Should I use general keywords or city specific keywords for back link campaign?
-
I am working on a new client that offer appliance repair in all of california and I was wondering would it be ok if I just target general keywords like "appliance repair" instead of city specific keywords like "los angeles appliance repair" for the back link campaign . I am sure city specific would be better for rankings, but would the general keywords help local seo at all? What is the best way to go about this with out having to make a city specific page for all listings? thanks
-
Hi Jesse,
You've received some thoughtful advice so far here from the community. I think it would help if you could clarify your business model, as this is quite important in terms of Local SEO.
Does your client have a single physical address or multiple physical addresses throughout California? I'm having a hard time picturing how a single location business could repair appliances throughout the whole length of California, so maybe I'm not understand your business model correctly. And, if the situation is that the business only has a single physical location in the city of Los Angeles, why would you need to rank in cities statewide? In other words, how would it help for the business to rank for 'appliance repair Eureka' unless services can be rendered up there in the north?
I think the more specific you can be about your business model, the more targeted advice you'll receive here. Hope this helps!
-
I think you could do both...
Have a page which is like a directory page for all their depots, but then have individual pages for each depot giving their full name, address and phone number, a Google map, details of the types and makes of appliance that depot repairs, opening times etc.
An example of a company that does both is Walmart. If you click on the More Details link in the page below you are taken to a detailed page about an individual store:
Or look at Fedex. They have a state level directory for California: http://local.fedex.com/ca/ which drills down to cities: http://local.fedex.com/ca/los-angeles/ and then to offices within that city: http://local.fedex.com/ca/los-angeles/office-4566/
OK, Fedex are huge, but they have very detailed individual pages for each of their offices. Whilst your client may only have a few service & repair depots in California, the principle is the same.
Peter
-
I am a little unsure what 'back link campaign' means but if it means Link Building then I recommend you to watch these before you work on it:
http://moz.com/blog/the-death-of-link-building-and-the-rebirth-of-link-earning-whiteboard-friday
http://moz.com/blog/seos-dilemma-link-building-vs-content-marketing-whiteboard-friday
http://moz.com/blog/the-top-4-ways-to-use-social-media-to-earn-links-whiteboard-friday
-
But would I need to make an additional page for each city or can I still get benefit from just adding cities in anchor text?
-
Google hasn't put a specific number to how many backlinks is bad or good. Just keep them diverse, spread out so you aren't doing 100 links a day or 5,000 a month like some of these crazy SEO companies tell you they can build for you. Use variations with plural versions, use commas, full state names, use variations in your URL for the anchor text link www.domain.com is different than http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com/. Keep the content relevant and high quality as we consider Google to be a human these days, so if a human has a hard time reading it, then you know Google will also. Keep your links on a steady flow and not all at once to spread them out over the weeks/months. If you think it feels or looks spammy, it most likely is in Google's eye too.
- Patrick
-
Patrick,
Thank you for your helpful input, I was wondering if there was a thing as too many different back link keywords? Would it be bad?
-
Hi Jesse
When you say they offer appliance repair in all of California does your client have a single location to which appliances are brought or taken to for repair or just one?
So, to use your example, if they have depot in Los Angeles which people can phone to arrange for their appliance to be repaired, then include a page on the site with the address details of the Los Angeles depot and optimise that page for "Appliance Repairs Los Angeles". Then do the same with all the other cities they have depots.
If they only have one location, then it will make more sense to just optimise for "Appliance Repair California".
As I say, it really depends on how your client operates.
I hope that helps,
Peter -
Jesse,
The type of anchor text (keyword) used for your link building should be diverse based on some important factors.
What type of links are you going to build - Social bookmarks, Directory, Guest Post, Press Release, Citation, etc... Based on what type of link you are going to build, you should switch up the general "service" keyword with geo-specfic keywords "city + service" and "service + city". Do some keyword research also to determine variations of keywords in how a service is being searched and if state names or abbreviations are being used like "service + city + state abbrevation" (appliance repair los angeles ca).
Just remember, Google is looking at original content, diversified links and diverse anchor text when considering to build rank and authority of a domain. Local SEO loves local citations, so look into this to begin building your link strategy. Keep in mind NAP (Name, Address, Phone) as well. If you are only based in LA, then you're going to have a tough time ranking locally in Google Maps for searches in San Diego or the like. Test the waters without being spammy and analyze. Also consider blog articles on the website www.domain.com/blog/article-title-here/ which can help you target more city specific terms, content and links so you aren't creating 1 page per city if that would be too much work.
Hope this helps. - Patrick
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
-
Have any suggestions for next steps in link building campaign?
We are conducting SEO and white-hat link building campaign for a client that is in the national (US) fertility/infertility niche. So far we've done outreach to potential websites that we found to be a good fit for the campaign, although the conversion rate for getting Guest Posts, even Sponsored Posts is quite low. Furthermore, the number of these potential websites is close to running out and it's getting harder to find other websites with relevant metrics that are outreach-worthy. Besides Guest Post/Sponsored Post outreach, we've done Link Reclamation, Resource Links and Broken Link Building. Also, we tried expanding the list of keywords to try and come up with some new leads (in sub-niches) but haven't had much success. One peculiar thing that is happening when we do start a communication with the blog/website owners is that they get interested in the topic at first, up to the point of asking us to send them a Guest Post article and then.. silence, no response from them. We do a couple of follow-ups, but in most cases we don't hear back from them. We realize that there could be some editorial changes that they might want to be done, which we would be willing to do, but they just simply do not respond at all. When talking to other people in the SEO business we get different opinions on how to proceed, ranging from creation of web 2.0 properties and linking them up with video content and the client website, to even creating SEO link wheels. We are quite committed to our client and would love to get their site ranking, but we're reluctant to use tactics that might yield only short term results and might end up hurting the rankings on the long run. Other part of our strategy is creating quality content on our client's blog (within their website) and doing outreach to bloggers to get them interested in the topics that we are covering. So far these efforts have also not been very successful. Basically, my question is when you are doing a link building campaign for a client, what is your next strategy when the link opportunities run out?
Link Building | | Ullamalm0 -
Manual Links Vs. Smart Links
Hey Everybody, Is there any downside to the smart link plugins that I see all over wordpress? Basically in short I enter a keyword and where I want that link to go (primarily internal) and set the parameters of repetition etc and it automatically adds the link to that. Now other than the obvious situation where it might put a link in an awkward place, is there anything wrong with this sort of software? Part of me things that this sort of software would not be liked by Google, and that it isn't really getting counted as a true link, but i wanted to see if there were other thoughts or experience with this.
Link Building | | HashtagHustler0 -
Internal linking anchor text with automated ASP.NET link building
Hi Everyone I really need some help here, the problem I have must be one that many have. I have a simple e-commerce style website so 1 product page can in fact get 40-50 internal links to it. These links come from a mixture of: 1. The parent category pages that the product sits on (Rugged PDA) and in turn the 10 filter pages of this category page (Rugged PDA, ordered by battery size). 2. Alternative product list on other product pages, So many products link to each other as alternatives. From Google analytics we can see that visitors like to browse product to product seeing 5 alternatives on each page with titles like "Smaller", "more rugged" etc. 3. Manufactuer pages, so we have a link to each product from each manufacturer home page where we talk lots about each manufacture we resell. We also have links from images used in the website. So its a nice usable website but we're finding that Google is still telling us in Webmaster tools that it thinks some links are dubious and we're trying to find out why. We only now have 190 external links to the website, most are internal and from the website or our blog on a subdomain. The problem we think is that we generate the category and products pages all dynamically so the anchor text is looking the same. Will this potentially create issues for us? Dave
Link Building | | Raptor-crew0 -
Spammy Links in MOZ but when I go to the external link I can't find a link to us
I was going to try to contact webmasters to see if they would remove some of our spammy links. I see alot of them in MOZ but when you go to the site our anchor text is not there. Is this good? How often does MOZ refresh external links. Please see: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.totalvac.com None of the links for the anchor text <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="vacuum cleaner parts vacuum parts vacuum bags vacuum cleaner bags" data-id="46391436859">vacuum cleaner parts vacuum part...</a> in MOZ exist? We got hit extremely hard by Penguin in May
Link Building | | totalvac0 -
Link to those that link to you? Worthwhile?
We have thousands and thousands of sites that link to a domain we are working on, many with low page authority and high domain (bloggers, forum posts, etc). Has anyone experimented with linking to the pages that link to you (not from your site) but from other means in an effort to boost their quality? I'm not sure what method we would use, maybe some relevant blog comments or social votes. But curious if this could be an effective method.
Link Building | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Building on specific keywords
Hi Guys, I'm will be building on specific keywords for my site and I'm thinking of doing some article marketing & I would like some advise, please. I'm going to write 10 300 word articles and within each article I will have 2 anchor text links going back to my site. To reinforce this I will be pinging the articles once completed. I will be submitting the articles to ezine, go articles etc. Advise and some other suggestions as to best practice for building on specific keywords would be appreciated, thank you.
Link Building | | Socialdude0 -
Find a specific link
Is there a tool that allows me to find a specific link. We just had a strong link type show up, but I can't find it anywhere in my backlink profile.
Link Building | | trafficlinker0 -
Link Building: Asking for links versus building links
I am currently delving into link building for SEO having started out from a social media marketing side. From that angle, it was always my belief building high quality links came from engaging targeted bloggers and sites in my market and related verticals for product reviews and/or providing expert advise and opinion for posts they are creating. As I am learning more the "technical" side of SEO, I've read a lot of posters on here talk about asking from links from websites. While I get the concept from a strategic stand point, are links really asking for or is better to continue to pursue the long term investment of pitching to get coverage from well known bloggers and sites?
Link Building | | joshuaopinion1