Local SEO - Rich content and list of towns enough?
-
I'm working on creating pages to target local SEO. I've created pages for example 'wedding band london' with useful content and optimised them with title tags, alt tags etc and will continue to do so for major cities and queries where there are significant search volume. However, I also want to pickup longtail local search queries such as 'wedding band camden' etc... Will adding a list of towns somewhere on the page for each city or county help drive traffic to the site from such queries? Is so what's the best way to structure the page?
-
Hi Samuel,
Google will consider you most relevant to whatever your physical address is - this is the locale for which you can work towards your main local/blended rankings.
Beyond this, yes, you can work for organic visibility for other towns you serve in. Having a unique landing page for each of your major service cities is a smart way to go. You can then linkbuild to these pages to go after organic visibility.
I agree that you should not simply go the route of listing towns in a list. Have you considered blogging? Instead of putting too many geo terms per page, have you considered using a blog to showcase weddings you've done in Camden, etc.? A few photos of your band, folks dancing, pics of the venue and 400-600 words of text describing the event, songs the couple requested, testimonials from the bride and groom or family members would make a strong blog post on the subject and could get that long tail traffic you seek. The nice thing about this would be that it would naturally generate very unique content. Though I'm sure there are similarities in all your gigs, each one must be a little bit different, right? And, it would enable you to optimize part of your site for things like regional and neighborhood/district names.
I hope this is a helpful suggestion.
-
Hi Gerry,
Thanks for your reply. It makes sense not to include too many towns so as not to risk diluting the value of the main keyword. Most of the long tail search terms I'm talking about are likely to bring me 2 - 5 clicks a week as an estimate. It does seem, and IS a lot of work to build pages for low traffic keywords so I guess I need to figure out if it's worth my time or if my time is better spent building links and improving domain/page authority. The reason I think building local pages is the best option is simply because the industry is so competitive for the main keyword terms and I think that perhaps highly targeted local terms would convert better anyway.
I think I'll go with the strategy of short but useful content (maybe around 100 words) which might be a good compromise as theses pages wouldn't take too long to build. As the long tail keywords are not competitive (most people don't bother with them at all) hopefully they'll rank page one pretty easily. I could potenitially get a few hundred highly targeted leads this way.
-
So I'm no expert, but I've spent a lot of energy and money with several revisions related to local SEO. Here it is for what it's worth and you'll have to judge for yourself.
The more cities and town names you add to any one page the more you will dilute the organic value in the one town or city that is most important to you. You may want to include the names of a few towns within a city if they are a logical and natural language why in which people speak about a given place. For example, if you were writing a page about New York, you could logically include info on Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Manhattan and (you might want to not bother with Staten Island), but you certainly would not want to mention services in Nassau and Suffolk which are well outside the city boundaries. But that wouldn't negate the thought of a separate page for each borough.
So how do you deal with services across a large geographical area without massive duplication? There are more and more problems arising with SEO placement with duplicate and "near duplicate" content. On my core website I have tried to use templates with some success, where I generate pages for different cities and towns using some common content, but leaving room for custom content on each page - more than just a city name variable. (Be sure that the meta data is also very unique). For my business, which is pest control, weather has a big impact on pest pressure. So I have a template for coastal, inland, mountain and valley towns - plus a few more. Then I also leave room for additional custom content for each city/town page - to eliminate near duplicate content and to address real differences between towns. Each town has it's own demographics and culture - so I address that as it relates to the products and services I offer.
Still, the best bet is to create totally unique pages for each targeted geographic area. That takes time. I am gradually addressing this, but wow, serving all of Southern California means creating a lot of unique local pages. I your business too, I am sure that in different cities and towns you will find that customers have different preferences and budgets. You can address that with unique pages for each geo.
I came across a company that for a while has had very good SEO placement, but with a tactic that I think will get detected. This company has massively duplicate content, but it is not on the same website. They have purchased separate domain names for every town and populated the identical content across these websites. I am sure Google will start smacking this website soon enough.
I hope this helps.
Gerry
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
-
SEO question
why does a business rank differ on google search and google maps (for example, a hair salon we do seo for ranks 5th for "hair salon in Dublin" on Google Maps and ranks 10th on Google search)
On-Page Optimization | | ryan.mamma0 -
Duplicate content query
I'm currently reauthoring all of the product pages on our site. Within the redesign of all the pages is a set of "why choose us?" bullet points and "what our customers say" bullet points. On every page these bullet points are the same. We currently have 18% duplicate content sitewide and I'm reluctant to push this. The products are similar but targeted at different professions, so I'm not sure whether to alter the text slightly for the bullet points on each page, remove the bullet points entirely or implement some form of canonicalisation that won't impact the profession-specific pages' ability to rank well.
On-Page Optimization | | EdLongley0 -
Duplicate content from page links
So for the last month or so I have been going through fixing SEO content issues on our site. One of the biggest issues has been duplicate content with WHMCS. Some have been easy and other have been a nightmare trying to fix. Some of the duplicate content has been the login page when a page requires a login. For example knowledge base article that are only viewable by clients etc. Easily fixed for me as I dont really need them locked down like that. However pages like affiliate.php and pwreset.php that are only linked off of a page. I am unsure how to take care of these types. Here are some pages that are being listed as duplicate: Should this type of stuff be a 301 redirect to cart.php or would that break something. I am guessing that everything should point back to cart.php.
On-Page Optimization | | blueray
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...art.php?a=view
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...php?a=checkout These are the ones that are really weird to me. These are showing as duplicate content but pwreset is only a link of the KB category. It shows up as duplicate many times as does affilliate.php: https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...ebase/16/Email
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...16/pwreset.php Any help is overly welcome.0 -
Product Descriptions & SEO
I got another small question for my price comparison website that I run 🙂 An example product from my site, to which this question relates http://goo.gl/XDTUNs I have about 600 products which I track, and the product description I have for each is as follows; Paragraph 1 - Standard copy which is contained on all products, only the product name / keyword is changed "Easily compare prices below on a XXX" Paragraph 2 = Blatant, 100% copy of the product description from Amazon Paragraph 3 - Standard copy which is contained on all products, only the product name / keyword is changed "Always read your chosen stores product description before buying your XXX" Firstly, I am now on a mission to create unique descriptions instead of the Amazon ones I foolishly copied. My question is, are the standard paragraph 1 and 3 which are in all my product ok? Or should this be avoided? Should my unique description be paragraph 1, or can it remain in the middle? The reason for the three separate paragraphs was so I could mention to keyword 3 times, which is what is suggested on the Moz page grader. Thanks so much!
On-Page Optimization | | MrPenguin0 -
Left Nav / SEO
We are in the middle of a redesign and would love to get rid of our left navigation. It's currently full of SEO rich categories and has been the same for 10+ years. Our programmers think removing the left navigation will have no impact on our SEO. As SEO's, do you agree with this?
On-Page Optimization | | EileenCleary0 -
Duplicate Content - Deleting Pages
The Penguin update in April 2012 caused my website to lose about 70% of its traffic overnight and as a consequence, the same in volume of sales. Almost a year later I am stil trying to figure out what the problem is with my site. As with many ecommerce sites a large number of the product pages are quite similar. My first crawl with SEOMOZ identified a large number of pages that are very similar - the majority of these are in a category that doesn't sell well anyway and so to help with the problem I am thinking of removing one of my categories (about 1000 products). My question is - would removing all these links boost the overall SEO of the site since I am removing a large chunk of near-duplicate links? Also - if I do remove all these links would I have to put in place a 301 redirect for every single page and if so, what's the quickest way of doing this. My site is www.modern-canvas-art.com Robin
On-Page Optimization | | robbowebbo0 -
How is my on-site SEO looking like?
I know this is a broad question. My site's content has been written more than one year ago and haven't been changed so far. Our main goal is to make the application hosted in the site work better every day, so we don't worry much about writing content. The URL is http://www.onlinelogomaker.com
On-Page Optimization | | rpedri0 -
Modal Windows SEO
The new company site is almost finished, and I've just learned that instead of the home page linking to a few internal pages (it's a tiny site), they are just using modal windows instead of deeper pages. Is that bad for SEO and what can I do to optimize with this setup?
On-Page Optimization | | UnaRealidad0