com/2011/07/21/protect-your-seo-when-changing-ip-address-and-server/ http://www.v7n.com/forums/google-forum/275513-changing-ip-affect-seo.html Assuming we don't use an IP address that has been blacklisted by Google for spamming or other black hat tactics, how problematic is it? (Note: The site hasn't really been aggressively optimized yet - I started with the company less than two weeks ago, and just barely got FTP and CMS access yesterday - so honestly I'm not too worried about really messing up the site's optimization, since there isn't a lot to really break.)
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Local SEO for service industry - one landing page for every town...in every county...in every state?
Starting a second local based service site. Initially going to target a couple counties and move on from there as the business grows. The first site of mine I set up a page for each town [service] + [town] + [state] + [zip]. I am afraid this could get out of control though if I don't have unique content on each page. For the last site I simply copied the page and replace the town name in each as well as the picture, picture title, and image name to make it look more unique for users but not necessarily Google. I had pretty good results but I want this next site to be done properly. Should I only target a few of the major markets to begin with? What about long tail searches for smaller towns that currently bring in a good amount of business? I am concerned about having "too many" long tail pages for each town which would essentially become a listing of every town and county in the state if I was to maintain the pace I want to. Also I would need a good amount of backlinks to each specific town page url if I wanted to do well in each of those specific markets right? Is this where the fine line between niche term and broad search is? Is there any happy medium?
Technical SEO | | kabledesigns0