Strategy for [list of keywords] + hundreds of cities
-
Hi, hoping to get some suggestions on strategy in terms of building out my site as I'm a bit overwhelmed. We provide home services throughout hundreds of locations - some major cities, others smaller yet affluent towns where demand is sufficient, though have no physical presence in the majority. My question is really regarding ranking organically (given local listings will be so difficult). I am new to Moz and have been using the Keyword Explorer to generate a long list of keywords, which I've refined to those which offer the most opportunity. Do I simply now take this list and append [city_name] to each keyword/phrase?
If so, working in [list_of_keywords] + [city] into hundreds of location pages is surely going to be a nightmare to make unique, and most likely a horrible user experience. All my customers really want to see is: that we service their area, some info on how we operate, that we are trustworthy (reviews/site quality etc) clear pricing/information (across mobile/desktop) and an easy way of contacting us. If I was searching for a lawn care service in Manchester for example, I couldn't care less about anything else other than the above information. So is padding out pages with content like 'Things to do in Manchester' etc. really the way forward? Would I be better off focusing on building relationships/links with other local complimentary businesses/influencers rather than building out tons of content (on the assumption of course that what content is there is high quality, contains a smattering of keyword + city, and optimised very well)?
Any help hugely appreciated!
-
Hi There!
I'm hoping watching some of Rand's Whiteboard Friday's will give you a clearer sense of how to organize this, but, in brief:
- You should never assume Google knows the location of a business, nor the locations it serves. It is up to you to point that out via content and links, but not to go overboard. There is nothing worse than reading text like this:
Our Chicago Housecleaning service help customers in Chicago keep their Chicago homes clean with good housekeeping practices special to Chicago customers.
Not saying you'd write something like that, but if you start looking at local business websites, you'll run into agonies like this one. So, the answer is, no, when writing in natural language, you're not going to append your city name to every keyword you are focusing on. Highly recommend watching those WB Fridays for more on this.
-
What you want to avoid here is unnatural links. Typically, people linking to you are not naturally going to use your preferred text. Highly recommend you read through this as you plan your link strategy: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-link
-
I reached out to Dan Leibson at Local SEO Guide and he said the problem you are encountering most likely stems from not first making a copy of the sheet. You might be trying to edit the original, instead, which Dan says folks sometimes do by accident. Here are the instructions:
This tool is really simple to use:
- Make a copy of the sheet for you to use yourself (don’t ask me for edit access, I’m not going to give it to you)
- Put the city you want to localize for (or zip code) in cell A4
- Put the keywords you want to localize in A10+
- Click the “Generate Keywords” button
- Check the new tab that has the localized versions of all your keywords
Hope this helps, and good luck!
-
Hi Miriam, thanks for taking the time to respond so fully - very much appreciated. Just a few questions though:
1. Lets say I am house cleaning company servicing numerous locations within London, lets say Mayfair (and have no physical location there). I will therefore wish to appear in the organic rankings for all manner of searches associated "house cleaning + Mayfair" "home cleaners + Mayfair" "domestic services + Mayfair" etc etc. There are likely to be hundreds of variations. Lets assume I get the URL structure and tech seo right, within my page content, should I be gunning for say the top 10 keywords on this list, with "Mayfair" appended, so something like _"...we offer a full range of house cleaning services in Mayfair..." _or, should I assume that Google will realise this page is clearly about Mayfair and not bother trying to add Mayfair to each keyword (just gut feel that if the word Mayfair is in title tags, meta description and H1, then peppering the page with further references to Mayfair may seem unnatural and spammy)?
2. Once I have worked out the answer as to how to structure this page content, I assume I should then focus on getting relevant high authority links to the Mayfair landing page, using natural language. If this is the case, and if some high ranking site is willing (I realise that this would be an ideal situation), might it be best to actually suggest linking text to them, so that their link to our page contains the text _house cleaning services in Mayfair _thereby targeting the exact content on our page?
By the way, I tried your tool, but couldn't work out how to actually add (using the above example) Mayfair into cell A4 and then keywords I want to localise into cell A10.
Many thanks!
-
Hey There!
Good topic! First, let me point you to this cool little tool Local SEO Guide just published: http://www.localseoguide.com/the-local-keyword-generator-tool/ It should really help with your keyword organization needs that you've mentioned.
From your post, what I understand is that your business is at a very critical moment in planning its strategy. You are so right: it is really easy to go at this wrong and end up with a redundant, duplicative site that simply doesn't do a good job of serving users. Most local businesses will need to create a strategy something like this for their website:
-
Build great basic pages (home, about, contact, testimonials, etc.)
-
Build a great page for each service the company offers.
-
Build a high quality, unique page for each city in which the business has a physical location. So, if you've got 5 physical locations, that's 5 pages.
-
Then, consider how you wish to cover all of the other cities that you serve. If you serve hundreds of cities, chances are slim that you're going to be able to create amazing content for all of them in the short term. As you've mentioned, you know you're not gunning for local pack rankings for cities in which you lack a physical location, but providing some content about them can definitely help with your organic visibility. So, typically, in this scenario, you'd be considering something along the lines of identifying maybe 10-20 most important cities where you serve but lack a physical location for, and then consider how you can create content that really shines for your work in those cities. For example, an architect physically located in San Antonio, Texas may have designed 3 building in Dallas, Texas. Even though he is not located in Dallas, he could create a wonderful page about the buildings he helped create there. In other words, you can showcase your projects in a given city, including text, photos, testimonials, links to 3rd party reviews, topical tips for that city, etc.
If a business can take this approach to its more important service cities, and then earn a few good links to those pages, they are well on their way to competing for organic visibility. They can then move out from there, perhaps mentioning some of their secondary target cities in blog posts, social media, etc.
Here are some resources I think you'll find very helpful at this critical stage of your planning:
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/local-seo-checklist
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/build-content-keyword-map-for-seo-whiteboard-friday
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/long-tail-seo-target-low-volume-keywords-whiteboard-friday
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/google-may-analyze-evaluate-quality-content-whiteboard-friday
Hope you'll enjoy these!
-
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
-
Should local businesses focus exclusively on a local SEO strategy (and forget traditional SEO)?
Hello Friends! I work at a small, local company. We definitely want to rank high for local search , so we see the value of having a local SEO strategy. But does it make sense for us to also invest in a traditional SEO strategy? My understanding is that a traditional SEO strategy is focused on improving your site's visibility on a national or international scale. Does this make sense for my company if only local customers convert? If we had unlimited time and resources, I'd be all for a traditional SEO strategy. I understand that the more traffic, backlinks, etc. my site generates from producing relevant content, the higher my ranking. But my company has to be very strategic about where we spend our time since our resources are limited. So...How much can or does a traditional SEO strategy impact local search results? I'd hate to spend the time writing a beautiful SEO-optimized blog on dog grooming, for example, if that effort won't impact my SERP ranking when someone in my area searches for "dog grooming near me." I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Local SEO | | annav0520 -
Local SEO for a business serving multiple small cities
We have a local business that has a showroom in one city, and serve other 5 different small cities (in total 6 small cities). Search volume for the targeted keyword is very low (around 100 each plus minus) with a variety of competition levels. The product is expensive so this justifies the low search volume with a serious user intent.
Local SEO | | Nadiamo44
My question is given the low search volume for each keyword, what would be the best local SEO tactic for this. The website has a DA of 20 with competitors who has similar and higher DAs. Options I am considering: 1. Create unique pages for each location with unique content (no address available so I will have to use a city name postcode)
2. Create pages with the same content (but changing the area of service on the URL, H1 and mention the postcode and the radius of coverage twice in the content) and using a canonical tag to solve the duplicate issue.
In this scenario, I will create the main product pages with the address of the showroom, and mention the area of service covered for the other 5 cities.
3. Given that the 6 cities are part of a greater area, use the greater area to target them all. The keyword of the greater area has a lower search volume than the city keyword. This might work for keywords with low competition but not for ones with high competition levels. Not sure how well search engines will rank the keywords that include the greater area and show the pages for searches in small cities. Any advice on which option to go with or any recommendations for other solutions?0 -
Effective Real Estate SEO Strategies
I am looking to increase organic traffic to our Real Estate website, and am looking for any suggestions and or feedback as to strategies to implement in this area or even the must-have SEO pages every real-estate business should build. Interested in attracting sellers & buyers, but obviously would love more to attract sellers... The issue with that being you have to outrank the massive sites like Zillow and Realtor. Some ideas I have so far. Building out Neighbourhood pages to rank for people searching for 'Neighbourhood name' Any feedback on this one greatly appreciate. What's {city name} like? {Neighbourhood name} houses for sale What are good areas of {city name} Is {city name} a good place to live? What's {city name} like? What __ are in {city name} restaraunts hospitals beaches colleges How is {city names} weather Thanks guys!
Local SEO | | Dakota_G0 -
Keywords not ranking at google.COM, only at google.com.br
I have a website registered with .com.br. And I have noticed that some (not all of them, some are ranking the same way at both "Googles") of its keywords are ranking only when I search at google.com.br, but if I search the same term at google.COM, those pages aren't ranking. What could I do to rank not just at google.com.br, but also at google.com. My chrome, for example, redirects searches automatically for google.com. If this happens with a large number of people, the impact in my website's visits would be very harmful. Please, help me.
Local SEO | | Ricardocpereira0 -
Is it worth tracking both "keyword" and "keyword near me" for a nation-wide directory?
We're a directory of industry-specific services, so a lot of people find their way to our site by searching something like "tire repair near me." For every keyword we rank for, ("tire repair"), we also rank for the "near me" version, ("tire repair near me"). I'm looking for opinions on if is worth spending ~50% of the keywords included in my plan to track these "near me" keywords, or if we would be better off tracking some of the most important "near me" keywords, and some of those same base keywords on a local basis for major population centres, (for example "tire repair nyc"). What does the forum think?
Local SEO | | 4RS_John0 -
Developing a content marketing strategy for a social security disability firm.
I have a client that I've been working with for a little over a year now and I've been struggling to generate new business from his online presence. Initially, I completely re-designed his website with semantically correct html markup, and used all of typical, site level SEO tactics, i.e., keywords in title tags, h tags, paragraphs, correct NAP, etc. We've only seen very low marginal returns off of our efforts. Part of the problem is that my client is not an attorney, but instead he runs a social security disability advocacy firm. He still performs all of the operations that an attorney performs, but due to the fact that he is not an attorney, we cannot optimize his site for search phrases containing "attorney", which is a common keyword that people would generally use to find the services that my client offers. So I've decided to try a different approach. A content marketing approach. The only reason I prolonged avoided this approach for so long is that, to be frank, I had no idea how to target his ideal clients with content. After talking to my client the other day and recommending this new approach, I uncovered some similarities between his previous clients. Most his clients live in rural areas, and they like nascar, hunting, fishing, etc. So I suggested that I create blog for him, and begin finding some freelance writers that can create some killer content about nascar, hunting and fishing. Admittedly, I don't have a much experience with a content marketing approach, but I want to learn everything there is to know about it. I guess I'm a little unsure about this approach that we're getting ready to try, and would love to hear from some people that have been down this path, and might be able to offer any advice. I really want to help my client's business flourish, and it's now very clear to me that solely relying on an old SEO line of thinking is not doing the trick anymore. Any tips, tactics and strategies would be greatly appreciated. Am I on the right track here? How would we get this content in front of his ideal clients, and market it in such a way that he will get a good return on his investment?
Local SEO | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Niche Keyword Opportunities in Canada when US Market Dominates
Hey, I have an interesting question. I am the owner of a Canadian E-Commerce site, and I have been brainstorming ways to find opportunities and niches for Canadian online shoppers in an industry that is dominated by American E-commerce sites. I looked around at another Canadian e-commerce site, and I wanted to get some advice on whether this strategy is sound. Here is an example. Well.ca is a large e-commerce site in Canada. They take a competitive product like a "KONG Goodie Bone" (a dog toy) and include local and intent terms in their title. For example "Buy KONG Goodie Bone from Canada at Well.ca - Free Shipping". If a Canadian shopper searches for "Kong Goodie Bone", they are going to find results for amazon.com, ebay.com, the Kong company website, Petco (which is not in Canada) etc. I would imagine that Canadian shoppers would start to add terms such as Canada, Buy, or online to try to find Canadian sellers. If that is the case, then Well.ca ranks. I guess my question is, if the dominant search terms in my industry are polluted with irrelevant or American companies (even in Canada), is this form of localization a good idea? The terms don't seem to be searched much according to any keyword research tool I've used, but I know that I add "canada" to my search terms in order to find Canadian results? I will also note that our website recently launched, we are using 100% original product page content, we are using videos, and we are really putting a lot of energy into quality content. I am just wondering if patience is the name of the game when you are dealing with sites with incredible domain authority, or if we are better off trying to find niche opportunities. Thoughts?
Local SEO | | evan890 -
Keyword Question - Metro Suburb
My question is about keyword selection for a small divorce law firm located outside of a major city. My firm focuses only on family law matters, such as divorce, child support, child custody, and paternity. Divorce cases generate the most revenue. We are located outside of the Orlando, Florida metro area, in a small town about 15 miles west of Orlando. My keyword research shows a significant amount of traffic for keywords including Orlando, such as Orlando Divorce Lawyer, Divorce Attorney Orlando, and Orlando Divorce Attorney. For my location, Winter Garden, Florida, the search volume is reported as "0" using Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool. When I use other tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, the reported volume for my physical location and surrounding cities, other than Orlando, shows a volume of "0." We do get potential clients contacting us indicating that they found us via a Google search, and I know that we are ranking well in local search results. That's the good news. However, we are trying to increase the volume of potential clients contacting us, and it seems that the way to do that is to rank well for searches including the word "Orlando." I know that ranking in the local results for Orlando is out of the question because my office is not physically located in Orlando. However, it does not seem to make sense to target keywords for organic search including my location and the surrounding cities because the search volume appears to be next to nothing. So my questions are as follows: Even though the search terms with high traffic seem to be quite competitive and my office is not located in Orlando, should I still target keywords including the Orlando location? How should a small business approach this strategy as far as keyword usage and organization of the website? Should I have a city landing page for Orlando or should I target my main pages using keywords including "Orlando" and build city pages for the smaller, surrounding cities? Thanks in advance for the help. My website is located at http://www.thegrossmanlawoffice.com
Local SEO | | ajgrossman0