Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Me, too.

Miriam,

Happy New Year and thanks for the post on 2017 local SEO predictions! I'm working with another client who, like the one mentioned above, serves a very large geographical area. The distinction is that he is a commercial and residential service company who provides plumbing, electrical, HVAC, handyman, generator installation, and appliance repair services. The nuance to the question I asked above is, "Which keywords do I target on those pages?" The company I mentioned above is an office furniture store and since office furniture store is a frequently searched term, it worked well to optimize primarily for "[city name] office furniture store," but no variation of "residential service company" or "commercial service company" has any substantive search volume. Since it's not feasible for an H1 tag or HTML page title, for example, to be "[city name] plumbing, heating, air conditioning, electrical, handyman, generator installation, and appliance repair service company," I'm stumped on what to do. How would you optimize those service area pages?

Thomas, that was HUGE! Thank you, sir!

Miriam,

You have been a tremendous help to me in the past, so thank you for replying to this question. In fact, I posted this hoping to get your input.

(1) That's right on the street names being baked into the listings themselves. I know it's helpful to have pages for cities, areas, and neighborhoods, but I have never (until now) considered building pages to target particular streets. It makes sense to me, but I had not found a precedent for it until Thomas' post above (thanks, Thomas!).

(2) I have seen the reports of dramatically increased "near me" searches, so thanks for the tips on optimizing for that.

I am working with a real estate agency who serves a very small geographical area in Dallas, TX. Many areas with Dallas addresses have proper names (e.g. Uptown, Highland Park, Lake Highlands, etc.), but the area my client wants to target is nameless, so we had the idea of trying to target searches for particular street names instead (e.g. homes for sale on easy street). I have looked around quite a bit, but have not found a website that takes that approach. Any thoughts on whether it's possible?

My thought was to have a master service area page that would be at mydomain.com/service-area. That page would have a service area map or the like that would link to the service areas themselves, which would be located at /service-area/texas/dallas or /service-area/dallas-tx, and which of the two is preferable is the essence of my question. Thank you!

Miriam, as a follow-up, do your recommendations for city pages change if a company serves a large number number of cities across several states? In particular, which of the following link structures would you recommend:

1. mydomain.com/service-area/texas/dallas and mydomain.com/service-area/louisiana/shreveport
2. mydomain.com/service-area/dallas-tx and mydomain.com/service-area/shreveport-la

Seriously, Miriam, this is all so helpful. Thank you for spending your time this way!

This conversation happened a couple of years ago now. Are there any updates on the issue of creating Facebook pages for businesses with more than 1 location? Thanks!

Miriam,

I'm so thankful for your input. I'm stunned that you took the time to check my page and respond because I know you have MUCH bigger fish to fry (pardon the Southern expression). I've made a number of changes and I'm at work now making more!

Miriam,

Thank you again for your help. It has been tremendous for me. I'm in process of creating 25 service area pages (there is only one physical location that has a large service area) for the company I'm serving. I've included a link to the first service area page I've created. If you're willing, would you mind telling me if I'm on the right track?

https://www.officebarn.biz/service-area/dallas-tx/

I'm helping an online furniture store search engine optimize a WooCommerce store and I'm trying to make sure our taxonomies make sense. I'd love any help you guys can give, but I'm particularly interested in determining whether we should use tags. Product attributes make sense to me, but I'm concerned to use tags because of the propensity for creating duplicate content. Thanks in advance for any help you guys are willing to give.

Thank you, Miriam!

Thanks for getting back with me so quickly! I'm asking about a business that has only one physical location, but a broad service area. Should site pages be primarily optimized for the physical location or should I leave city names out of most page titles if I'd like to rank beyond the city of my physical location. Given that I have only one physical location, but a broad service area, which option is better (or is there a third):

Option #1: Optimize Most Pages for Physical Location

• Homepage: "Company Name | HVAC | New York City"
• About Page: "About Company Name | New York City"
• Service Page 1: "Service 1 | Company Name | New York City"
• Service Page 2: "Service 2 | Company Name | New York City"
• Service City Page 1: "New York City | Company Name"
• Service City Page 2: "Albany, NY | Company Name"
• Service City Page 3: "Philadelphia, PA | Company Name"

Option #2: Optimize Only City Pages for Physical Locations

• Homepage: "Company Name | HVAC"
• About Page: "About Company Name"
• Service Page 1: "Service 1 | Company Name"
• Service Page 2: "Service 2 | Company Name"
• Service City Page 1: "New York City | Company Name"
• Service City Page 2: "Albany, NY | Company Name"
• Service City Page 3: "Philadelphia, PA | Company Name"

How would you recommend optimizing the site for its physical location? Would the homepage Title, for example, be something like "Company Name | HVAC | New York City" if that's the physical location of the business or would it be better to go with "Company Name | HVAC" as not to nullify the attempts to rank well in Albany, New Brunswick, and other surrounding cities?

Thanks you! If my client has numerous practice areas, how do you recommend optimizing each location page? Should I optimize for my client name and city name only?

Also, how do I handle the Schema markup for multiple locations? Do I insert Schema markup for all three locations in the footer of every page of the site or should I only place Schema markup on the location-specific pages?

Thank you for using your time to help me. This Moz article recommends the use of subdirectories or subdomains for each location. If I understand him correctly, his argument is that the value of such a structure is that each city gains localized pages, each with its city-specific shema.org NAP info. What do you think?

https://moz.com/ugc/get-your-multilocation-business-ranking-in-multiple-cities-with-one-domain-21815

A business with offices in 3 major cities and loads of service areas hired us to build its website. Here's my internal debate regarding local SEO:

1. Do I build one site with a thorough sitemap that utilizes one page per city and/or region for local SEO?

2. Do I build a primary site with a limited sitemap and a subsite for each city (e.g. companyname.com/city) that essentially replicates the sitemap from the primary site? If I go this route, the content on each page of each subsite would be unique (not copied and localized versions of the content on the primary site), but what about the keywords? For example, should each subsite use the same keywords as the primary site (e.g. companyname.com/keyword-or-phrase and companyname.com/city-name/keyword-or-phrase OR companyname.com/keyword-or-phrase and companyname.com/city-name/variation-of-keyword-or-phrase).

In the end, I suppose the question is, "Should I build one site with a more thorough sitemap and single pages for each city and/or region OR should I build a site for each city with less thorough sitemaps?" Budget constraints won't allow for option C, which is build a site for each city with a thorough sitemap for each.

Thank you guys in advance for whatever insight you're willing to give!

I appreciate both of you. This is beyond helpful! Off to local SEO work I go!

Thanks for your reply. Your tip about the title tag is particularly helpful.

Both sites should rank for variations of "churches" because most people who search "churches" aren't looking for a church directory website. They are looking for Google to list out the websites of individual churches in the area. That said, I do see that including the word "churches" could make us look more like a directory to Google, but we rank #2 in organic search in a city with hundreds of churches, so I'm concerned to make too many adjustments that won't clearly benefit.

Regarding local SEO, I have done lots of that, but we still don't rank at the top. Do you see any obvious local SEO factors that we've left undone?

I built the site https://www.sylvaniachurch.com about 5 years ago, but the site has been live for more than a decade. Tyler has hundreds of churches and Sylvania Church currently site ranks second for most variations of "churches in tyler tx." Sylvania has a well-optimized homepage, several well-optimized subpages, a consistent sermon audio feed, and an increasingly used blog. In addition to what's on the site, there are a few other relevant sites that link to the Sylvania site and I have completed profiles on virtually every business listing site known to man.

Here's the oddity. The website that ranks third and even displaces Sylvania for the second place spot from time to time (http://www.crosspointecc.com/) has only been a live URL for a few years, has no readable text on the homepage other than the nav menu, has very little content on the subpages, no blog that I can find, and fewer links from less authoritative sites.

What's even odder to me is that Sylvania Church has the following numbers according to the MozBar:

PA: 26

mR: 3.64

mT: 3.28

DA: 14

DmR: 3.27

DmT: 2.74

The numbers for CrossPointe:

PA: 24 (2 less than Sylvania)

mR: 4.68 (1.04 higher than Sylvania)

mT: 5.30 (2.02 higher than Sylvania)

DA: 13 (1 less than Sylvania)

DmR: 2.98 (.28 less than Sylvania)

DmT: 3.49 (.75 higher than Sylvania)

The obvious question is, "Why does Moz like this site better than mine? What am I missing?"

Thanks for any help you guys can give!

Thanks for your response. Life Point does blog more than Sylvania and they have a more prominent social media presence, so their performance may be CTR related. As for speed, Google PageSpeed Insights scores Sylvania Church substantially higher on speed than Life Point.

Oddly, Sylvania Church has a better Moz Local score than Life Pointe, but Life Pointe still outranks it at times. It's a strange thing...

I thought that until I noticed that Sylvania Church often ranks behind Life Pointe, yet also appears to have local SEO in order and a functional blog with posts approximately every few weeks. Sylvania Church has a higher domain rank and the homepage has a higher page rank than Life Pointe, but Life Pointe still outperforms Sylvania on most searches...

Thanks for your response. Two of the most potent keyword phrases are "churches in tyler tx" and "baptist churches in tyler tx."

I noticed recently that the website of a local church (http://www.lifepointfc.com/) has climbed toward the top of the SERPS, and I cannot figure out why. The on-site SEO seems mediocre, at best, and their domain authority is 15 while their homepage authority is just 19. Does anyone see how they are working their SEO magic?

The site appears to be okay. When I searched "1099 pro" on Google, www.1099pro.com was the first result. Using the Moz plugin for Chrome, I found that the site has Domain Authority of 39 and Page Authority of 48, both of which are decent scores. The Moz plugin also shows that www.1099pro.com has 34 +1's on Google+, which is a good sign of the company's validity and their trustworthiness as a link.

Also, I'm not sure what bylines are or how I can enable them. Do you have a resource you prefer that will teach me a bit about them?

I did. It checks out according to the GSDT.

Since I was using a logo as the picture, I'm trying to get a picture from my client to use instead. I haven't yet been able to get one, though, but I'll update you guys once I'm able to try it. Thank you for answering my questions! The help is such a blessing!

I have read Yoast's tutorial and others on how to get rel=author to work properly on my site (http://injuryattorneyshouston.com). Here are the results I get from the Google Structured Data Testing Tool:

"Authorship is working for this webpage."

"rel=author markup has successfully established authorship for this webpage."

"Publisher markup is verified for this page."

All seems well except for this:

hatom-feed

| hatom-entry: |   |
| Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.Error: Missing required field "entry-title".Error: Missing required field "updated".Error: Missing required hCard "author". |
| Error: At least one field must be set for HatomEntry.Error: Missing required field "entry-title".Error: Missing required field "updated".Error: Missing required hCard "author". |

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thank you guys for your help! I disconnected by Google Analytics accounts and reconnected them. Now, everything works as it should. Thanks again!

Interestingly, I can't get my Google Analytics to work at all. Once I'm notified that my connection has been dropped, I manually reconnect it and it shows that it has connected, but it again says that my connection has been dropped as soon as I refresh the page or navigate to a different page in the Moz dashboard. It has rendered my Google Analytics data completely useless.

Thanks for your help, Ruben!

I get the following message every time I check the Moz Analytics dashboard on any of the sites I manage. It seems like a bug in the system. Does anyone know how to fix it?

"We lost connection with your Google Analytics account. Don't worry — you won't lose any data. Please reauthorize now."

www.sylvaniachurch.com shows over 14,000 nofollow links, but I have never deliberately created a nofollow link. How, then, did I collect so many?