Optimizing for Local Terms
-
I am just building my website and planning keyword strategy for my pages.
How much is too much in terms of optimizing locally?
So if I want "web design firm birmingham al," is it overkill to add that in the URL slug, title tag, essentially all the on-page optimization?
/web-design-firm-birmingham-al
much uglier than
web-design-firm
Obviously, would prefer to think big and believe it can go beyond one city to compete in other markets statewide or regionally, thus, optimizing for one city is too narrow (and there's the ugly url thing).
I'm working on offsite local optimization, so I'm thinking this will not be necessary.
Thoughts?
-
Hi Again C Smith, Regarding this: "I bet there's a "best practice" implementation out there - perhaps an "Areas Served" channel, with the cities as sub-pages, and then some truly unique content on each page with some keywords seeded in." I recommend you take a look at this other discussion I'm having with a marketer whose client is a contractor in a service radius. View my very long, most recent comment toward the bottom of the thread to see my advice on how to do this legitimately (without being spammy): http://www.seomoz.org/q/use-schema-on-service-areas-page-for-local-business-2#post-123244 This is applicable to your business model, as well:)
-
@Miriam, Owen:
I agree that a light SEO hand is best. As one who was a writer and journalist first, I despise over-optimization.
When you are just starting out with a new website, it's tough to know how aggressive one should be. When looking at the competition for local search terms, it does seem like most of my competition that ranks well does "over-optimize" for these local search terms like "birmingham alabama web design."
However, I need to just keep my head down for the next couple of months and blog repeatedly.
I've seen that done - creating a unique page for each locale - I'm not a fan of it. I'm not knocking your comment, but it does seem that in most implementations I've seen, the content seems to be bordering on duplicate with only the local SEO terms swapped out. I bet there's a "best practice" implementation out there - perhaps an "Areas Served" channel, with the cities as sub-pages, and then some truly unique content on each page with some keywords seeded in.
Curious to what others might think of this strategy?
-
Hello C Smith,
Like your avatar.
Okay, so here's the thing: 'web design' is not actually a local query, due to Google's handling of this niche. I believe it was in January of 2010 that they stopped showing true blended/local/pack-type results for web design queries, so your approach to this is basically going to be organic, in terms of SEO, rather than what you'd be doing if you were a shoe store in Birmingham.
If you're located in Birmingham and your goal at this point is to attract Birmingham-based businesses, then I would imagine your whole website (not just a landing page) would make frequent mention of Birmingham and the businesses you serve there.
But, as Owen has rightly pointed out, it is better to use a light hand in this. Don't go overboard. Write titles, tags and text that read naturally. Remember, you don't have to string your phrases together every time. In other words, you don't have to write:
Birmingham Alabama Website Design Services
over and over again.
A paragraph might contain the words 'Birmingham' and 'Website Design' and 'Services' and 'Alabama' within it, of course, but they don't have to be stuck all in a row with glue:)
Between Panda, Penguin and EMD issues over the past year, Google is very clearly moving towards a preference for naturalness. So, using a gentle touch is going to serve you better in the long run, both as far as human users and search engine bots are concerned.
-
I'd suggest starting out a bit more modestly. Follow SEO best practices as outlined via the SEOmoz tools and Google SEO 101. Present the keywords in a natural way which lets the user know what the page is about. If you find you aren't gaining traction in terms of visibility for those terms, and your competitive analysis tells you, you should, then perhaps increase the optimization.
Exact match domain value is something Google is looking with a sharper eye on now so don't overdo that just to rank for a city phrase out of the gate.
-
Hi- I'm not an expert but it seems like you could create a main landing page that includes links to all possible cities (maybe use a div tag for all that extra info.) at: web-design-firm, then create a specific landing page for each city: web-design-firm/birmingham then optimize that page. It's a lot of work for someone advertising to a lot of different locations, but you could use the opportunity to add really great locally-specific content that would help your users and SEO.
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
-
Is there a tool that can alert me whenever the first page of search results change for a certain search term in a specific region?
Is there a tool that can alert me whenever the first page of search results change for a certain search term in a specific region?
Keyword Research | | Amanda_Palmary0 -
Optimizing a Webpage without keywords
Hi all, I’m really running into a challenge internally lately in that we have a lot of teams redesigning or building new pages (specificially one team) that do NOT loop our teams in. When we finally get them to work with us, to drive traffic to the pages, they disagree that there must be other ways of optimizing the pages than focusing on keywords with search volume that are relevant to the page. We usually land that they will choose a keyword or two they think a user will search for, we do keyword research and pick something close (because they don’t want to utilize a term that doesn’t make much sense, as they have written the content without involving us from the beginning, but then our search volume is declining). They keep saying there are other ways than changing the paired down content on their page and adding in keywords to the H1 headers, content on page. they mentioned semantic search at one point. For example, https://www.entrust.com/products/entrust-getaccess/ currently ranks around #10 for "single sign on solution." This keyword was on the previous page quite a few times in headers and body copy. Now it appears on the page 3 times after the redesign and is not in the h1. The team does for example want to optimize for this term, but there’s lots of pushback as they want a page with minimal content and little design. Just wondering your thoughts on this. IS this a common challenge you deal with too and any idea on answers as I've tried many with the teams? Thanks, Laura
Keyword Research | | lauramrobinson321 -
On-page optimization for closely related keywords or acronyms of keywords
We are in the process of on-page optimization for a site that sells one kind of software. We are trying to optimize each page for a target keyword and variations of the keyword, however we have more pages than keyword variation types, so I'm looking for feedback on whether the below plan would be keyword cannibalization. Examples: URL: www.domain.com/product
Keyword Research | | seo_1234b
Tarket Keyword: device imaging software
Title Tag: Device Imaging Software | Company Name URL: www.domain.com/solutions
Target Keyword: device imaging solutions
Title Tag: Device Imaging Solutions | Company Name URL: www.domain.com/products/product-name
Target Keyword: dis (acronym)
Title Tag: DIS Software | Product Name | Company Name My question is are these keyword too closely related for each of the pages? Will they be considered duplicate title tags? Keyword cannibalization? etc. Thanks!0 -
General Advice or Strategies on optimizing Non-Plural and Plural
Moz, I was just looking for any insights, advice, personal experiences in optimization for keywords that have Non Plural and Plural variants, Basically from my keyword and traffic research i have gathered the majority of the search traffic i am looking to gain is coming through the singular spelling of the keyword i am currently optimizing and updating our page for, From experience with this we have always ranked for the general non plural quantity page and brought traffic from both, My Example : Our lollipops page which has meta information targeted towards 'Lollipops' rather than the singular 'Lollipop' but links to Singular information pages that are targeting the singular word 'Lollipop' This way seemed to make sense as it wouldn't be good for user experience to have titles and headers on a page listing multiple products as a single instance, the content of the page would mostly reflect this targeting also, To make things worse the page language and content is in German where their seems to be many ways of saying the same word from my understanding, Am i doing the right thing in not sacrificing my user experience to target the singular version of the word ? Just some advice please? Apologies i struggled to get my question across well, Thanks James
Keyword Research | | Antony_Towle0 -
Best Practices For Keyword Optimization
Hey currently building a new page on a clients site in the weight loss niche. The keywords he wants to rank for are the following: <colgroup><col width="198"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
Keyword Research | | monster99
| [fat burning foods] | 49500 |
| [foods that burn fat] | 22200 |
| [fat burning foods for women] | 2900 |
| [belly fat burning foods] | 2900 |
| [best fat burning foods] | 1900 |
| [fat burning foods for men] | 1900 |
| [list of fat burning foods] | 720 | His site is new, but he has excellent content production capabilities. My question is, in terms of optimizing the page (the title and url) for these keywords would you focus on the highest volume keyword. In this case the highest volume keyword is "fat burning foods" however is the most competitive and dominated by high domain authority sites (50+ vs. clients site which is around 30). Thus its highly unlikely he will rank for that keyword for quite a while. But for the keyword term "best fat burning foods" the competition is alot less in terms of DA and other factors but volume is smaller with 1900 hits a month. So would you optimize the page (the title and url) for "best fat burning food" or would you optimize thinking about the long-term and eventually ranking the keyword "fat burning foods". My thinking would be to optimize the page for "fat burning foods". And that the benefits of optimizing (url and title) for "best fat burning foods" isn't ideal for the long-run. Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated. Cheers, Mark0 -
Local search data
Is there a good reliable tool for getting search volume for local keywords. The adwords keyword tool is nice but I am wanting to know which cities get which portion of the local traffic they present.
Keyword Research | | webfeatseo0 -
Do you avoid the use of stop words in your keyword optimization?
For example, for the keyword phrase 'the history of the united states,' how would you determine whether or not to include 'the' or 'of' in the title, description, and URL? Do you tend to use stop words or not in your keyword optimization? Why or why not?
Keyword Research | | nicole.healthline0 -
Optimizing for two nearly identical keywords.
Hi Mozzers, So in one of my campaigns I'm trying to optimize for "Personal Trainer Minneapolis" and "Minneapolis Personal Trainer". Would the best tactic be: Develop and optimize two pages. One for each of these similar keywords. (Clearly not the best UX). or Try to optimize a single page for both. Thanks for your thoughts!
Keyword Research | | JesseCWalker0