Is it possible for a web site to get 'Pigeon Holed' geographically?
-
I have a site that sells widgets. It's called widgets.com. I want to sell widgets locally in 10 different geographic areas so my url structure/kw goal is as follows:
URL KW I Hope to Rank For
widgets.com 'Widgets'
widgets.com/houston/ 'Houston Widgets'
widgets.com/dallas/ 'Dallas Widgets'So I've optimized my site accordingly where my home page has no Geo optimization and my 'city pages' are all geo optimized, complete with hcard brick and mortar addresses that are all legit offices that sell our widgets.
My problem, is that despite all that, my home page (which again, is not geo-optimized) is now ranking for 'Dallas Widgets'. This is messing up my strategy and very frustrating because the home page does not have any information Dallas residents will find helpful about widgets.
So my question is, am I better off just owning this 'Dallas' label is forcing on my site and just optimize the home page for dallas and keep the rest of the 9 cities in their directories? Does anyone have any experience with getting pigeonholed geographically speaking?
-
Thanks Colin - very good feedback. I was leaning that direction but you're advice pushed me over the edge. I agree, I think all the 'off site signals' are what's got my non geo home page ranking for Dallas.
-
I've actually seen this happen quite a bit. I work with a lot of service area businesses who take this same strategy.
I think the pigeon-holing comes into play because of the off-site signals (maybe a bunch of listings with a Dallas address and link to your homepage?) ...I don't think hcard, schema, etc. do much to keep it from happening.
So what I wind up doing most of the time is optimizing the home-page for their primary high-traffic city, or headquarters. Unless they're actually trying to rank nationally and it seems possible, it's the way to go. I've seen huge advantages doing it this way - especially if you have the off-site signals to go with it (which I would guess you do).
So if you had "Dallas, TX Widgets" somewhere in your home-page title, you may wind up ranking well for just "widgets" when searched in the Dallas area.
In my opinion, optimize that homepage for Dallas, then watch and see. To me, Google already kind of preferring that page is a good sign.
-
You're getting off just putting your entire business into a single domain. Unless you have the time to test an experiment running 10 different domains it's better just to build one big quality website. With 10 domans you need to build backlinks to 10 different sites. It's hard enough building one up.
To rank geographically, I would continue optimizing the front page for straight "widgets", let Google pick up whatever they wanted, and develop backlinks to your sub widget pages.
Quick question. Are you using the same widget product in multiple locations. For instance:
widgets.com/houston/car-app-widget/widgets.com/dallas/car-app-widget/ (where this is the same widget)
Each directory should have unique widgets. Using the same content will get you in trouble (duplicate content).
-
It's challenging to say. If you have the time to develop an SEO experiment for something like that, you should totally do it!
Create a web page like dallasSOMETHINGwidgets.com, create a basic site, tie it to your brick-and-mortar, and create something like SOMETHINGSOMETHINGwidgets.com which has the same content, but not tied to your brick-and-mortar, and see how they compare in rankings.
That's the best way to know!
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
-
Video page duplicates (that aren't really duplicates)
Hi. My company has a 1000 videos, each of the videos appear on their own page that follows the same template. The title is of course different / videos linked to / etc. Google is reporting them as "duplicate content". What should I do to differentiate these pages enough so that google can recognized that they are different pages?.
Image & Video Optimization | | adamorn0 -
Question about Wistia and possible other Video Solutions for better SEO?
We are considering using Wistia as a more SEO-friendly video solution. In our preliminary tests, we like what we see with the exception of one thing. There is no way for video users to toggle the interactive transcripts on and off. From an aesthetic viewpoint, our team finds the scrolling text extremely visually distracting. For usability and SEO purposes, we know that having the transcript there is important. Unfortunately in the embed codes, you are limited to either including the interactive transcript, or leaving it out. There is no mechanism to allow users to view it if they want to, but leave it off if they don.t Has anyone here created a workaround for this problem or found another solution, like Wistia, that has a more aethetically pleasing and user-friendly presentation of trascripts/captions? Thanks! Dana
Image & Video Optimization | | danatanseo0 -
Google+ Local/Places isn't displaying my suite #. Should I leave it out of NAP on other directories, too?
HI All, For some reason Google is not displaying the suite # for a client of mine in Google+ / Places. I've entered the suite # in the back-end of Google+ / Places and it shows there when I log in, but the public version of the listing omits it. So the question is, should the NAP in other directories omit it as well? Google knows it exists, but is choosing not to publish it... Thanks! Zack
Image & Video Optimization | | HammerandHand0 -
Can this make one's local listing vanish from Google local search?
Hi All, Does anyone know if selecting "Yes, this business serves customers at their locations" under "service areas and location settings" in Google Places can cause a business's listing to disappear from Google local search? My interior designer client has a bricks-and-mortar location, was ranking at about #20 for "interior designer" in Portland, and now has dropped from local search. I had "No, all customers come to the business location" selected previously. In the past week, before the vanishing, I made these changes: 1. changed the service area to "Yes, this business serves customers at their locations", 2. removed "Portland" from the description in Google Places, and 3. submitted maybe two dozen directory listings to high DA sites (using Whitespark as the tool for determining where to post). Thanks everyone! Zack
Image & Video Optimization | | HammerandHand0 -
How to get video content indexed (incl. example)?
Hi, I am currently working with my first client on SEO, and I've been asked (among other things) to help them get their video content indexed by Google. Since this is my first client, and I haven't worked much with videos, I hope I can get some tips. An example of one of their "theme pages" is about studying in Australia. The site is in Norwegian and don't mind the pop-up: http://www.studenttorget.no/australia I would love to get some feedback to what I should do about this page in order to help them get their videos indexed. By the way, they're considering hosting their own videos, and creating a system to keep everything local. Is this a better solution to seo than if the videos are hosting on YouTube/Vimeo or something else? Thanks. Jens P. Berget
Image & Video Optimization | | berget0 -
How do you get links from a photo pointing to a third party site in Google Places?
How do you get links from a photo pointing to a third party site. I’ve seen a number on other Places accounts but I can't figure out how to do it. They had a picture/logo and the url underneath it (instead of it saying 'from the owner' underneath it), when you clicked the photo it took you to the website instead of just a page with only that photo on it. Please see image as an example. I've highlighted the image links below. Thanks in advance for your help 🙂 i0HxK.jpg
Image & Video Optimization | | HICRM0 -
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 -
Switching to a domain name with keywords in it, is it possible to make this happen smoothly?
Hello, We have been working on the SEO of our site for almost a year now, and we are still not really seeing the success we would like to see. I notice often we get outranked by other sites that have lower PA/DA/citations/reviews etc than us, and the only explaination i can find is that they are getting a boost for a Partial Keyword Match in the domain name. Right now our domain name is: http://www.storwell.com And we are considering switching to http://www.storwellselfstorage.com and of course 301 redirecting all the individual pages from the old domain to the new domain's pages. How much would we risk loosing out in this transition? Can we safely transfer domains, or do we risk loosing the majority of our PA & DA because the backlinks will point at redirects instead of the actual location? Has anyone successfully managed to transfer domains and keep their DA & PA?
Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg0