Best strategy to follow for a single service site
-
Can anyone share what they feel is the best strategy to follow for a single service site?
Would you optimise and target the homepage for the primary service they offer or target a page one level lower and leave the homepage to target the Brand name?
Links to any references or case studies would also be greatly appreciated, thank you!
-
Great addition of Jonathan! I also think a well implemented example will not get affected by this update but identical pages won't do you much good in the future. So if you start with this strategy, make sure you do it good!
-
As a word of caution to this, Google is updating its doorway page algorithm. I am not sure if this will affect a well implemented example of this strategy, although I would be surprised if it did (i.e. very unique content with text relevant to each location), but I think it will be designed if you use identical pages with just different location names then there is a real risk.
See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html
Ultimately it won't be fully known until it is implemented, if it hasn't already.
-
Hi OLLI_M,
I would definitely focus your homepage on the keywords / search intents for your primary keyword. This page is your best change of scoring in your own city and has the possiblility to score in city’s close by.
You don’t have to worry about scoring on your brand because:
- When people search for your brand name they want you. So from an search engines perspective you’re the 100% match with this search intent and you will have a great dwell time and CTR which work in your favor.
- You will probably get enough inbound links with your brand name in it. That’s very natural.
There are probably a lot more reasons why you will score on your own brand name but I hope these make it clear you don’t have to worry about it.
When you determine your website structure you will probably need some insights in the following:
- Are people adding local modifiers like “Car service [city name]”
- What is the search volume on those keywords? Based on this, are there any more city’s in your service area you intent to rank on besides the city you’re located?
- What is the competition on the keywords you intent to rank on?
In a normal situation where you have one physical location and you serve a couple more nearby city’s I would advise you to focus your homepage on the city you’re based in and add level one pages for the city’s in your service area you intent to rank for. Make sure these pages are added to your normal navigation and are interesting for visitors who do either enter your website through your homepage as directly through the local landings pages.
Miriam wrote a great guide for creating those service area’s on Moz. You might want to check it out: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
You can also check out this project we have been working on some time ago: www.skaya.nl (Dutch website).
When you click on “Waar rijden wij” you will find a list of the city’s they give driving lessons. Every page has some unique tips and information about driving lessons in those specific city’s. In this case we also added the city we’re based in as a level one page. So either our homepage as the local landings page can score on the city were based in.
Two more great resources when you want to start local SEO I would love to share with you:
- http://moz.com/blog/40-important-local-search-questions-answered
- http://moz.com/blog/11-ways-local-businesses-can-get-links
I hope this helps!
PS. When you look at the example there are two improvements for this website. The tabbed content should be shown immediately and there should be less duplicated content like the prices for example. Just so you don’t copy the wrong parts of this tactic
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
-
My site is not ranking at all.
Can anybody check it what is the main culprit behind my website's growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Best way to implement canonical tags on an ecommerce site with many filter options?
What would be the best way to add canonical tags to an ecommerce site with many filter options, for example, http://teacherexpress.scholastic.com? Should I include a canonical tag for all filter options under a category even though the pages don't have the same content? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Site duplication issue....
Hi All, I have a client who has duplicated an entire section of their site onto another domain about 1 year ago. The new domain was ranking well but was hit heavily back in March by Panda. I have to say the set up isn't great and the solution I'm proposing isn't ideal, however, as an agency we have only been tasked with "performing SEO" on the new domain. Here is an illustration of the problem: http://i.imgur.com/Mfh8SLN.jpg My solution to the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicated area of the original site out (around 150 pages) to the new domain name, but I'm worried that this could be could cause a problem as I know you have to be careful with redirecting internal pages to external when it comes to SEO. The other issue I have is that the client would like to retain the menu structure on the main site, but I do not want to be putting an external link in the main navigation so my proposed solution is as follows: Implement 301 redirects for URLs from original domain to new domain Remove link out to this section from the main navigation of original site and add a boiler plate link in another area of the template for "Visit xxx for our xxx products" kind of link to the other site. Illustration of this can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/CY0ZfHS.jpg I'm sure the best solution would be to redirect in URLs from the new domain into the original site and keep all sections within the one domain and optimise the one site. My hands are somewhat tied on this one but I just wanted clarification or advice on the solution I've proposed, and that it wont dramatically affect the standing of the current sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Can Anyone show me a site that has followed the seomoz seo rules
Hi i have been reading the seo information on here which is very interesting and i would like to know if anyone can point to any sites that have followed the rules and advice. It is great when you can read the info and rules but i feel it is also better to see a site that has followed the rules and to hear from people who have followed the information and put them into practice and explain what results they have got. I am currently building the following website http://www.womenlifestylemagazine.com so it would be great to see a site that has followed all the rules and who can explain if they work or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Best multi-language site strategy?
When reading about multi-language site structure, general knowledge says that there are 2 right ways of doing it right: Assign one domain per region/ language: www.domain.fr www.domain.de www.domain.co.uk ... If a country has more than one language, such as Switzerland, you can create folders for those languages: www.domain.ch/fr - in french www.domain.ch/de - in german Have a unique domain www.domain.com for the whole site and create folders for language region: www.domina.com/fr www.domain.com/uk ... If a language is spoken in more than one country, you can create subfolders www.domain.com/fr-ch - french in switzerland www.domain.com/de-ch - german in switzerland At first sight, it seems that option 1 is the right one. However, sites such as www.apple.com are using option 2. I am unable to decide... what would you recommend? Any objective criteria?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hockerty0