Better to use specific cities or counties for SEO geographics?
-
Hello SEO experts!
We are encountering a difficult situation at our marketing firm with a client who wants to optimize her site for keyworks + counties, as she doesn't want to be restricted to one specific city. We have suggested alternate solutions like location pages, utilization of H2's, etc, however, she wants to know the effectiveness of using a specific city (ie: Winona, MN) vs a county (ie: Winona County, MN) for SEO purposes. The research I have conducted thus far hasn't gotten me very far, basically I'm seeing that it all comes back to what people search for (cleaning services in Winona, MN vs. cleaning services in Winona County, MN). Does anyone have any insight into this issue?
-
This is unscientific and based on the way I personally search, but I'd ask how people in the area refer to that area for some additional input. Here are some examples of the ways I have searched for locations in areas I've lived in (or had family live in).
In the SF Bay Area, I used to live in Newark. There were about 30,000 people in the city, and it was surrounded by the SF Bay on one side, and Fremont on three other sides. I would verbally tell people in the region that I lived in Fremont, and I'd search for local businesses using Fremont instead of Newark, as otherwise I'd get results for New Jersey.
I have relatives that used to live in Woodstock, VA. Everyone always thinks of Wodstock, NY, and it's hard to find local info, especially when searching from the West Coast. A lot of businesses describe themselves as in the Shenandoah Valley (and it was Shenandoah county), so I'd often search for Shenandoah, or Front Royal, which was the nearest sizable town.
Other relatives live in Battle Creek, Iowa, a town of 800 or so people. Even with adding Iowa, I get way too many results for Battle Creek, Michigan. If I need to search for something (usually on ebay, looking for memorabilia) I will search for Ida Grove or Ida County.
I know this really isn't an answer to your question, but more of some things to think about. Again, I'd ask (if you're not local to the area yourself) how people usually describe where they live, and look at search volume for that. Maybe also run some AdWords targeted to desired zip codes, and then look in the Search Query Reports in AdWords to see what cities people type in to modify their search?
-
I used to live in a town that had a couple thousand people.. It was the largest town in the county. The county was large enough that it would take 1.5 hours to drive from the northwest corner to the southeast corner - not because the distance was that great - but because there were few good roads in that direction. Many of the people lived on an unpaved road and most of the people had a well instead of water service.
In the entire county there was one tiny hospital, a few grocery stores and enough stoplights that you could count them on your fingers. But there were more campsites than residents and the population of the county would double the day before the first day of deer hunting or trout season.
If you had a healthcare emergency you better be right with God. It could be an hour before an ambulance gets to you and another hour before you get to a tiny hospital with a couple GPs and one surgeon and then transferred to the hospital of a small city another hour away.
-
I'd listen to EGOL and Kemp. Sounds like they know the rural places better than I, and these rural people don't know how to search good yet
-
Continuing on what EGOL said, we have had very good experiences with County + keyword for areas outside of Hillsborough County (outside of Tampa). You will not find Pasco + keyword or Hernando + keyword ever showing up on any mainstream keyword tool. They just don't have the search volume...however, we get conversions on those landing pages all the time.
Frankly, I don't know how you would even do county vs city research, because you (most likely) will not find search volume for counties even though conversions might be there. However, as William said, they are the same name. So, in your particular case, it really shouldn't matter.
Best,
Ruben
-
In some parts of the United States people use town and city names when they talk about where they live or where things are located or where they are going. These people usually live in towns and cities and that is how they think about places.
However, many people live in rural areas - not in any town or city. These people often use counties, instead of cities when they talk about where they live or where they are going.
The lower the population density the more likely they are going to use counties instead of towns and cities. Why? Because the tiny towns and cities where they live are unknown to most people. Everyone has heard of Pittsburgh and Cleveland but nobody has heard of Gassaway and Erbacon, yet they probably know the name of the county if they live in that region.
People who live in cities "don't get it" when they hear rural people talking about what county they are from... but people who live in rural areas understand city people talking about what city they are from. This shows that rural people are smarter when it comes to geographic locations.
-
Agree with William. Show your client the keyword search volume data on searching by city vs by county. Several of the sites I run have localized pages and we have gotten into discussions about getting more specific by using zip code or the names of neighborhood as we were well optimized for city + service. Why not zipcode + service etc.
It came down to, nobody searches for zipcode + service or neighborhood + service in the areas we focus on. Yours may be different, so look at the data first, but I bet it will hover at the city level. You can put it to your client this way, "I can spend a lot of your money on pages that are optimized at the county level and they could even rank for that search. But if no one is searching for those key terms, then I have just wasted your money and time."
Good luck!
-
Wait... the town and county have the same name? Then there's no issue.
People don't search by county and rarely put in the state when searching a city geo. Your money term is variations of, "cleaning services in Winona". Even though this phrase and others like it don't have a high search volume, experience and years of data tell me this would be the way to go. Unless you wanted to focus on carpet cleaning, which is a different ball game.
To sedate your client, maybe discuss a local SEO play with G+. Then you can define the exact area you'd like to cover, which would include both no problem.
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
-
Multi Store SEO Drop
I have two stores (thespacecollective.com and thespacecollective.com/us) and over the past month the keyword rank for the US store had dropped by half, while the UK store is relatively the same. The content is mostly the same, except the US site uses US spelling. I assumed that this would not be flagged as duplicate content because it is the same site, just serving two locations. I'd be interested to hear some thoughts on the reason for this drop and how I might fix it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
SEO Value of Google+?
Hi Mozers, Does having a Google+ page really impact SEO? Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Brightcove SEO Best Practices?
My company has decided to go with Brightcove as a video platform so we can better monetize all of the video content we create and better customize the experience as well. We have a pretty decent YouTube presence, and I won't let them stop using that because it would totally alienate us from part of our audience. So I was hoping someone could help me with the following: Are we able to keep videos hosted on YouTube as well as Brightcove without any risk of duplicate content? If we use the Brightcove player to embed videos in our on-site content, are we hindering potential organic search visibility? On the embeds, it's looking like it's using an iframe in our content (https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/sativa-indica-and-hybrid-whats-the-difference-between-cannabis-ty) - We're using a Brightcove WP plugin for the embed, but I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on a better way to implement/if this is even an issue at all. Are there any other general best practices/insights anyone has working with this platform? I found this article on their site, but I was wondering if there was anything else I should consider. Thank you in advance for any insights/answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidkaralisjr0 -
Why is hosting good for SEO?
I've heard a few people mention this now. I have seen hosting packages range from £5 to £1000 per month, and I understand that each comes with their own amounts of storage space, bandwidth and all. Now I understand that page speed is important to SEO and the type of hosting will dictate your page speed, but other than this why is hosting important to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Where do we focus from an SEO perspective?
I run a digital business development consulting company. Our core has always been centered around consulting with client to develop strategy and then working with a set of vendors in a variety of different services types to implement the strategy. I'm struggling right now to determine the best approach for our own SEO. Our website is http://phase2solutions.net. What suggestions would you have on the approach here? Feel free to share your service as well as the tactical end is something we are looking to outsource. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phase2solutions0 -
It appears that Googlebot Mobile will look for mobile redirects from the desktop site, but still use the SEO from the desktop site.
Is the above statement correct? I've read that its better to have different SEO titles & descriptions for mobile sites as users search differently on mobile devices. I've also read it's good to link build, keep text content on mobile sites etc to get the mobile site to rank. If I choose to not have titles & descriptions on my mobile site will Google just rank our desktop version & then redirect a user on a mobile device to our mobile site or should I be adding in titles & descriptions into the mobile site? Thanks so much for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Small buisiness multiple cities
Say i have a website for a small business...but that business is expanding into neighboring areas. I still want to have it SEO optimized for keywords in the neighboring towns but I do not want to have to redo the whole website. Is there a way to do this without having google penalyze me for having duplicate content? I mean i know i can create a landing page www.mysite/newtown but whos to say the reader wont click the logo and go to the home page and gets navigated to www.mysite.com and get confused because its not the same info or its talking about the original town the business started. I hope this makes sense...thanks for the help! I see that craigslist uses the city.craigslist.com so im wondering if this is the answer??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dcstover10 -
Would the use of
Hi, I am wondering on you through relevant to SEO in the following situation. I have a "travel" website and obvisouls as part of that I have a whole list of desitinations. So I have a drop down in my page navigation, which lists all my desitinations. At the moment I see have 2 main options to display the lists as follows: 1/. Perfect Anchors, but not good for usability - IE repeating the word "holiday in a list of 100 destinations, looks spammy for one, and when the headline says "Holiday Destinations", then from a use perspective its pretty pointless and takes away from navigation rather than improves it".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
New York Holidays
Las Vegas Holidays 2/. Non Perfect Anchors - But better for usability
New York
Las Vegas So I am thinking - would the use of the title attribute provide a perfect solution?? Or am I wasting my time with this and it is just pointless considering it as an option. EG - what I had in mind was:
3/. Ideal Solution for both SEO and usability??
New York
Las Vegas Thanks for you help in advance.0