How can i optimize my pages for local areas if we are not in that area?

[edward-may]

Hi Mozers!

So I watched a video about Matt Cutts he talks about creating multiple web pages just for one keywords is an absolutely no go.  So I was wondering we serve a clients in NZ Australia and USA, If we target phrase like

Psychic Readings California, Psychic Readings San Diego etc (USA)

Psychic Readings Melbourne, Psychic Readings Sydney (AU)

Psychic Readings Auckland, Psychic Readings Wellington (NZ)

What is the best practice or right way to go about structuring my pages to do this without going against googles guidelines.

Many thanks

[EGOL]

I do assessments of existing articles by looking at their traffic.  If they are pulling in very little traffic I look at their optimization and see if I can tweak them towards better keywords.   I also look at traffic growth over time.  For my sites a new article might not start drawing representative traffic until it has been on the site for at least a year.

[edward-may]

Hey EGOL,

Thanks mate for your awesome feedback! I really draw to the idea of creating the best kickass content out there for noobs lol (love the way you put it) this to me would make a lot of sense, especially for our audience, also I have found many competitors write for the sake of writing and enjoying the writing rather then what the clients enjoy reading if that makes sense.

So I have been trying to find a way to come up with good topics articles from my customers own questions and experiences.  I really like the idea of "psychic reading bogus" as it draws in skeptics as well, psychic scams etc.

Yes it does take a lot of work, and patience.  I have just recently done a whole make over of the site and will be reviewing all the content.  Seeing some positive results after this latest change, but my focus is now on producing good engaging and quality content that is also unique.

If you have any advice around how to come up with these and how to eliminate the existing articles on the that would be much appreciated.

Thanks again

Justin

[edward-may]

Hi Kristina,

Thank you so much for your response and taking the time to provide me some great feedback!

That clears everything up for me.  I had this advice given to me by an SEO that I hired a while ago and found out some things didn't really stack, so I guess this is another one I'm finding, so I'm here trying to fix everything

Thanks again for this I really appreciate all your guys input to helping me get to the bottom line

Cheers

Justin

[EGOL]

Adding to Kristina's comment.   If you have an informational page you can often rank in the local SERPs with no mention of any geographic location.   I have lots of informational pages about products and services.  Many of them rank on the first page of Google across the United States and many countries.

To do this you must write kickass content for noobs on the topic of "psychic readings".  I am talking about several articles that are the best for their topic that exist on the web, better than anyone anywhere.  If you are willing to do that, and can do that ("can do it" and "willing to do it" are very different things), it is possible to get it on the first page of Google.  If you happen to also offer that product or service, you can run house ads on that page that direct visitors to your sales pages.

Often, the competition is not as steep as you expect.  People who sell stuff are so focused on promoting sales pages that they totally ignore writing content that is so basic that a noob would want to read it and be able to understand it.   They are focused on sell sell sell.  And, Google, like a good search engine, will often mix informative content onto a page full of sales, just so people who are simply curious can learn about that topic.

So, I might write a dozen or two articles like these and post them on my site....

What to expect from you first psychic reading.....

Are psychic readings bogus?....

How can a psychic give accurate readings?...

How to know if my psychic is giving me a good reading?  ....

Then, after I have a great library of articles about psychic readings, I would make a category page that contains "the first article that anyone consulting a psychic should read".  That article will occupy the left column of that page.  The right column of that page would link out to all of the general "psychic readings" articles that I have along with some of the best that are out on the web - even if they are on my competitors websites.

No guarantees on this, but if you write all of these articles and do a fantastic job they should pull in some visitors and give you one of the most awesome libraries on the web.  I have ranked for some really difficult queries using this approach.  It takes a lot of work, you got to be patent before you see results, but if you can bust into the national or English language or global search results the traffic can be awesome.

Good luck if you try this.

[KristinaKledzik]

Hello Edward!

I work for a site that has a lot of physical locations, so Moz asked me to step in.

Let me start with this: you don't have to call out locations if Google can establish you as an online service. When I was working for Distilled I had multiple clients with online ecommerce sites, and they ranked well in most locations in the US without specifically calling out any city or state. The key, I think, was that Google saw the "buy now" and "shipping" buttons and understood that this was accessible to anyone in America.

Your site is similar. You have "get started" or "call now" buttons that show that the whole of the transaction can be done wherever you are in the US, Australia, or NZ. You have different CCTLDs, so Google knows which countries you're relevant in.

My question for you is - why do you want to optimize for local? Do you have clients who can't find you because they're searching for local terms? Did you find a lot of local keyword volume? Because my gut response is, you probably don't need to worry about this.

Best,

Kristina

[MiriamEllis]

My pleasure! And wishing you best of luck!

[edward-may]

Hi Miriam

Thanks so much I appreciate your advice and thanking you for taking the time to go out of your way and look into this.  It didn't really make sense for me to put all cities in one article, so I'm looking for the right way to do this - so I wanted to make sure that I wasn't doing anything to cause myself any issues with google later down the line.  Will sit tight.  Thanks again

Justin

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

I totally get how this can be complex. While I think it's important to mention the areas which you virtually serve, what I, personally, don't find to be a good strategy is one in which any business that serves nationally tries to create a page for every city. The services they are offering across the country are the same, and the only reason to create a page for each city would be if the services are somehow different from city to city. This is different than a local business that has to describe their services in a small handful of cities to make it clear where they will travel to. For a virtual/national/international business, I don't know of a way to create unique content for hundreds, thousands or millions of cities and towns when the service is the same for all.

There needs to be another approach to clarifying countries served than a city-by-city approach. But, I wouldn't be the expert on this, because I work primarily in the Local SEO field. I could see, if you serve 3 different countries, having a unique page for each country explaining hours or operation, languages spoken, etc., ... but not every city. It doesn't seem scaleable or realistic to me to do this this way for a virtual business.

I'm going to ask for some additional input from our team from staff members with more experience in national/international SEO than I have. Please stand by, and thanks for asking a good question!

[edward-may]

Hi Mariam,

Thank you very much for your response, I appreciate this and your options here.  I wanted to ask with regards to the organic.  Is it okay to mention areas we cover in one article?  For eg: I wrote this page here http://bit.ly/1JSap8j I put the area as the title and local areas into the article, is it okay to do this? But then again, I think i'm repeating myself not with the local areas but by adding another page that talks about psychic readings in general as I already covered psychic readings on the home page and psychic readings is a category of its own.  I'm a little confused at how I should be adding these, keeping in mind I want to be keeping everything unique, and also not overlapping content after reading this from moz https://moz.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial

Cheers for your help

Justin

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Edward!

Thanks for the further details. So, yes, you are correct. In order to participate in typical local search marketing activities, you must have both a physical location and make in-person contact with your customers, whether at your location or at theirs. Barring this, you have 3 main options open to you:

1. Organic SEO - creating content, earning links, optimizing pages, etc. geared to toward various regions for which you are hoping to rank organically, because you will not be able to rank in the local packs of results. It's critical here that anything you create be of the highest possible quality and unique. No duplicate content, spammy links, doorway pages, etc.

2. PPC - Paying to appear with ads in various regions, in which case, you can appear in any city or state for which you're willing to pay.

3. Social Outreach - gearing your social campaigns toward specific regions for visibility on social platforms.

Hope this clarification is helpful!

[edward-may]

Hi Miriam,

The business is a virtual business offering advisory/psychic readings online from anywhere in the world.  I have 3 top level domains to focus on specific countries.  So to use local am I right in thinking or understanding that you need to be in a physical location offering your services?

Cheers

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Edward!

Would you be able to fill in with a bit more detail here? Are you talking about a local business that makes in-person contact with clients in specific cities in AU, NZ and USA? Do you have an office anywhere in these countries to which people come and have face-to-face contact with staff? Or, is this a virtual business, perhaps providing services via the web or phone?

The more detail you can provide, the better help the community can give. Thanks!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

If you have physical locations in those areas that would be fantastic from the standpoint of being able to list address / contact information (marked up with Schema - you can also attach organizations to a brand) to your site on a locations page, utilize Moz Local (for US) and Whitespark (for Australia and NZ) listings, and also build out Google My Business profiles for each.

If you don't have physical locations in these areas, or you work with service providers in those areas, the best you can do is again build a locations, partners, or an "Areas We Serve" sort of page on each regional domain and list specifically what areas you work in with a link to the page of the service provider, or their contact information. That way you're telling users the areas you work in and have a way for them to reach out to those specific providers.

Google My Business also provides Service-area businesses map building which you can look into as well.

Don't get too heavy into optimization for local specific content or tagging - sometimes people do this and go way overboard and create spam issues.

Hope this helps! Good luck!