Local Keyword Strategy
-
Good morning!
I'm working on building out a new website for a regional insurance agency specializing in auto insurance for high risk drivers (ex. Tickets, Accidents, Dui's, etc.). Due to the competitive nature of our industry, I believe it is best to focus on very localized long tail keywords, instead of broad terms I don't have any chance of ranking for.
Our keyword research indicates that there is an opportunity to optimize and potentially rank for keywords that include geographic modifiers for towns and cities within a roughly 50 mile radius. The problem is, there is only so much you can say about auto insurance. On the one hand, I would like to have individual landing pages for each keyword phrase. On the other hand, I don't want to look manipulative to Google or hurt user experience by creating a bunch of pages with relatively similar content.
Can anyone offer some advice on how I can structure the site/content to optimize for each geographic modifier without having lots of pages that are very similar?
Thank you!
-
Greetings, Matt!
Thanks so much for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Your assessment of the situation is an honest one - how much can one say about auto insurance over and over again? Member, Ressler Motors, has gotten you off on the right track here, thinking outside the box to discover creative types of content that could make each page different.
I would further recommend discovering how you can personalize the pages in a meaningful way. For example, each city page could tell a real story about insuring a real driver there. This would take some doing - you would need the company to identify a happy customer who would be willing to tell their story and you would have to arrive at a level of privacy for them that meets their comfort at the same time. So, you might not publish photos or full names, but getting a driver from City X to describe why he needed to come to your client's company would make this page different than your page for City Y.
Similarly, you can mine the staff at the company for other stories. Get them to describe what is most common in different towns in terms of the types of issues that make for high risk drivers. Does town X have a lot of DUIs, while the highway passing through town Y engenders a lot of speeding tickets?
Does the company offer any type of seminars about improving one's driving record? Could these be featured on certain pages?
How about interviews with highway patrol officers explaining their side of the story?
How about advice for parents whose teens have already racked up a bad driving record? When should they take the keys away? When will the law take the keys away in these cities, towns, counties?
Ressler's idea about photos is excellent, complete with good captions, of course, and I definitely think there is room here for videos. Statistical videos (with text descriptions) showing worst traffic areas in town with stats of the numbers of accidents and violations would be unique and very local.
How well your client is funded and how invested they are in the creation of quality pages vs. squeaking by with the least possible effort is likely to determine how far you can take this. Assuming that the client has only one main office, I would expect the pages to have to be pretty strong to break into the organic SERPs because the client is likely to be outranked by companies with actual physical offices in the neighboring towns in the Local SERPs.
I think the overall picture needs to be one of telling a compelling story about what happens in each of the towns in terms of driving problems, who these issues affect and how the company can help. You may want to engage a creative copywriter to manage the project, but I do believe your richest data sources for whatever is written or produced will be the company's clients and the staff.
I hope this helps. Good luck!
Miriam
-
Infographic on where the vast majority of tickets are handed out in a city? Hot means the most tickets, etc. Not only are you offering a service to your customers with great insurance rates, but you are also telling them where they need to slow down!
Include this in all your city specific landing pages to try use as link bait. I'd also include local pictures from those cities, using file names that describe them well, in order to seem much more relevant.
For Internal links:
Use footer links for your most important cities, and a chart listing where you do service for all of your cities. By using the chart on enough pages you should be able to imply that they are your most important pages.
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
-
Keywords problems
Hello,
Keyword Research | | Gabijaurbs
I am having a problem while I am searching for keywords - it just says "Getting serp analysis failed. Please retry your search or refresh this page" on all browsers I try it on. Hard reloaded too and still not working. Could you help me with this?
Best regards, Gabija0 -
Point of diminishing returns for keyword research?
Hey, something I've been thinking about lately is "where is the point of diminishing returns for keyword research detail?" I get that keyword research is important for finding out stuff like "people generally search for 'doctor' way more often than they search for 'licensed medical professional'", but what about after that? Is there much useful information to be found by sifting through spreadsheets of stats about "doctor" vs "dr" vs "doctors" vs "physician" vs "physicians" etc? Especially when Google seems to treat a lot of those as interchangable? Or another example: If a remodeling company did basements, do you think there's much to be gleaned from AdWords data comparing "basement remodeler", "basement remodelers", basement remodeling", "basement remodeling contractor", "basement remodeling contractors", "basement renovation", "basement renovations", "basement renovators", "finished basements", "basement finishers", "basement finishing", etc.? Should those variations be analyzed and each targeted by their own sets of pages and pieces of content (e.g. a blog post that specifically targets "basement remodeler" and a blog post that targets "basement finisher" and a third blog post that specifically targets "renovated basement") Or should the takeaway be "there aren't any combinations that people overwhelmingly prefer to use, so let's just make content about basements and topics relevant to basements. Keyword research complete."
Keyword Research | | BrianAlpert782 -
Keyword Over-usage?
I have a photography page, where there are a number of galleries. In the galleries and thumbnails of each photo I'm selling. These also include the title. It's built dynamically. However, I've noticed when I do an on-page grade check, that one of the places I'm failing is over-using the keyword on the page. This is mainly due to the titles of each photo containing that keyword. For example, there might be a photo gallery for images of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and 30 of the 40 images on the page have a title with "Golden Gate Bridge" in them. So naturally, the title is displaying this on the page and showing up 30+ times (after the term is used in the page text as well). Is this a really big problem, or is the benefit on each individual photo page outweighing any hit on the gallery page? Any thoughts? Thanks!
Keyword Research | | shannmg10 -
Is this keyword cannibalization?
I have a product page and our home page ranked for the same keyword. On August 6th the product page was ranked #14 then plummeted to #60. On August 13th our home page was in the #2 spot (line just appears out of nowhere) and it is now in the #1 spot. I also see the same pages appearing for some keywords ranked in multiple positions then plummeting and one coming back up. I'm having a hard time understanding how the Keyword tool in Moz is reporting exactly. Thanks! To add to this: From Oct 8th to the 15th we jumped up from #60 to #16 for one keyword and then by Oct. 22nd are back down to #60. I have a huge spike on the 15th. Wondering if that had anything to do with any algorithm updates?
Keyword Research | | Sika220 -
Google keywords
I'm having trouble understanding how google determines out of my text what are the keywords and what aren't. Is there somewhere I can go that will tell me what google sees as my dominant keywords and I'd like to see my total keyword list too. We are running eCommerce and I don't think it is picking up on everything we expected it to see as keywords. I'm pretty new to this SEO stuff but I'm trying to learn. Any help would be appreciated. I understand I'm suppose to include important words in my page titles, headers and meta description and use effective markup as well so I'm just a bit lost on how I can actually see what google counts as my keywords and their level of power/importance. If this isn't possible if anyone has any suggestions on how to gauge this, I'm open to ideas! Thanks in advance guys!
Keyword Research | | ithvac0 -
Moz Keyword Competition Analysis Tool
Hi Just been having a play around with the Moz Keyword Competition Tool and noticed that the reuslts given in terms of exact match searches is different from the data in the actual Google Adwords keyword tool even though the Moz tool pulls its data form the Google Adwords index so technically should be the same right? Was just wondering if anyone else had noticed that or if I am missing something. All you help would be greatly appreciated! Cheers
Keyword Research | | PIXUS0 -
Acne related keywords in Google.fr
Hello everyone, I am setting up a website with domainname.fr to rank in google.fr with Acne related keywords. Can anyone give me Competitive keywords which can bring more than 10K visitors per month?? Help will be very much appreciated. P.S: Actually, my uncle is having an offline acne product shop in France. He asked me to setup a website in Google.fr so that he can make some money.
Keyword Research | | artemmin0 -
Does anyone have a best practice for identifying local keyword terms?
I utilize a variety of keyword tools when I'm doing research, Google keyword tools, word tracker, keyword spy, etc but as soon as I throw in a city or state, the numbers seem to drop drastically or disappear. I understand that naturally these numbers will decrease because it will be a less popular term, but I feel like I have a great phrase and i don't understand why there isn't ANY local data for it. I was wondering what process you go through to specifically identify local terms.
Keyword Research | | webdecorators1