SEO planning: Franchise/multiple local sites
-
I am in the planning stages of franchising a cleaning business and was wondering if anyone had some ideas on SEO strategy. If money were no object and I had a team of hundreds of copywriters at my disposal, would the ultimate solution be to have the following sort of URL structure www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city within which there are numerous www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city/local-town pages?
If this is the best strategy then is it worthwhile to begin work towards ranking for cities and local towns within them prior to actually operating there? I understand that lack of physical presence will penalize me in terms of local search but would a lack of physical address and phone number render any foundation work pointless (for example, prior to having any franchises in say London, would it be worth while building quality content and links on a www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london page, and then www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london/notting-hill, alongside a blog and so on?)
Interested to understand the best way to go about this given the enormity of the campaign!
Thanks
-
All of the sites you mentioned seem to do this primarily through user generated content (ie reviews). This path makes sense as it is "unique and providing value." It looks like reviews may just be the table stakes to play this game at scale.
I do like how thumbtack created some localized content here http://www.thumbtack.com/tx/houston/#/2014/1. That looks like something I could use for inspiration.
-
If that content is unique and providing value to searchers, then that's exactly what's working well in the Hummingbird/Pigeon SERPs these days. Many national directories with trusted brands are outranking individual small businesses. Check Yelp, Avvo, TripAdvisor, Thumbtack, Angie's List, etc.
-
We're talking about something along the lines of http://www.searshomeservices.com/pa/philadelphia-air-conditioning-repair? The way this site does it seems quite redundant - creating lots of duplicate content that I can't imagine Google likes. Have you ever seen someone do this at scale properly? If so can you show an example?
Thank you for the help David!
-
No, I'd strongly recommend a page (or set of pages) about the location that lives on your primary domain. Non-physical locations can only rank organically, and you're much more likely to rank organically using the strength of a parent domain.
-
Would you recommend creating the dedicated website, even if there is no physical local location? Thanks David!
-
I generally agree with Matt about the two pronged approach. If money is no object, build out a completely dedicated www.cleaningbiznottinghill.co.uk website for Local results, but for organic results, a directory like
cleaningbiz.co.uk/locations/london/nottinghill
is likely to rank better, at least in the current Hummingbird iteration.
-
"If money were no object" then the best plan would be a two-prong approach. Your prong would be #1. And cleanbizCITY.co.uk would be the second prong.
This would give you the possibility of not only multiple results in each page 1 but a dedicated landing page to build maps/NAP and local SEO to as well.
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
-
English pages given preference over local language
We recently launched a new design of our website and for SEO purposes we decided to have our website both in English and in Dutch. However, when I look at the rankings in MOZ for many of our keywords, it seems the English pages are being preferred over the Dutch ones. That never used to be the case when we had our website in the old design. It mainly is for pages that have an English keyword attached to them, but even then the Dutch page would just rank. I'm trying to figure out why English pages are being preferred now and whether that could actually damage our rankings, as search engines would prefer copy in the local language. An example is this page: https://www.bluebillywig.com/nl/html5-video-player/ for the keywords "HTML5 player" and "HTML5 video player".
Local SEO | | Billywig0 -
Local Site stuck on page 2 for years. Can’t penetrate page 1! Help!
Hey there Moz community! This is the first time I've ever asked a question here so please forgive if I slip up on any etiquette. I manage a website for a small Orlando Florida family law and divorce law firm who are targeting search phrases that include those "Orlando divorce attorney" variants. The site is located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/ If you run a search for "Orlando divorce attorney" along with close variant search terms our law firm website for about the past two years has hovered at the top of the second page of google but has never actually penetrated page 1. When you examine metrics such as page authority, domain authority, trust, and other traditional metrics it tells you that our site should be on page 1 but alas it's not happening. We have, however been featured quite often in the three pack for the local listings for the target search terms. Though valuable, our goal has always been to be featured in the top three of the organic search results. To add to the confusion we have a practice area page located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/orlando-divorce-lawyer/ dedicated to divorce and expected that page to rank for these divorce attorney search terms but it will not rank for the search terms and instead our homepage ranks for them every single time regardless of how we swap around the optimization on the page. Never had any manual actions. any help you guys can offer is greatly appreciated and I really appreciate your time!
Local SEO | | Seanthewood1230 -
Keyword rich domain names -> Point to sales funnel sites or to landing pages on primary domain?
Hey everyone,
Local SEO | | Transpera
We have a tonne of old domains we have done nothing with. All of them are keyword-rich domains.
Things like "[City]SEOPro" or "[City]DigitalMarketing" where [city] is a city that we are already targeting services in. So all of these domains will be targeted for local cities as keywords. We have been having an internal debate about whether or not we should just host sales funnel pages on these domains, that are rich in keywords and content......... ... Or ... ... Should we point these domains to landing pages on our existing domain that are basically the same as what we would do with the sales funnel pages, but are on our primary site? (keyword rich, with good and plentiful content) Then, as a follow-up question... Should these be set as just 301 redirects on these domains to our actual primary domain so the browser sees the landing page domain instead of the actual keyword-rich domain? ( [city]seopro.com ) Thanks guys. I know for some, the response will be an obvious one. However; we have probably way over thought this and have arguments for almost every scenario. We think we have an answer but wanted to send this out to the community first. I won't post what we are thinking yet, so that the answers can remain unbiased for now and we can have a conversation without it being swayed any one way. We understand that 301 redirects would be seen as a doorway page.
We are also only discussing in the context of organic search only.
If we ran the domains as their own sites, they would be about 3 pages of content only. Pretty static, but good content. Think of a PAS style sales funnel. Problem -> Acknowledgement -> Solution.0 -
How valuable is non-local organic traffic for local business?
Hey friends! I work for a local digital marketing agency in Greenville, SC – serving primarily local small businesses. Over the past six months, we've increased our monthly organic traffic by almost 100%. The majority of this traffic is coming to blogs we've written over the past year on industry topics and trends. I love seeing our traffic increase, but it hasn't necessarily translated to more quality leads. Conversion numbers have largely remained the same. I think one reason is that a lot of this traffic isn't local. Here's my question: as a local business, how valuable is content that ranks well and drives organic traffic, when the traffic isn't local, and from users we would never work with? A lot of this content has earned links and grown our authority, so I suppose we've seen benefit, but I'm struggling to convince myself that it's really that valuable. I know local content is key, but it feels like what we want to educate on isn't searched locally. Would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks!
Local SEO | | brooksmanley3 -
Local store (B2B) that produces high quality prints for photographers: are we adopting the right strategy?
Hi, I'd like to know your opinion on the following case and gather new ideas on how to optimise our strategy: Starting situation: local store (B2B) in a bigger city in Europe that produces high quality prints mainly for photographers on paper (or other materials like canvas, aluminium, etc. ). They really take care of your images (e.g. Color Management) and produce printouts that look how they really should look like. Target audience: photographers (pros), museum, exhibitions and hotel people that would like to produce high quality prints of their images. Almost never the ambitioned private photographers (until now). **Actual situation: **its really a local business (people around 30 km). competition: big online stores where you can upload your pictures and get your prints sent home (quality: not bad, but not exceptional, no special requests; more for private customers) Already done (with relatively little results): _AdWords: _very "tight" keyword combinations, not broad at all, targeting area around business location. results: small traffic, small costs: not a lot of conversions. _SEO: _for organic search we now achieve very good positions for tight" keyword combinations, not broad ones. results: little traffic: not a lot of conversions LinkedIn-Ads targeting the above target group: results: little traffic: not a lot of conversions Facebook Remarketing (targeting his newsletter mail-list: results: little traffic: not a lot of conversions Optimized the landingpage (in my opinion far more to the point than before) PROBLEM: Basically we now get to the right people but traffic is really (too) small. At least we don't waste money at all but we don't gain a lot either... If we broaden the "keywords" the private customers will come in and waste our advertising money. Do you ever had a similar situation? What did you do? Any suggestions? Other target groups? Alternative channels? Thanks for your input. Cheers, Cesare
Local SEO | | Cesare.Marchetti0 -
How to find best local websites?
For example, I'd like to type in a zipcode and get the highest ranking websites by DA/whatever metric the software uses, within a 25 mile radius? Does that type of service exist? I'm looking to build up our local links, but most of the websites have extremely low authority. I'm trying to find some good ones without having to manually check each one. Thanks, Ruben
Local SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Franchise Business: In competition with... itself!
I manage SEO for a franchise business that has multi-point markets like Toronto, where several locations are competing with one another for visibility. Assuming Google wants to give preferential treatment to businesses that are putting effort and energy into their unique website landing pages and their Google My Business pages, the exercise is like whack-a-mole. Put effort into giving visibility and ranking priority to one, another one gets upset. Also, it just so happens that the business is a competitive market (automotive repair) and so Google wants to show variety in search results; i.e. multiple businesses offering repair services in a given area. It tends to select one of four locations for a given multi-point market for the brand, which makes three out of four franchise owners upset. Anyone run into this before? I'm just trying to balance out the effort so that each of the locations gets equal visibility, but alas I have no control over what Google decides to display as the authoritative result for the geographical area. Looking for suggestions on how to manage client expectations and explain this issue properly. Anything I am missing?
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