How can I personalize content based on a state/region? Is it possible?
-
I'm getting a lot of traffic from different regions throughout the US. I need to personalize the content in my website or on a certain landing page based on the users state/region. Is it possible? For example, forwarding a user that lands on page "x" to page "y" if he's from California and to page "z" if he's from South Carolina.
And of course, can this somehow affect my rankings in Google?
Thanks!!
-
I agree with Miriam. The only thing I would add here - consider making changes to your lead conversion form to reinforce the "we only work in California" aspect. This could be like a check box up front that says "Are you located in California?" If they select "No," the rest of the form disappears and they get a message that says "At this time, we're only able to serve the California area. Thank you for your interest!" or something. You could keep your lead form as-is and if people select a state other than California when entering their location information, send them to a different thank you page that delivers a similar message.
Basically, I would recommend changing your lead process so that a.) it's really clear to users that you don't operate outside of California, and b.) the information about whether or not a lead is from California is easy to see up-front in your lead management system. You'll probably still get some irrelevant leads (everyone does), but you'll be able to deal with them quicker.
-
Thank you!
-
Hey Gal!
That's a good explanation, thanks. I honestly would not suggest trying to block people from other areas from accessing your website. For all you know, they could be doing research for a family member who lives in your area. Now, I'm no traffic wizard, so I'm actually going to ask a team member to add to this discussion, but from a purely Local SEO perspective, I'd suggest that you:
-
Be sure you've really stressed on the page the geography of the service being offered. That means titles, tags, text, internal links, etc.
-
Be happy your page is strong enough to rank beyond its service area. If it's getting a lot of out-of-state traffic despite doing all you can in point #1, perhaps there's some way for you to monetize that page, whether with ads or as a lead source of some kind.
Let's hope we can get you some more feedback on this.
-
-
Hey Miriam,
I'll try to explain it in detail,
It's a local business, the page i'm talking about is an inner page that drives traffic from a lot of places in the US. It has some relevant traffic (only if it comes from California) and some irrelevant traffic (out of state visitors). The page generates leads, some of the leads are qualified because they're from California, some of them are not, because they're not from California. The problem this generates is the quality of the ratio in leads and a difficulty to measure them. What I want to do is to deliver different content to out of state users (it might be a redirect or even blocking them from entering the page) in order to ensure the quality of traffic.
Hope this makes it clearer
-
Hey Gal,
If this is a local business that only serves customers in California, why would you want to create content for people in others states? What is the goal with that?
Do you feel you've done a really good job of ensuring that your current content is properly optimized for the city in which you're located or the California cities you serve, or could it be that your local optimization is not sending a clear enough signal to Google regarding the target audience?
More questions than answers, so far Want to be sure the community fully understand your scenario.
-
Thanks, but Targeting Monkey doesn't answer my need.
I need a complete overhaul of the content if a person is out of state (even a redirect might be a fit)
-
Hi Miriam,
I'm talking about a local business in California that tends to get a lot of irrelevant traffic out of state which affects some of the statistics and quality of leads we're getting.
I'm looking to deliver different content to out of state users.
-
You can use some of the tools here to personalize content on your landing page, that said Google will try and rank you for the content it sees when they crawl the site. You can try and see what they see using The Fetch as Google tool from Search Console.
Targeting Monkey
-
Hi Gal,
Are you talking about a local business with physical locations in California and South Carolina, or are you talking about a national business that does not make in-person transactions with customers?
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
-
Variation on the subdomain/sub-directory question... Descriptive TLDs
Hi there, We have a variation on the subdomain/sub-directory question... Our business has two monetising areas, a clinic and a shop. To market them, we do recipes, blogs and social media, rather than relying primarily on SEO, but we do want to up our SEO game. Our primary site is www.example.co.uk This is Wordpress and where we market the clinic, host the recipes and blogs, and is our main email domain. Our second site is Woocommerce, at www.example.shop Our shop market is primarily in the UK, but we seem to pick up a fair amount of international business, partly because the clinic does virtual consultations to many countries. The shop is online only. We have physical clinics across the UK. Both sites cross link extensively, eg with blogs advertising products in the shop. The branding is intentionally related yet different, because they have very distinct functions, and eg. I don’t want to clutter the interface or distract people with blog or clinic once we have funnelled them to the shop checkout. I would also like to separate the blog and recipe elements from the clinic, using a slightly different theme with different functions. We use a lot of plugins, and the more we aggregate functions on the same Wordpress instance, the more likely something is to go wrong. I like the new TLDs because they are more “human”, and they identify where you are and what you are doing more clearly. We do email footers with links to example.clinic (redirected to www.example.co.uk) and example.shop. They are simple and explain what is going on. Conversely, shop.example.co.uk is not so easy to write or read out. www.example.co.uk/shop looks like an afterthought, rather than a shop in its own right with its own home page. So there would have to be a really good SEO reason for me to merge the shop into the main site with reverse proxy or multisite. Do you think that there is such a good reason? If not, by the same token, would it make sense to separate out example.blog or even naturedoc.recipes from example.clinic and use .co.uk as a single page portal to the three separate sites? My instinct, for what it is worth is that Google is smart enough to have started thinking that domains linked by topic TLDs can be equivalent to subdomains, and to recognise that we are not trying to build links from spammy unrelated sites. My last area is about human behaviour... Are people are as happy to click on or type in a new TLD like .clinic as a local .co.uk one? ...when (a) it is not a discredited TLD like .biz, and (b) it gives them more insight into what they will get when they arrive. And since we have the .uk domain, should we switch to this shorter version at the same time? I already use it for custom shortcodes (eg. example.uk/fte6 for people to type in from printed material or instagram). I can’t help feeling .uk has been unsuccessful, and its use now looks bad, even if it is shorter. Many thanks in advance.
Local SEO | | MizRabble0 -
Can we use the same titles and meta descriptions for all of our office locations? We have 18 locations in total.
Hello, TTR Data Recovery has 18 different office locations and I am wondering if we can use the same title and meta description for all locations and just change the location name...For example: #1 Best Data Recovery Services in Atlanta, GA| TTRDATA TTR Data Recovery offers a comprehensive suite of data recovery services in Atlanta, GA including Hard Drive, SSD, Server and RAID/NAS. Get A Free Quote! #1 Best Data Recovery Services in Miami, FL | TTRDATA TTR Data Recovery offers a comprehensive suite of data recovery services in Miami, FL, including Hard Drive, SSD, Server and RAID/NAS. Get A Free Quote! Would this be already, or would it be better if we had a unique title and meta description for every location? We want to get the same message across and it would be difficult to change the wording 18 times. I look forward to hearing back from you guys. Thank you.
Local SEO | | Kiakh19870 -
Searchmetrics Google ranking factors study says content gaining while links losing in importance ? Any View About this Post.
I am very Curious about it anyone please update about this http://searchengineland.com/searchmetrics-google-ranking-factors-study-says-content-gaining-links-losing-importance-265431
Local SEO | | MTPixels0 -
Why does Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) gives different results than a Google search for a very similar or identical query?
My client Dr. Harris ranks #1 in SERPs and Local results for many terms, including "hair transplant surgeon Denver" However, when I did a voice search w Siri ""find me a hair transplant surgeon in Denver" Siri said she could find no results. A similar search for a clinic returned 2 competitors, but not my client. How do I ensure we are served up in voice queries? This surgeon deserves it, he invented most of the technology in use in the world today.
Local SEO | | CalamityJane770 -
SEO and IP based content
Hello, We are building a guide/directory that will service multiple cities across Canada. Currently, our home page will detect your IP, and display local content on the home page. Although we feel this is incredibly useful to the end user, we are worried about how search engines will interpret our home page. In addition to our home page, should we have landing pages for each city that we are in? and should we follow site structure like this? www.thesite.com/vancouver So if a user from Vancouver goes to our home page, they will see Vancouver related content, but how would a search engine see the home page? We would like to know the best approach to placing well for searches in different Canadian cities. Most of our searches will be city specific: Calgary widgets, Vancouver widgets, etc. Thanks
Local SEO | | ebk0 -
Building Great Content
When writing content. Let's say I write fantastic useful content that most home buyers (since I'm a realtor) would benefit from, but they don't have a website, so they aren't going to link back to me anywhere. Whats the best way to get your content seen? Do you recommend putting it on facebook and promoting it? It's just tough in my business because it's such a commodity but I know there has to be a way. I'm just trying to see the best way before I spend TONS and TONS of time on writing actual useful and great content. As of now it's been a risk vs. reward thing and I haven't done it, but I feel like now is the time. Thanks!
Local SEO | | Veebs0 -
How Can I Outlink Web Designer Link Building from Their Clients' Footer
_I used open site explorer to view the backlinks for a competitor of an agency I work with. They have ten times as many links, if not more, than we do, and I noticed there were only a few more domains linking back to them. As I dug deeper I noticed these links were coming from the footer tag they put on their clients' sites like "Site Designed by __." If a site had 20 pages, they had 20 links back...weird and annoying that it counts. They have more clients for web design than we do, so their bulk linking could continue to outrank us. Any suggestions on how we can outrank them locally? We are in the midst of redesigning our entire site to build out more pages and have much better internal linking. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks everyone!
Local SEO | | Michael4g0 -
Is it necessary to implement hreflang for translated content on different ccTLDs?
Hello there, new MOZ here. I hope someone of the international SEO MOZs can share their opinion on a doubt I have. I've been reading a lot about hreflang and I understand the importance for subdomains and subfolders not only for targeting the same language in different countries (.com, .co.uk, .ca, etc) but also for websites partially or fully translated in other languages. However for these I've always seen examples where you want to have hreflang with subdomains or folders e.g. ru.example.com ; example.com/ru What if I have my translated websites on different ccTLDs - i.e. example.com example.ru. example.br example .fr Do I still need to implement hreflang or in this case is not necessary?
Local SEO | | selectitaly0