Google Location - Taking Away Our National Reach?
-
Hey, I was just noticing that we achieve #2 ranking on Google for one of our customers for one of their primary keyword phrases. But then I noticed the traffic analytics were not matching what we should expect from that keyword phrase.
Then I noticed, in using "Chrome's Incognito Window", that our location was automatically selected for our main geographical city area.
I then went and changed that location from Denver, to San Diego & Also Chicago, just to see what would happen, and I noticed we instantly dropped from #2 to #7 when changing our location.
I don't know what my question is, but I guess I feel like that is preventing us from achieving the results we need to sell ecommerce products. Is there any info on this or suggestions anyone has on how to tackle this issue?
It feels like Google is pulling the rug out from underneath our feet and trying to spread rankings more to localized areas, rather than offering someone the opportunity to capitalize on good rankings for a national audience. I understand why they would do it, and I don't say I disagree. But it just seems to affect our work as SEO's doesn't it? Since we can't be as effective for customers that have a global audience instead of strictly a localized one.
I'm curious to see what people have to say about this issue. Thanks!
-
We have the same issue-- our customers are located around the country and when we had AdWords campaigns we targeted certain cites, but always coast-to-coast.
Our solution has been to attack certain cities with special pages, so we can try to rank for "keyword seattle" and "keyword miami"
This is sort of working, so far. I know that isn't possible for every business, just wanted to share that you're not alone.
-
Hey John, no, you answered correctly, and I agree with you. However, I only agree with that scenario when, like you said, it involves geographically based service industries such as a hair dresser, plummer, etc.
In our case, it involves a product that is not geographically restricted. Our page is the only page of the Google top 10 that has unique content describing that product. And we are the only page that has more than one or two root domains linking directly to that product page.
And in the case of the results when I changed to Chicago, the website that did come up #1 was based in California.
Basically, I'm just not understanding how it works, or what the best strategy to employ would be for an eCommerce web site.
-
IMHO...it is not a penalty that you are ranked lower #7 for Chicago (or any other non locale)..it is that you are more competitive in your own market to be ranked #2...essentially a boost locally.
If you had a hairdresser site ranked #3 for Austin for "hairdresser", b/c of google local, chamber of commerce link etc that same site might not be top 10 in New York city...it could be with more nyc specific relevance indicators (links, mentions).
I may have answered the wrong question....good luck.
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
-
GA traffic locations must be wrong? Most hits from a state we don't do business in!
I launched a website earlier this year. Very limited traffic, 200-300 a month. It is an info site for a specialized business. However, when I review my GA traffic reports, 20% of our traffic comes from one city in Virginia. (although the company does business in many states, it does not in Virginia) or anything close. The bounce rate is 97%! Could it be a web scraper or some kind of redirect?
Search Behavior | | bakergraphix_yahoo.com0 -
Deceptive site warning from Google: Java script and meta descriptions deployed.
Hi all, We received a deceptive site warning from Google recently. Seems like there is a deceptive content on some pages of the website. Some pages are removed from Google index. Meta descriptions have been deployed on the site few days ago. There is also java script on the website which we use for tracking visitors like GA. I wonder what's the reason for this alert? We believe its due to the Java script. Do you think meta descriptions will harm this bad? Any ideas? Thanks
Search Behavior | | vtmoz0 -
What would the US traffic increase be for a website YoY if all Google SERP rankings remained the same?
This question has come up a few times with some of our clients and I've spent some time researching this question, but I can't find an answer online so hopefully, someone at MOZ has this data available to them with all the data they collect. The data points that would be needed to answer this question off the top of my head: Increase in the # of Google Searches in the US YoY The decrease in CTR for organic results "10 blue links" which take a searcher off of Google YoY, as Google continues to keep more searchers on Google.com with rich snippets, increased AdWords prominence, AdWords extensions, etc I'm sure this greatly varies per industry, but an average for all industries is all that is needed to answer this client question. Many thanks in advance and I've included a video which hopefully helps to better explain the search "plus/minus" that we can expect to see as SEOs in 2018. WF1yLlJC6LetnpbD3
Search Behavior | | WebpageFX1 -
Google web master tool - stats
Hello everyone! I have 2 questions : 1. does anyone come across this behavior ? (image 1). In the last week Page crawled per day behavior was quite wild and it wasn't affect directly on Time spent downloading a page. 2. I'm getting site map warning for high response time (image 2) i have 29M pages so I aware that 4 warning for 4 pages is almost negligible but still ? Thanks to all helpers 8OkgXp7 q3txRAb q3txRAb
Search Behavior | | Roi_Bar1 -
Banned from Google
Hello experts I need some help. I have a customer that have been banned from Google´s top ranking. I need an expert to get the cusotmer back on the track again.. Cann you help? Regards Peter
Search Behavior | | seopeter290 -
Google reconsideration nightmare
Hello and thanks in advance The website has had a penalty on it for a while now, around 10 months, it was worked on by an agency who bought bad links to it but before then it was worked on by other agencies that may have done the same. I cleaned up as many bad link (according to many posts read) and filled for reconsideration and was told to get rid of a whole bunch of links which i did not know existed. Downloaded WMT links as instructed by Google admin person and contacted a heap of people which took a lot of man hours and cost us a fortune. Resubmitted and again was shown a handful of links by the Google admin person and told to contact and remove. The funny thing is that a few of them I disavowed in my list so they should not have pointed these out. I emailed back and showed that everything I could do was done and am happy to disavow any other link which they though violated their terms. This was not enough and I was told to show more efforts in removing links and then resubmit for reconsideration. I have done as much as I can on the website, I cannot see any more links which show violation, if there are some I am happy to remove but am now at a stage where i need direction from others to tackle this matter. Any advice would be helpful; I cannot start over from scratch as it's a brand and not a small website.
Search Behavior | | Benbug0 -
Dating Blog Posts & How Fast Google Picks up on New Pages
I had until a few months ago included the original post date of a new blog post on the site. I then removed it and none of my results in Google now include the blog post date, although for some (for articles written about events) Google includes the date of the event where you would usually see the post date. Since I did this, it seems like new blog posts are taking longer to rank on Google, some results are ranking well, and others declined relative to what I would have previously expected. What's the best thing to be doing? To include a date (considering a lot of my content is not time-relevant) or to keep it as it is now? The second thing, is I often go through and update my articles with new information and re-post it in my rss feed etc - ie the date becomes new again. How does Google treat this? Any ideas or comments would be great! Thanks
Search Behavior | | ben10001