Large scale geo-targeting?
-
Hi there. We are an internet marketing agency and recently did a fair amount of working trying to optimise for a number of different locations. Although we are based in Preston (UK), we would like to attract clients from Manchester, Liverpool, etc.
We created landing pages for each of the locations that we wanted to target and each of the services - so we had an SEO Manchester page and a Web Design Manchester page for example. These were all written individually by a copywriter in order to avoid duplicate content. An example of one of the first of these pages is here: http://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/places/seo-blackpool.php
We created a 'where we cover' page and used a clickable map rather than huge long list of text links, which we felt would be spammy, to link through to these pages. You can see this page here: http://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/where-we-cover.php
Initially we gained a great deal of success from this method - with the above Blackpool page ranking #7 for "SEO Blackpool" within a week. However these results quickly disappeared and now we don't rank at all, though the pages remain in the index. I'm aware that we don't have many external links pointing to these pages, but this cannot explain why these pages don't rank at all, as some of the terms are relatively non-competitive.
A number of our competitors rank for almost all of these terms, despite their pages being exact duplicates with simply the city/town name being changed. Any ideas where we've gone wrong?
-
I'm from Burnley originally and I've worked in Blackburn and Manchester previously but now I live and work in Dublin, Ireland
It's nice to see somebody local on here.
I would suggest Social Bookmarking the new pages that you have created and I think you'll be surprised at what will happen, something so simple. Have you updated your sitemap as well?
-
Thanks for the reply Glenn. I really can't see why we would have been penalised as everything we do is above board, although it does seem as if that might be the case. I certainly think that the QDF point you make is a valid one, although it could have been around the time of the latest Panda update too, so perhaps that might have flagged up something.
I think our next step might be to recreate the pages from scratch on entirely new URLs and see if that has any effect. We will certainly try and poach some of our competitor's links too!
-
It's possible that your site has been penalized, though I don't see too many reasons why it would be in reviewing your OSE report. From a cursory investigation, I'd say you've done a great job earning the links pointing to your site... though if any trickery was involved, you may be penalized, so you may want to investigate how to get out of that trap.
I suggest you investigate the link profiles of the competitors who rank for almost all of your targeted terms. If your on-page SEO is truly better than there's, it's likely that their external link profile is earning them the rankings you desire. Learn from their strategy.
Your initial high rankings could have been related to QDF.
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
-
.co.uk or .com for a UK geo location domain?
Let's say you were in the market to buy a domain for a large city in the UK. Manchester for example. Would you prefer to own the .co.uk or the .com version? Do .co.uk have higher CTR/ranking factors over .com for GEO location based websites in the UK?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mokdiiek0 -
Similar content, targeting different states
I have read many answers regarding not having duplicated pages target different states (cities). Here is the problem. We have same content that will serve different pages in some provinces in Canada that we can't change allot intentionally. We don't want these pages compete within the same province. What would be the best approach not to get penalized and keep SERP? Initially we though about hreflang, but we can't really do it on the provice/state attributes. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSaffou20180 -
Large Redirects, How do I cross check two websites
My company currently owns five different websites and every day we download a list of for Google crawl errors.I then crawl the downloaded list with screaming frog to double check the redirects to make sure the pages are not 404s. We have two websites that have similar identical content and used to cross-check each and used to redirect to the parent page by our bread crumbs. (404 error) www.website1.com/productxx.html (working Site) www.website2.com/productxx.html we then redirect (404 error) www.website1.com/productxx.html to the last parent page or similar page. Is there a faster way to compare two websites beside opening 200 windows all at once? Is there a program that would allow us to compare two websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petmkt0 -
No international targeting option showing in GWT?
Hi for some strange reason for one of our sites the international targeting option to select what country to target in GWT is not showing. Usually it shows up like this: http://s9.postimg.org/bkxkkrafi/screenshot_1672.jpg (this is a different site we have in GWT). But it shows up like this: http://s16.postimg.org/im1ysd5z8/screenshot_1673.jpg With no way to change country targeting. My permission level is set as: Owner and are verified. Any ideas on why its not showing up? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Advanced: SEO best practice for a large forum to minimise risk...?
Hi Hope someone can offer some insight here. We have a site with an active forum. The transactional side of the site is about 300 pages totals, and the forum is well over 100,000 (and growing daily) meaning the 'important' pages account for less that 0.5% of all pages on the site. Rankings are pretty good and we're ticking lots of boxes with the main site, with good natural links, logical architecture, appropriate keyword targeting. I'm worried about the following: crawl budget PR flow Panda We actively moderate the forum for spam and generally the content is good (for a forum anyway), so I'm just looking for any best practice tips for minimising risk. I've contemplated moving the forum to a subdomain so there's that separation, or even noindexing the forum completely, although it does pull in traffic. Has anyone been in a similar situation? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iProspect_Manchester1 -
Best Format for URLs on large Ecommerce Site?
I saw this article, http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/common-ecommerce-technical-seo-problems/, and noticed that Geoff mentioned that product URLs format should be in one of the following ways: Product Page: site.com/product-name Product Page: site.com/category/sub-category/product-name However, for SEO, is there a preferred way? I understand that the top one may be better to prevent duplicate page issues, but I would imagine that the bottom would be better for conversion (maybe the user backtracks to site.com/category/sub-category/ to see other products that he may be interested in). Also, I'd imagine that the top URL would not be a great way to distribute link juice since everything would be attached to the root, right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eTundra0 -
Getting individual website pages to rank for their targeted terms instead of just the home page
Hi Everyone, There is a pattern which I have noticed when trying to get individual pages to rank for the allocated targeted terms when I execute an SEO campaign and would been keen on anyones thoughts on how they have effectively addressed this. Let me try and explain this by going through an example: Let's say I am a business coach and already have a website where it includes several of my different coaching services. Now for this SEO campaign, I'm looking to improve exposure for the clients "business coaching" services. I have a quick look at analytics and rankings and notice that the website already ranks fairly well for that term but from the home page and not the service page. I go through the usual process of optimising the site (on-page - content, meta data, internal linking) as well as a linkbuilding campaign throughout the next couple of month's, however this results in either just the home page improving or the business page does improve, but the homepage's existing ranking has suffered, therefore not benefiting the site overall. My question: If a term already ranks or receives a decent amount of traffic from the home page and not from the page that its supposed to, why do you think its the case and what would you be your approach to try shift the traffic to the individual page, without impacting the site too much?. Note: To add the home page keyword target term would have been updated? Thanks, Vahe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahe.Arabian0 -
Which page to target? Home or /landing-page
I have optimized my home page for the keyword "computer repairs" would I be better of targeting my links at this page or an additional page (which already exists) called /repairs it's possible to rename & 301 this page to /computer-repairs The only advantage I can see from targeting /computer-repairs is that the keywords are in the target URL.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0