Should I Add Location to ALL of My Client's URLs?
-
Hi Mozzers,
My first Moz post! Yay! I'm excited to join the squad
My client is a full service entertainment company serving the Washington DC Metro area (DC, MD & VA) and offers a host of services for those wishing to throw events/parties. Think DJs for weddings, cool photo booths, ballroom lighting etc.
I'm wondering what the right URL structure should be. I've noticed that some of our competitors do put DC area keywords in their URLs, but with the moves of SERPs to focus a lot more on quality over keyword density, I'm wondering if we should focus on location based keywords in traditional areas on page (e.g. title tags, headers, metas, content etc) instead of having keywords in the URLs alongside the traditional areas I just mentioned. So, on every product related page should we do something like:
example.com/weddings/planners-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/djs-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting-washington-dc-md-vaOR
example.com/weddings/planners
example.com/weddings/djs
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lightingIn both cases, we'd put the necessary location based keywords in the proper places on-page. If we follow the location-in-URL tactic, we'd use DC area terms in all subsequent product page URLs as well. Essentially, every page outside of the home page would have a location in it.
Thoughts?
Thank you!!
-
No website in particular that springs to mind, I'm afraid. But it's not uncommon practice, and I'm sure you'll find plenty within your industry from a little competitor research.
Good luck!
-
This is great stuff. Thank you! Would you happen to have an example of a site that does this well? I think you're spot on in your suggestions and would love to see it in practice.
-
(I had posted my response, but Moz didn't fancy saving it for some reason and it's just gone. So I'll try and remember what I typed and repost it...)
I wouldn't dilute the site authority by using subdomains for your locations.
As a user, I would recommend your main site navigation lists the different event types (weddings, parties, corporate, etc) and branch your locations from there.
e.g.
-
Weddings - /weddings/ (Weddings)
-
Miami - /weddings/miami/ (Weddings in Miami)
-
Planners - /weddings/miami/planners/ (Wedding Planners in Miami)
-
DJs - /weddings/miami/djs/ (Wedding DJs in Miami)
-
Ballroom Lighting - /weddings/miami/ballroom-lighting/ (Ballroom Lighting for Weddings in Miami)
That structure seems the most logical to me, but you should do your own research to back this up. Conduct thorough keyword research for each service in each location and structure your landing page content accordingly. For example, main category pages broadly targeting root keyword, but display "cards" or sections that link to each location without optimising those main category pages for the locations - save this for the location-based landing pages. So this sub-navigation is in the body, rather than in the main navigation, for user-friendliness.
I think with something like events, you don't want to shove the locations in the user's face first thing. Let them see what you offer (the different event types), then delve down into the locations, and the specific services within those locations.
People are free to disagree with me, and I welcome critique on these thoughts. I do think with SEO, it gets to a point after "best practices" that it comes down to more of personal preferences.
-
-
Excellent advice Ria. I'll likely give that advice to the client.
Another question that brewed from this: how then should main navigation be handled as we expand? obviously we can't have D.C. centric keywords in the main navigation as the business expands. I think we could create unique content and landing pages for each individual service and location, but how would that be incorporate into the overall user flow and URL structure?
Would it be more of a sitemap play? If someone goes to www.example.com, should they be given an option to choose their location then be routed to that specific city's subdomain and yhenbrowse from there?
I guess my main question is, how exactly should we structure the site navigation for users from multiple cities to both please UX and the big G?
Thank you!
-
For a handful of different locations, it's quite common to structure them as different subdirectories, as you said. site.com/weddings/miami/planners or /miami/weddings/planners - whichever makes the most sense for your customer base and how you're targeting the content.
Just ensure that these are not considered doorway pages or appear to be too templated. Make each landing page for each location unique, and tailored specifically to your customers in each location. If you have nothing unique to say, then you don't need separate pages. It would be best to target the different locations on the same landing pages. But you being the expert in the industry, I can imagine it'll be easy enough to cater toward each audience specifically. Especially when you're not dealing with tens if not hundreds or thousands of different towns.
If you are certain on expanding to different cities soon, then it might be best to begin the URL structuring with /washington-dc/ subdirectory somewhere, so you don't have to change this later.
-
Thank you, Ria. That's very helpful.
Im curious, when the business expands to different cities in the coming months (for example, Miami and Chicago are being considered, not yet finalized), then in that case I would assume we need to have location in the URL path for the sake of designation and differentiation. This may be a sub folder in and of itself though. Thoughts?
-
I'd avoid adding the location in the URL if you only work with those services for a single location. It looks messy to the user, and can look spammy to Google. And it would save you from having to change the URL and set up redirects, if you need to remove the location keywords from the URL at a later date in order to please the Big G. Optimising for location within the content, title and meta can be easily tweaked with time. Tweaking URLs can be a lot messier.
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
-
Google has discovered a URL but won't index it?
Hey all, have a really strange situation I've never encountered before. I launched a new website about 2 months ago. It took an awfully long time to get index, probably 3 weeks. When it did, only the homepage was indexed. I completed the site, all it's pages, made and submitted a sitemap...all about a month ago. The coverage report shows that Google has discovered the URL's but not indexed them. Weirdly, 3 of the pages ARE indexed, but the rest are not. So I have 42 URL's in the coverage report listed as "Excluded" and 39 say "Discovered- currently not indexed." When I inspect any of these URL's, it says "this page is not in the index, but not because of an error." They are listed as crawled - currently not indexed or discovered - currently not indexed. But 3 of them are, and I updated those pages, and now those changes are reflected in Google's index. I have no idea how those 3 made it in while others didn't, or why the crawler came back and indexed the changes but continues to leave the others out. Has anyone seen this before and know what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Ridding of taxonomies, so that articles enhance related page's value
Hello, I'm developing a website for a law firm, which offers a variety of services. The site will also feature a blog, which would have similarly-named topics. As is customary, these topics were taxonomies. But I want the articles to enhance the value of the service pages themselves and because the taxonomy url /category/divorce has no relationship to the actual service page url /practice-areas/divorce, I'm worried that if anything, a redundantly-titled taxonomy url would dilute the value of the service page it's related to. Sure, I could show some of the related posts on the service page but if I wanted to view more, I'm suddenly bounced over to a taxonomy page which is stealing thunder away from the more important service page. So I did away with these taxonomies all together, and posts are associatable with pages directly with a custom db table. And now if I visit the blog page, instead of a list of category terms, it would technically be a list of the service pages and so if a visitor clicks on a topic they are directed to /practice-areas/divorce/resources (the subpages are created dynamically) and the posts are shown there. I'll have to use custom breadcrumbs to make it all work. Just wondering if you guys had any thoughts on this. Really appreciate any you might have and thanks for reading
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utopianwp0 -
Is ok to add 'no follow' to every outbound link?
How do you handle outbound links from your site?.. do you no follow them all to be on the safe side?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name1230 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Add or not add "nofollow" to duplicate internal links?
Hello everyone. I have searched on these forums for an answer to my concerns, and despite I found many discussions and questions about applying or not applying "nofollow" to internal links, I couldn't find an answer specific to my particular scenarios. Here is my first scenario: I have an e-commerce site selling digital sheet music, and on my category pages our products are shown typically with the following format: PRODUCT TITLE link that takes to product page Short description text "more info" link that takes to the same product page again As you may notice, the "more info" link takes at the very same page of the PRODUCT TITLE link. So, my question is: is there any benefit to "nofollow" the "more info" link to tell SEs to "ignore" that link? Or should I leave the way it is and let the SE figure it out? My biggest concern by leaving the "nofollow" out is that the "more info" generic and repetitive anchor text could dilute or "compete" with the keyword content of the PRODUCT TITLE anchor text.... but maybe that doesn't really matter! Here a typical category page from my site; http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html My second scenario: on our product pages, we have several different links that take to the very same "preview page" of the product we sell. Each link has a different anchor text, and some other links are just images, all taking to the same page. Here are the anchor texts or ALT text of such same links: "Download Free Sample" (text link) "Cover of the [product title]" (ALT image text) "Look inside this title" (ALT image text) "[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text) "This item contains one high quality PDF sheet music file ready to download and print." (ALT image text) "PDF" (text link) "[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text) So, I have 7 links on the same product page taking the user to the same "product preview page" which is, by the way, canonicalized to the "main" product page we are talking about. Here is an example of product page on my site: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html My instinct is to tell SEs to take into account just the links with the "[product title] PDF file" anchor text, and then add a "nofollow" to the other links... but may that hurting in some way? Is that irrelevant? Doesn't matter? How should I move? Just ignore this issue and let the SEs figure it out? Any thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Should /node/ URLs be 301 redirect to Clean URLs
Hi All! We are in the process of migrating to Drupal and I know that I want to block any instance of /node/ URLs with my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing them. My question is, should we set 301 redirects on the /node/ versions of the URLs to redirect to their corresponding "clean" URL, or should the robots.txt blocking and canonical link element be enough? My gut tells me to ask for the 301 redirects, but I just want to hear additional opinions. Thank you! MS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
Google's serp
Hello Guys ! I will appreciate if you will share your thoughts re the situation i have. The homepage for one of my sites is one last page of google's serp, although internal pages are displayed in the top 10. 1. Why ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
2. What should I do to correct the situation with the homepage ? regards0 -
Questions about Vittana.org's blogging contest and having bloggers use specific anchor text.
Hi All, Kenji Crosland here. I just joined vittana.org (yesterday!) to do some of the blogger outreach and content creation/link building. Although most of the links we've gotten in the past are branded links, we've decided to actively pursue anchor text links with specific keywords. If you check, you'll see that vittana has a relatively high domain authority. At the beginning of next week we'll be conducting a blogging contest with A-list celebrity tech bloggers. I don't think we'll have time to contact influencers in other areas for this contest unfortunately. When these A-list bloggers write their posts, we want them to have a link to this page: http://www.vittana.org/students To me, this seems a great opportunity to win on certain keywords we've discovered that should be easy to win and yet have a high volume of monthly searches. These are 5 word plus keywords that have over 300,000 searches per month. The students page, however, isn't optimized for those keywords. In the long run we want to win for the more difficult keyword "literacy". The word "literacy" is what we think will be a part of our new tagline: "Literacy is not enough". Because of time constraints, we won't be able to create landing pages to win for those "low hanging fruit" keywords in time for the blog contest. My question is: to what extent should we optimize the http://www.vittana.org/students page for the five word plus low hanging fruit keywords that we've discovered. I imagine if the content isn't relevant our clickthrough rates will suffer even if we do win for it (Altering our meta description is a possibility here) . Should we just try for the difficult keyword from the get go and come up with other ways to win for the low hanging fruit keywords? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vittana_seo0