Local SEO, how much additional information to fill out beyond NAP
-
Hello,
When filling out citations, do you flush out each site with extra profile information like picture, categories, service area, etc or do you just fill out NAP and website link and move on?
I'm concerned about the time factor but I want to do good SEO that lasts into the future.
What do you skip and what do you add?
-
If it's always a planned action then I don't know. If none of the experts have noticed a difference then perhaps it doesn't matter. Maybe something to keep in mind in case one day things change. Thanks Miriam
-
Hi Bob,
A citation campaign is going to generate a lot more than 2-3 duplicate listings. Just a glance at GetListed.org's Local Search Eco-system shows how much data is fed, scraped, shared:
http://getlisted.org/resources/local-search-data-providers.aspx
My point being, it's just baked into the system. Think about when people use a service like Localeze and the distribution that occurs from that. I agree with you that naturalness is generally desirable, but directory inclusion isn't really a spontaneous and natural occurrence (like reviews are supposed to be). It's a planned action on the part of a business. So, I'm just not sure what natural would look like in this scenario. Know what I mean?
Appreciate your reply, Bob!
-
I think I need more information to answer that, Mariam. I would need to know how a quality local company that does no local SEO naturally would gain citation descriptions (if they would at all) to be able to answer that.
Whatever is closest to natural would be my guess to emulate.If it's natural for a company to have very few or no unique descrptions then I'd say we are totally OK using the same ones.
I know they are scraped but five to ten different descriptions scraped is different than one to three. Maybe naturally one to three is normal
I'd be interested to know your thoughts.
-
Will do.
-
Cool. Please follow up if you get a reply, vzPRO.
-
My 2 cents: I don't think this would affect the small business at all. It would be an issue when comparing two internet yellow page aggregators - they're the ones that lose out because the duplicate content makes their page less likely to rank than Yelp or another large IYP that features the same content.
-
I asked this question to Matt Cutts on Google Moderator.
-
Hi Bob,
That is such a good question. Honestly, I've asked myself that very question, too. What about duplicate content? I welcome the opportunity to share my thinking with you on this and hope you'll tell me if this sounds like good horse sense to you:
When you create a listing at one of the major data providers, it is going to automatically create additional listings on the sites it feeds data to. These auto-created listings will be identical in nearly every way, including the description you've provided. There is no way around this except to avoid listing your company on these major providers (which no sane person would want to avoid doing, right?)
So, the way that data is aggregated and shared, you cannot avoid what might be called duplicate content. Every local business with a citation profile has identical descriptions attached to these kinds of listings, and if there was a penalty involved, it would be affecting all of them, right? And I've never seen any indication of a penalty. Now, there's a chance I could be wrong about this, but my guess is that Google would be sophisticated enough to know that this type of duplication is baked into the way data is shared between the various indexes.
What do you think about that? I'd value your feedback. It's something I've wondered about, as I've said, but I've never taken the time to bring it up amongst peers.
-
Thanks Miriam,
One question: If I have descriptions ready wouldn't I run into duplicate content issues? But my original question has completely been answered, very happy with the feedback here.
-
Hey Bob,
I like VZpro's answer on this one. One area I always try to take advantage of is that some directories allow for a much longer business description than others. At the beginning of a citation campaign, I write descriptions of different lengths so that I have them at the ready for using on the different platforms. Those longer description field allow for a very robust (and optimized) description of the business, so that's something I never pass up.
-
Interesting question... If i would be at your place i would have added extra more information about the band the idea behind it is simple like vzPRO said, this submission, you are not going this for search engines only... but you are doing this for REAL people who are going to take a look of it.
I would defiantly say not to add tons and tons of paragraphs of information but at least add the information that is appealing to your targeted audience and help them convert. Images, Video, Payment information, parking info are the things that are usually helpful for people looking for small businesses like restaurants, bars and similar.
-
Agreed with vzPro - It's generally recommended to fill out as much of the extra content as possible. If nothing else, it makes you more likely to be featured on the internal search for those local websites.
Photos, categories, tags, all contact information, and products/services are a must in my book.
-
I happen to like to fill out the "extra" stuff. My philosophy is that you never really know who will be looking at that particular profile. It's not that much extra time to do.
What do you skip and what do you add?
As I mentioned, you never know who will be looking at that particular profile but if time is an issue I like to add at least the images and description as the images can be titled with your keywords and the description is sometimes used as your meta on certain citation sources.
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
-
Local Search Clean up Done. Now Best Way to Index?
I have spent hours doing some local search clean up and have a list of all the URLs to index, about 75. Is there a place I can dump these to get them all indexed quickly or do I have to wait for the hand of Google to come down and bless me with indexing. I don't want to dump all these to Google +, Facebook, or Twitter; that would just be wrong. Any ideas for fast indexing. I want them to all get indexed before the business address changes in a couple years 🙂
Image & Video Optimization | | photoseo10 -
Best way to use popular YouTube channel for SEO purposes
Hi all, We have a YouTube channel containing about 25 videos we created professionally a few years ago. They are all product features and are hosted on our site for applicable products (a very small percentage of our overall number of products). This channel was largely forgotten about for a few years. It has now reached over 160k views. What's the best way to utilize these videos for SEO benefits? Any techniques anyone has to maximize our ever increasing number of views? Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | bradkrussell0 -
Video SEO - Why are my videos not being indexed?
Hello All, I work on a site that has a lot of videos. The trouble is none of them are ranking. Here is an example of a page with a video on. If you click the play button you will see But none of these videos are being indexed, as you can see here. Is it because these videos are just mp4 files, rather than being embedded players (like SEOmoz use for instance)? Would embedding videos through Viddler / Wistia / Youtube etc help? Or is there some other issue at work here? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Rich
Image & Video Optimization | | JBGlobalSEO0 -
SEO for Explicit / Medical Pictures - Will It Hurt Rankings?
I have a client with page 1 rankings for several keywords. He wants to make some updates to his website. He is offering a new service and wants to show before and after photos of the procedure. He is an OB/GYN, so the before/after pictures are very explicit and have full nudity. How will this affect his rankings? Is there something that I can do to tell Google and other SE's that these photos are medical and not pornographic? Should I host them on another domain? Just looking for thoughts and insight. Thank you in advance!
Image & Video Optimization | | itrogers0 -
How much does a link from a YouTube video to a site affect its pagerank?
How much does a link from a YouTube video to a site affect its pagerank?
Image & Video Optimization | | JLAW0 -
As a whitehat SEO how do you manage in a highly competative market?
I have a competator that has literally hundreds of sites like this: http://www.wire-shelf.com/tag/cleaning/ that don't have a huge amount of page authority, but he is getting citations out of all of them. The site is obviously useless, and just a place for some SEO company to keep adding more links to their various clients, and creating google citations for them at the same time. Once you have filled out your information on every single local database and obtained all the legit citations you can, your competitors are still beating you by having more citations, from various sites like the one above. Is there any way to stay whitehat and actually succeed? or should i just follow suit, and make 100 crappy websites full of crap and put links in them. seems silly, but it seems like the only way to compete these days.
Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg0 -
Google Places - Different NAP on various directories...
My client's veterinary clinic uses a service called Localvets.com which is a division of Yext.com. This service updates listings and sponsors them across various directories. Since this is a referral service (they get paid for new clients) they use a custom phone number and custom website address for these listings. Question: Is this hurting the SEO potential of the Google Places listing since the N.A.P. are not the same? Thoughts?
Image & Video Optimization | | PMC-3120870 -
Canadian Local SEO gurus: What are the best citation sources?
I have been trying to gain some position in our local O-pack results and have used whitespark to hunt for citations and aquire as many as possible, but even after 4-5 months google has still not detected many of the citations we have added. What are you favourite citation sources? which ones really help? i.e. what are some quality canadian citation sources?
Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg0