Local SEO + Searcher Intent Targeting for Home Builder
-
Good Morning, All!
I work for a home builder - www.HibbsHomes.com. Their site has hundreds of pages and blogs and I'm looking at consolidating many of them as they're older and use an older SEO strategy.
Can you take a look at their portfolio? http://hibbshomes.com/custom-home-builders-st-louis/st-louis-custom-homes-portfolio/
I'm wondering if I should consolidate the various projects into their own pages by house type and city - rather than having all on one page? Both for SEO and for easier searchability.
How would you organize this for these?
The benefit to setting up city pages is the local SEO rank (St Louis has so many suburbs).
The benefit to setting up pages by home style or size would be for user experience. How do I improve this for both?
And... how do I optimize for conversions better?
-
Hi D E!
Thanks for the opportunity of looking at your client's site. A foundational concept to understand is that the company's local pack rankings will depend on their physical address, not on the addresses of the homes they build in various communities. So, as the home builder is in Saint Louis, their local pack rankings will be most achievable for searches containing the words 'st. louis' or stemming from Saint Louis-based devices. They are unlikely to rank in the local packs for any city other than St. Louis because of Google's documented bias towards physical locale of the business.
So, where we move beyond this kind of understanding of how local packs work is when we are going after additional organic rankings, instead of local ones. For this purpose, building out content that showcases the homebuilder's work in specific neighborhoods or in neighboring cities supports goals of ranking organically for searches that use these geographic terms. For a good example of how to build landing pages that serve users making these types of searches, please read: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
In that post, you'll see an example of how a house painter could create a landing page showcasing his projects in a specific community, so that seems quite similar to what you're hoping to do.
That being said, I can't predict whether city landing page or style-of-home landing pages will convert better for your particular client. Are you tracking how people currently interact with the website? When a potential customer contacts the business, are the asking what styles of housing are available, or are they inquiring about neighborhoods? Answering questions like these will necessitate some serious research.
Without knowing all of the details, I'd be inclined to think that you could have both a set of landing pages based on the neighborhoods of St. Louis, and then a separate gallery depicting popular home designs, regardless of what part of the city the homes are in. You'd have the best of both worlds that way, but if there's a reason why you have to choose one or the other, only real research into the preferences and needs of the client's customers can provide a data-based answer.
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
-
Title Too Long - Seo importance
Hey; What do you think Title Too Long for Seo importance my site adress almost all page Title Too Long warning is showing http://prntscr.com/ndykgw from many sites this way, how much difference does this order make?
Local Website Optimization | | mesutcandan0 -
In local SEO, how important is it to include city, state, and state abbreviation in doctitle?
I'm trying to balance local geographic keywords with product keywords. I appreciate the feedback from the group! Michael
Local Website Optimization | | BFMichael0 -
Is it ok to redirect users to a market-specific home page based on their previous selection?
I'm working with a real estate client currently that asks users to identify the market they are in prior to showing them properties. The markets are far enough apart that no user would conceivably be browsing within two separate markets. When the user selects their market choice, they are redirected to a market-specific home page whenever they login after the original home page loads. These market-specific pages are ranking currently (page 2-4) for market-related phrases, but before embarking on further optimization I wanted to get a second opinion on whether or not keeping this redirect process is even a good idea or not. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | jluke.fusion0 -
Applying NAP Local Schema Markup to a Virtual Location: spamming or not?
I have a client that has multiple virtual locations to show website visitors where they provide delivery services. These are individual pages that include unique phone numbers, zip codes, city & state. However there is no address (this is just a service area). We wanted to apply schematic markup to these landing pages. Our development team successfully applied schema to the phone, state, city, etc. However for just the address property they said VIRTUAL LOCATION. This checked out fine on the Google structured data testing tool. Our question is this; can just having VIRTUAL LOCATION for the address property be construed as spamming? This landing page is providing pertinent information for the end user. However since there is no brick and mortar address I'm trying to determine if having VIRTUAL LOCATION as the value could be frowned upon by Google. Any insight would be very helpful. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB1 -
Can anyone recommend small UK based SEO Consultancy companies?
Hi there, We're possibly looking for a small, completely whitehat SEO firm here in the UK to work with us from early next year. We've probably got a budget of around £200 - £300 a month. We're looking for top up work really, not a complete campaign. I've checked out http://moz.com/community/recommended but it's not broken down by region or budget. I had an embarrassing phone call with Distilled who it turns out charge £10,000 a month minimum! Can anyone recommend anyone to speak to?
Local Website Optimization | | jennie.evans0 -
Local Rank & Branding Confusion - HELP
I am working with a client now that has two sites that serve two segments of a particular market segment. They have two different URLs which cater to these different target markets BUT the company is known in its local market as a their brand name (of course) which is different than their 2 domain names used on these 2 sites. Confusing eh? This has resulted in confusing Google and their rank has suffered a bit. To provide more color + insight- Let's just say this company is called AtlantaEventsInc and they offer event services for corporate events and let's say weddings. So let's say they have had atlantaeventscorporate.com for 20 years and then they add atlantaeventweddings.com about a year ago since their wedding business is expanding. So they promote their corporate events on one site and their wedding events on another. These 2 sites also currently share one blog, share one Facebook page, one Twitter and have two Google+ pages. Should we keep these two sites totally separate? and even have separate blogs and separate social media accounts? OR since our rank has only suffered with the new wedding site (just a year old) should we retire that site? (i suppose we could still keep separate blogs though for each target market. WOULD LOVE INSIGHT ON THIS! Thanks, Chris
Local Website Optimization | | Sundance_Kidd1 -
Localize Homepage, or service pages?
Hi so I am curious if a homepage may carry the most link juice, then if you service an entire state, do you include the state name as a keyword in your homepage title to get noticed, or the company brand, resulting in adding service area pages to cater to unique each city that you service? I am just not sure if Google is smart enough to know you service a state? I have my local page with a service area, but is this all I need? So I would not need to add a state name. Like I build horse barns, pole barns, metal buildings, and indoor riding arenas. So I am curious if you would do a title tag like Colorado Builders - Barns, Buildings, and Arenas Or maybe Colorado at the end? Or not at all Thanks for any tips.
Local Website Optimization | | asbchris0 -
How to rank in Local Google Without physical address and phone number?
Can We Rank Well in Local Google without Physical address and Phone Number??? If Yes. How??
Local Website Optimization | | Dan_Brown10