Target broad keywords for local or broad keywords+local city?
-
Hi,
Is it better to target broad keywords in a local market or target 'broad keywords + local city'? Or both?
The sites I'm working with currently have landing pages for each 'local city/town + keyword' ... they each have about 5 services they offer and about 7 or more nearby towns they service. This means I'm tracking about 35+ keywords per client. That seems to be a bit much. Am I wrong? Would it be just as effective to target broad keywords and track them locally being that the local market isn't very competitive. Of course the broad keywords yield more search volume according to google keyword tool. However, the current setup is sending a worthwhile traffic volume to the site.
According to Miriam's article http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide I'm working with a business model 2 - single brick and mortar location servicing many areas nearby.
Thanks,
Chris
-
Hi Joshua,
Good for you for letting the client know that duplicate content landing pages for the cities are not a good idea. If the client is rural and the competition is low, I honestly wouldn't be recommending city landing pages at all in this scenario, unless their is a genuine reason for the business to be describing its activities in cities B, C, D, etc. Again, without knowing the nuances of the specific business, it's hard to give great advice. So, I can only take a general stab at this.
Let's say the client is a farm supply store located in Sonora, California. They are the only farm supply store within a 20 mile radius, and they want to be sure that customers in neighboring communities like Angels Camp, Jamestown, Colombia and Groveland know they exist. I would likely recommend a strategy like this:
-
Optimize all key pages of the website for product/service terms + Sonora
-
Earn testimonials from the farm store's loyal customers who come to them from various towns and include these throughout the product/service pages, including the name of the town the customer comes from.
-
Build citations for the Sonora-based store
-
Put a blog on the site and, on a modest basis, blog about industry-related events in the all the surrounding towns. Good content for the blog would be things like planting forecasts for the various towns at the different mountain elevations, coverage of farm stands, rural fairs, bake sales, mills, large animal vets, farming demonstrations, school gardens and anything else that relates to agriculture taking place in the neighboring communities that shop at the farm store for products.
-
Consider offering town-specific sales, contests and other promotions.
Given the rural location and low level of competition, this would likely be all the business would need to do to become very dominant for its goods and services within its own city and in the neighboring communities. It should not be necessary in any way to create those thin, duplicate content pages. A modest but well-planned effort should be all this business needs to succeed.
-
-
Hi,
The clients are located in small towns with many other small towns surrounding them. Most times one business is 'local enough' to be countywide and even stretch into nearby counties because of the rural-ish nature of the local market.
Currently, my company has done city pages (not unique content, just city specific titles changed) and done less effort toward the broad keywords. Even though they're getting traffic now with this method I've already notified them that they need unique content for each city page and that it's only a matter of time before Google's algorithm doesn't award such gray-hat techniques.
It'd be much easier for me to have them focus on the broad keywords then have a blog that has city-specific categories talking about the service coverage in the nearby town. However, until I have enough data I think I'll just stick to doing city-specific content (unique) with broad keyword focus as well. Review the data, then reevaluate.
Perhaps you have a better structure or approach?
Thanks,
Chris (Josh's SEO guy).
-
Hi Joshua,
That's really nice that you read my Moz Blog article. If the client is business model #2, then his city of location will almost always outweigh anything you do with additional cities. It can be difficult to offer general advice in this situation because I'm not aware of the specifics of the client's business - for instance, what is his relationship to these other cities? Is it a strong relationship or is it kind of a situation in which you're having to scramble to find a reason to build content for cities B, C and D? These nuances are very important in creating a strategy. Yes, broad keywords are almost always going to outweigh service/city terms, but for most local businesses, it's the city-related or city-based searches that count most.
-
I would generally track both, with the understanding that you are only looking to gain traffic from local clients. This doesn't specifically mean that your local clients are going to be typing in the city details in their search for your client's service. Some people might include the city while some might assume the search will target their location automatically. Generally on landing pages, if your client has a physical location, it's not that hard to create copy that includes the city. I would definitely include the main city in your titles--along with the service keywords. The search engines will pick up both.
-
While you should not fear change, your comment "However, the current setup is sending a worthwhile traffic volume to the site." says all you need to know, if the service + city landing page model is working, don't change it to change it or because you read something that says you should. If you do however believe that targeting the broad keywords instead will net you better local results, set up a few landing pages for the broad keywords and A/B test them against the local landing pages.
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 do Nation wide business win Local?
For example, this site https://www.kvetinyhned.cz for selling flowers is ahead of the sales of local stores that have a site but aimed only at sales in a certain area of the store
Local Website Optimization | | Martin11Martin0 -
Company with different branches: Generic Keywords & Localized Keywords: Best practise?
INITIAL SITUATION: We offer a branded product/service in different cities. We have different contact pages for every city (—> basically just a form and a map, i.e. 100% SHALLOW). GOAL:
Local Website Optimization | | Cesare.Marchetti
We would like to rank for the branded keyword only (—> more generic search intent) but as well as for branded keyword + cities (—> more transactional search intent) combinations. REMARK: It would make little sense in my opinion to develop the individual contact pages (for every city) to „full“ pages with real content as there isn’t really specific content for the differenct cities to add. OPTIONS:
1) HOME page: target for the branded keyword CONTACT pages (one for each city): target for the branded keyword + city name HOME page: target for the branded keyword + all the city names CONTACT pages (one for each city): : NO keyword targeting at all HOME page: target for the branded keyword + different city names CONTACT pages (one for each city): target for the branded keyword + city name Add CANONICAL tag to main page ???!!!??? What is best practise? What would you recommend? Is there another solution? I really would like to know your opinion. Thanks a lot for your hints in advance.
Cheers,
CesareBearbeiten0 -
Applying NAP Local Schema Markup to a Virtual Location: spamming or not?
I have a client that has multiple virtual locations to show website visitors where they provide delivery services. These are individual pages that include unique phone numbers, zip codes, city & state. However there is no address (this is just a service area). We wanted to apply schematic markup to these landing pages. Our development team successfully applied schema to the phone, state, city, etc. However for just the address property they said VIRTUAL LOCATION. This checked out fine on the Google structured data testing tool. Our question is this; can just having VIRTUAL LOCATION for the address property be construed as spamming? This landing page is providing pertinent information for the end user. However since there is no brick and mortar address I'm trying to determine if having VIRTUAL LOCATION as the value could be frowned upon by Google. Any insight would be very helpful. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB1 -
Ranking a Website that Services Multiple Cities
We have a website that offers services to various cities in a state. However, since we don't want to do keyword stuffing, how do we rank this website for all of these cities when it comes to the **title tags? **For example, how do we optimize the homepage title tag? Obviously I know we can't put all the cities into it, so how do we choose which city to use? I know we can add city/local pages and optimize them for those locations, but I'm referring specifically to the homepage and other main pages of the website. How do you determine which cities to use in those title tags?
Local Website Optimization | | SEOhughesm0 -
Australian local business website on a dot.com - how do I ensure its indexed/ranked by Google.com/au as priority
look forward to your advice My client is a local business in australia but has a dotcom site which is hosted in US. We are just moving it to wordpress and new hosting. I want to ensure that Google.com/au will be able to index and rank the content. How can I tell google its a site for people in australia? I thought best to set up a subfolder like this hissite.com/au and redirect anyone from australia to go to this url? Thanks for your recommendations
Local Website Optimization | | bisibee10 -
Targeting different cities for my service - Geo landing pages
I am breaking my head trying to figure out the best way around this... so we have an hvac company located in nyc. We want to also target all the different boroughs. We have a bunch of different major keywords hvac repair + location hvac service + location along with keywords such as air conditioning repair + location, heating service + location , and so on..... Should each borough + keyword have its own page? Or should we just have one page called brooklyn and in that page target all the different keywords like hvac, air conditining, and heating ? Also does it matter how we have it laid out? Domaim/hvac-repair-brooklyn or should I add domain/service-area/hvac. ..... Some of my competitors have the same content written on each borough page just moved around a little with different city names, how are they ranking so well? Isn't that duplicate? Would love to hear from some people with success in this local area. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | interstate0 -
Overuse of Keyword in Blog Articles
I have a business that I just recently started working with and he has written a ton of blog articles (some of which are really good) and decided it would be a good idea to insert the keyword hes targeting into the content or title of many of his blogs. Lets just say for example that the keyword is plumbers chicago. So I searched on Google and the words "plumbers chicago" (in that exact order) are on 199 pages on his site, not including filtered content. He is on page 2-3 for that keyword and I'm wondering what people's advice would be for a site that has so much content referencing the same exact keyword. It is a keyword that is service + location too so it actually doesn't even make sense when you read it in half the sentences it's in. I think one of the main issues of why it's on so many pages is he has a tag for it in Wordpress and tons of the blog articles have that particular tag.
Local Website Optimization | | ImprezzioMarketing1 -
Which is better for Local & National coupons --1000s of Indexed Pages per City or only a Few?
Not sure where this belongs.. I am developing a coupons site for listing local coupons and national coupons (think Valpak+RetailMeNot), eventually in all major cities, and am VERY concerned about how many internal pages to let google 'follow' for indexing, as it can exceed 10,000 per city. Is there a way to determine what the optimal approach is for internal paging/indexing BEFORE I actually launch the site (it is about ready except for this darned url question, which seems critical) Ie can I put in searchwords for google to determine which ones are most worthy to have their own indexed page? I'm a newbie sort of, so please put answer in simple terms. I'm one person and have limited funds and need to find the cheapest way to get the best organic results for each city that I cover. Is there a generic answer? One SEO firm told me the more variety the better. Another told me that simple is better, and use content on the simple pages to get variety. So confused I decided to consult the experts here! Here's the site concept: **FOR EACH CITY: ** User inputs location: Main city only(ie Houston), or 1 of 40 city regions(suburb, etc..), or zip code, or zip-street combo, OR allow gps lookup. A miles range is defaulted or chosen by the user. After search area is determined, user chooses 1 of 6 types of coupons searches: 1. Online shopping with national coupon codes, choice of 16 categories (electronics, health, clothes, etc) and 100 subcategories (computers, skin care products, mens shirts) These are national offers for chains like Kohls, which do not use the users location at all. 2. Local shopping in-store coupons, choice of same 16 categories and 100 subcategories that are used for online shopping in #1 (mom & pop shoe store or local chain offer). The results will be within the users chosen location and range. 3. Local restaurant coupons, about 60 subcategories (pizza, fast food, sandwiches). The results are again within the users chosen location and range. 4. Local services coupons, 8 categories (auto repair, activities,etc..) and around 200 subcategories (brakes, miniature golf, etc..). Results within users chosen location and range. 5. Local groceries. This is one page for the main city with coupons.com grocery coupons, and listing the main grocery stores in the city. This page does not break down by sub regions, or zip, etc.. 6. Local weekly ad circulars. This is one page for the main city that displays about 50 main national stores that are located in that main city. So, the best way to handle the urls indexed for the dynamic searches by locations, type of coupon, categories/subcats, and business pages The combinations of potential urls to index are nearly unlimited: Does the user's location matter when he searches for one thing (restaurants), but not for another (Kohls)? IF so, how do I know this? SHould I tailor indexed urls to that knowledge? Is there an advantage to having a url for NATIONAL cos that ties to each main city: shopping/Kohls vs shopping/Kohls/Houston or even shopping/Kohls/Houston-suburb? Again, I"m talking about 'follow' links for indexing. I realize I can have google index just a few main categories and subcats and not the others, or a few city regions but not all of them, etc.. while actually having internal pages for all of them.. Is it better to have 10,000 urls for say coupon-type/city-region/subcategory or just one for the main city: main-city/all coupons?, or something in between? You get the gist. I don't know how to begin to figure out the answers to these kinds of questions and yet they seem critical to the design of the site. The competition: sites like Valpak, MoneyMailer, localsaver seem to favor the 'more is better' approach, with coupons/zipcode/category or coupons/bizname/zipcode But a site like 8coupons.com appears to have no indexing for categories or subcategories at all! They have city-subregion/coupons and they have individual businesses bizname/city-subregion but as far as I see no city/category or city-subregion/category. And a very popular coupons site in my city only has maincity/coupons maincity/a few categories and maincity/bizname/coupons. Sorry this is so long, but it seems very complicated to me and I wanted to make the issue as clear as possible. Thanks, couponguy
Local Website Optimization | | couponguy1