Local ranking (keyword) strategies
-
Hello SEOmozers,
I've been working on improving all components of my SEO skills for the past 6 months. I have definitely had some great victories and some gray defeats.
My newest challenge is local ranking for a home improvement company. My target is to rank them locally with Google within the top 7 results. I have managed to do so, but only for one keyword "windows and doors CITY". My campaign, in terms of anchor text has a wide variety of long and shortail keywords, I have not concentrated on the above keyword.
My question is, how do I go about to rank this website in the local results for all other keywords "windows CITY", "window replacement CITY", etc...
What I don't understand is how Google picks up which keywords to rank the website locally for, and which ones to ignore.
Any information will be well received.
Cheers,
Nikster
-
Hi Nikola,
The reason I'm suggesting the above tool is that I think you need to research competitors who are managing to rank for both keywords to discover if they are doing something different or better than your business is. The answer to your question may lie in this research.
If Google is providing local results for both keyword phrases and you are appearing in one and not the other, there is some reason why Google is considering your company as a relevant result for one query but not the other. This isn't something that can be diagnosed without research into your unique company and your unique competitors. Perhaps a competitor has a better optimized website, more links, different types of citations, more frequent/fresher relevant content, more reviews, an older domain than you. There is a lot to explore. Thus, my recommendation of competitive analysis.
Regarding social media, yes, this likely plays some role in your local rankings, but the extent of that role is unknown. Clearly, Google is moving more and more towards social factors (think Google+) but the weight of these factors is not really clear.
-
Great! I think you'll like it!
-
Thank you for your answers and advices.
@Miriam, very nice tool, I tested it yesterday.
My problem is not with keyword research or citations format or placement. I just want to figure out how Google chooses which of my keywords to associate with my local rankings. For instance, I can rank locally for "roofing replacement Toronto" but not for "roofing Toronto". My keyword building campaign has concentrate on both keywords (plus others) equally. However, one is nowhere to be found on local search :).
What do you guys think about social shares, likes, pluses etc...do those play any role in local rankings?
Thanks again.
-
Cool, never came across that tool, will give it a whirl.
-
Hi Nikster,
Marcus has given a terrific reply. I'll add just one tip. I think 51 Blocks' competitive analysis tool offers great insight into why different businesses might be surpassing your own for various queries. The tool is free and I recommend you give it a whirl:
http://www.51blocks.com/online-marketing-tools/free-local-analysis/
-
First thing you want to do here is do some research.
1. Keyword Research - find the keywords you are interested in (obviously)
2. Do these keywords generate local results blended in with the main results?
3. If so - research the current ranking sites.
- How are they categorised
- what citations do they have?
- what do the citations look like?
- How is the actual site optimised for these terms?
- What is their organic ranking for these terms?
- What is their backlink profile look like?
A good way to dig into the competitors is to simply google their name, postcode and then remove their site from the results. This will get you started:
"Competitor" AND "Post Code" -site:http://www.competitor.co.uk
4. Think reviews - get reviews on your Google listing and also on any other relevant sites (looking at the local listings you should see external review sources mentioned if there are any worth considering).
--
Ultimately, you are going to want to do some local SEO - citations, local backlinks etc but you first want to make sure you have all the basics in place and the site and google maps listings are all correctly categorised. Then, get busy on those citations and get creative - anything can be a citation so think
- Press releases
- Q&A Sites
- Videos and Image descriptions
- Social profiles
- forum profiles & sigs
- Guest post bios
- article bios
Obviously, go after the directories where you can get listed. Look for any local directories or sites for citations and for industry specific directories.
Also, make sure you get the basics right. Get the name, address and postcode on every page of the site and make sure it is consistent with the Google listings. If you already have some citations, audit them and make sure everything is consistent there as well.
That should be enough to but in a nutshell dig in, research, find out what the successful people are doing and do more of it.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Nikola,
I just posted the exact same question within 60 min of you.
Ping me in you get some ideas.. results etc...
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
-
Keyword stuffing in document
Hi, I recieve a grade A on my on page grader, however i get "Avoid Keyword Stuffing in Document" - now on my page, i am not sure if its avoidable. It says this is highly important, but here is the issue. My website specialises in a particular product, so we have many variations of that product, different fabrics, styles, trimmings etc, so we have over 50 URLS pertaining to different variations of that "keyword" it's not in a spammy way, its actually done as customers are searching for it that way. Let's say for example scarves. Cotton Scarves, Viscose Scarves, Polyester Scarves, Pom Pom Scarves, etc etc So on my homepage even if i reduce the text mentions of "scarves" the urls still have 50 or so with it as the title, and in the URL. So how do i avoid this form of "keyword Stuffing" ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phoenixcg0 -
Ranking with subdomain - Urgent
Does anyone have any experience if it is possible to get a website ranking on a subdomain? I'm trying out a business idea and need to keep costs to an absolute minimum. I have a site which I designed in wix.com they give a free subdomain and I want to know if there's any chance of getting it to rank Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Why my site not ranking
Hello everyone, can anyone suggest me, where i am having problem in my site www.suntechengineers.com, i know content is less,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojathakar
but any other things that i am missing in my site? Is There any on page query please let me know, i need urgently getting up this,please help thanx in advance0 -
Keyword Rankings: One keyword dropped, dragging other rankings down. Possible or not?
Hey moz fans, So these week I noticed significant drop in rankings... But what caught my attention is that one specific keyword dropped 18 positions, and all the other just 1-3. Print screen: http://prntscr.com/7fb4g4 Do you think it's possible that the drop of that page, that went 18 positions down, brought the whole domain down? Or is it another cause?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kokolo0 -
Homepage bombed from rankings
I'm working on a site that has historically had issues ranking the homepage. We cleaned up some on page issues and then it went into a high and low pattern - page 4 then page 12 etc (was static around page 9 before), settling at page 6. The link profile was not good and there were a high level of links that should have been no-follow as they were clearly looking paid for - we addressed this along with some other poor links. This effectively dropped ranking down to page 23, but not unexpected considering the very big drop in followed links. Meanwhile we have embarked on a fresh steady link building strategy with nice clean links, varied anchor text coming from varying DA domains, smattered with a few no-follow links - strongly focussing on being as natural as possible. At the Penguin update the homepage has totally disappeared. Frustratingly just after the update (same day) we removed a 301ed old domain from the profile. This was the old company URL which we discovered had a lot of spam linking associated with it. An oversight - there were other 301 domains that were removed some time ago which were totally unrelated to the main site and we were told all other domains were simply bought and redirected to stop hijacking - all but this were. Considering the work we have done would it be good assumption this domain 301 could be the underlying factor? So far organic traffic is steady, in fact a tad up. What would you guys do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Wrong page being ranked
Hi there, This seems a bit of a strange one, I have a particular keyword which I am trying to rank for, all internal links with the appropriate anchor text are pointing to the page I want to rank for, for this particular keyword, all external links are pointing to the page I want to rank for, for this particular keyword, however Google is ranking another page on my website for this keyword and the bizarre things is the page which is being ranked is a .PDF I am really not sure what else to do to give Google the hint that they are ranking the wrong page, any ideas? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Triple listing in rankings
We have a triple listing for the keyword vca cursus (Dutch keyword). But the page we optimized for that keyword ranks lower than our vca examen page. First we had the number one spot but now we rank 2 to 5. In opensite explorer i compared the competiton and we scored on almost all factors better. Do you know the causes why the vca examen page ranks higher then the vca cursus page. Is it possible to change that or reverse the triple listing somehow. And why does our competitor ranks higher?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PlusPort0 -
Website Ranking Issue
Hey All My question is specfic to a particular website. The category of the website is Kitchen Appliances. The keyword is extremely competitive. The website I am currently optimizing has loads of products and many pages as well. I am constantly building links from industry specific websites for the website as well as composing articles and leading the users back to the website with keyword rich anchor text. I have been doing this for around 3 months and I do not see the website in the first 30 pages of the SERP (for the keyword kitchen appliances - the site is a page rank 2 BTW). No bugs reported as well in Webmaster tools. My next step is to add these articles to the website (www.example.com/KitchenAppliances ) with keyword rich metatags as well as content with internal links to my product pages. I also plan on sending traffic to these pages to build the pages link popularity. Do you think I can expect better results for the article pages than my original website product pages or do you think I should continue with the link building activity I was performing originally for the website. regards Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team2