Geo Target Location in your URL Structure
-
Hello everyone at SEOMOZ
I have a question if you would be as kind as to inform me of which direction that I should take on this matter would be the more desirable approach for my seo strategy
I have been using my location in my URL structure since I started doing SEO 5 years ago and I have always benefited from including my city in the URL.
My question is, since the SEO landscape has change so drastically over the past 2 years and the Search Engines have become much more end user friendly and list suggestions for users as they type would it be more beneficial in 2013 to have the "Keyword" before or after the Geo Targeted Location in the URL structure?
I own a computer repair business for the past 6 years now and I know that when i check to see where I am ranking for a particular keyword phrase such as "Computer Repair" GOOGLE detects my location and provides suggestions as I start typing out "Computer Repair" for the search query.
One of the suggestions is "Computer Repair Wilmington NC" so I am starting to wonder if placing the Geo Targeted City after the Keyword would be the wiser choice instead of before it like a couple of years ago?
Working Example:
Here is a site that I am building out right now to re-brand my business.
Currently I have one of the Silo Category Slugs set as seen below using the Location before the Keyword
The First Example has the Geo Target Location before the Keyword and looks more natural to visitors on the site (at least to me) however I'm afraid that I may be shooting myself in the foot not placing the keyword before the Target Location? But if I do that, It does not read or flow fluently to the average looker so kinda confused and torn on how to deal with this>!
FIRST EXAMPLE: Location Before Keyword
Silo Parent Category = "Computer Repair"
http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/wilmington-nc-computer-repair/
Silo Child Category = "Laptop"
http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/wilmington-nc-computer-repair/laptop-repair/
Silo Grand Child Category = "LCD Replacement"
http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/wilmington-nc-computer-repair/laptop/lcd-screen-replacement/
**SECOND EXAMPLE: ** Keyword Before Location
Silo Parent Category = "Computer Repair"
http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/computer-repair-wilmington-nc/
Silo Child Category = "Laptop"
http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/computer-repair-wilmington-nc/laptop-repair/
Silo Grand Child Category = "LCD Replacement"
http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/computer-repair-wilmington-nc/laptop-repair/lcd-screen-replacement/
Which would be the more favorable of the 2 examples that I have given please?
Keyword before or After the Geo Targeted Location?
thank you
-
Hi Ralph,
Excellent question and one frequently wondered over. The trouble is that Google's Adwords Keyword Tool typically shows identical search volumes for keyword+city and city+keyword. I recommend you check out this enormous post on this topic by Linda Buquet:
While I don't believe their is a simple, single answer for every case, I hope this resource will give you some new ideas on this!
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
-
Subdirectories geo-targetting: Tagretting a language to a single country affects in other countries?
Hi all, We have enabled a plugin which translated our site to subdirectories. We are going to geo target certain language sites to their countires. Like Portuguese site website.com/it/ will be targetted to rank in Portugal. I wonder what to do with language sites where the same langauge is spoken in multiple countries. For example, if we target english site website.com to US; will it effects the ranking in other english countires like UK, Australia, Canada, etc....? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How do you get a url to show as a tagline in google mobile search?
When searching in google via mobile, I am seeing urls changed to taglines. I have attached pictures that show the url in a web search, but a tag line from the mobile search. Does anyone know how to get a tagline to show in place of a url in a mobile search? Any advice would be appreciated! uLkYWRx.png wljXRI3.png
Algorithm Updates | | David-Kley0 -
301 redirect to URL plus anchor tag???
Hi - my company has just had a site redesign completed, and our "old" site we have landing pages for a full product line. The new design has taken the content from those landing pages and placed them into one long scrolling page. We currently rank well on the "old" landing pages but now all that content is contained in a single page with anchor tags throughout attached to the headings. Can you set up 301's to anchor tags? Example: old site www.mysite.com/products/automotive/auto-parts.html new site: www.mysite.com/products/automotive#auto-parts
Algorithm Updates | | Jenny10 -
Is having an identical title, h1 and url considered "over optimization"? Is it better to vary?
To get some new pages out without over-thinking things, I decided to line up the title tag, h1 tag and URLs of my pages exactly. They are dynamically generated based on the content the user is viewing (internal search results pages) They're not ranking very well at the moment, but there are a number of factors that are likely to blame. But, in particular, does anyone know if varying the text in these elements tends to perform better vs. having them all identical? Has there been any information from Google about this? Most if not all of the "over optimization" content I have seen online pertains to backlinks, not on-page content. It's easy to say, "test it!" And of course, that's just what I'm planning to do. But I thought I would leverage the combined knowledge of this forum to see what information I could obtain first, so I can do some informed testing, as tests can take a while to see results. Thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | ntcma0 -
Sitemap Question - Should I exclude or make a separate sitemap for Old URL's
So basically, my website is very old... 1995 Old. Extremely old content still shows up when people search for things that are outdated by 10-15+ years , I decided not to drop redirects on some of the irrelevant pages. People still hit the pages, but bounce... I have about 400 pages that I don't want to delete or redirect. Many of them have old backlinks and hold some value but do interfere with my new relevant content. If I dropped these pages into a sitemap, set the priority to zero would that possibly help? No redirects, content is still valid for people looking for it, but maybe these old pages don't show up above my new content? Currently the old stuff is excluded from all sitemaps.. I don't want to make one and have it make the problem worse. Any advise is appreciated. Thx 😄
Algorithm Updates | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Server Location & SEO
So I just read an interesting Tweet: #SEO Tip: #Google takes into account the location of the server (the IP) when projecting the search results #web This is something I had not thought of. I suppose my question then is HOW does it factor this information into it's results? For some reason, one of our sites is hosted on a Canadian server. We are a cloud hosting company and we serve all of NA with data centers in the US and Canada... For whatever reason we've used the Canadian server farm for our web server. Could this possibly be hurting our NA google SERPs? Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Algorithm Updates | | jesse-landry0 -
Is it allowed to put a word in all domains URLs to get higher in SERP?
Hello, What good or bad could happen if someone put the same keyword in all site's URL's? (i.e. I would be selling cars and my domain isn't included any word cars, so i put all of my pages in one folder like domain.com/cheap-cars/etc)
Algorithm Updates | | komeksimas0 -
Any ideas on how Google +1 handles URLs and canonicals?
If your URL string shows up in a search and they +1 the URL with the coding in it will the +1 transfer to the canonical page? Example: site.com/locations/arizona/?utm_source=go gets a Google +1 from a user. The page itself has a canonical for site.com/locations/arizona/ Does google credit the canonical with the +1 or do they then have dup pages with separate +1 scores?
Algorithm Updates | | Thos0030