Does having the local area name in a domain effect your results when branching out?
-
We have a domain which performs well within the local search and has got good authority and trust but we are now moving further afield to rank for keywords country wide. Our current domain contains our local area, does this effect your chances of ranking for broader searches? You don't seem to see many general searches bring domains up with the location keywords within their domain.
-
Ryan's point about localized search being drastically different. So the real question is whether you offer products or services that require localized identification. If so, having your initial local area in the domain will definitely not help your effort.
As for the example of the New York times, they can get away with showing up when not searching for local specifics because they're one of the biggest sites with some of the highest SEO authority from 3rd party sites on earth. So of course they can get away with it. If you want to achieve the same (for non-local search phrases), you'll need to go to extreme lengths to build your site's SEO authority as well.
Personally I'd say that if your site depends on local related search, you'd be better off with a domain that doesn't have the local aspect in the name. Build out content in a locations funnel - starting with the geographic areas you determine to be a mix of the most important and some that are semi-important (and thus easier to rank for over time).
That way, you can create individual pages (or ideally sections) that have each geographic location in the URLs. This is much less challenging to get ranking for over time than the root domain being about just one location, because the root domain placement of a keyword is much stronger than a sub-folder.
High quality SEO will be key in the geographic funnel. Citations from other sites in each of those locations will be really helpful as well.
-
Our current domain contains our local area, does this effect your chances of ranking for broader searches?
No.
If I type "newspaper" in to Google, the first result is New York Times. Since I live in California that is definitely not a local result. You can definitely rank well for broad searches with a localized name.
The moment a user adds a local name to their search, the results will drastically change. If I add the term "California" to the newspaper search, the New York Times is no longer even on the first page. I probably would have to go quite deep to find them.
How you expand depends on the nature of your business. I would recommend a press release or other announcement which generates publicity around your recent expansion. "London Cable Installation now offers service in the Liverpool and Manchester areas". This will help you rank better for localized searches in those areas.
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
-
Bing result title is displaying a competitors name
When searching "Cambridge Savings Bank" which is the specific name of a bank in Bing the search results return with them as Number one with the correct URL. The issue is Bing has titled the search result "East Cambridge Savings Bank" (which is another entity all together) and still has the correct www.cambridgesavings.com URL. So basically Bing is putting another corporation's name on our website. This issue only is in Bing. Any idea how to correct this? 2.png 1.png
Technical SEO | | BOD20081 -
Google Gives me different results
Hello Everybody My website is giving me 2 results for my page ...
Technical SEO | | falguniwpi
if i search in google.com by "domain.com" it shows results without current pagetitles and if i search in google.com using keyword phrase "site:adomain.com", then it shows me all my website pages with current meta titles . why i am facing these 2 results and how to solve these . Why This happens, I have correctly redirectd URL to domain.com to www.domain.com, but Still it same, please Suggest me, what should i do With,0 -
Local search results appearing above Organic
Hello, I've just performed a search for the query 'outdoor clothing' using Google Incognito mode and I've added the screenshots below to show my findings. The first attempt at the search only showed local results then when I clicked search again adverts were shown. I found this very odd, normally I'd see the local results after the 3rd of 4th organic result.Have Google changed their algorithm or is this just random? http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/8643/incognito1.jpg http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/6382/incognito2jf.jpg Thanks, Dan
Technical SEO | | Sparkstone0 -
Domain Registrar
Looking for opinions on some good domain registrars since I have decided to transfer from Godaddy. A question while I'm here discussing the topic. Does the reputation of a Domain Registrar affect SEO in any form?
Technical SEO | | greenfoxone0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
Mobile Domain Setup
Hi, If I want to serve a subset of pages on my mobile set from my desktop site or the content is significantly different, i.e. it is not one to one or pages are a summarised version of the desktop, should I use m.site.com or is it still better to use site.com? Many thanks any help appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MarkChambers0 -
Consolidating domains on root subject
I had several sites regarding a core subject. The main site was xyz.com and then I had multiple sites for the inner categories of xyz.com . I decided to consolidate everything to a single site and so did a change of address in webmaster tools and 301 redirected all niche sites to the appropriate page on the primary site of xyz.com. Shortly after we lost rankings for those niche pages. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0