Should an international company also be marketing locally?
-
I've just watched the very helpful video on Google Local best practices at http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/all-about-google-places and see MANY areas in which we are not utilizing our local marketing efforts.
Given that we do not have TOO much local demand, I would say that the main reason for doing this work is to gain momentum in our broad-scale Google SEO efforts/results.
But I am worried that Google might see us as a local company and stop showing us in the SERPs for non-local searches. Is this a good strategy to market locally, or to stick to backlinks on a broad international-based scale.
Does it even help my overall SEO rankings (for broad keywords like Point of Sale and POS Software) to have a strong local and hyperlocal presence?
Thanks!
Derek M
-
Excellent! Good luck Derek.
-
Thanks! Great reply. I will make these adjustments
-
For local and some national products I like to back brand on the title tag:
Best Green Widgets - Widget Company XYZ
-
Hi Derek,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum.
Now, my answer to your question is going to be of the it-depends type. Does your business have:
-
A physical street address (not shared, not a virtual office)?
-
A local area code phone number?
-
Face-to-face interaction with clientele, whether at your office or at their homes/businesses?
I ask these things because they are the requirements for inclusion in Google Places, which is pretty much the big cheese in Local. If you can say yes to all 3, then we're good to move forward. If any of those items is missing, then Google will not consider your business to be local.
Moving along, I want to mention that this is one of the most common questions I see being asked. Business owners want to know if having a local campaign will decrease their national or international presence in the eyes of Google. To date, I have only ever seen and given common sense answers to this question and have never seen:
-
An official study on this, with actual stats
-
An official pronouncement from Google on the subject
So, the advice I can give you here is going to be the general advice given on this topic, and should not be considered as though it is based on studies or words from the horse's mouth. The general consensus of opinion on this is that it is fine to run a modest Local SEO campaign at the same time as doing your National/International SEO.
What this might look like:
You put your complete local contact info in the footer of your website site-wide and you add it to your contact page. You devote a page or two to talking about your local office, local services, etc.. You get your business profiled in Google Places and other relevant local business directories, being sure to carefully adhere to the guidelines. You seek and manage your reviews. Finally, depending on the competitiveness of your market in your geography, you may do a little linkbuilding to give you a boost over other local competitors.
It is my belief that the percentage to which you engage in local SEO efforts should be commensurate with the percentage of local business you do. So, if 90% of your business is international and to 10% of it is local, then it makes sense for 10% of your efforts, content, linkbuilding etc. to be devoted to local. In such a case, you would NOT want to go and rewrite all of your title tags to include your city name in them or otherwise highly optimize for your local geographic terms, but a modest campaign, at least in the collective wisdom of the Local SEO community, should not harm your other rankings.
I do wish some company with good Local skills and extra time on their hands could do a thorough study of this FAQ so we could have some more visible conclusion to cite, but I hope this general advice will be helpful to you in making up you mind. Good luck!
Miriam
-
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
-
Creating country specific pages to show pricing in local currencies
For our product page, we want to be able to show the pricing in the local currency of the visitor. I discussed this with our web developer and he said that we can create country-specific pages, so one for UK, Australia, etc. I am afraid that this solution might hurt our SEO as Google might see this as duplicated content. What are your thoughts about this? The website runs on WordPress.
Technical SEO | | Maggie.Casas0 -
Internal link is creating duplicate content issues and generating 404s from website crawl.
Not sure what the best way to describe it but the site is built with Elementor page builder. We are finding out that a feature that is included with a pop modal window renders an HTML code as so: Click So when crawled I think the crawling is linking itself for some reason so the crawl returns something like this: xyz.com/builder/listing/ - what we want what we don't want xyz.com/builder/listing/ xyz.com/builder/listing/%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9/ xyz.com/builder/listing/%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9//%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9/ so you'll notice how that string in the HREF is appended each time and it loops a couple times. Could I 301 this issue, what's the best way to go about handling something like this? It's causing duplicate meta descriptions/content errors for some listing pages we have. I did add a rel='nofollow' to the anchor tag with JavaScript but not sure if that'll help.
Technical SEO | | JoseG-LP0 -
These days on Google results, it also shows the site map. I submitted my company's sitemap and it still does not show?What am I doing wrong?
Look at the image in the link. I want my company to look like the "pluralsight" website in Google. I want it to show the sitemap. I have already submitted the sitemap to Google few days back, what am I doing wrong? search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&q=pluralsight&oq=pluralsight&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.11024j0j8
Technical SEO | | Deein0 -
Optimizing internal links or over-optimizing?
For a while I hated the look of the internal links page of Google Web Master Tools account for a certain site. With a total of 120+K pages, the top internal link was the one pointing to "FAQ". With around 1M links. That was due to the fact, on every single page, both the header and the footer where presenting 5 links to the most popular questions. The traffic of those FAQ pages is non-existent, the anchor text is not SEO interesting, and theoretically 1M useless internal links is detrimental for page juice flow. So I removed them. Replacing the anchor with javascript to keep the functionality. I actually left only 1 “pure” link to the FAQ page in the footer (site wide). And overnight, the internal links page of that GWT account disappeared. Blank, no links. Now... Mhhh... I feel like... Ops! Yes I am getting paranoid at the idea the sudden disappearance of 1M internal links was not appreciated by google bot. Anyone had similar experience? Could this be seen by google bot as over-optimizing and be penalized? Did I possibly triggered a manual review of the website removing 1M internal links? I remember Matt Cutts saying adding or removing 1M pages (pages) would trigger a flag at google spam team and lead to a manual review, but 1M internal links? Any idea?
Technical SEO | | max.favilli0 -
Yoast Local SEO
Hello has anyone had any any issues with the Yoast local plugin not accepting the license when the WP install is in subfolder. Or any license issues with the plugin?
Technical SEO | | edwardfrebow0 -
Google local / Rich snippets in multiple locations
Hi All, Something i'm trying to understand about Google local but cant find precise info about what we are thinking of doing. We are located in City A, but also provide our services in almost every city in our country. We broker the service to branches that don't have their own local websites and want to take advantage of being listed in each city by marking up the address of each branch on each of our specific branch pages. All our pages are currently marked up using the physical company address. Would their be any issues marking up separate branch pages to the corresponding branch address, and then taking advantage of Local results in many areas around the country? In other words, Is it possible for a single website to mark up separate pages for different locations and take advantage of local results for each? Thanks in Advance Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on internal pages
Lets say I'm working on a decorators website and they offer a list of residential and commercial services, some of which fall into both categories. For example "Internal Decorating" would have a page under both Residential and Commercial, and probably even a 3rd general category of Services too. The content inside the multiple instances of a given page (i.e. Internal Decorating) at best is going to be very similar if not identical in some instances. I'm just a bit concerned that having 3 "Internal Decorating" pages could be detrimental to the website's overall SEO?
Technical SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Internal Link Counts in SEOMoz Report?
Hi, We ran a site diagnostic and it came back with thousands of pages that have more than 100 internal links on a page; however, the actual number of links on those pages seems to be far less than what was reported. Any ideas? Thanks! Phil UPDATE: So we've looked at the source code and realized that for each product we link to the product page in multiple ways - from the product image, product title and price. So we have three internal links to the same page from each product listing, which is being counted by the SEOMoz crawler as hundreds of links on each page. But in terms of the Googlebot, is this as egregious as having hundreds of links to different pages or does it not matter as much?
Technical SEO | | beso1