How can I personalize content based on a state/region? Is it possible?
-
I'm getting a lot of traffic from different regions throughout the US. I need to personalize the content in my website or on a certain landing page based on the users state/region. Is it possible? For example, forwarding a user that lands on page "x" to page "y" if he's from California and to page "z" if he's from South Carolina.
And of course, can this somehow affect my rankings in Google?
Thanks!!
-
I agree with Miriam. The only thing I would add here - consider making changes to your lead conversion form to reinforce the "we only work in California" aspect. This could be like a check box up front that says "Are you located in California?" If they select "No," the rest of the form disappears and they get a message that says "At this time, we're only able to serve the California area. Thank you for your interest!" or something. You could keep your lead form as-is and if people select a state other than California when entering their location information, send them to a different thank you page that delivers a similar message.
Basically, I would recommend changing your lead process so that a.) it's really clear to users that you don't operate outside of California, and b.) the information about whether or not a lead is from California is easy to see up-front in your lead management system. You'll probably still get some irrelevant leads (everyone does), but you'll be able to deal with them quicker.
-
Thank you!
-
Hey Gal!
That's a good explanation, thanks. I honestly would not suggest trying to block people from other areas from accessing your website. For all you know, they could be doing research for a family member who lives in your area. Now, I'm no traffic wizard, so I'm actually going to ask a team member to add to this discussion, but from a purely Local SEO perspective, I'd suggest that you:
-
Be sure you've really stressed on the page the geography of the service being offered. That means titles, tags, text, internal links, etc.
-
Be happy your page is strong enough to rank beyond its service area. If it's getting a lot of out-of-state traffic despite doing all you can in point #1, perhaps there's some way for you to monetize that page, whether with ads or as a lead source of some kind.
Let's hope we can get you some more feedback on this.
-
-
Hey Miriam,
I'll try to explain it in detail,
It's a local business, the page i'm talking about is an inner page that drives traffic from a lot of places in the US. It has some relevant traffic (only if it comes from California) and some irrelevant traffic (out of state visitors). The page generates leads, some of the leads are qualified because they're from California, some of them are not, because they're not from California. The problem this generates is the quality of the ratio in leads and a difficulty to measure them. What I want to do is to deliver different content to out of state users (it might be a redirect or even blocking them from entering the page) in order to ensure the quality of traffic.
Hope this makes it clearer
-
Hey Gal,
If this is a local business that only serves customers in California, why would you want to create content for people in others states? What is the goal with that?
Do you feel you've done a really good job of ensuring that your current content is properly optimized for the city in which you're located or the California cities you serve, or could it be that your local optimization is not sending a clear enough signal to Google regarding the target audience?
More questions than answers, so far
Want to be sure the community fully understand your scenario.
-
Thanks, but Targeting Monkey doesn't answer my need.
I need a complete overhaul of the content if a person is out of state (even a redirect might be a fit)
-
Hi Miriam,
I'm talking about a local business in California that tends to get a lot of irrelevant traffic out of state which affects some of the statistics and quality of leads we're getting.
I'm looking to deliver different content to out of state users.
-
You can use some of the tools here to personalize content on your landing page, that said Google will try and rank you for the content it sees when they crawl the site. You can try and see what they see using The Fetch as Google tool from Search Console.
Targeting Monkey
-
Hi Gal,
Are you talking about a local business with physical locations in California and South Carolina, or are you talking about a national business that does not make in-person transactions with customers?
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
-
Variation on the subdomain/sub-directory question... Descriptive TLDs
Hi there, We have a variation on the subdomain/sub-directory question... Our business has two monetising areas, a clinic and a shop. To market them, we do recipes, blogs and social media, rather than relying primarily on SEO, but we do want to up our SEO game. Our primary site is www.example.co.uk This is Wordpress and where we market the clinic, host the recipes and blogs, and is our main email domain. Our second site is Woocommerce, at www.example.shop Our shop market is primarily in the UK, but we seem to pick up a fair amount of international business, partly because the clinic does virtual consultations to many countries. The shop is online only. We have physical clinics across the UK. Both sites cross link extensively, eg with blogs advertising products in the shop. The branding is intentionally related yet different, because they have very distinct functions, and eg. I don’t want to clutter the interface or distract people with blog or clinic once we have funnelled them to the shop checkout. I would also like to separate the blog and recipe elements from the clinic, using a slightly different theme with different functions. We use a lot of plugins, and the more we aggregate functions on the same Wordpress instance, the more likely something is to go wrong. I like the new TLDs because they are more “human”, and they identify where you are and what you are doing more clearly. We do email footers with links to example.clinic (redirected to www.example.co.uk) and example.shop. They are simple and explain what is going on. Conversely, shop.example.co.uk is not so easy to write or read out. www.example.co.uk/shop looks like an afterthought, rather than a shop in its own right with its own home page. So there would have to be a really good SEO reason for me to merge the shop into the main site with reverse proxy or multisite. Do you think that there is such a good reason? If not, by the same token, would it make sense to separate out example.blog or even naturedoc.recipes from example.clinic and use .co.uk as a single page portal to the three separate sites? My instinct, for what it is worth is that Google is smart enough to have started thinking that domains linked by topic TLDs can be equivalent to subdomains, and to recognise that we are not trying to build links from spammy unrelated sites. My last area is about human behaviour... Are people are as happy to click on or type in a new TLD like .clinic as a local .co.uk one? ...when (a) it is not a discredited TLD like .biz, and (b) it gives them more insight into what they will get when they arrive. And since we have the .uk domain, should we switch to this shorter version at the same time? I already use it for custom shortcodes (eg. example.uk/fte6 for people to type in from printed material or instagram). I can’t help feeling .uk has been unsuccessful, and its use now looks bad, even if it is shorter. Many thanks in advance.
Local SEO | | MizRabble0 -
Is dynamic keyword insertion a viable local SEO tactic/strategy for your content?
Hi mozzers, I have a meeting tomorrow with the dev team to discuss about dynamic keyword insertion implementation on a new site. This site currently holds 40 geo specific microsites with several service pages each carrying unique content. These pages(about 400 pages) are seen by VP of marketing as hard to maintain and inconvenient when wanting to change content across these pages. The VP is looking to automate content as much as possible without hurting our local SEO efforts. The dev team will be asking me if dynamic keyword insertion could a viable strategy for these 40 locations without harming local SEO. Currently we have a robust local SEO strategy in place and wouldn't want to change it unless dynamic keyword insertion is a viable option and won't hurt all the seo efforts that are in place? If this is not a viable solution, any recommendations on any other solutions we could use to satisfy the VP? If you have used DKI for your local SEO efforts, please share your thoughts and results that you have seen. Any real case scenario data/knowledge would be really helpful. Thank you!
Local SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Category pages are treated as duplicate content - is that a problem?
Hi there I have analyzing a webshop where we sell products for pets, gardening and the like. I am getting a lot of "Duplicate Content" alerts from Moz when doing a site crawl and I am told that the pages for e.g. cat products and gardening tools show duplicate content. Those two pages contain no identical products, so I am guessing that it is just the "set up" of the page (they look almost identical, except for the products). My question is: Is this really a problem? Does it affect my ranking in a negative way, and if so, how can I counter it? Best regards Frederik
Local SEO | | fhertzp0 -
Searchmetrics Google ranking factors study says content gaining while links losing in importance ? Any View About this Post.
I am very Curious about it anyone please update about this http://searchengineland.com/searchmetrics-google-ranking-factors-study-says-content-gaining-links-losing-importance-265431
Local SEO | | MTPixels0 -
Does anyone have stats or know where I can find stats on searchers who use geolocated queries versus geomodified?
My client is a franchise business and they want their location landing pages to rank for every one of their 60 plus locations nationwide. They are performing extremely well for geomodified terms. The argument is that people rarely ever search using the city name. Are there stats to back up whether this claim is true, and if so, do you know where I can get a hold of such data (outside of searching in Keyword Planner... unless that's the answer!)
Local SEO | | Treefrog_SEO0 -
Question about Multi-Locale/Lang Sitemaps
If you have one site with multiple language and locale variations how best should one approach the sitemaps. Here is what I believe the options to be: sitemap_index.xml which includes all of the difference lang/locale sitemaps on the site create 1 main sitemap that includes the rel=alternate href lang for ever alternate page to the main US version. Do the sitemap_index.xml for all the other sitemaps and also include the rel=alternate href lang in those separate ones as well. I have these in this order because it goes from least to most work....Thoughts folks?
Local SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
How to get links for boring niches/industries?
I've asked this question before, but it's 12/18 months on, the SEO landscape has changed, and new people are aboard. So basically, how do others look/achieve links for industries that generally have static sites with little to report. My books are awash with forklift truck, accountants, concrete companies. Very little happens in their businesses - someone orders concrete... my client delivers concrete. Someone orders a forklift.... my client sends a forklift..... Yes, we can do a bit of social, but where else would people go for link building. If my client was a wedding photographer, a mountain climber or cancer specialist, I'd be rolling in ideas, as it is, I find myself a little stumped sometimes.
Local SEO | | Gordon_Hall0 -
Is there a tool out there that can help me determine how people in a particular area search for things?
I'm attempting to create geo-specific landing pages for a client. For example if I'm targeting southern Milwaukee very specifically I'd have to target Oak Creek, South Milwaukee, Bay View, etc. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to create landing pages for every one of those. Is there a tool to help with this issue? The tool I use right now is this http://www.5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php I like it for getting the names of every city/village/town in the area. However, it doesn't answer the nagging question ... how do people search for services in those areas?
Local SEO | | tunatraffic1