How Google Deals with States and State Abbreviations
-
I am in the process of doing research on building content for some state to state transactions. Through our PPC ad history I can see people have searched relatively evenly for full state names versus state abbreviations. Texas vs TX or California vs. CA. If I do a google search for one of our key terms with the state abbreviation, it seems that google returns results with the full state name and bolds the full state name in the meta description even though only the abbreviation, and not the full state name was part of the search. I guess I'm trying to figure out if its worth me building out and targeting two sets of content...one around the full state names and one around the state abbreviations.
Any advice?
-
Hi Chris
I generally agree with "xvp's" answer. Google for the most part can pick up the distinction between the state and abbreviation. What you can do is check search volume (if there is any) for each - optimize for the one most searched for in key places like the title tag, but just make sure to include variations within the content if possible. Like include the abbreviation in the meta description if you've written it out in the title tag. But you definitely don't need to create separate pieces of content or anything just to target one or the other.
-Dan
-
Hi Chris,
Google recognizes both, and will show results for both on a search for one (either abbreviation or full name), but they are still working out this kinks. Issues like Google not being able to distinguish between words with more than one meaning like "OH" as the state abbreviation and as the expression, "IN", "OR" etc. They also still treat key phrases as separate in some cases, so if the phrase is searched I would target both. If you must choose, go for the full name.
Hope this makes sense.
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 do I outrank Monster and ZipRecruiter in Google for Jobs?
My company has recently started using Google for Jobs to post all of it's available positions. Unfortuntely, they also list these same jobs on third party job boards like Monster.com, ZipRecruiter, Lensa, etc. Some people are wondering why we aren't outranking these third party sites. My explanation has been that those sites are specifically made for job searching and have much better authority with Google, so they are going to always outrank us. Aside from taking down the third party posts, is there anything we can do to get our jobs higher in the rankings for Google for Jobs? Very appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
How does google decide who to rank 1 st ?
Let take a medical example. Flu symptoms How does google know who has the best answer ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
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 -
How do I know what pages of my site is not inedexed by google ?
Hi I my Google webmaster tools under Crawl->sitemaps it shows 1117 pages submitted but 619 has been indexed. Is there any way I can fined which pages are not indexed and why? it has been like this for a while. I also have a manual action (partial) message. "Unnatural links to your site--impacts links" and under affects says "Some incoming links" is that the reason Google does not index some of my pages? Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Does google penalize for banner ads?
client has banners on site 1 linking to site 2 and vice-versa but these links are auto generated with each blog post ( new post means new ad link) is this a problem? see, its not like he just has one banner on reach site pointing back to the other - his ads automatically appear on each page that a blog post is posted - im sure you know what i mean but im trying to to my best to make sense here everytime another blog post is created for site 1 then another banner is also created linking to site 2 client thinks it may be a big problem - is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ezpro90 -
Google Translate for Unique Content
We are considering using the Google Translation tool to translate customer reviews into various languages for publication as indexable content both for users and for search engine long tail visibility and rankings. Does anyone have any experience, insights or caveats to share?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edreamsbcn0 -
How to make Google forget my pages ?
Hello all ! I've decided to delete many pages from my website wich had poor content. I've made a php 301 redirect from all these old pages to a unique page (not the home page, a deep page). My problem is that this modification has been made a week ago and my position in the SERPs have crashed down... What can I do ? I believe that I'll get up again when Google will see that these pages don't exist anymore but it could take a long time 😞 (these page are in the Google cache with a date older than my modification's date) I've read somewhere that I should put a link to the destination page (where old pages are 301 redirected) but I don't understand how it could help... Can someone help me ? Tell me what I've done wrong... These pages were very poor and I've deleted them in order to boost the global quality of my site... It should help me in the SERPs, not penalize me...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | B-CITY0 -
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NEWCRAFT0