Well Ranked National Site - Need Local Rankings
-
We are a virtual company doing business in 30 states nationwide. All our business is done via the phone, fax, email and express mail.
Back in 2008 I optimized our small 8 page website for our key terms and was able to rank the site #1 nationally for our main keywords. (I did a 6 month consulting gig for the company). The site remained #1 in Google until last year when some serious competitors entered the space and knocked us down to the middle of page one.
Then with the Panda update #1 & #2 we have seen our traffic drop 50% mostly due to not receiving the City + Keywords rankings any more.
I have now been hired full time to bring us back but my question is this
- Do I need to build out city specific pages on the existing website?
- Do I need to buy keyword specific domains and create microsites?
- Do a combination of both?
I would love to do both but I have to prioritize my efforts.
Any thoughts would be great.
-
That is what I thought. Thanks for the reply. Now I need to find time to return the favor to the board.....pay it forward.
-
citykeyword.com is best for quick results, a new domain can rank quicly, but as time go on the advatage is dimished when you build up other signals.
but citykeyword.domain.com keeps the link juice in your site. As long as your subdomnains are well linked to the root domain google will see it as the same site.
-
In regards to the onsite optimization, I am still trying to slowly fix some of the issues. It is an old site not built well and done in tables. Once I get a bit more money, I plan to rebuild the website in wordpress.
A follow on question from above. Although you say the long term strategy is a single site with local city pages, which process would see quicker results? city specific domains + keyword or state.website.com/city + keyword.html ?
Just curious what you think. thanks.
-
City domain names is a good idea, but as you say, you will be splitting you efforts, so I say no. city landing pages is a better idea, try and get the city into your link text when you get links, local directories also will help
You also have a lot of on page issues, you have a lot of images with out alt text, I mean a lot, there is a good chance to put some city names, you also have a lot of non relevant link text, “click here” I would definitely fix them
You also have a lot of soft 404s, missing pages, or in your case mostly images that give a 200 instead of a 404. this is not helping, google has made a point about this recenly
Your code includes a lot of noise to content ratio, lots of script, flash and stuff, search engines like clean code.
How I see it a site with many violations needs many more links to rank than one that is violation free.
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
-
Our web site lost ranking on google a couple of years ago. We have done lots of work on it but still can not improve our search ranking. Can anyone give us some advise
A couple of years ago the ranking on our site dropped over night. I believe someone working here at the time purchased links about that time. We have been doing lots of work on the site since then to improve it. We can not get our rankings back up on google searches. Can anyone give us some advise about what to do or where to go for some help that we can trust.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Local SEO - Do I need it if I don't do business locally?
Super confused about this. Our office is located in Los Angeles, but it is not a storefront, and our clients are from all over the country... and our business involves travel to other countries. So there is nothing "local" about us. But everything I read seems to say we should be doing local SEO. How to approach this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benenjerry1 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Will multiple domains for the same local business hurt its rankings?
If I have a mold removal client who has domain1.com, which is several years old, and he creates a new domain2.com with the same info (reworded), but changes over the citations to domain2 will it 1. lower domain1.com's rankings? 2. make ranking either site harder since there are now 2 sites for the same thing? 3. reduce the ability for either site to gain a higher domain authority since links can now go to either
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Baffled why my site is not improving in rankings.
Site shows up in the Map results when ever Google shows them. But for all other organic terms site ranks way back. Have lots of unique content and one page grade of an A. The site is http://alexpadillabailbonds.com The main page is optimized for "sacramento bail bonds" with a Moz grade of A yet its not included in the search results. It was before. Any insight from any one will greatly help. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andreyzolnikov0 -
Switch hosting to be closer to site visitors, and 99% dropped from rankings?
Last week I decided to switch for a UK server to a US one at Hostgator since most of my visitors are from the US. About nine hours later 99% of my pages disappeared from google rankings, only a few non-relevant pages are at position 100-200. All decent (1000-2000 word) articles on specific topics, are gone. These pages were getting 2-3 minutes per user of readership and a low bounce rate, so I think they were pretty good quality. Does anyone think it's possible I got accidentally added on a blacklisted IP? Or why would something like this happen. Since then, I've tried switching back to the old IP for 3 days, that didn't work. Now I've filed a reinclusion request with the details. Has anyone had a similar experience? What can possibly cause this massive drop in rankings and traffic? Any help is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zpeti0 -
Lost all ranking after site-wide 301 redirect
Hi all I did a complete site-wide 310 redirect about 3 weeks ago for a site that had consistently been in Pos 1-5 for my targeted keyword ("low glycemic foods"). I changed the domain from low-glycemic-foods-org to low-glycemic-diet.com because I thought that was a more appropriate title and thru my readings I believed that if I carefully followed the recommended procedures I would quickly regain my SERP. Webmaster tools is showing that I have over 800 inbound links - many from very trustworthy sources including .edu, etc BUT my home page is nowhere to be found for the keyword search "low glycemic diet". My Seomoz onpage SEO score is an "A" Any enlightenment would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | veezer0 -
Widespread Ranking Drops for Strong, White Hat sites
Hi Moz, A few of our sites experienced widespread ranking drops across all keywords this morning. Both of these are very strong sites with a high DA (56), moz rank and moz trust above 5. We haven't been doing any black hat SEO, creating spammy links, or paying for links. Is anyone else seeing anything similar or have any ideas as to what type of Algorithm update this might be? We currently rank 67th for our name.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OneClickVentures0