Could targeting 2 geographic locations decrease rankings?
-
Hello,
I think that us targeting 2 different geographic locations (San Francisco, CA and Salt Lake City, UT) is negatively effecting the rank of some of our main keywords.
My evidence for this:
Since December our main keyword (NLP) dropped in ranking for nlpca(dot)com from about 19th to about 40th. This is about when we started to really target 2 different locations. Other main keywords dropped a lot as well, like the important term "NLP Training"
Also, our name, nlpca(dot)com indicates NLP California (CA stands for California in Google)
The other day we bolded a sentence with the words "Salt Lake City, Utah" at the top of our content and in one of Google's Databases (the one I was looking at) we dropped in rankings for "NLP California" where we used to be completely sitelinked (where we took up a lot of space at the top of the search). Also, we shot up to 1st on my datacenter for both "NLP Utah" and "NLP Salt Lake City". At the same time, our rankings for the term "NLP" dropped off the map. It has come back up, but we've also targeted California again.
A lot of our anchor text has the word "California" in it.
We're thinking about building a separate site for Utah and just linking to it from the California website when we need to.
Does it sound to you, in your experience, that targeting both locations in our case is what's causing a decrease in rankings?
Thank you!
-
You're welcome, Bob.
Sorry if that wasn't clear. I think I need more information. When you say you are targeting Salt Lake City and San Francisco, do you mean that you have offices in those two cities and are doing a true local campaign for the cities (optimizing the site for them + getting Google Place Pages, other local business index listings, etc.)?
Or, is your service virtual and you are just targeting cities with your content only?
If the former, then if the Local SEO is not handled correctly, Google can get confused as to why you've got two distinct addresses. In such a case, they may lose 'faith' in the validity of their data about you and that could, potentially, cause a drop,
Please, come back with more info if you can.
Miriam
-
Thanks Miriam!
What do you mean if "Google got mixed up about our address", and would that affect national rankings?
-
Hi Again BobGW,
As promised, I ran this past a few colleagues. As I expected, the response was "correlation is not causation". Unless the Local SEO on your site or on local business indexes was mishandled, it seems unlikely that your targeting your second location is responsible for the ranking drop you observed. Now, if Google got mixed up about your addresses, that could cause a problem, but provided you've handled your Local SEO correctly, this is probably not the culprit.
Hope this feedback helps!
Miriam
-
Hi BobGW,
I have not encountered any studies or evidence to indicate that adding a second location would cause a ranking drop of the original location - though, of course, you have in a sense split your KWs in half by doubling them (adding Utah).
I'd like to ask a few of my Local SEO colleagues for any feedback on this in case anyone can point to a similar case. I'll be back.
Miriam
-
One factor that seems to have quite a bit to do with geographical rankings is the actual popularity of that geographical region. Larger more metro areas have more people more people searching & are harder to rank in then smaller places with fewer people thus fewer people searching.
I can cobble a site that ranks top 3 for Daly City Photography in a day or so.
Yet if I create the same site for San Francisco Photography.
That will be a much harder set of keywords to rank for since Daly City is so small & has so fewer people using that phrase VS San Francisco.
The same may be true for California VS Utah.
-
Hundreds of factors determine your rankings. I don't think you can point to creating a second geographic location and say that was what tanked your SERPs. For all you know google could be saying... wow! these guys have two locations now, they must be successful... but other factors tanked the rankings.
Would I build a second site for a second location? Only if the service was completely different... Like if I had a beer joint in Utah and a knitting club in California.
But that's only one opinion.
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
-
How to rank for a keyword
Hi guys, I'm looking to rank a new blog for a search term which we currently already rank #1 for. I want to create a blog which provides a better solution to a searchers query and knock our current #1 page for this new one. Is there a way to do this simply without losing the real-estate the currently ranked #1 page has already accumulated? Or is just a matter of working on this new blog to find it's own way to the top? Thanks in advance, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameseacott0 -
Reclaiming Ranking positions in Google
We have a website we are working on that was ranking well in Google but since having a hosting upgrade has completely dropped in rankings. When a hosting upgrade was made, the developer added an incorrect robots.txt file that restricted the site from being found, hence resulting in lost rankings. We have since sorted out that issue so the robots.txt is OK. However, ranking results have yet to be reclaimed. We are unsure why these rankings haven't rebounded back, as it has been a while now. The site is https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au. We have since also attempted to add a sitemap however to help the site be better crawled and to regain rankings, however, it appears that sitemap generators are having problems creating a sitemap for this site and we are not sure why. And we are not sure whether this may relate to why Google has not picked up on pages and ranking results have not be restored. If you have any ideas as to how we can reclaim rankings to the strong positions they were in previously, that would be much appreciated. We believe we may be missing something here that is not allowing webpages to be picked up and ranked by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Ranking on google but not Bing?
Any reason why I could be ranking for Google but not Bing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Ranking go down why ?
Hello, Thank you , if you help us our web url www.prismpharmamachinery.com before some time very top ranking but now going down 5-7 pages in google any SEO expert can help for that Regards pooja
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Poojath0 -
Authorship/Ranking when 2 separate authors
Hello, We've got a pdf with, on the front page "by author 1 and author 2" Author one published the PDF and sits at rank 3 Author 2 is us (on a completely different website than author 1) How can we rank highest, and can we use google authorship? Can we get our picture next to the article? Let me know if we need to convert to html for (1) and/or (2)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Keyword Question: How to Target my Niche
Hello, I'm a health coach helping people with multiple sclerosis. Here's my website: bobweikel(dot)com What do you think the top 4 local keywords would be for my niche? I'm in Boise ID. I'm thinking MS Boise MS Boise Idaho Multiple Sclerosis Boise Multiple Sclerosis Boise Idaho With your intuition, do you think these are valuable keywords for a coaching site? Also, can you think of any other keywords? I want this 100% white hat.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Sudden drop in page rank
Hi One of our client websites has had a sudden drop in rankings, and also in page rank. We have obviously been off for 2 weeks, so havent been blogging daily etc as we normally would have. Would this cause such a drop? Some keywords have lost from position 2/3 to page 7 over night, and we havent change the strategy! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOwins0