Local Competition Analysis
-
Hi Mozzers,
I've been mainly B2B focused, and am used to estimating the amount of work necessary to best competition for organic results, but now I have a local client.
I need a method to estimate the amount of work necessary to get listed in the one-box for my chosen queries.
Can someone point me in the right direction? Any help appreciated.
-
Hi Wayne, There are some good tools out there for what you want to do, but I need to let you know that getting a one box result is not generally a Local SEO goal. Google seldom displays a single result for common queries. In general, what you want is to go for the highest ranking in the local results (the grey pinned results) whether Google is displaying 2, 3 or 7 results for a given query. My favorite local search competitive analysis tool is from 51 Blocks, and it's free: http://www.51blocks.com/online-marketing-tools/free-local-analysis/ It's really nice. You may also want to check out the suite of tools offered by Whitespark.ca, especially when it comes to the art of citation building for local businesses. So, the job here is to set common goals (a high local ranking) for specific terms and then create a plan that will typically incorporate a mix of on-page work and off-page citation creation, review acquisition and other factors. Hope this helps!
-
Hi Wayne,
I'm going through older questions and just ran across this one. I'm not sure that it's even called the one box anymore. I'm going to ask Miriam to jump in here with some tips and links for you that'll help you with what's current in local.
-
Process is fairly similar... search for your target keywords and do competitor research (check their backlinks and on page optimization). This will let you know how difficult it may be to rank for a specific keyword.
In general, local business rankings can be greatly improved with proper on-page optimization, places page optimization and being submitted to all the major business directories (check out yext.com and getlisted.org)
Best of luck!
Oleg
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
-
How Google organic search results differ in Local Searches?
We all know Google displays nearby results by locating our ip address. My question is how does these results differ? For eg 1. If someone from Newyork search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 2. Someone from California search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 3. Someone from California changes his location to Newyork and search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" What are the factors the Google SERP looks into to display the result in local terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rajeevEDU0 -
Where is the best place to put a sitemap for a site with local content?
I have a simple site that has cities as subdirectories (so URL is root/cityname). All of my content is localized for the city. My "root" page simply links to other cities. I very specifically want to rank for "topic" pages for each city and I'm trying to figure out where to put the sitemap so Google crawls everything most efficiently. I'm debating the following options, which one is better? Put the sitemap on the footer of "root" and link to all popular pages across cities. The advantage here is obviously that the links are one less click away from root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" (e.g. root/cityname) and include all topics for that city. This is how Yelp does it. The advantage here is that the content is "localized" but the disadvantage is it's further away from the root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" and include all topics across all cities. That way wherever Google comes into the site they'll be close to all topics I want to rank for. Thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Should (and could) a nation wide store compete on local terms?
For example: Can I create a page per each store with it's location including a map? Would it assist in local results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Are there any other ways to "push" local results for a nation wide site? Random example:
For a computer store selling computers:
"buy computers NJ"
"buy computers Boston" Thanks0 -
I need help with a local tax lawyer website that just doesn't get traffic
We've been doing a little bit of linkbuilding and content development for this site on and off for the last year or so: http://www.olsonirstaxattorney.com/ We're trying to rank her for "Denver tax attorney," but in all honesty we just don't have the budget to hit the first page for that term, so it doesn't surprise me that we're invisible. However, my problem is that the site gets almost NO traffic. There are days when Google doesn't send more than 2-3 visitors (yikes). Every site in our portfolio gets at least a few hundred visits a month, so I'm thinking that I'm missing something really obvious on this site. I would expect that we'd get some type of traffic considering the amount of content the site has, (about 100 pages of unique content, give or take) and some of the basic linkbuilding work we've done (we just got an infographic published to a few decent quality sites, including a nice placement on the lawyer.com blog). However, we're still getting almost no organic traffic from Google or Bing. Any ideas as to why? GWMT doesn't show a penalty, doesn't identify any site health issues, etc. Other notes: Unbeknownst to me, the client had cut and pasted IRS newsletters as blog posts. I found out about all this duplicate content last November, and we added "noindex" tags to all of those duplicated pages. The site has never been carefully maintained by the client. She's very busy, so adding content has never been a priority, and we don't have a lot of budget to justify blogging on a regular basis AND doing some of the linkbuilding work we've done (guest posts and infographic).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonLancaster0 -
Googlebot on paywall made with cookies and local storage
My question is about paywalls made with cookies and local storage. We are changing a website with free content to a open paywall with a 5 article view weekly limit. The paywall is made to work with cookies and local storage. The article views are stored to local storage but you have to have your cookies enabled so that you can read the free articles. If you don't have cookies enable we would pass an error page (otherwise the paywall would be easy to bypass). Can you say how this affects SEO? We would still like that Google would index all article pages that it does now. Would it be cloaking if we treated Googlebot differently so that when it does not have cookies enabled, it would still be able to index the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OPU1 -
How Does SEO Help Local Businesses
Hello, I recently took a position as a digital marketing manger with a advertising agency. Its my job to grow the digital marketing department. One of the issues I am running into is 90% of our clients are local businesses. When doing keyword research it is very difficult to find keywords with lots of search. For example, if I am optimizing for a Ford dealership in Hackensack,NJ there are not a lot of searches for this term. How can I justify a larger SEO budget when there is just not a lot of search volume for these keywords? This is nothing like Dog Training Videos or something similar. Am I missing something? Where can I pull traffic from for local businesses to justify larger SEO budgets? Thanks, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tony-Dimmock0 -
Building a Large Local Services Directory - Subdomain Needed?
In 2012 we will be rolling out a directory of local services for our industry. This will ultimately be thousands of additional pages, with city/zip searching, individual provider pages etc. The main reason is for UX -- providing local resources for our industry to compliment the online experience (we're an online B2C retailer) My question is if there are pros/cons to putting this on a subdomain, or if having it on the root is ideal. I don't see a huge influx of backlinks (making a sub fine) but I suppose that could change down the road. I do see some indexing benefits for new terms like 'service x in los angeles' etc, but that would also be fine on a sub. It feels like it would be cleaner to keep separate and on a sub, but maybe we're missing something. We certainty don't want to hurt anything on our primary site which drives the business. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOPA0