Targeting local areas without creating landing pages for each town
-
I have a large ecommerce website which is structured very much for SEO as it existed a few years ago. With a landing page for every product/town nationwide (its a lot of pages).
Then along came Panda...
I began shrinking the site in Feb last year in an effort to tackle duplicate content. We had initially used a template only changing product/town name.
My first change was to reduce the amount of pages in half by merging the top two categories, as they are semantically similar enough to not need their own pages. This worked a treat, traffic didn't drop at all and the remaining pages are bringing in the desired search terms for both these products.
Next I have rewritten the content for every product to ensure they are now as individual as possible.
However with 46 products and each of those generating a product/area page we still have a heap of duplicate content. Now i want to reduce the town pages, I have already started writing content for my most important areas, again, to make these pages as individual as possible.
The problem i have is that nobody can write enough unique content to target every town in the UK via an individual page (times by 46 products), so i want to reduce these too.
QUESTION: If I have a single page for "croydon", will mentioning other local surrounding areas on this page, such as Mitcham, be enough to rank this page for both towns?
I have approx 25 Google local place/map listings and grwoing, and am working from these areas outwards. I want to bring the site right down to about 150 main area pages to tackle all the duplicate content, but obviously don't want to lose my traffic for so many areas at once.
Any examples of big sites that have reduced in size since Panda would be great.
I have a headache... Thanks community.
-
My pleasure, Silkstream. I can understand how what you are doing feels risky, but in fact, you are likely preventing fallout from worse risks in the future. SEO is a process, always evolving, and helping your client change with the times is a good thing to do! Good luck with the work.
-
Thank you Miriam. I appreciate you sharing with me the broad idea of the type of structure that you feel a site should have in this instance (if starting from scratch).
You have pretty much echoed my proposal for a new site structure, built for how Google works nowadays, rather than 2-3 years ago. We are currently reducing the size of the current site, to bring it as close to this type of model as possible. However the site would need a complete redesign to make it viably possible to have this type of structure.
I guess what I've been looking for is some kind of reassurance that we are moving in the right direction! Its a scary prospect reducing such a huge amount of pages down to a compact targeted set. With prospects of losing so much long tail traffic, it can make us a little hesitant.
However the on-site changes we have made so far, seem to be having a positive affect.And thank you for giving me some ideas about content creation for each town. I really like this as an idea to move forward after the changes are complete, which will hopefully be by the new year!
-
Hi Silkstream,
Thank you so much for clarifying this! I understand now.
If I were starting with a client like this, from scratch, this would be the approach I would take:
-
View content development as two types of pages. One set would be the landing pages for each physical location, optimized for each city, with unique content. The other set would be service pages, optimized for the services, but not for a particular city.
-
Create a Google+ Local page for each of the physical locations, linked to its respective landing page on the website. So, let's say you now have 25 city pages and 46 service pages. That's a fairly tall order, but certainly do-able.
-
Build structured citations for each location on third party local business directories. Given the number of locations, this would be an enormous jobs.
-
Build an onsite blog and designate company bloggers, ideally one in each physical office. The job of these bloggers would be something like each of them creating one blog post per month about a project that was accomplished in their city. In this way, the company could begin developing content under their own steam that would meet the need of showcasing a given service with a given city. Over time, this body of content would grow the pool of queries for which they have answers for.
-
Create a social outreach strategy, likely designating brand representatives within the company who could be active on various platforms.
-
Likely need to develop a link earning strategy tied in with steps 4 and 5.
-
Consider video marketing. A good video or two for each physical location could work wonders.
I'm painting in broad strokes here, but this is likely what the overall strategy would look like. You've come into the scenario midway and don't have the luxury of starting from scratch. You are absolutely right to be cleaning up duplicate content and taking other measures to reduce the spaminess and improve the usefulness of the site. Once you've got your cleanup complete, I think the steps I've outlined would be the direction to go in. Hope this helps.
-
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for jumping in.
The business model is service-based. So when i refer to "46 products" they are actually 46 different types of service available.
The customer will typically book and pay online, through the website, and they are then served at their location which is most often either their home or place of work. They actually have far more than the 25 actual locations, much closer to 120 I believe. However, I only began their SEO in February, AFTER they were hit by Panda. So building up their local listings is taking time, as the duplicate content issue seems far more urgent. Trying to strike a balance, and fix this all slowly over time to lay a solid foundation for inbound marketing, as its being diluted by the poor site structure.
Does this help? Am I doing the right things here?
-
Hi Silkstream,
I think we need to clarify what your business model is. You say you have a physical location in each of your 25 towns. So far, so good, but are you saying that your business has in-person transactions with its customers at each of the 25 locations? The confusion here is arising from the fact that e-commerce companies are typically virtual, meaning that they do not have in-person transactions with their customers. The Google Places Quality Guidelines state:
Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.
Thus, my wanting to be sure that your business model is actually eligible, given that you've described it as an e-commerce business, which would be ineligibl_e._ If you can clarify your business model, I think it will help you to receive the most helpful answers from the community.
-
You scared me then Chris!
-
Of course, if you've got the physical locations, you're in good shape there.
-
"It sounds like you're saying that your one ecommerce company has 25 Google local business listings--and growing?! It's very possible that could come back and haunt you unless you in the form of merging or penalization."
Why? The business has a physical location in every town, so why should they not have a page for every location? This is what we were advised to do?
"If there was no other competition, you would almost certainly rank for your keywords along with the town name"
I have used this tactic before, for another nationwide business, but on a smaller scale and it worked. Ie; they ranked (middle of page 1) but for non competitive keywords and the page has strong backlinks. With this site, the competition is stronger and the pages will not have a strong backlink profile at first.
My biggest worry, is to cut all the existing pages and lose the 80% long tail the site currently pulls in. But what other way is there to tackle so much duplicate content?
-
It sounds like you're saying that your one ecommerce company has 25 Google local business listings--and growing?! It's very possible that could come back and haunt you unless you in the form of merging or penalization. If not that, it's likely to stop being worth the time as a visibility tactic.
As far as whether or not mentioning local surrounding towns in your page copy will be enough to get you to rank for them, it would depend on competition. If there was no other competition, you would almost certainly rank for your keywords along with the town name but with competition, all the local ranking factors start coming into play and your ability to rank for each one will depend on a combination of all of them.
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 to rank a product page
Hello, I have a product page and just did a little introduction ( 5 lines of text) but I have the feeling this is not enough for google. What is the solution ? Is it to increase the amount of content even though it is not going to be user friendly ? Or will google look at the product page I link too and take into account the content on those subpages to boost my "pillar / product page". Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Few pages without SSL
Hi, A website is not fully secured with a SSL certificate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
Approx 97% of the pages on the website are secured. A few pages are unfortunately not secured with a SSL certificate, because otherwise some functions on those pages do not work. It's a website where you can play online games. These games do not work with an SSL connection. Is there anything we have to consider or optimize?
Because, for example when we click on the secure lock icon in the browser, the following notice.
Your connection to this site is not fully secured Can this harm the Google ranking? Regards,
Tom1 -
301 Redirect to Home Page or Sub-Page?
What do you think about 301 redirect of good expired domain to a sub-page instead of the home page? I'm doing this so I don't hurt my brand name. Let me know your thoughts please. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JuanWork0 -
500 and 508 pages?
Hi we just did a massive deepcrawl (using the tool deepcrawl.co.uk/) on the site: http://tinyurl.com/nu6ww4z http://i.imgur.com/vGmCdHK.jpg Which reported a lot of URLs as either 508 and 500 errors. For the URLs as reported as either 508 or 500 after the deep crawl crawl finished we put them directly into screaming frog and they all came back with status code 200. Could it be because Deep Crawl hammered the site and the server couldn't handle the load or something? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Glossary index and individual pages create duplicate content. How much might this hurt me?
I've got a glossary on my site with an index page for each letter of the alphabet that has a definition. So the M section lists every definition (the whole definition). But each definition also has its own individual page (and we link to those pages internally so the user doesn't have to hunt down the entire M page). So I definitely have duplicate content ... 112 instances (112 terms). Maybe it's not so bad because each definition is just a short paragraph(?) How much does this hurt my potential ranking for each definition? How much does it hurt my site overall? Am I better off making the individual pages no-index? or canonicalizing them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeadSEOlogist0 -
Consolidating numerous landing pages using similar search terms
Hi, The site I am working on currently uses numerous pages for search terms with similar keywords. vehicle wrapping / vehicle wraps / car wrapping / car wraps / van wrapping / van wraps etc Now obviously i want to bring these into one to help create one high authority page covering all terms. At present the "car wraps" page is ranking for quite a few of these terms. Am i best to stick with this or chose the highest search term being car wrapping, and pass the dribbles of juice from the rest and "car wraps" onto this? This is aimed at a local demographic so the local terms will be thrown in too unless you think the places pages will work in favour? Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lee4dcm0 -
2 pages lost page rank and not showing any backlinks in google
Hi we have a business/service related website, 2 of our main pages lost their page rank from 3 to 0 and are not showing any backlinks in google. What could be the possible reason. Please guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tech_Ahead0 -
Local Search Results Tanked My 1st Page Ranking
My site was routinely ranking in the top 2-3 in Google for my relevant search terms. Then I started working on my local SEO. Now I'm in the map list at 1-2, but my site no longer shows up with the rest of the search results. I've heard that this has been happening to other local businesses with a big Google presence. I'm thinking that I should create some micro sites for each location listing that gives a location specific intro and then links to my main site. Then I can sever my main site from Google places. Here are my two questions: 1) Is this going to kill my placement in the map results; and, How long will it take for my main site to get back to its 2-3 spot rankings in Google's regular results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ToughTimesLawyer0