Targeting local areas without creating landing pages for each town
-
I have a large ecommerce website which is structured very much for SEO as it existed a few years ago. With a landing page for every product/town nationwide (its a lot of pages).
Then along came Panda...
I began shrinking the site in Feb last year in an effort to tackle duplicate content. We had initially used a template only changing product/town name.
My first change was to reduce the amount of pages in half by merging the top two categories, as they are semantically similar enough to not need their own pages. This worked a treat, traffic didn't drop at all and the remaining pages are bringing in the desired search terms for both these products.
Next I have rewritten the content for every product to ensure they are now as individual as possible.
However with 46 products and each of those generating a product/area page we still have a heap of duplicate content. Now i want to reduce the town pages, I have already started writing content for my most important areas, again, to make these pages as individual as possible.
The problem i have is that nobody can write enough unique content to target every town in the UK via an individual page (times by 46 products), so i want to reduce these too.
QUESTION: If I have a single page for "croydon", will mentioning other local surrounding areas on this page, such as Mitcham, be enough to rank this page for both towns?
I have approx 25 Google local place/map listings and grwoing, and am working from these areas outwards. I want to bring the site right down to about 150 main area pages to tackle all the duplicate content, but obviously don't want to lose my traffic for so many areas at once.
Any examples of big sites that have reduced in size since Panda would be great.
I have a headache... Thanks community.
-
My pleasure, Silkstream. I can understand how what you are doing feels risky, but in fact, you are likely preventing fallout from worse risks in the future. SEO is a process, always evolving, and helping your client change with the times is a good thing to do! Good luck with the work.
-
Thank you Miriam. I appreciate you sharing with me the broad idea of the type of structure that you feel a site should have in this instance (if starting from scratch).
You have pretty much echoed my proposal for a new site structure, built for how Google works nowadays, rather than 2-3 years ago. We are currently reducing the size of the current site, to bring it as close to this type of model as possible. However the site would need a complete redesign to make it viably possible to have this type of structure.
I guess what I've been looking for is some kind of reassurance that we are moving in the right direction! Its a scary prospect reducing such a huge amount of pages down to a compact targeted set. With prospects of losing so much long tail traffic, it can make us a little hesitant.
However the on-site changes we have made so far, seem to be having a positive affect.And thank you for giving me some ideas about content creation for each town. I really like this as an idea to move forward after the changes are complete, which will hopefully be by the new year!
-
Hi Silkstream,
Thank you so much for clarifying this! I understand now.
If I were starting with a client like this, from scratch, this would be the approach I would take:
-
View content development as two types of pages. One set would be the landing pages for each physical location, optimized for each city, with unique content. The other set would be service pages, optimized for the services, but not for a particular city.
-
Create a Google+ Local page for each of the physical locations, linked to its respective landing page on the website. So, let's say you now have 25 city pages and 46 service pages. That's a fairly tall order, but certainly do-able.
-
Build structured citations for each location on third party local business directories. Given the number of locations, this would be an enormous jobs.
-
Build an onsite blog and designate company bloggers, ideally one in each physical office. The job of these bloggers would be something like each of them creating one blog post per month about a project that was accomplished in their city. In this way, the company could begin developing content under their own steam that would meet the need of showcasing a given service with a given city. Over time, this body of content would grow the pool of queries for which they have answers for.
-
Create a social outreach strategy, likely designating brand representatives within the company who could be active on various platforms.
-
Likely need to develop a link earning strategy tied in with steps 4 and 5.
-
Consider video marketing. A good video or two for each physical location could work wonders.
I'm painting in broad strokes here, but this is likely what the overall strategy would look like. You've come into the scenario midway and don't have the luxury of starting from scratch. You are absolutely right to be cleaning up duplicate content and taking other measures to reduce the spaminess and improve the usefulness of the site. Once you've got your cleanup complete, I think the steps I've outlined would be the direction to go in. Hope this helps.
-
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for jumping in.
The business model is service-based. So when i refer to "46 products" they are actually 46 different types of service available.
The customer will typically book and pay online, through the website, and they are then served at their location which is most often either their home or place of work. They actually have far more than the 25 actual locations, much closer to 120 I believe. However, I only began their SEO in February, AFTER they were hit by Panda. So building up their local listings is taking time, as the duplicate content issue seems far more urgent. Trying to strike a balance, and fix this all slowly over time to lay a solid foundation for inbound marketing, as its being diluted by the poor site structure.
Does this help? Am I doing the right things here?
-
Hi Silkstream,
I think we need to clarify what your business model is. You say you have a physical location in each of your 25 towns. So far, so good, but are you saying that your business has in-person transactions with its customers at each of the 25 locations? The confusion here is arising from the fact that e-commerce companies are typically virtual, meaning that they do not have in-person transactions with their customers. The Google Places Quality Guidelines state:
Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.
Thus, my wanting to be sure that your business model is actually eligible, given that you've described it as an e-commerce business, which would be ineligibl_e._ If you can clarify your business model, I think it will help you to receive the most helpful answers from the community.
-
You scared me then Chris!
-
Of course, if you've got the physical locations, you're in good shape there.
-
"It sounds like you're saying that your one ecommerce company has 25 Google local business listings--and growing?! It's very possible that could come back and haunt you unless you in the form of merging or penalization."
Why? The business has a physical location in every town, so why should they not have a page for every location? This is what we were advised to do?
"If there was no other competition, you would almost certainly rank for your keywords along with the town name"
I have used this tactic before, for another nationwide business, but on a smaller scale and it worked. Ie; they ranked (middle of page 1) but for non competitive keywords and the page has strong backlinks. With this site, the competition is stronger and the pages will not have a strong backlink profile at first.
My biggest worry, is to cut all the existing pages and lose the 80% long tail the site currently pulls in. But what other way is there to tackle so much duplicate content?
-
It sounds like you're saying that your one ecommerce company has 25 Google local business listings--and growing?! It's very possible that could come back and haunt you unless you in the form of merging or penalization. If not that, it's likely to stop being worth the time as a visibility tactic.
As far as whether or not mentioning local surrounding towns in your page copy will be enough to get you to rank for them, it would depend on competition. If there was no other competition, you would almost certainly rank for your keywords along with the town name but with competition, all the local ranking factors start coming into play and your ability to rank for each one will depend on a combination of all of them.
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
-
JSON-LD schema markup for a category landing page
I'm working on some schema for a client and have a question regarding the use of schema for a high-level category page. This page is merely the main lander for Categories. For example: https://www.examples.com/pages/categories And all it does is list links to the three main categories (Men's, Women's, Kid's) - it's a clothing store. This is the code I have right now. In short, simply using type @Itemlist and an array that uses @ListItem. Structured Data Testing Tool returns no errors with it, but my main question is this: Is this the _correct _way to do a page like this, or are there better options? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
Is this page low quality?
Hey everyone, I need some help defining a post whether it is low quality or not. I got a post and it's a roundup post having 5 lists of fonts for free download. I actually linked to the sites from where anyone can download the font. The post is driving 300 visits a day but the bounce rate is too high around 90% and the time spent on the post is about 20 seconds on average (I checked it under GA Behaviour > Site Content > Landing pages). Also, I checked the traffic of those sites which I'm pointing in the roundup post and in their referral traffic my website is contributing. Does this mean that people clicking on the post from SERPs then quickly visiting the site to download the font as there are only 6 fonts featured in the post to download (due to six font they are not spending time)? Should I need to improve it or the page is answering query fast? Any thoughts are welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bunnypundir0 -
500 and 508 pages?
Hi we just did a massive deepcrawl (using the tool deepcrawl.co.uk/) on the site: http://tinyurl.com/nu6ww4z http://i.imgur.com/vGmCdHK.jpg Which reported a lot of URLs as either 508 and 500 errors. For the URLs as reported as either 508 or 500 after the deep crawl crawl finished we put them directly into screaming frog and they all came back with status code 200. Could it be because Deep Crawl hammered the site and the server couldn't handle the load or something? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Show parts of page A on page B & C?
Good afternoon,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
A quick question. I am working on a website which has a large page with different sections. Lets say: Page 1
SECTION A
SECTION B
SECTION C Now, they are adding a new area where they want to show only certain sections, so it would look like this: Page 2
SECTION A Page 3
SECTION C Page 4
SECTION D So my question is, would a rel='canonical' tag back to Page 1 be the correct way of preempting any duplicate content issues? I do not need Page 2-4 to even be indexed, it is just a matter of usability and giving the users what they are looking for without all the rest of the extra stuff. Gracias. Tesekürler. Salamat Ko. Thanks. (bonus thumbs up for anybody who knows which languages each of those are) 🙂0 -
Consistent Ranking Jumps Page 1 to Page 5 for months - help needed
Hi guys and gals, I have a really tricky client who I just can't seem to gain consistency with in their SERP results. The keywords are competitive but what the main issue I have is the big page jumps that happen pretty much on a weekly basis. We go up and down 40 positions and this behaviour has been going on for nearly 6 months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_bangonline
I felt it would resolve itself in time but it has not. The website is a large ecommerce website. Their link profile is OK in regards to several high quality newspaper publication links, majority brand related anchor texts and the link building we have engaged in has all been very good i.e. content relevant / high quality places. See below for some potential causes I think could be the reason: The on page SEO is good however the way their ecommerce website is setup they have formed a substantial amount of duplicate title tags. So in my opinion this is a potential cause. The previous web developer set-up 301 redirects all to their home page for any 404 errors. I know best practice is to go to the most relevant pages, however could this be a potential issue? We had some server connectivity issues show up in webmasters tools but that was for 1 day about 4 months ago. Since then no issues. they have quite a few 'blocked URLs' in their robots.txt file, e.g. Disallow: /login, Disallow: /checkout/ but to me these seem normal and not a big issue. We have seen a decrease over the last 12 months in Webmasters Tools of 'total indexed web pages' from 5000 to 2000 which is quite an odd statistic. Summary So all in all I am a tad stumped. We have some duplicate content issues in title tags, perhaps not following best practice in the 301 redirects but other than that I dont see any major on page issues, unless I am missing something in the seriousness of what I have listed.
Finally we have also do a bit of a cull of poor quality links, requesting links to be removed and also submitting a 'disavow' of some really bad links. We do not have a manual penalty though. Thoughts, feedback or comments VERY welcome.0 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
To land page or not to land page
Hey all, I wish to increase my sites rankings on a variety of keywords within sub categories but I'm unsure where to be spending the time in SEO. Here's an example of the website page structure: General Home Page > Sub Category 1 Home Page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 > Sub Category 2 Home Page
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 We've newly introduced the Sub Category Home Pages and I was wondering if SEO is best performed on these pages or should landing pages be built, one for each of the 4 sub categories in each section. Those landing pages would have links to the "Searching / Results pages" for that sub category. Thanks!0 -
Category pages in forums
I would like to hear feedback on the best SEO practice for forum category pages. An example would be a forum about cars. You can have a Chervorlet category which contains forums for every chevy model. Often this category page is simply a list of all the forums. If I noindex, follow the page then am I missing an opportunity? I am thinking of Google sitemaps for example where this page can be used for a category link. If I noindex the page, there probably isn't another great place for a sitemap to link to. I could fill out the page with wiki-like generic chevy information. Please share any thoughts or best practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0