Am I pigeonholing myself with a geo-targeted titles?
-
I've got a site that ranks very well in my local area for mobile app development related keywords. We use terms like "NYC" and "New York" in our title tags.
However I do not believe that this is NORMALLY a "local" geo keyword.
The reason that I believe this is because my competitors rank all over the USA (and even in Europe) for these keyterms, but we only rank in our local area of New York.
Is it possible that by including geographic terms like NYC and New York, that we are actually HURTING our rankings in other cities like Los Angeles and Chicago? If we removed these words, could we see rankings increases in other parts of the world?
The other side of the coin is that if we remove the "NYC" and "New York" keyterms, could we see serious drops in the local area as a result?
-
Hi Rameet,
I'm sorry my earlier replies didn't help. I'll close your earlier post and let's leave this one open in hopes that you get replies that are what you were looking for. Thanks for letting me know!
-
Well, the school of hard knocks has been testing me quite well.
I don't know that I'd add too much to your experiment, but thanks for the invite.
-
We're going to run a test on super easy keyterms to see what happens when you add or remove geo targets from the titles and content.
Would you like to do this with us?
-
Thank you for following up!
I felt that I had asked the question poorly and that you seemed confused about what the real issue was. So i used new language to hopefully get a more appropriate answer.
-
Hi Rameet,
I'm following up to discover if you did not feel you got an answer on this previous thread on the same topic:
http://moz.com/community/q/how-can-i-tell-if-my-targeted-keywords-are-geo-based
I understood from your thread that it was your competitor, not you, who had optimized a website for NYC terms, but the question you have asked here is basically the same. Because of this, I want to discover if you feel something was missing on your previous thread, prompting you to re-post this same question. Please, let me know. It's important to us that you receive help with your question!
-
I'll add also that some of our geo-targeted keywords rank well nationally when the competition is not relatively strong compared to other keywords.
-
"Is it possible that by including geographic terms like NYC and New York, that we are actually HURTING our rankings in other cities like Los Angeles and Chicago? If we removed these words, could we see rankings increases in other parts of the world?"
If someone in Chicago or Los Angeles types in a mobile app keyword without entering a city in the search then you most likely will be pigeonholing yourself because Google is seeing your pages as authoritative in your geo-targeted location.
For pages we want to rank nationally - we exclude geo-targeting and only geo-target keywords we want to win in our local/regional market.
-
We crush them.
-
I've wondered and posted the same question here myself.
Last year at the time, feedback from reliable forum users was that there was no conclusive data to suggest that geo-targeting hurts national serp results for non-geotargeted keywords.
There are a lot of brick and mortar stores serving local and regional that would be hurt by this.
How do your domain and page authorities compare to those who are ranking well nationally?
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
-
Spaces at beginning of title tag - negatively affect the optimization of the page?
For some reason, our title tags have a long space after the beginning title tag and before the text appears. The beginning title tag is on one line, then a break, a tab and then the content of the title tag. I'm pretty sure this is not good and is affecting optimization of the page. Am I correct or is this not an issue and does not need to be fixed? Example: | <title></span></p> <p> </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"> First keyword</td> </tr> </tbody> </table></title> |
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Best Approach to Rank For Multiple Locations With Similar Targeted Keywords
I'm trying to determine the best way to set up a website to rank for a similar set of keyword phrases in three different cities. The keyword phrases I want to rank for are all pretty much the same with the only difference being the city associated with the keyword phrase. For example, "Austin water restoration" vs "San Antonio water restoration" vs "Houston water restoration". Each city needs about 7 or 8 pages of unique content to accurately target the group of keywords I'm trying to rank for. My initial thought was to write up unique content for each city and have each city act a site within the main site. For example, the main navigation for xyz.com/austin would be Austin specific, so when you land on xyz.com/austin and go to Services - Water Restoration, it would be all Austin specific content. The same would be true for San Antonio and Houston. The only problem with this approach is that I have to build up the page authority for a lot of different pages. It would be much easier to build up the page authority for one Water Restoration page and just insert a little "Areas we serve" on the page that includes "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" and maybe work the coverage area in again at the bottom of the page somewhere. However, it would be much more difficult to work "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" into the title tags and H1s though, and I couldn't logically work the cities into the content as much either. That would be a downside to this approach. Any thoughts on this? Wondering how large companies with hundreds of locations typically approach this? I'd really appreciate your input.
Web Design | | shaycw0 -
Relationship page to target
Hi guys and girls, looking for some help on the topic of links and the options I have before me in the content editor JCE for Joomla. Is this worth setting? Will it help? Please see the screen shot for the options I have and let me know if I should be creating links that are nofollow, help, or any of the other option I have? This is one of the pages I'm looking at for example.. http://www.a1gt.com.au/training-courses/certificate-iii-in-automotive-mechanical-technology In this case the site is linking to a gov training site and I feel the relationship is beneficial and started to wondering if the advanced options have any advantages today? Thank you for your help in advance 🙂 Ben. [
Web Design | | yoonet](<a href=)" target="_blank">a>
0 -
Duplicate Titles for Large Lists
Our blog (www.cowleyweb.com/blog) has recently been given topic categories so we can utilize our old blogs. Otherwise, users would only see what's new and never look back (our blogs are organized by the month they were published) and all that hard work would kind of be a waste after a while. So we came up with a few topics (i.e. social media, internet marketing, etc.) and adding those as tags to blogs. Now, users can click the topics and get a results page on our blog of all the previously published blogs related to that topic. Sounds great. BUT, it's hurting our SEO crawl report. If the list goes beyond one page of search results, the 2nd and subsequent pages get dinged as "duplicate title" b/c they share the same title (i.e. "Social Media"). How can I fix this? I'm not the web designer but something tells me maybe some sort of tag that says "Page 2" or something would do the trick. We use Drupal which is good for customization. I assume tons of bloggers and websites have dealt with this problem. Please help. Want to give the web guy some solutions. Thank you.
Web Design | | JCunningham0 -
Hi Everybody. I have a large site that is made up of the main site then a large support site. The support site has a lot of overlapping content and similar titles. Would it be beneficial to separate the two? Thank you. All answers appreciated.
Hi Everybody. I have a large site that is made up of the main site then a large support site. The support site has a lot of overlapping content and similar titles. Would it be beneficial to separate the two? Thank you. All answers appreciated.
Web Design | | arithon0 -
Linking to an image with the keyword in the title and alt tags.
Hi guys, Just thought I'd ask for opinions about an ecommerce catalog I'm working on. I don't know if it's even worth worrying about, but here's the scenario. Let's say I'm linking to a category called 'Sale' using an image, I have the title tag of the link as 'Sale', the image title is also 'Sale' as well as the alt tag. The HTML looks like this: Sale The page itself is: http://www.fashionbasicsonline.com/catDisplay So my question is, do you think I'm stuffing the keyword in too many times there? It's CMS driven so I could have the alt tag as 'Sale Products' or one of the titles as 'Sale Catalog' perhaps, do you think there would be a benefit in doing that? Maybe it's microoptimisation and I should be looking at other low hanging fruit, but I'm just trying to come up with the best scenario. Would love to hear what you think. Cheers, Bruce p.s. Looking forward to meeting as many people as possible at MozCon next week 🙂
Web Design | | bruce_werdschinski0 -
Geo targetting and SEO
Hi all!
Web Design | | lhernandezBum
We are about to launch a new geotargetting feature on our site. Basically, nowadays we have a normal Homepage (example: myHomepage.com). Next week, the homepage will depend on your localization (checked through IP): For example, for Texans there will be a myHomepage.com/Texas (automatically redirected), for New Yorkers a myHomepage.com/Newyork. My question is, how can this affect SEO? Where will the bot go? Hopefully the answer is not "depending on where the bot is hosted"... because this can be dangerous. Also, I don't think that "telling the bot to go to a generic Homepage" is a good idea, as Google dislikes when you show them something different from the human users. Thanks0 -
Title Element length too long?
My site automatically builds a title element basic by taking the forum thread title and adding the board description to it. Let's use a fictional site as "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums" in this example. A user makes a post titled "Transmission Problems" then the automatically created title would be: Transmission Problems | Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums The process seems to be helpful. Overall thread ranking is good. The added words provide value to users searching for information as "Transmission Problems" is too vague, whereas by adding Chevy Corvette the search can be optimized better. The only issue is a small percent of my pages are being flagged by reporting tools with "Title Element Too Long" So I wish to ask, is there any real harm in this case? Google will simply truncate the title, right?
Web Design | | RyanKent0