Are local business directories worth the effort? Eg. White pages, Yell.com, Local.com?
-
Hi Guys,
Im new to Moz and very keen to do SEO right without upsetting Mr. Google too much.
Are local business directories worth the effort? Its a laborious job, but happy to do it, if its effective and won't be considered spammy by Google?
Thanks
-
Thanks Patrick,
I am based in Australia so unfortunately can't take advantage of MOZ local. But hopefully it will be available here too.
Ill get hacking away at the business directories then.
We have 3 business sites that need to be uploaded. All have different details, can anyone suggest a quicker fill option. Ive heard Google has a extension Call Auto fill but I cant seem to get it to work. Ive also heard of CSV files?
Anyone with advice or experience with this?
Thanks
-
Hi thereI
I do, overall, find these to be valuable links and listings because ultimately what you want is traffic to your site. You want traffic coming to your website for brand awareness and for users to take action. These listings do just that, they put you in front of audiences looking for your business or services and send traffic. From a SEO standpoint, some of these sites / links may not send ranking or linking value because they are nofollow, but I would not let that you deter you - remember, your purpose in obtaining that link is sending quality traffic to your website to take action, not praying for higher rankings. Just make sure the listings you obtain are relevant and through known entities.
As you said, it's a tedious undertaking to manually list your website in all of these local business directories, but services like Moz Local take all of the work off of you and do this automatically. You can learn more about Moz Local here and focus on other things, like building quality content and obtaining quality links.
Hope this all helps! Good luck!
Patrick
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
-
Question About Local SEO
Hey all, If a business operates in one city but works with associated organizations across multiple regions how would this impact a local SEO campaign? For example, a transportation company is located in Texas but services the Northwest and New England by outsourcing to smaller transportation companies in each of those regions. Would it be wise to create pages for each region they service on their website and then break that down in further into specific cities? Also, would it be worth targeting local search terms even though specific cities are serviced by the associated organizations and not the parent company itself? Thanks in advance, Andrew
Local Website Optimization | | mostcg0 -
Service area local seo
Hello, everyone. I am struggling a little with the vast amounts of information about how best to get a local service area business ranking and the best practice. If I explain what I have been doing and then see how I can improve. I have created a couple of websites for window cleaners. These window cleaners offer several services like window cleaning, gutter cleaning, conservatory cleaning, pressure washing etc. They also cover several towns/cities so it's important for them to be able to target all these areas in search. They don't have multiple offices so only have one home/office address and by the nature of the job provide services at the customer's house/business. What I have been doing is creating a page for each service they provide then to cover the areas I have been doing two things. Creating a page on the site called areas covered with a list of the areas they cover and also adding in the title of the page the main one or two areas that are most important to them. From what I can gather this might not be the best approach?? Google may see the areas in titles as keyword stuffing? Google also doesn't like a list of areas in one go anywhere on a site which can also seem like keyword stuffing? So for an example, this would be a rough title structure of service pages Window cleaners in town/city, town/city and town/city Gutter Cleaners in town/city, town/city and town/city As I said I am not sure this is the best way to do this from what I read. I have read about area specific pages but i struggle to see how i could make each area specific page unique enough as the service is exactly the same in each area. I have also read that putting the most important keywords at the begingin of the the title is better so using the above example would this be better? town/city window cleaners - business name So from what i understand having pages like this might be better Window cleaners town/city1 Window cleaners town/city2 Window cleaners town/city3 Gutter Cleaners town/city1 Gutter Cleaners town/city2 Gutter Cleaners town/city3 and so on but like I say I am aware each of these area specific pages would need to be unique but being that the services are exactly the same in each area I am not sure how I could warrant creating all the pages. Writing about the specific area on the page seems a little odd in that the visitor who lands on that page doesn't want to learn about their area, they live there and know the area. They want to know what the service is and if they do in fact cover their area. In which case how can i best ensure all or most of the areas they cover are targeted and show in search? Some sites i have done cover around 20-30 towns around them so how can best ensure they rank for them? I have also been reading conflicting information about how to structure pages and urls. Some say don't use commas in page titles, some say don't use underscores and only use hyphens. Similarly, I have read that the URL should not contain any hyphens but I am not sure about this seeing as WordPress often adds hyphens between words in URLs. Some say you should always have an H1 on every page others say it's not all that important anymore. With images, i have also been giving them alts the same as the page titles thay are on, is this the wrong thing to do? Id be happy to private messge (if i can do that here) one of the sites I would be eternally grateful if anyone can help in firstly clarifying how I could best improve ranking for areas covered and secondly what best practice is to structure page content like H1's image alts etc. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | Gavpeds0 -
Multilocation business, how can you rank for different categories in different locations with only branch pages?
Hello Mozzers, I am wondering how do you rank for categories locally where when you operate from multiple branches. Currently our eCommerce website has location pages for every category but I know that this is now classed as doorway pages and spammy so I am in the process of sorting out our site structure. I understand that the general format for having sites with multiple branches is to have a branch page per physical location and that's about it. Is there any more to this ? However, What confuses me though, is that if you offer all these services in all these branches, how are you going to rank for them locally if you don't have a specific page for each of them in that location? So for example - We rent Carpet cleaners , floor sanders, generators in each of our different branches. My site currently has a carpet cleaner hire <location>url , floor sander hire <location>url and a generator hire <location>url. Every branch has a url for each of my categories.</location></location></location> So if I was to get rid of all of my location category pages. How am I going to rank for these renting these products in different cities where our branches does without having specific location pages for them ? Is it just a case that google knows that because I have branch pages at locations x, y, x , then my carpet cleaner , floor sander and generator category pages will rank locally in those locations providing I have decent citations etc etc etc thanks
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC12
Pete0 -
2 websites, 1 business... How should I proceed?
Hi MOZ Folks, I am looking for SEO advices! I have my own business call : Tonikwebstudio.com... and recently, we bought a other company called Olawebstudio.com... So 2 websites for 1 business. How should I proceed to optimize my Local Seo? I think I have two choices... 1- I make referal links on Ola customer websites that redirect to Ola(+referal link) and then to Tonik. OR 2- I make referal links on Ola customer websites that redirect to Tonik directly... and then, I delete Ola web site... Any advices?
Local Website Optimization | | Gab-Tonik1 -
Australian local business website on a dot.com - how do I ensure its indexed/ranked by Google.com/au as priority
look forward to your advice My client is a local business in australia but has a dotcom site which is hosted in US. We are just moving it to wordpress and new hosting. I want to ensure that Google.com/au will be able to index and rank the content. How can I tell google its a site for people in australia? I thought best to set up a subfolder like this hissite.com/au and redirect anyone from australia to go to this url? Thanks for your recommendations
Local Website Optimization | | bisibee10 -
Local SEO HELP for Franchise SAB Business
This all began when I was asked to develop experiment parameters for our content protocol & strategy. It should be simple right? I've reviewed A/B testing tips for days now, from Moz and other sources.I'm totally amped and ready to begin testing in Google Analytics. Say we have a restoration service franchise with over 40 franchises we perform SEO for. They are all over the US. Every franchise has their own local website. Example restorationcompanylosangeles.com Every franchise purchases territories in which they want to rank in. Some service over 100 cities. Most franchises also have PPC campaigns. As a part of our strategy we incorporate the location reach data from Adwords to focus on their high reach locations first. We have 'power pages' which include 5 high reach branch preferences (areas in which the owners prefer to target) and 5 non branch preference high reach locations. We are working heavily on our National brand presence & working with PR and local news companies to build relationships for natural backlinks. We are developing a strategy for social media for national brand outlets and local outlets. We are using major aggregators to distribute our local citation for our branch offices. We make sure all NAP is consistent across all citations. We are partners with Google so we work with them on new branches that are developing to create their Google listings (MyBusiness & G+). We use local business schema markup for all pages. Our content protocol encompasses all the needed onsite optimization tactics; meta, titles, schema, placement of keywords, semantic Q&A & internal linking strategies etc. Our leads are calls and form submissions. We use several call tracking services to monitor calls, caller's location etc. We are testing Callrail to start monitoring landing pages and keywords that generating our leads. Parts that I want to change: Some of the local sites have over 100 pages targeted for 'water damage + city ' aka what Moz would call "Doorway pages. " These pages have 600-1000 words all talking about services we provide. Although our writers (4 of them) manipulate them in a way so that they aren't duplicate pages. They add about 100 words about the city location. This is the only unique variable. We pump out about 10 new local pages a month per site - so yes - over 300 local pages a month. Traffic to the local sites is very scarce. Content protocol / strategy is only tested based on ranking! We have a tool that monitors ranking on all domains. This does not count for mobile, local, nor user based preference searching like Google Now. My team is deeply attached to basing our metrics solely on ranking. The logic behind this is that if there is no local city page existing for a targeted location, there is less likelihood of ranking for that location. If you are not seen then you will not get traffic nor leads. Ranking for power locations is poor - while less competitive low reach locations rank ok. We are updating content protocol by tweaking small things (multiple variants at a time). They will check ranking everyday for about a week to determine whether that experiment was a success or not. What I need: Internal duplicate content analyzer - to prove that writing over 400 pages a month about water damage + city IS duplicate content. Unique content for 'Power pages' - I know based on dozens of chats here on the community and in MOZ blogs that we can only truly create quality content for 5-10 pages. Meaning we need to narrow down what locations are most important to us and beef them up. Creating blog content for non 'power' locations. Develop new experiment protocol based on metrics like traffic, impressions, bounce rate landing page analysis, domain authority etc. Dig deeper into call metrics and their sources. Now I am at a roadblock because I cannot develop valid content experimenting parameters based on ranking. I know that a/b testing requires testing two pages that are same except the one variable. We'd either non index these or canonicalize.. both are not in favor of testing ranking for the same term. Questions: Are all these local pages duplicate content? Is there a such thing as content experiments based solely on ranking? Any other suggestions for this scenario?
Local Website Optimization | | MilestoneSEO_LA1 -
SEO for local business directory type site
I am thinking about creating a local business directory type website that lists all local Tattoo Shops. I am familiar with both local and global SEO and how to differentiate between them, however, I am not sure how I should approach this type of website. It isn't an actual business, but I want to target local searches that are looking for tattoo shops. In other words, when someone types in "tattoo shops" or "tattoo shops near me", or "tattoo parlors", I want the website to appear. Is this something that is manageable, or will the individual Tattoo Shop websites always show before mine since they are real local businesses with google+ pages?
Local Website Optimization | | brfieger0 -
Which is better for Local & National coupons --1000s of Indexed Pages per City or only a Few?
Not sure where this belongs.. I am developing a coupons site for listing local coupons and national coupons (think Valpak+RetailMeNot), eventually in all major cities, and am VERY concerned about how many internal pages to let google 'follow' for indexing, as it can exceed 10,000 per city. Is there a way to determine what the optimal approach is for internal paging/indexing BEFORE I actually launch the site (it is about ready except for this darned url question, which seems critical) Ie can I put in searchwords for google to determine which ones are most worthy to have their own indexed page? I'm a newbie sort of, so please put answer in simple terms. I'm one person and have limited funds and need to find the cheapest way to get the best organic results for each city that I cover. Is there a generic answer? One SEO firm told me the more variety the better. Another told me that simple is better, and use content on the simple pages to get variety. So confused I decided to consult the experts here! Here's the site concept: **FOR EACH CITY: ** User inputs location: Main city only(ie Houston), or 1 of 40 city regions(suburb, etc..), or zip code, or zip-street combo, OR allow gps lookup. A miles range is defaulted or chosen by the user. After search area is determined, user chooses 1 of 6 types of coupons searches: 1. Online shopping with national coupon codes, choice of 16 categories (electronics, health, clothes, etc) and 100 subcategories (computers, skin care products, mens shirts) These are national offers for chains like Kohls, which do not use the users location at all. 2. Local shopping in-store coupons, choice of same 16 categories and 100 subcategories that are used for online shopping in #1 (mom & pop shoe store or local chain offer). The results will be within the users chosen location and range. 3. Local restaurant coupons, about 60 subcategories (pizza, fast food, sandwiches). The results are again within the users chosen location and range. 4. Local services coupons, 8 categories (auto repair, activities,etc..) and around 200 subcategories (brakes, miniature golf, etc..). Results within users chosen location and range. 5. Local groceries. This is one page for the main city with coupons.com grocery coupons, and listing the main grocery stores in the city. This page does not break down by sub regions, or zip, etc.. 6. Local weekly ad circulars. This is one page for the main city that displays about 50 main national stores that are located in that main city. So, the best way to handle the urls indexed for the dynamic searches by locations, type of coupon, categories/subcats, and business pages The combinations of potential urls to index are nearly unlimited: Does the user's location matter when he searches for one thing (restaurants), but not for another (Kohls)? IF so, how do I know this? SHould I tailor indexed urls to that knowledge? Is there an advantage to having a url for NATIONAL cos that ties to each main city: shopping/Kohls vs shopping/Kohls/Houston or even shopping/Kohls/Houston-suburb? Again, I"m talking about 'follow' links for indexing. I realize I can have google index just a few main categories and subcats and not the others, or a few city regions but not all of them, etc.. while actually having internal pages for all of them.. Is it better to have 10,000 urls for say coupon-type/city-region/subcategory or just one for the main city: main-city/all coupons?, or something in between? You get the gist. I don't know how to begin to figure out the answers to these kinds of questions and yet they seem critical to the design of the site. The competition: sites like Valpak, MoneyMailer, localsaver seem to favor the 'more is better' approach, with coupons/zipcode/category or coupons/bizname/zipcode But a site like 8coupons.com appears to have no indexing for categories or subcategories at all! They have city-subregion/coupons and they have individual businesses bizname/city-subregion but as far as I see no city/category or city-subregion/category. And a very popular coupons site in my city only has maincity/coupons maincity/a few categories and maincity/bizname/coupons. Sorry this is so long, but it seems very complicated to me and I wanted to make the issue as clear as possible. Thanks, couponguy
Local Website Optimization | | couponguy1