Could targeting 2 geographic locations decrease rankings?
-
Hello,
I think that us targeting 2 different geographic locations (San Francisco, CA and Salt Lake City, UT) is negatively effecting the rank of some of our main keywords.
My evidence for this:
Since December our main keyword (NLP) dropped in ranking for nlpca(dot)com from about 19th to about 40th. This is about when we started to really target 2 different locations. Other main keywords dropped a lot as well, like the important term "NLP Training"
Also, our name, nlpca(dot)com indicates NLP California (CA stands for California in Google)
The other day we bolded a sentence with the words "Salt Lake City, Utah" at the top of our content and in one of Google's Databases (the one I was looking at) we dropped in rankings for "NLP California" where we used to be completely sitelinked (where we took up a lot of space at the top of the search). Also, we shot up to 1st on my datacenter for both "NLP Utah" and "NLP Salt Lake City". At the same time, our rankings for the term "NLP" dropped off the map. It has come back up, but we've also targeted California again.
A lot of our anchor text has the word "California" in it.
We're thinking about building a separate site for Utah and just linking to it from the California website when we need to.
Does it sound to you, in your experience, that targeting both locations in our case is what's causing a decrease in rankings?
Thank you!
-
You're welcome, Bob.
Sorry if that wasn't clear. I think I need more information. When you say you are targeting Salt Lake City and San Francisco, do you mean that you have offices in those two cities and are doing a true local campaign for the cities (optimizing the site for them + getting Google Place Pages, other local business index listings, etc.)?
Or, is your service virtual and you are just targeting cities with your content only?
If the former, then if the Local SEO is not handled correctly, Google can get confused as to why you've got two distinct addresses. In such a case, they may lose 'faith' in the validity of their data about you and that could, potentially, cause a drop,
Please, come back with more info if you can.
Miriam
-
Thanks Miriam!
What do you mean if "Google got mixed up about our address", and would that affect national rankings?
-
Hi Again BobGW,
As promised, I ran this past a few colleagues. As I expected, the response was "correlation is not causation". Unless the Local SEO on your site or on local business indexes was mishandled, it seems unlikely that your targeting your second location is responsible for the ranking drop you observed. Now, if Google got mixed up about your addresses, that could cause a problem, but provided you've handled your Local SEO correctly, this is probably not the culprit.
Hope this feedback helps!
Miriam
-
Hi BobGW,
I have not encountered any studies or evidence to indicate that adding a second location would cause a ranking drop of the original location - though, of course, you have in a sense split your KWs in half by doubling them (adding Utah).
I'd like to ask a few of my Local SEO colleagues for any feedback on this in case anyone can point to a similar case. I'll be back.
Miriam
-
One factor that seems to have quite a bit to do with geographical rankings is the actual popularity of that geographical region. Larger more metro areas have more people more people searching & are harder to rank in then smaller places with fewer people thus fewer people searching.
I can cobble a site that ranks top 3 for Daly City Photography in a day or so.
Yet if I create the same site for San Francisco Photography.
That will be a much harder set of keywords to rank for since Daly City is so small & has so fewer people using that phrase VS San Francisco.
The same may be true for California VS Utah.
-
Hundreds of factors determine your rankings. I don't think you can point to creating a second geographic location and say that was what tanked your SERPs. For all you know google could be saying... wow! these guys have two locations now, they must be successful... but other factors tanked the rankings.
Would I build a second site for a second location? Only if the service was completely different... Like if I had a beer joint in Utah and a knitting club in California.
But that's only one opinion.
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
-
Product pages and rank brain
Hello, On product pages does the content matter or does the presentation and answering the user intent matter more ? I know for informational query content definitely matters but with rank brain, I am thinking that for pages where your present product content doesn't matter as much ? Am I right ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Keyword difficulty and time to rank
Hello, Is there a correlation between the keyword difficult and the time it takes to rank ? In other words let's say I try to rank for the keyword "seo" and it is going to take 2 years to rank 1 st whereas if I go for "best seo tools in 2018" and it takes just 2 weeks ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Yahoo and Bing Rankings
Hello. I have noticed that Yahoo and Bing rankings for all of my clients have significantly tanked as of the beginning of March. Has there been a recent algorithm update for these two search engines and what are some major things I can look for to fix? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | higherimages0 -
Why have my rankings dropped?
I have a client who has just seen his average page rank creep up from around 39 to 34 over about two months, then it appears to have dropped back to position 40+ in the space of a week. I believe he's made a lot of changes to targeted keywords, so I'd like to think it's simply because his old targeted keywords are dropping and new keywords still have to build their rankings. But I'm also worried in case he has over-optimised and might get getting penalised. Any advice on where to start digging?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Dividing my catalog into 2 different sites.
Hi, We are a wholesaler for electronics parts and accessories on our main site Our Business for parts is more B2B. Accessories is more B2C oriented. Right now, our catalog is not the best SEO Friendly kind. We want to move all accesories to a new site. Now. So as not to get duplicated content, and user experience, I guess the best is remove all category pages and product pages from our main site. That would generate lots of 404. What would be the way to handle this as we are talking about hundreds, maybe thousands of pages ? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kepass0 -
Ranking drop
Hello there, Based on Moz's rank tracker our keywords ranking have been dropping in ranking. Does anyone know what might be the cause? We have been building quality "white hat" links which are very relevant to our niche Thanks, Robert
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Authorship/Ranking when 2 separate authors
Hello, We've got a pdf with, on the front page "by author 1 and author 2" Author one published the PDF and sits at rank 3 Author 2 is us (on a completely different website than author 1) How can we rank highest, and can we use google authorship? Can we get our picture next to the article? Let me know if we need to convert to html for (1) and/or (2)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both
Hi All, For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page. My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them? Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated 🙂 Happy New Year Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tony-Dimmock0