Business location in small town - How to target meta title?
-
So it's common practice to include the city/state in page titles and within the content. However let's say that a business is located in a small town, but serves customers in surrounding, larger towns. You might say that it's not worth mentioning the small town because there would be few searchers in that area.
However, does Google take into account the distance a searcher is from the business location, in relation to the page title, as well as the Google my Business page? Obviously you can't go stuffing all of the surrounding towns into your homepage or main service pages. Is there any value in mentioning the small town, or is it fine to leave it out too?
What has been your experience?
-
Hi Oliver,
It might help to think of it this way. Whatever your town is (small or large) that is your local home base. This is the address you'll be using in all of your citation building, the footer and contact page of your website, and in at least some of your website content and optimization, all for the purposes of ranking locally.
For any other locations you serve, but where you lack a physical location, you'll be aiming at organic (not local pack) rankings. So, this will have nothing to do with your citations. It will all have to do with service city content you build on the website + additional outreach in the form of social and paid promotions.
So, even if your town is small, it's the anchor that proves you to be a local, physical business. It's what proves your eligibility to be included in Google My Business and other citation platforms. It's your best hope of local pack rankings.
Everything beyond your city of location is for organic outreach.
As for how Google will handle all this, given the user-as-centroid phenomenon, Google will customize local results for the searcher based on his physical location at the time of search. So, you do want to be sure you're making it clear that your physical location is at 'X' so that Google is convinced searchers near there are close to you.
Hope this helps, and might like this for further reading: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
-
Hi Oliver!
Mike's answer is spot on.
In reference to your question about Google taking the searcher's distance from the business into account I would like to provide some insight. Organic listing will not have as much to do with location to the search, but the results in the local pack do. Three important factors to keep in mind when trying to rank in the Local Pack:
- Relevance
- Distance
- Prominence
Relevance is impacted by the information in your profile relating to the searcher’s query. Ensure your profile is completely filled out with valid information, hours, photos, etc. Google will show results calculated by the user’s location in order to display business closest to them. Lastly, how prominent your business is within the industry is important. Prominence refers to offline factors (links, articles, directories), as well as positive reviews and SERP positions.
Hope this helps!
-
Oliver,
We serve the DC market with a commercial print shop in Waldorf, MD (15 miles outside DC) and I've focused all my SEO efforts on DC. We've had success with this strategy along with the convenience of lower manufacturing costs, as well as maintaining our Super-Fast expedited services model. We've done it and you may as well.
KJr
-
Fantastic answer Mike!
I would also add to look into services like Moz Local, Whitespark, or Yext, to get more relevant listings that help Google and other search engines verify your information and help you appear for searches related to your industry and service area.
Don't forget also that Moz has a great local SEO audit resource.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Patrick -
In a situation like this, I would turn to your Google My Business page and make sure that the locations or distance that you serve is set properly in order to reach all of the surrounding towns that you do, in fact, serve. It doesn't necessarily hurt to include your small town name in the meta title. While that will help with more immediate local traffic, Google does change titles and descriptions in the SERPs for certain terms they feel the page is relevant for but do not feel your other info adequately expresses. Google will take into account the location of your business but if your GMB page shows that you service a nearby area, they won't just discount you because you're in nearby small town instead of Big Town. In cases like that, you may find that Google alters the page title in the SERPs to show the name of the bigger town or completely remove mention of any town. So just because your title and description don't perfectly reflect every single area you might work in, that doesn't mean you can't show up for those local searchers.
It can also be useful to make pages on your site specifically talking about the services available to those bigger surrounding towns. So even if your homepage is more targeted to Small Town, you can have an organic landing page devoted to Big Town A and Big Town B with all your info, service information, a blurb about the town and how your business interacts with that area, and a nice call to action and/or contact form for that town. Just make sure not to copy/paste to create tons of targeted pages like that. You want everything to be nice and unique so there are no duplication issues.
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
-
What is the effect of CloudFlare CDN on page load speeds, hosting IP location and the ultimate SEO effect?
Will using a CDN like CloudFlare.com confuse search engines in terms of the location (IP address) of where the site is actually physically hosted especially since CloudFlare distributes the site's content all around the globe? I understand it is important that if customers are mostly in a particular city it makes sense to host on an IP address in the same city for better rankings, all things else being equal? I have a number of city-based sites but does it make having multiple hosting plans in multiple cities/ countries (to be close to customers) become suddenly a ridiculous thing with a CDN? In other words should I just reduce it down to having one hosting plan anywhere and just use the CDN to distribute it? I am really struggling with this concept trying to understand if I should consolidate all my hosting plans under one, or if I should get rid of CloudFlare entirely (can it cause latency in come cases) and create even more locally-based hosting plans (like under site5.com who allow many city hosting plans). I really hope you can help me somehow or point me to an expert who can clarify this confusing conundrum. Of course my overall goal is to have:
Local Website Optimization | | uworlds
1. lowest page load times
2. best UX
3. best rankings I do realise that other concepts are more important for rankings (great content, and links etc.) but assuming that is already in place and every other factor is equal, how can I fine tune the hosting to achieve the desirable goals above? Many thanks!
Mark0 -
Struggling with My Title Tag...
I have read so many articles that stress the importance of the Title tag but I am having a hard time really finding good advice on what we should do. Everywhere I read stresses the importance of short title tags due to Google's display limitations but also the importance of including important keywords in our title - talk about a catch 22. Our Law Firm is "Brock & Stout Attorneys at Law" and we have 3 primary services: Bankruptcy, Social Security Disability, Personal Injury. We have 6 office locations all around Alabama. Our website is: http://www.brockandstout.com/ The current title is: "Alabama Bankruptcy Attorneys | Social Security Disability | Personal Injury | Brock & Stout Attorneys at Law" - 108 characters (well over the 70 recommended characters, but does contain our Brand, and Services) Is this a good title for SEO purposes? Should we consider making a change? We are ranking "ok" for certain locations and then barely at all for others. I know the title tag is just one of a million factors but I would love some advice/opinions from those who know much more than I. Thanks for any input you may have.
Local Website Optimization | | MattStamant0 -
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 -
Best practices for 301 redirect to a new location website.
We just opened a new location in a nearby city. We were already servicing this location from our main base. As such we had a special page for this location which raked fairly well. The new location will have its own website. Would it be better to 301 redirect the current location page to the new location website? Or should we simply link from the old page to the new location's website? Any best practices?
Local Website Optimization | | Vspeed0 -
Ecommerce Site with Unique Location Pages - Issue with unique content and thin content?
Hello All, I have an Ecommerce Site specializing in Hire and we have individual location pages on each of our categories for each of our depots. All these pages show the NAP of the specific branch Given the size of our website (10K approx pages) , it's physically impossible for us to write unique content for each location against each category so what we are doing is writing unique content for our top 10 locations in a category for example , and the remaining 20 odd locations against the same category has the same content but it will bring in the location name and the individual NAP of that branch so in effect I think this thin content. My question is , I am quite sure I we are getting some form of algorithmic penalty with regards the thin/duplicate content. Using the example above , should we 301 redirect the 20 odd locations with the thin content , or should be say only 301 redirect 10 of them , so we in effect end up with a more 50/50 split on a category with regards to unique content on pages verses thin content for the same category. Alternatively, should we can 301 all the thin content pages so we only have 10 locations against the category and therefore 100% unique content. I am trying to work out which would help most with regards to local rankings for my location pages. Also , does anyone know if a thin/duplicate content penalty is site wide or can it just affect specific parts of a website. Any advice greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Do you need exact match geographically targeted keywords for ranking within a specified city limit?
For example, I have a personal injury law firm in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I only care about potential clients searching within the city limits of Sheboygan (and not within the state of Wisconsin or on a national level). Do the following elements need to contain an exact match geographically targeted keyword if I only care about ranking locally in Sheboygan, Wisconcsin? (The type of keyword phrase I'm referring to would be Sheboygan Personal Injury Lawyers, Sheboygan Car Accident Lawyers, etc.) Title Tag Meta Description Main Headline Body Content Should I not include an exact match geographically targeted keyword in my content and trust that Google can make the association with where I'm located by other factors on the website? Website factors: Google local business page is setup linking to my website Other local listings have been claimed and setup properly My contact page contains our full address and phone number My footer contains our full address and phone number on every page
Local Website Optimization | | peteboyd0 -
Must Have Meta info?
Just wondering what meta info is must have these days. For example" | | http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> |
Local Website Optimization | | Superflys
| | name="Subject" content="Invision Technical - Spokane Web Design an Development services" /> |
| | name="keywords" content="Spokane Website Design, Spokane Web Design, Website designers spokane Washington, Spokane web site Design firm, Web design spokane, spokane web designers, spokane web hosting, spokane web development, spokane web marketing services."/> |
| | name="description" content="Spokane Website Design by Invision Technical. Quality website designers in Spokane Washington. Call (509) 590-0655 for your Spokane Web Design needs."/> |
| | property="og:title" content=" Invision Technical | Website Design and Development"/> |
| | property="og:description" content=" Web Design | Development | Web Hosting | Logo Design | Branding | Custom Software | Search Engine Optimization"/> |
| | property="og:image" content="http://www.spokanewebsitedesign.org/fb.jpg"/> |
| | name="abstract" content="Invision Technical - Spokane Web Design and Development Services."/> |
| | name="distribution" content="Global"/> |
| | name="copyright" content="Invision Technical, All Material Is Copyright"/> |
| | name="robots" content="FOLLOW,INDEX"/> |0 -
Single Site For Multiple Locations Or Multiple Sites?
Hi, Sorry if this rambles on. There's a few details that kind of convolute this issue so I'll try and be as clear as possible. The site in question has been online for roughly 5 years. It's established with many local citations, does well in local SERPs (working on organic results currently), and represents a business with 2 locations in the same county. The domain is structured as location1brandname.com. The site was recently upgraded from a 6-10 page static HTML site with loads of duplicate content and poor structure to a nice, clean WordPress layout. Again, Google is cool with it, everything was 301'd properly, and our rankings haven't dropped (some have improved). Here's the tricky part: To properly optimize this site for our second location, I am basically building a second website within the original, but customized for our second location. It will be location1brandname.com/secondcity and the menu will be unique to second-city service pages, unique NAP on footer, etc. I will then update our local citations with this new URL and hopefully we'll start appearing higher in local SERPs for the second-city keywords that our main URL isn't currently optimized for. The issue I have is that our root domain has our first city location in the domain and that this might have some negative effect on ranking for the second URL. Conversely, starting on a brand new domain (secondcitybrandname.com) requires building an entire new site and being brand new. My hunch is that we'll be fine making root.com/secondcity that locations homepage and starting a new domain, while cleaner and compeltely separate from our other location, is too much work for not enough benefit. It seems like if they're the same company/brand, they should be on the same sitee. and we can use the root juice to help. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | kirmeliux0