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
-
Site has disappeared since Panda 4 despite quality content, help!
Our site www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk has lost over 20 first page rankings since the end of May. I assume this is because of Panda 4.0. All content on the site is high quality and 100% unique, so we did not expect to get penalised. Although I read somewhere that if Google can't read particular js anymore they don't rank you as high. The site has not been blacklisted as all pages are showing in Google's index and there are no messages on webmaster tools. We have not taken part in any link schemes and have disavowed all low quality links that were pointing there just in case (after the penalty). Can anybody see anything on www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk that may have cause Panda update to affect it so negatively? Would really appreciate any help.
Algorithm Updates | | search_shop0 -
Post penguin & panda update. what would be a good seo strategies for brand new sites
Hi there. I have the luxury of launching a few sites after the penguin and panda updates, so I can start from scratch and hopefully do it right. I will get SEO companies to help me with this so i just want to ask for advices on what would be a good strategies for a brand new site. my understand of the new updates is this content and user experience is important, like how long they spend, how many pages etc social media is important. we intent to engage FB and twitter alot. in New Zealand, not too many people use google+ so we will probbaly just concentrate on the first two hopefully we will try to get people to share our website via social media, apparent that is important should only concentrate on high quality backlinks with a good diverse set of alt tags, but concentrate on branding rather than keywords. Am i correct to say that so far? if that is the principle, what would be the strategy to implement these goals? Links to any articles would also be great please. Love learning. i just want to do this right and hopefully try to future proof the sites against updates as possible. i guess quality content and links will most likely to be safe. Thank you for your help.
Algorithm Updates | | btrinh0 -
Guest Blog Post or Article Content Should be Do-Follow or No-Follow Link ? Help Plz !
Many SEO writers and blogs after Google Matt Cutt said, You should not allow no-follow link in Guest Post. What should we do. ? I am allowing Guest post - what they ask in return a do-follow link to their site or blog. other articles or post i wrote about inspiration collected from different source or single portfolio site - i credit them(as blogger - we should respect them). What i am doing right or wrong ? Please advise and help me on this ! http://searchengineland.com/google-guest-blogging-for-links-you-better-nofollow-those-links-166218
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
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 -
Yoast SEO plugin and Weak Links
The plugin has what I thought was a great feature. My main site is often scrapped and I thought 'well at least we're getting a Link out of it' - due to the RSS feature of Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin (you can add a link to the bottom of your RSS feeds). Now Google is talking about Links from weak/crap sites and how they may impact your rankings. So - with this in mind.. Do we want links from scrappers? Are we now better off discontinuing the usage of this feature? I imagine there may be varying opinions on this so I'll open it as a discussion... thanks
Algorithm Updates | | TheHockeyWriters0 -
Local search ranking tips needed
Hi there, I've been working on my clients website for a while now. About a month ago I created him a local business listing in Google. I was wondering if there are any new tips to get his business up the rankings in local search? I've researched and only really found information relevant to the old way Google displayed local search.
Algorithm Updates | | SeoSheikh0 -
Non .Com or .Co Versus .ca or .fm sites - In terms of SEO value
We are launching a new site with a non traditional top level domain . We were looking at either .ca or .in as we are not able to get the traditional .com or .co or .net etc . I was wondering if this has any SEO effect ? Does Google/Bing treat this domain differently .Will it be penalized ? Note : My site is a US based site targeting US audience
Algorithm Updates | | Chaits0 -
After optimising for SEO my ranking went down...
Hello, My website was ranking for over 100 keywords but was not really optimised properly. For example, the page title was much too long, it was segmented like this: "keyword - Category - domain " I followed recommandations in SEOMOZ and I removed the domain and category from the long page titles to only leave the keyword and updated the H1 to reflect also the keyword. We dropped in ranking since even though we did not change anything, only made things more SEO optimised. I don't understand how it made us drop in ranking?? David
Algorithm Updates | | DavidSpivac0