Localised results always been returned for a query, how do you handle this?
-
I've got an interesting issue relating to geo-location and I'm not sure how to go about solving it. The site: http://www.onlinecoal.co.uk according to the Moz rank tracker is currently ranking 12th for the term "coal merchants" but has been as high as 5th in recent weeks.
However, I've tried the search out in a number of locations (cleared caches, not logged in, different devices etc) and it always seems to returns results with a bias towards local business. The only way I see the results that Moz reports is by using this string: https://www.google.com/?q=coal&pws=0#pws=0&q=coal+merchants&safe=off&start=10
I know from the visits report by analytics that my experience is typical of that potential visitors are finding, Google always returns localised results for the term "coal merchants"
My question is two pronged:
1. What causes google to decide that a general search term is best served with localised results?
2. What is my best strategy to deal with this?
-
Thank you everyone, lot of interesting information. We'll take the approach suggested by Miriam of building up organic authority slowly and we're already on with Adwords (this site is only 5 months old so it was the obvious choice over the winter). I'm also going to follow Rob's advice and focus on a few local areas based on Analytics to try and get a bit more visibility until we build up some domain authority.
Thanks again,
Rodney
-
Sorry, had to go away a bit.
The Omskirk is being returned due to proximity. You are near there, you get to see Omskirk. If you went into Google Search settings and made the location London, you would see London showing more.So, someone in Liverpool, won't be seeing a bunch of Omskirk.
Your question was: How do you handle localised results being returned for a query? You don't. In the eyes of search engines (Google in this case), search results are impacted by the searcher who makes the queries. If you and I are in the same room and we both search on Home delivered coal, we will likely get a somewhat different result (you search on that type term more and click on specific results that modify what you see.) If we both are on non personalized search and in the same room, 99% we will get the same SERP.
So, we probably got off track a bit with the way we all answered. If not, then Miriam's direction is as solid as can be. She knows local back and front. You can either grow slowly or you advertise for a faster result.
The only way YOU will impact Local terms is to use them. Now, DO NOT GO OUT AND CREATE A BUNCH OF LOCAL LISTINGS. Not yelling, really emphasizing. You could have a page for London coal and other larger cities, etc. but take care with duplicate content.
To learn where the traffic is coming from, I would do this. Go into GA, Audience, Visitors Flow and isolate the traffic to city. In my screenshot you will see what I am speaking of. This will show you what city the traffic is coming from. (You need to first click on the UK and View only this segment). Now you see where your city traffic is coming from. That can show you where you can improve or change to meet your business desires.
Let us know if this helps,
Robert
-
Hi Rodney,
What you are experience is pretty much what all non-local businesses have been experiencing since Google began displaying local packs for queries even if they don't include geo-terms. There is nothing you can do to influence whether Google feels your search terms have a local intent or not. If Google has decided that they do, then the local pack is probably here to stay for your core search terms. As you are not a local business, your best hope lies in the following:
-
Building up enough organic authority so that you are ranking alongside the local pack - but not in it
-
Paying for visibility via Adwords
Option one will likely take a great deal of time an effort. Option two can be instantaneous, but will require an outlay of money. Hopefully, you can find a feasible strategy that combines both of these efforts and gets you as much visibility as you can achieve without being a truly local business model.
-
-
Hi Robert,
Thank you for your detailed reply, the results are focused on towns and cities rather than broader surrounding areas. I've uploaded an image of an example result, here: http://www.onlinecoal.co.uk/images/coal-merchants---Google-Search.jpg the 7 pack above and the serps highlighted in red below with lots of local elements being returned e.g. Ormskirk (which is a very small town, 3 miles away from where I currently am). This localized serps is my real problem because Google is returning them in all areas and never appears to be showing a UK serps. I know from my adwords campaigns the power of the phrase "coal merchants" as a traffic driver but if Google always returns localised serps for this term I've got an issue.
My traffic is coming from a very broad range of locations (12.5k locations are identified in Google Analytics, most with only a few visits).
Regards,
Rodney
-
Rodney,
My first question when you say local is you are speaking of a city or region around a city or a "neighborhood" as we would call it in the States, is that correct? (I am trying to differentiate between local being the UK or Great Britain and you are wanting to go beyond those borders.)
If so, I would suggest a couple of things that could assist you. First, understand that in local (with very rare exception) you will not have a page that is in the 7 pack also show in the organic for that SERP. You need to think about that if Local is important to you. So, you want the Local traffic, but you also want to broaden your market beyond "London" for example. You will need to be sure that you have a page that is "set up to rank for Local" (this is a loose phrase) and one that is more for the organic. For example on a service business you might have a contact page that is resolving in the 7 pack and a services or homepage that resolves in the organic. I have had clients with three organic pages (all different) and a listing in the Local 7 pack (also different from the other three) a couple of times - not by our design; it just happened they had strong pages.
If you look at the landing pages you are seeing traffic to, if you look at visitor flow in analytics, etc. there will be clues as to what is happening. Have you looked at where your traffic is coming from in terms of geography?
LMK if you have other questions,
Best,
Robert
-
In that case your best bet is organic rankings. To rank for local seo you need a local presence in the area, this would not work in your case. Unless you open local business locations that would represent your company.
-
Hi Vadim,
Thank you for your quick response. How would you go about "local seo" for a site which supplies nationally from one point of distribution?
Thanks,
Rodney
-
Hi Rodney,
-
This is up to Google, it is open about some categories such as web design; however most results are up to Google, and it can vary for different people and different locations viewing. This brings me to my main response:
-
Best is to rank for local results and organic results (general search as I assume you are referring to). This way you give Google two options to serve your amazing page, as Google feels best fit
Hope this helps!
-
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
-
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
How do I handle a redirect chain issue pertaining to a page that doesn't actually exist on my site?
I have a page showing up on the insights report as being a redirect chain. This page however does not exist as far as I can tell. It is not on my dashboard anywhere and pointing a browser to it produces a messy page with Wordpress theme error code spit out. How do I track this down to clean it up if the page does not exist within my Wordpress installation? The page for reference is https://butlermobility.com/dealers/downloads. As it stands today the dealers and downloads pages are separate. There is no downloads sub page within the dealers section.
Technical SEO | | NiteSkirm0 -
Strange Behavior - Dupe Content Via Query String URLs?
Hey y'all, could use community help with some strange behavior I'm seeing with a particular ranking. A week ago a high volume keyword ranking above the fold dropped off the map. I immediately thought must be an algorithmic penguin penalty (no manual action message) or panda / dupe content issue. I think it's dupe content at this point because I found my former ranking page in the omitted results section for the keyword we used to rank for. The strange thing is that without making any changes, Google would momentarily show our domain ranking high page one again, but with a strange query string URL. At first just domain.com/page/? whereas the old ranking was held by domain.com/page/ but now I see several long query string URLs floating around that the engines don't seem to know what to do with. Canonical tags are in place to canonicalize any query string URL back to the top and I have now designated query string URLs as unimportant in Search Console parameter filtering but these URLs persist. I ended up deduplicating content to a page on another domain we own (think that was the original problem) and there seemed to be a positive effect but now we are top of page 2 with a much longer query string URL as the ranking page. It seems Google wants to rank everything but the former ranking URL even though it's the most authoritative by far, has canonical signals in place, and is now no longer duplicate content. Content checker tool showed 60% similarity to the other piece, which is a ratio I've never known to cause dupe content. We found the source of the query string URLs to be from an external site that has a link to us but it's a buggy site so filtering on the page adds the string to our URL, so Google can find them and thinks they're significant. Long question short, has anyone had trouble like this? Getting weird parameter / query URLs to get out of the index in favor of the non-parameter folder? Is it possible the main folder page got hit with Penguin and is "banned?" Still, I don't know why Google would go out of it's way to rank query string copy pages in its place if that were the case. Any help greatly appreciated. An example of the URL looks like this:
Technical SEO | | Alder
domain.com/page/?CustomerSubscriptionTrack1PageSize=1&CustomerSubscriptionTrack1Order=Sorter_ID&CustomerSubscriptionTrack1Dir=ASC&CustomerSubscriptionTrack1Page=3&WorkOrder_TBLOrder=Sorter_AssetID&WorkOrder_TBLDir=ASC&ID=1060 -
Can Mobile Results show on Desktop results?
Hi everyone, I have a question - I have a client who has told me they had a problem with duplicate mobile pages showing on desktop results in place of their main URL pages They have a mobile domain mobile.domain.com. My understanding is that Google can differentiate mobile and nonmobile pages and hence you cannot see mobile results on desktop and duplication of pages is not a problem. Has anyone had this problem before? Is this possible? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Using 302s to redirect pages returning in 6 months
We are doing a 2-phase site redesign (in order to meet a deadline). An entire section of the site will not be available in the first phase, but will come back in 6 months. The question is, do we use 301s or 302s for those pages that will be coming back in 6 months? Is there a time limit on what is considered "temporary"? thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Max_B0 -
Handling 301s: Multiple pages to a single page (consolidation)
Been scouring the interwebs and haven't found much information on redirecting two serparate pages to a single new page. Here is what it boils down to: Let's say a website has two pages, both with good page authority of products that are becoming fazed out. The products, Widget A and Widget B, are still popular search terms, but they are being combined into ONE product, Widget C. While Widget A and Widget B STILL have plenty to do with Widget C, Widget C is now the new page, the main focus page, and the page you want everyone to see and Google to recognize. Now, do I 301 Widget A and Widget B pages to Widget C, ALTHOUGH Widgets A and B previously had nothing to do with one another? (Remember, we want to try and keep some of that authority the two page have had.) OR do we keep Widget A and Widget B pages "alive", take them off the main navigation, and then put a "disclaimer" on the pages announcing they are now part of Widget C and link to Widget C? OR Should Widgets A and B page be canonicalized to Widget C? Again, keep in mind, widgets A and B previously were not similar, but NOW they are and result in Widget C. (If you are confused, we can provide a REAL work example of what we are talkinga about, but decided to not be specific to our industry for this.) Appreciate any and all thoughts on this.
Technical SEO | | JU19850 -
How is a dash or "-" handled by Google search?
I am targeting the keyword AK-47 and it the variants in search (AK47, AK-47, AK 47) . How should I handle on page SEO? Right now I have AK47 and AK-47 incorporated. So my questions is really do I need to account for the space or is Google handling a dash as a space? At a quick glance of the top 10 it seems the dash is handled as a space, but I just wanted to get a conformation from people much smarter then I at seomoz. Thanks, Jason
Technical SEO | | idiHost0 -
Google indexing thousands crazy search results with %25253
In GWT I started seeing very strange pages indexed a few weeks, and Google is no reporting over 21,000 of pages (blocked by robots.txt) with weird URLs like this: http://www.francesphotography.com/?s=no-results:no-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%2525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525252525253Ano-results%2525252525252525252525253Adanna&cat=no-results http://www.francesphotography.com/?s=no-results:no-results%2525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%2525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Adanna&cat=no-results The current robots.txt looks like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | BoulderJoe
Disallow: /wp-content Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /data
Disallow: /slideshows
Disallow: /page/*/?s=
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search This website is running an up to date WP install with Yoast's Google Analytics and SEO plug-in. I can't point to anything specific that happened with the site when these URLs started appearing even after I modified the robots.txt. What can be done to try and stop Google from creating and indexing these goofy URLs? I see lots of sites having this issue when I search in Google, but no one seems to have a solution.0