Use of Location Folders
-
I'd like to understand the pro's and con's of using a location subfolder as an SEO strategy (example: http://sqmedia.us/Dallas/content-marketing.html), where the /Dallas folder is holding all of my keyword rich page titles. The strategy is to get local-SEO benefits from the use of the folder titled /Dallas (a folder which is unnecessary in the over all structure of this site), but how much is this strategy taking away from the page-title keyword effectiveness?
-
Hello SEO5,
Since I'm a virtual business wanting to rank well here in Dallas, as well as build my ranking nationally over time,
you're feedback on these two examples would be interesting:
http://sqmedia.us/dallas-tx/customer-experience-optimization.html
http://sqmedia.us/customer-experience-optimization-dallas-tx.html
The first address is the easiest to work with, as I have a keyword in each page URL, although having the keyword not so far back in the URL might be better for keyword ranking. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Steve
-
Hi Miriam,
Yes, I have a local number and a unique physical address. I'll change the phone number on the site to the local number instead of the 888 number, and forward to my service. I'll also aim for organic results. I'm a virtual business wanting to rank well here in Dallas where I'm located. Many thanks, Steve
-
Hi Steve,
Do you have a unique physical office and dedicated local phone number in Dallas? This is the only way to go after true local rankings for any service. Without this, your SEO efforts will need to have organic, rather than local, results as a goal.
If you are virtual business attempting to get some organic traffic for different cities where you have clients, which is what I'm guessing the hope is here, it would be most typical simply to create a city landing page high in the architecture of the site for each target city. So you'd have: mysite.com/dallas-content-marketing-services or mysitecome/austin-content-marketing-services
I don't see a need to put these things in different folders, but, I definitely do see a need to be sure you are creating totally unique content for each of these landing pages. That is critical.
Does this help answer your question? If not, feel free to provide further details.
-
Hi Steve,
I'd like to reference this site www.cityfeet.com that i did in one of my earlier posts. This site ranks extremely well for any geo targeted search for the keyword "office space for lease" . Type in " office space for lease dallas" or "office space for lease new york" they are always in the top search results. Their URL structure is below:
http://www.cityfeet.com/cont/new-york-office-space
http://www.cityfeet.com/cont/tx/dallas-office-space
So it seems like you may have to adopt a dual structure on the site. For the more competitive search terms you can have the keyword close to the domain name. For the others , you can have a state abbreviation and the city keyword next.
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
-
Moving image directory location on redesign.
I'm getting ready to do a redesign for a client and one thing that annoys me about the directory structure of the website is that he has files buried deep in the directories. For example, the images are buried like four folders deep in some cases and I would like to move all of those images into an images folder directly below the root. All of those images, however, have already been indexed by google and show up in google images. If I start moving those images around, could it hurt his rankings?
Technical SEO | | ScottMcPherson0 -
SEO across sites built using Google Web Toolkit
Hi guys, General question around general SEO best practices, such as url and title, and how they fit in with Google Web Toolkit built sites that use a www.site.com/#!category=12345 format. The space we're getting into is heavily competitive, with many established players doing standard SEO well. I know there are some speed benefits to using GWT, however I'd like to better understand the SEO impact, if any, before the site development progresses too far. Cheers, Jez
Technical SEO | | jez0000 -
Folder Hierarchy Structure Theory
Hi, I was wondering if search engines, in particular, Google, actually use folder hierarchy to determine how important a particular page on a website might be for ranking purposes, or is on-site page inter-linking only taken into consideration. I know that external and internal links help to support the authority or 'page rank' of a particular webpage on a website. In a typical Wordpress installation, for example, it is easy to create a page and assign child-pages to support it. These sub-pages would naturally link to their parent pages via menu and/or body links, so they would theoretically 'support' the authority of the parent folder/page. My question is... would search engines see the parent folder page as more authoritative than a child-page, even without a lot of on-site interlinking of child and parent pages, just because it is higher up in the folder structure? For example, I have a client who has a Wordpress website, but is using a plugin to make all pages have a .htm ending. The site is fairly 'flat', hierarchally speaking and does not use any /folders/, but the pages are inter-linked. In the following scenario, there are 4 testimonial pages... 1 main one and 3 supporting pages. The 3 supporting pages are linked to from the parent page and vice versa. /testimonials.htm /testimonials-quality.htm /testimonials-price.htm /testimonials-ease.htm I was wondering if it is worth suggesting to my client that we remove that plugin so that we can more easily employ the natural folder hierarchy functions of Wordpress, such as this scenario: /testimonials/ /testimonials/quality/ /testimonials/price/ /testimonials/ease/ Would the loss of 'link juice' due to redirects and the work that would be involved would be worth the possible ranking increases of potentially structuring the website better... or are we fine just relying on the existing page interlinking to show the search engines what are the important parent pages?
Technical SEO | | OrionGroup0 -
Locating 404 Page Errors for Deletion
On my SEOmoz report, there are several 404 pages that I assume need deletion. Yes? When I am looking at my pages from the back-end of WordPress, how do I identify these to delete or fix them? In the list of pages I have created, it is not at all apparent when I click into "edit" the page that any of these are broken pages. I think the 404 pages are urls from pages that I changed the url to be more seo friendly, but they don't really exist. I hope this makes sense - it is baffling to me : ) Thank you for any insight and help with getting these cleared. The errors are listed below from the report. Sheryl | 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/durango-dentists-why-greg-mann/dentists-in-durango-co/Cosmetic_Dentistry_Services_Teeth_Whitening_Montezuma_CO.html 404 1 0 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/durango-dentists-why-greg-mann/dentists-in-durango-co/General_Dentistry_Services_White_Fillings_Montezuma_CO.html 404 1 0 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/durango-dentists-why-greg-mann/dentists-in-durango-co/Request_an_Appointment.html 404 1 0 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/videos/repairing-teeth/pid%3A4078865 404 1 0 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/videos/teeth-whitening/pid%3A4078865 404 1 0 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/videos/veneers/pid%3A4078865 | 404 | 1 | 0 |
Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.0 -
What are the SEO implications of URLs that use a # in them?
I have several clients who have begun to ask questions about sites that are designed to look like a single page. When you click on a link, the URL changes but it uses a # before (i.e. http://www.kelloggs.com/teamusa**/#**/teamusa/athletes/kerri-walsh.html. What are the SEO implications of having a page set up this way? I noticed that Google has indexed this page but the indexed URL does not include a #. Is Google indexing a separate version of this page? Any insights would be really helpful! Thanks
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
How can I use a keyword based domain to rank for my existing site?
Hi everyone, From my understanding if your keywords are in your domain name it can help you rank for the keyword. My site www.pixelchefs.com was affected from the latest Google Algorithm changes, as I used my main site as a testing ground for all my back linking. Our site was a single page with Jquery slide, late February the same time with the Google algo changes we uploaded our new site, larger site with lots of pages and info. Result of that was that home page has PR3 and all other pages PR0. Well I don't really depend on Google for any work as most of my work comes from referrals.......but While searching for names for my private page I came across the domain name www.DesignOrlando.com, The specific keyword gets 22,210 view per month according to Google analytics and also contains part of the keyword for all the keywords I am after. I want to use the domain name for my main site but i am not sure what is the best way to forward the domain so Google can start reading my site as DesignOrlando.com Any Suggestions will be very appreciated.
Technical SEO | | alex_pixelchefs0 -
How do I use the Robots.txt "disallow" command properly for folders I don't want indexed?
Today's sitemap webinar made me think about the disallow feature, seems opposite of sitemaps, but it also seems both are kind of ignored in varying ways by the engines. I don't need help semantically, I got that part. I just can't seem to find a contemporary answer about what should be blocked using the robots.txt file. For example, I have folders containing site comps for clients that I really don't want showing up in the SERPS. Is it better to not have these folders on the domain at all? There are also security issues I've heard of that make sense, simply look at a site's robots file to see what they are hiding. It makes it easier to hunt for files when they know the directory the files are contained in. Do I concern myself with this? Another example is a folder I have for my xml sitemap generator. I imagine google isn't going to try to index this or count it as content, so do I need to add folders like this to the disallow list?
Technical SEO | | SpringMountain0