How do you use local keywords naturally in a sentence?
-
Some local SEO key phrases are difficult to use naturally in a sentence - consider "dry cleaners Birmingam". Do you have any ideas about how to use this type of phrase in a natutral-sounding way when writing content?
-
One thing that I've discovered is that you can use punctuation in the middle of a keyword phrase. So, for example, if you were trying to rank for dry cleaners Birmingham you could have a line of text like this:
"When looking for dry cleaners, Birmingham has lots of options."
or
"We have lots of experience as dry cleaners. Birmingham is an amazing city and we are happy to serve our many customers."
Those are not the best examples, by I think you get my point though.
-
You definitely want to avoid "dry cleaners Birmingham". Just write to the folks. "Looking for a dry cleaner in Birmingham?" or something similar. Your content should be a blended to serve both humans and bots.
-
Sorry, misunderstood you. Please accept my apologies! I thought you are going cynical on that
-
István, I said "I agree" and gave you thumbs up.
-
I talk about this topic all the time at work. Its hard to fit some these keywords in naturally. For things like that which do not naturally flow I find using it in a header works. Also maybe a list instead of paragraph content (have that as well but leave your keyword out).
There are ways to make it fit into your page without making poorly read content.
-
I would go along with Istvans example.
Will's Dry Cleaners Birmingham or Birmingham Dry Cleaners are the very best at what they do.
Dry Cleaners in Birmingham is another good search term.
Thanks
Will
-
Egol no need to be cynical. I don't really have to much experience with this, but if that is a Brand name, such as "McKenzie's dry cleaners Birmingham", THEN I would use it.
That is a personal opinion.
If you don't agree then please give a response and maybe some advice where to read more about this matter. This is what TAGFEE is about, right?
Istvan
-
I agree. If you want to paint a target on your back produce a lot of content that contains "dry cleaners Birmingham".
Yes, if I was Google I would be zapping those sites.
-
Hi Paul,
I would use it as "dry cleaners in Birmingham". It looks more natural for both visitor and search engine.
If you want to optimize it further for the "dry cleaners Birmingham", then just insert it as a hCard into footer of the site. It should do it's job.
Since you are a PRO member, you should check the latest webinar, there were some very good tips how to optimize locally.
Gr.,
Istvan
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
-
Massive local + national disconnect in rankings (local deindexed)
I asked the question originally on webmaster central. I tried RickRoll's solutions (but it doesn't seem to have solved the issue). Problem below: I've been noticing for some time that certain pages of our site (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent) have been deindexed locally (or very low ranked), but indexed nationally (well ranked). In fact, it seems that the actual page isn't ranking (but the blog https://www.renthop.com/blog is). This huge mismatch between national vs local rankings seem to only happen for Boston & Chicago. Other parts of the country seem unaffected (and the national & local rankings are very similar). A bit of a background (and my personal theory as to what's happening). We use to have subdomains: boston.renthop.com & chicago.renthop.com for the site. These subdomains stopped working, though, as we moved the site to the directory format (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent). These subdomain URLs were inactive / broken for roughly 4 months. After the 4 months, we did a 301 from the subdomain to the main page (because these subdomains had inbound external links). However, this seems to have caused the directory pages to exhibit the national/local mismatch effect instead of helping. Is there anything I'm doing wrong? I'm not sure if the mismatch is natural, if the pages are getting algo penalized on a local level (I'm negative SEOing myself), or if it's stuck in some weird state because of what happened with bad sub-domain move). Some things I've tried: I've created webmaster console (verified) accounts for both the subdomains. I've asked Google to crawl those links. I've done a 1-1 mapping between individual page on the old site vs the new directory format I've tried both doing a 301, 302 and meta-refresh redirect from the subdomains to the directory pages. I've made sure the robots.txt on the subdomain is working properly I've made sure that the robots.txt on the directory pages are working properly. See below for a screenshot of the mismatch & deindexing in local search results (this is using SERPS - but can be replicated with any location changer). Note the difference between the ranking (and the page) when the search is done nationally vs in the actual location (Boston, MA). I'd really appreciate any help.. I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure this out (as well as experimenting). renthop%2Bboston.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lzhou0 -
What's with the Keyword Apocalypse?
Hi, 9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week. The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places. For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite. I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin1 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
URL Keyword Structure and Importance
Hey Guys, I've done quite a bit of research on this but still can't decide what the correct answer is, so was hoping the Moz community might be able to give some clarification. Say I have a URL **www.yourdomain.com/product/domain-names **is there any benefit in changing my site's backend structure (a relatively lengthly process) so the URL can read **www.yourdomain.com/domain-names **without the 'product' slug? I understand keywords in the URL can have a small impact on SEO, but does the positioning to this degree play any part? Any advice would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paragongroup
Cheers.0 -
Sudden rankings drop for our most profitable keyword?
Hi, I was hoping you could help me with a troubling issue that has come up this week. We have consistently ranked in the top 3 for the keyword "grey goose glasses" for the last 12 months. We received 74 visits from this keyword from Dec 3 to Jan 3. For some reason on Jan 4th we dropped from the top 3 to somewhere around 40-70 and receive almost no traffic from this keyword an longer. The page that was ranking was http://thebottlemill.com/tbm/grey-goose-drinking-glass.html I have since changes a the Page title and URL with a 301 redirect and the H1 tag to be a better match but this was just done yesterday. We havent seemed to be effected like this on other keywords. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bottlemill0 -
How would you use this broken link building opportunity?
I've found a good opportunity to build some links and I'd love your opinions on my options here. There's a big event that happens once a year in my city. Let's say the event used to have a website called www.CityEvent.com. The event decided not to use this website anymore, but instead to put all of their event information on their facebook page. It looks like they let their domain name expire and someone else snapped it up. It's now sitting as an empty wordpress blog with one line of text. This empty website has 1300 links pointing to it. I can see two opportunities here: 1. Write a very thorough article on my website (that I am trying to build links to) describing the event and giving people all of the information that they need to know about it. (The amount of information on the Facebook page is minimal.) or 2. Create a new website called www.EventCity.com and put up a static page with all of the information that people need to know. There would be a link on this page pointing to the site that I am trying to rank. In both cases there would be much more information than is available on the Facebook page including a collection of youtube videos about the event and many helpful links for people who are interested in this type of event. Then the plan is to contact the sites who are linking to the dead page and invite them to link to my new page (either on my site or the new site that I could create). I see a few pros and cons to each method. For option #2 I think people would be more likely to link to a more official looking page rather than an article on a separate website. (My website has information about the city in question but is not closely related to the event at all.) However, I would only be getting one link back to my site. One negative to this is that the actual organizers of the event may not be pleased that someone has created an official looking page. But then again, perhaps they would be happy to have a free website. For option #1 I would possibly get more links from sites that are authoritative in my city that point directly to the site I am trying to rank. However, people would be less likely to link to us because we are not an official site for the event, but simply a very good article about the event. There are no other good articles for this event that are ranking on Google. Hopefully that makes sense. What would you do? EDIT - Just thought of a third option - try to buy the domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Ranking For Misspelling of Primary Keyword
I have been baffled for the past few months for ranking for the misspelling of our primary keyword BELIZE in the Google U.S. Serps. We are nowhere to be found, but are ranking for the misspelling BELIZ (without the final "e"). We have been online since 1995 on page one everywhere. 11 months ago we did a site redesign changing over to WP as a CMS. We changed all pages from widget-example.html to widget-example and properly 301ed all pages after deleting the old pages. Then we accidentally de-indexed the site for a month due to a robots.txt error. This has been corrected 4 months now. We shared this on the Google Webmaster forums and some kind folks helped with advice - nothing major in our opinion but we implemented most of the tips given. We are doing fine everywhere with all search engines and Google itself in other areas Google.ca Google.bz Google.mx for example. But in our primary market is the U.S. where the majority of our readers are - tourists and retirees looking for our information - we do not exist. The joke is that searching for BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serps has us on Page One. It is a joke that is NOT funny - or maybe some human evaluator made a mistake or is playing a sick joke? We have done a reconsideration request in case there was a manual penalty and we received the no manual penalty form letter. I notice increasingly in Google Live Analytics people typing in our full domain name - I guess out of frustration not getting the site when inputting the primary keyword. I find that I can write a new article and in a couple of weeks it ranks in the top couple pages. Many other pages are found via long-tail only. I find it intriguing that yesterday I wrote a very small article, a press release actually, and today searching for the misspelling BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serp the root domain is ranked #2 and the snippet and image displayed is from this little article which is nothing really great. I am new here. Thanks to anyone who can help. The site: Belize http://www.belize.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Belize0 -
Service Keyword in URL - too much?
We're working on revamping the URL structure for a site from the ground up. This firm provides a service and has a library of case studies to back up their work. Here's some options on URL structure: 1. /cases/[industry keyword]-[service keyword] (for instance: /cases/retail-pest-control) There is some search traffic for the industry/service combination, so that would be the benefit of using both in URL. But we'd end up with about 70 pages with the same service keyword at the end. 2. /cases/[industry keyword] (/cases/retail) Shorter, less spam potential, but have to optimize for the service keyword -- the primary -- in another way. 3. /cases/clientname (/cases/wehaveants) No real keyword potential but better usability. We also want the service keyword to rank on its own on another page (so, a separate "pest control" page). So don't want to dilute that page's value even after we chase some of the long tail traffic. Any thoughts on the best course of action? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdcomms1