Ranking locally without local keywords in title?
-
I have a website that targets national keywords. I would like to be able to rank locally for these keywords as well without having the city in the title. What is the best strategy for this?
-
Yes that will help for sure. The best way to do it is make a separate contact us page that when you make the new Google+ for business listing that you add that instead of the main root domain. For example yourcompanyname.com/denver-creative-services and that will rank quicker. I personally have done that myself a few times.
-
To have virtual offices is not against their terms and extremely effective.
-
Exactly. It was kind of a sad day when Google booted all the SEOs/designers out of the local index. But there is still organic. And I guess they were getting spammed like mad.
-
Yes I know that web design companies and SEO's aren't part of Google Local Search but if you do a search for Denver web design you will see companies optimized for this term. I guess that blogging and link building is the way to go.
-
Yes I know that web design companies and SEO's aren't part of Google Local Search but if you do a search for Denver web design you will see companies optimized for this term. I guess that blogging and link building is the way to go.
-
Hi Again Will,
People are often afraid that adding local factors to their website might somehow decrease their national/international rank. I have yet to hear of a case of this actually happening. So, if you'd like to get some more visibility in your area, you can embed some local hooks in the site (address in footer, on contact page) and write some copy about your services in those cities.
Now, that being said, Google removed web design companies and SEO companies from their Local index in January of 2010. See:
http://www.searchengineguide.com/miriam-ellis/google-shoves-their-liaisons-off-maps.php
So, typically they will not show local rankings for website design firms, again pointing to organic as the way to go for you. Write/Blog about your projects for local clientele and chances are, you can make a dent in the SERPs.
-
I do have a physical business location and it is in the metro are of the term I am trying to rank for. I am 20 minutes at most from the cities center point. I was just looking for a good way to rank without localizing my whole website. I do graphic design and web design but I have clients all over and I don't want to limit myself to just the city where my office is located.
I also have a places page and my business in Dexknows, Yelp, and other directories
-
Good to know, thank you. I had actually picked up that advice on seomoz 6-7 months ago.
-
Hi Nathan,
I'm not sure from your post whether this is something you used to do in the past or is something you are still paying people to do for you, but in case you've been misled by bad information out there, I wanted to take a second to make you aware of the guidelines which I've linked to in my reply to Will. The practice you are describing is not allowed, and when Google gets wise to things like these, the hammer can come down pretty hard.
I thought it worthwhile to comment on this, because I would not want to see the Places account of any SEOmoz member penalized of banned.
Miriam
-
Hi Will,
Unfortunately, I would not recommend getting a virtual office or setting up a Google Place Page for any city in which you do not have a physical address. This practice is forbidden by Google's Places Quality Guidelines:"Business Location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.
Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. If you operate from a location but receive mail at a mail box there, please list your physical address in Address Line 1, and put your mail box or suite number in Address Line 2."
http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528
Your desire to rank well in a major city in your state is understandable, but does not meet with Google's guidelines. If ranking in Denver becomes essential for your business, you must rent a real office there - not a virtual office, not a P.O. Box - in order to qualify for inclusion in Places.
Now, if you would like to get a Place Page for your Greenwood address, the criterion you must meet is that you have in-person transactions with clients either at your Greenwood address or at your clients' locations (as in the case of a carpet cleaning company, chimney sweep etc.)
If you do not have in-person transactions with clients, your business is not local, but virtual, and again, not suitable for inclusion in Google Places.
If the latter is the case, then you will need to rely solely on organic SEO to target cities where you would like to gain rankings. Typically, this will not enable you to outrank competitors with physical locations and in-person transactions in said cities, but you may be able to achieve some visibility by a combination of copywriting and linkbuilding.
Hope this set of definitions helps, Will.
Miriam -
I really don't want to add a new location if I don't have one there and I have a Google Place page for my real address now. My address belongs to a metro area of a bigger city and I would like to rank for terms in the bigger city.
-
I know Google Places doesn't allow PO Boxes, and this might be against their terms of use too. I'm asking our local expert to add to this thread with some more information.
-
This is another great idea. Within your blog, have categories or tags for each location that you want to rank for and keep those categories fresh with local content. Then have 'areas we serve' as mentioned on your contact page and link the anchor text to the category pages or location blogs.
-
What if I already have a Google Places page but with a different city. Will they be linked together because I am using the same company name?
-
If you have a contact page on your website that talks about your location you could also mention that you serve the areas of .....I've also added cities/ counties in Google Places in the additional areas.
-
The city that my business is located in is Greenwood Village, CO but I would like to rank in Denver, CO. So I should just add another location to my google places listing?
-
Yes, I agree with the other answers about optimizing your local listings. You may even want to get citations too. One thing that I've done is to create content that is optimized for the cities. You could even add something in the footer that links to that interior (local) page.
-
Do you have a local address? Use this to your advantage by making sure you have local directory listings, Google Places, etc. Make sure you have that address on your website. Target some blogs to the local area with local keywords. You can think about having a local blog, perhaps a local social media presence as well.
-
When I have needed to do this. I usually got a virtual office address in the locations I wanted to rank. I haven't used these guys and am in no way affiliated with them, but here is an example:
http://www.davincivirtual.com/
Then just created Google Places with your new address and optimize for that.
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
-
Ranking without use of keywords on page & without use of matching anchor text??
Howdy folks. So, here is a dilemma. One of competitors of ours is somehow ranking for a keyphrase "houston chronicle obituaries" without any usage of these keywords on the page, without any full or partial anchor text match ("chronicle" is not used anywhere). The rest of competitiors' rankings make sense. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Rankings Continue To Drop
Hi there I'm at wits end trying to stop the slow bleed in our rankings to our store URL's that started mid March 2017 and continues through to today. I'd appreciate some pointers and hope this will throw up a challenge to someone out there. Here is the background: 1. We run an e-commerce store on Shopify with a blog. The recent ranking decline has been almost entirely on the store URL's (catalogue and product pages) while at the same time we have seen steady growth in search volumes in the blog - this makes me think we are seeing a Penguin4 penalty of some type, because the impact is confined to the store URLs. 2. We received a linked based manual penalty back in 2014 and this was successfully removed within 3 months. We have quite a large disavow file as a result. 3. Shortly after launch of Penguin 4.0 in Sept/Oct 2016 we saw a really nice boost in traffic and ascribed this to being under a previous Penguin algo penalty, now removed. 4. Come March 2017 we see a small but steady weekly drop in rankings for our store URL's only, this steady drop continues through to today and over time has become significant. Approximately a 50% decline in visitor numbers to store URL's only as of today, since March. All of this despite: a. Initially I thought this was a Panda issue (because it seemed to coincide with Panda releases in March and May) so the entire website has been rewritten (during June and July) with thin content removed across the store and the blog. Remaining content has been given a serious content boost, being very careful to watch for over-optimisation, and for keyword cannibalisation. I think I've got this right. There are also no crawl issues being highlighted by Moz Pro or SEMRush site audits. b. Recently discovered, only last week in fact. A very low domain website, trust score (0 and 0) had been copying our blog articles steadily on a weekly basis, starting Oct 2016 (yes same time as Penguin4) and only caught last week (my fault for missing this). These articles were copied verbatim with all links and so generated nearly 400 spammy backlinks to our store URLs (about 30% of all the links we have). I've had all these articles removed from the spammy site via DMCA so none of those links exist anymore (as of 8/14/17). I've also disavowed this domain with Google. Could these spam links be the issue, and Google is still needing to crawl this site to see the links are no longer there? I'm not sure because my understanding is that Penguin4 would have devalued these links to start? c. A general review of links and anchor text. I've used Moz Pro and SEMRush backlink audit (linked to Google Search Console) and have removed all toxic links by contacting web masters and using Google disavow. This included removing any links that I think are causing over optimised anchor text. After disavow, according to SEMRush, we have no toxic backlinks left and only 50 out of 1200 links with "Money" anchor text. This exercise was completed two days ago when the last disavow file was uploaded. However I don't believe there was an issue here before as toxic links were < 1% of all links and exact match "money" anchor text in the region of 5%. d. One potential problem with our backlinks is that we have quite a few high domain/high trust links to our scholarship page with anchor text "official website". The net result is that our "Other" anchor text category is just over 50% of total links - these are mainly educational institutions with .edu domains. e. A review of internal linking. We had some what I would refer to as SEO links, linking all product and collection pages across the store, through a tagging type system. This was removed two days ago as it was probably unnecessary for user experience. Other than this I have two concerns remaining with our internal linking structure. The first is that we have quite a big static navigation on the left margin of our store collection pages. This is not faceted navigation, but static. The second is that we've internally linked from almost every blog to our "key" money page in the store, however with varied and non-money anchor text. f. There is nothing in Google Search Console indicating a problem, no manual actions, no significant HTML improvements, and Google has indexed over 90% of URL's compared to the sitemap. All broken links have been fixed - there were a lot before but all fixed as of three weeks ago. g. Checking site speed in GA. Speed has remained constant over the period and we have put in some fixes to improve it. Site speed has not got worse and scores average in Googles speed checker. That's about it. It's possible that with the recent changes made with respect to b, c, e and f above I just need to wait a couple more weeks for Google to catch up, and would appreciate thoughts on this. However I'd also like some thoughts on the static navigation on our collection pages, plus importantly on linking from blog articles to mostly a single money page in the store - of all that remains I think this is potentially a problem. Our website is located at www.thekewlshop.com Many thanks for your help. Charles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | charlesfitz0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Brand in Title Tag - a Ranking Factor for Scaling Big Websites?
I'm in the middle of redesigning title tags on a large ecommerce site - approximately 9000 product pages. The old structure was -(product name/description) | (Website/Brand) So an example would be - Big League Chew - 13 oz. | Target - With 'Target' Being the site's brand and appearing on each. With Google's new Title Tag display, our title tags are too long now. Unfortunately, our Brand/Website is HUGE - over 18 characters. My question is two fold - 1. Is it OK to remove brand from the title tags of some particularly long names? Will this impact ranking? 2. Does Google look for brand in these title tags, and more specifically: brand consistency in title tags? I'd love to cut the brand out of some as the product name is the biggest click-through element by far - but I don't want to affect rankings. My 'gut' says that I should focus on clickthrough rate with title tags and cut brand where necessary. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blenny0 -
Rank drop in June
Since fixing a major duplicate content issue in Dec 2012, our traffic saw steady and dramatic growth through the summer. It has started to settle down now and rankings have started to decline. I have a bad feeling that something is wrong but for the life of me I cannot figure it out. Our Moz rank is pretty high but some of our biggest keywords have gone from #2 to #9 in a fairly short time period which makes me very nervous. I am not even sure where to look at this point. Any suggestions are welcomed as I am kind of at a loss now but worry I am missing something basic. www.threeguysgolf.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astaelin0 -
Keyword tool for news?
Working on developing a news product and wondering if there are tools available to gauge search interest in a particular topic. For those that work in news, what are your favorite SEO tools?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Geo-specific SERP Rank Tracker that is good for hyper local results?
We've had a lot of success using Raven Tools, as well as some other tools for SERP Rankings for our clients; however, most only go down to the country level. We're researching into some good hyper local trackers (down to the city/zip level). Does anyone have any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlastAM0 -
Ranking a site in the USA
I'm UK based and looking at setting up a site to rank in the USA. As I understand it a .com TLD is best but these are used worldwide so do I simply need to set the geotargeting to USA in webmaster tools? Or is there a better domain to use? With hosting the site in US and on page content related to US cities (I plan to create a page for each US city I operate in the the city name in the H1 tag) will that be enough for google to understand that the page should rank in the US version of google. Also how can I view Google USA search results - when I go to google.com it automatically redirects to google.co.uk and I can only change the location on the left hand side to UK cities. Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0