I've been having a lot of conversations recently with websites in need of better rankings for keyword + cityname combinations in cities across the country (or around the world). This is one of the most challenging tasks in the SEO field, for four big reasons:
- Maps Results Bias Against Multi-City Domains
Google's local/maps results are far more challenging to get into if you're not a business with a physical local presence. Opening field offices or leveraging local franchises are possibilities, but they take time and effort.
_ - Web Results are Getting More Geo-Sensitive Too
The "standard" web results are seeing more and more leanings towards local results, even when the maps/local trigger isn't in place:
At least 4 of the top results are showing based on my location alone (and I'm feeling really weird that I don't know anyone at any of these Seattle SEO companies - where are you guys? Come to a meetup!).
_ - Exact/Partial Keyword Match Domains Dominate
In reviewing results for some friends and folks on PRO Q+A, it seems that exact match domains dominate results in local even more than in other verticals.
This makes it even harder for single sites with landing pages to get into the results (and honestly, I question whether this is a smart algorithmic move on Google's part).
_ - Earning "Local" Links is Harder for Multi-City Sites
If you live locally, run your business in an area and thus participate in that community, your liklihood of earning links from local businesses and with anchor text that includes your city name increases dramatically. This works against national sites seeking a presence in the local rankings.
Before I continue, I'll first point out that it's not necessarily a bad thing that Google biases towards local sites ahead of national or multi-city ones. It's quite likely that doing so has actually improved relevance and searcher happiness from a few years ago (when national sites with multi-city listings dominated these types of queries).
However, this post is here to help those of you who are aiming for those multiple city listings, so let's dive into strategy and tactics.
Maps vs. Web Results
There's two ways to get results from SEO in local keyword campaigns:
Competing in one is hard - in both, harder still. Yet, given Google's propensity to make localization and geographic queries leverage Google Maps (and the announcement today that they're doubling down with former VP of Search, Marissa Mayer, moving from to local), it would seem this will grow in importance and reach.
Best Practices & Resources for Maps/Local
In Google Local & Maps, it's all about the listings (rather than the links). You need to:
- Optimize your own Maps listing
- Create LOTS of consistent data across every resource Google might be using
- Build passion among online-savvy audiences who use your business (so they'll do the promotion for you)
Need more? Read the Bible on Local SEO.
Building the Right Content
Content for local searchers is hard to fake and hard to make "great," often because the intent of a local query can vary more than initial instincts might lead you to believe. In my experience, local searchers are seeking:
- Llists of the "best" businesses in this arena, or at least an endorsement they can trust of a select few (think of queries like "San Diego sushi restaurants" or "Ocean Beach consignment shops")
- A single, geographically close, convenient and "good enough" solution (e.g. "bookstore near Balboa Park" or "La Jolla Apple Store")
- Content-based answers or resources more than local businesses (e.g. "San Diego neighborhoods" or "
If you're going to stand out in the field, you need to identify the intent successfully and fulfill it exceptionally.
This means you can't go the classic route of building a single page of content and simply replacing the geographic keywords with each city you're targeting. Content needs to be meaningfully unique and target the intents described above. My best advice is to follow these three steps:
- Leverage or build a unique source of data - that could come from your own deep experience in the field, from user/editorial data or from a technological solution you've constructed (think Zillow's home price values or SimplyHired's job + salary data).
- Hire the best writers you can find, the best designers you can get and mashup beautiful elegance with literary genius (NYmag has always impressed me on both fronts)
- Don't skimp on the depth and detail. Better to spend 40 hours of work for each city building the most amazing resource possible and earn top rankings than to put in a half-hearted effort and hit page 2 or 3. And, even if you can rank, how can you convert and win raving fans if you don't have the best material (e.g. see how Oyster reviews a hotel - Tripadvisor is a letdown in comparison).
Content alone won't win the day (sadly, it's a myth that the best content earns top rankings), but it is critical to building the foundation for long term success.
Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization
The standard best practices for keyword targeting & on-page optimization apply, with a few twists.
- Keyword cannibalization can be a big problem, particularly if you're producing both broad and narrow categories and landing pages (like "San Diego Restaurants" and "San Diego Kid-Friendly Restaurants"). It's not impossible to win both, but you need to be careful about how you use keywords on the pages and be smart with internal (and external) anchor text. Recently, I've witnessed some cases where the wrong page ranked due to anchor text and keyword usage issues. This is an area where it pays to be cautious.
- It sometimes pays to target multiple keywords on the same page. When that's the case, be careful not to go overboard and get spammy or abusive. Often, I see sites repeating the city name far more often than is necessary. If I'm on the San Diego page, there's no need to go overboard with internal anchor text or repetitive phrases that include "San Diego" in front of every other noun.
- Keywords in the URL string seem, perplexingly, to be a stronger signal on these types of pages and queries than I'm accustomed to. I haven't invested in real research around a correlation study on this, but looking through hundreds of results, my sense is that writing good URLs that are keyword rich matters. That doesn't mean something like: site.com/san-diego/san-diego-restaurants/san-diego-kid-friendly-restaurants - in fact, I suspect many searchers are starting to learn that URLs like those often don't have what they want. But I would, for example, recommend at least: site.com/san-diego/restaurants/kid-friendly
- Another tough one to prove, but my instincts have been telling me that topic relevance matters quite a bit here too. The free LDA tool isn't perfect, but it's the best thing I know of in the SEO world to help evaluate a piece of content's relevance to a query. You can and should, of course, also use your intuition.
Be careful not to get too addicted to a template approach, particularly if your template isn't a robust platform for nailing the user intents described above. It can be good to vary keyword usage based on demand - for example, some cities might have more searchers using "Seattle Men's Suits" while others use "Mens Suits San Diego." Do the research and the testing before you commit - and be ready to change if the data shifts.
Earning Links
Link building in general is tough - in the local space, particularly when you need dozens of hundreds of links to hundreds or thousands of pages, it's nightmarishly challenging. But, that's what makes SEO a true competitive advantage (vs. PPC, for example).
The tactics I've seen work best for those scaling out local pages include:
- Being a listing resource that promotes other sites/businesses and, in return, earns links from those sites thanks to the cognitive principle of reciprocity (and a desire to share one's accomplishments). Yelp's badges are a perfect example of this in action:
Offer graphics or embeds that local businesses can use to promote themselves and you'll see plenty of links (so long as your site/brand has a reputation that impresses the business owners). - Syndicating content with other relevant local content providers can earn lots of links to a wide range of your pages. The only weakness is that the diversity of sources is low, but if you can form a number of partnerships with big players, this can be overcome. Perhaps no one has had more success with this strategy than Trulia, whose link partnerships with newspapers and news sites across the country (powering their real estate sections) has meant rankings domination for the better part of 4 years. Sites like Superpages.com and Citysearch.com take advantage of this as well by "powering" the listings on may partner sites and earning links back in return.
- Participating in local community events and sponsoring in-person gatherings has long been a tactic we've recommended, but it works very nicely in the local keyword space because the links tend to come from local sites, feature cityname anchor text (or at least have that cityname plastered on the linking pages).
- Ingratiate yourself with local bloggers and reporters. Urbanspoon did this by promoting the posts and content of local food bloggers when they expanded to a new city. Techflash's expansions have been similarly successful because they reach out to the local tech, venture, startup and entrepreneur communities through coverage for their sites, blogs and events.
As always, there are a plethora of link building tactics that can work, limited only by your creativity and willingness to experiment.
Staying Ahead of "Hyperlocal" Competition
For larger sites going head to head with local niche sites in the rankings, what seems like a struggle can actually be an opportunity. Try reaching out to indirectly competitive top rankers to see if affiliate deals, advertising, sponsorships or other partnerships could work. Sometimes you may not be able to earn a link, but you can buy some of that super-relevant traffic that's landing on someone else's pages.
If there is a true head-to-head and you have the size/resources to pull it off, turning highly successful and rankings dominating sites into franchisees or buying them outright can make sense from a long-term business perspective. It can also be a great way to acquire "boots on the ground" if that's part of what your model needs to succeed.
If none of these are available and you're facing 3-4 keyword match domains that are out-linking, out content-building and out-optimizing you, you might consider "sneaking around" the competition. Instead of targeting the cityname, try individual neighborhoods, outlying secondary regions (e.g. Bellevue, Tacoma, Renton, Redmond and Everett instead of "Seattle") or even states/counties. You can also approach the long tail demand in local by building more and better content around the topic, engaging with UGC and mining alternative sources for keyword data.
Learn from the Best
In a number of sectors, certain sites have had dramatic success over the years and maintained it. Looking at these domains and understanding their strategies is an excellent way to bolster your knowledge of how to play this competitive game. Some of the sites that have impressed me the most on this front include:
- Yelp & Urbanspoon in restaurants
- Trulia, Zillow & Yahoo! Real Estate in real estate
- Superpages in doctors and dentists
- Freelancedesigners for programmers
I'll leave it to you to run the queries, see the success they're having in local rankings and reverse engineer their strategy.
Looking forward as always to your thoughts, ideas and questions on this.
The KWD + City Name issue is something I deal with almost everyday, as many of my clients are B&B or Local Businesses, therefore I see the problem from the perspective of those ones who have to fight against the sites you are talking about.
How I deal with this topic, especially for tourism web sites:
1) Following the rules David Mihm Bible for Google Places;
2) Giving rich local content in the websites. For instance original city guides (things like: What we suggest you to visit while...), or - if you are a farmhouse - local recipes and so on
3) I've found that a blog centered on local events can help you enlarging the long tail, which is many times a problem especially for Hotels, B&B, Farmhouse (I mean, you cannot base your kwd strategy on all the different variations of B&B, Bed & Breakfast, Bed and Breakfast...)
4) To engage your past and present clients. If you are able to engage them offline, why not trying to engage them online. If you liked you and you simply ask or give them the opportunity to do it, you can receive the biggest part of your inbound links and reviews from them.
Is it possible to use these techniques for nationwide websites that looks for local markets? I thinks yes. The problem for tourism nationwide websites (but also about other topics) is that as your site there are at least other 100s competing, therefore you have to have something that makes the difference: and the difference is usually something not so directly SEO but with such an huge SEO effect: the human touch towards your users. Therefore to build a strong community feeling is maybe the real key behind the success of sites like Yelp!, Urbanspoon, Oyster and so on.
So much of what I read refers to elements that just do not feel relevant to the majority of my clients, and after reading your comment regarding B&B's etc, I am really starting to wonder...
We primarily deal with local, blue collar, service contract businesses like fencing companies, plumbers, landscapers, etc. In our city (Houston, TX) the suburbs and outlying areas are our primary target, as the geographical scope of Houston is HUGE, and most people search for these services in individual suburbs (e.g. The Woodlands, Sugarland, Katy, etc.)
The trouble is, these businesses have no real call to have rich local content on their pages. It would be silly to have an "about the area" page on a plumber's site, right? This also follows with the entire social media arena. No one wants to like "Bob's Toilet Repair" on Facebook, nor follow them on Twitter.
And yet, we need to rank for these KWD+city areas SERPS to drive any significant traffic to our clients.
When a business is literally "nothing personal," how do you get personal with your local based content and marketing?
I disagree - people love to keep up with the local guy and if Bob the plumber just installed a toilet I say let him brag and be the guy that is not only proud of what he does but glad to sit with you for a moment and share his worst nightmare job he was just on or describe what great day he is having.
I think your comment stems from not going on a job with your clients. I am not saying you should but try to think of the end comsumer - ultimately thats why youre doing the SEO in the first place, at least IMO.
Hope you get what I am saying. The little guy in business like your describing builds his business on the personal touch - his website should say the same, as well as the social media he's connecting with.
I totally agree...any business that serves people is a PERSONAL business. I had a plumber who I just loved! When I bought my first home I was a single gal and didn't know bupkus about maintaining a home. My plumber came by after my toilet kept getting stopped up and gave me some preventative hints on what to do...took me to Home Depot and basically gave me a plumbing101 class. There is PLENTY of content your plumber business could be putting on their website, that would help his customers and allow them to be more inclined to call him first. SEO isn't about link building, or high ranking its about finding what the customer is looking for and giving it to them! Right?
But none of the content you're talking about relates to local search. It relates to plumbing tips. How can a plumber organically rank for all the suburb names in his/her area?
Thats a good post. My understanding of local search is that any mention of your business name along with the service name and its address is a very strong signal for local business listing and local web search listing. Here is what i recommend:
1. Modify your business name (at least on the site if not on company's registration paper) to include your primary service (also the location for best results). For e.g. if business name is 'Ocean village' and it is a restaurant in woolston, then the name can be modified to 'Ocean Village Restaurant Woolston'. Such name has many advantage:
i) Prospects know what the business is all about and where it is located.
ii) Any mention of the business name on a site/directory will automatically include the 'service name' and 'location' which is a boon for ranking in local results.
iii) Prospects searching for nearest restaurants through mobile may find the business easily. So it make sense to create a mobile version of your site to get advantage in mobile searches.
2. Write good reviews about local businesses (esp. those in the industry verticals or closely related) in your area using your business name on your site, Google places page and review sites. This tactic has many advantages:
i) You create a demand for your service as you business name may pop up in local business listings of other businesses (under 'Reviews' section) on google places page and review sites like yelp, citysearch etc. So if you have car rental business, you should be reviewing hotels in your area. Why? Cos the next thing people search for after hotels is 'transportation' and many opt for 'car hire'. So now instead of one you have virtually several local business listings which will improve your conversions.
ii) If you make other businesses aware of your review then they may use the review as testimonial and link back to your site. Even if they don't link back they will mention your business name (local citation) which also helps in local search.
3. Take advatage of famous landmarks near you and optimize for them. For e.g. if your business is near 'Tower of london' and you are in travel or hotel business, then you should optimize for landmark keywords. For e.g you can optimize your page for 'Tower of london car parks' if you are in car rental business near 'tower of london' or central london. Generally tourist search for such keywords and then the next thing they look for is hotel and local transport. You got my point.
4. Recommend each other. If you are a restaurant, recommend other local businesses in your area with their complete address on your site and ask them to recommend you in return. This may result in loads of local citations, links and offcourse leads.
5. Make your website a one stop solution for all local needs. This is the height of becoming a local. You can come up with review sections on your site that will review/recommend other businesses in your area, provide local tourist information etc.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on my ideas. One question before i leave, do you think such type of material is worth presenting in a SEO conference?
Answering to your question: yes. Presenting it with real life examples could be a very good topic for conferences.
About your solutions: I practically agree with all of them, as they are part of my local seo baggage.
The problem is - and this is what Rand was mostly talking about (correct if I misunderstood): how to use the same tactics whenever you aren't really a local business but operates a local scale?
Here above I pointed out to what - imho - seems to be the common factor of any of the websites he suggested as example of success: community.
And it has a logic. If you create a local based strong community for every geo you are marketing, therefore you are probably going to have more opportunities to rank for geolocalized kwd thanks to the buzz & links your community will create for you.
Great advice, Rand. In our experience, many of these multi location businesses have created (or allowed others to create) a total mess of their core data (Name, Address, Phone Number). Between trying to convince Google that they have locations in places where they do not exist, using multiple call tracking numbers and simply being careless with who is entering what data on the web, the confusion can be daunting. Without clearing up that data confusion, many of these tactics will have little effect on rankings.
I have seen this with large sites as well. They often do a Bulk Upload to Google Places and if the site/company is large enough, Google tends to just trust that they're giving correct data. I often find that they list locations that simply do not exist. I have even seen this when searching for a post office in my area - each mailbox on the street had its own listing, as if it was an individual post office. And there were listings for addresses that didn't even have a mailbox.
In many cases there's an opportunity to create good mashups for local pages to provide enough unique content for each page. If you were to then put in extra effort and combine that with some unique, manually created content for each city you're targeting that provides a solid foundation for targeting these localized searches.
Another great topic and post Rand. Thanks.
Interesting post but it doesn't really address the issue of online retailers with no brick and mortar locations (www.OutdoorPatioShop.com, www.Zappos.com, www.CompUSA.com, etc.) How can they increase their chances of ranking well when Google increasingly puts the local search results on the page, even if the user has not specifically searched locally?
The technique of putting all of the states/locations served on the bottom of each page might work but could also be viewed as keyword stuffing...
I think that's a great question. I would like to know answer too.
Very insightful, very timely information. This morning I was talking to my stepdad about his local results -- we have a lot more to talk about now. Thanks.
Consider creating and optimizing Facebook Place Pages to help in local searches across multiple engines.
I work with a national company based in the UK. They have given me the task to rank for local keywords and national keywords. I'm always up for a challenge so this is how I went about it.
When I started this project they only had 1 domain www.companyname.co.uk.
I used this domain for all my national stuff and it's working great.
But the more research I did I found that having subpages for local keywords just didn't cut it. I found a lot of sites ranking on the first page were showing exact match domains .
My tactic was simple and has proved very effective. If you can't beat them join them.
I bought several (over 100) exact match domain names and built unique sites. These sites were way smaller than the main site, only 5-10 pages but all content was unique and targeted to my local keyword.
It took 1 day to complete 1 site.
Once the site was built we pointed several links at them and within 1 week they were ranking very high on page 1. At this present time we have over 100 local domain names and 95% of them are ranking in the top 5 on Google.
But we didn't stop there; we bought a package of virtual offices for a great price and used these as locations for our local sites. Sure enough with a little link building they now show up in Google Map Listings.
Some of you may read this and think wow, a lot of effort put in. But our product has a good markup so even if we get 2 jobs a year of each local site we have more than justified it.
I would like to know more about the microsites tecnique:
Thanks
This is not meant to be a how to comment as I know there are 100's of you out there ready to pounce should I say something that is frowned upon. I've read many a time that hosting a lot of sites on one server is a bad thing and can detriment your rankings in G should you do operate sneaky tactics. I've also heard that if you don't interlink and keep the sites clean it's ok.
With this in mind we decided to setup 4 different servers. I mean completely different hosting providers. Why? Just because I thought it would be a good idea to separate them as much as possible.
One server acts as the blog server where we pump a lot of links out to the mini sites (kinda shady). The other 3 host around 30 sites each, none of them linking together.
With the link building, yes, a lot of the links are from local directories that offer direct links with custom anchor text. As we all know, anchor text is the most important factor in rankings. So making sure the directories allow this was key. There are also a lot of blogs out there who allowed us to write content on a regular basis with links at the bottom. We also had over 200 articles written for us which we slowly drip fed through articlebase, ezineartles etc. Again with good anchor text distribution.
Personally I think with the local keywords its the domain name that plays a huge part. With little link building you can get a site up there in quick time if it exactly matches the term you want to target.
Hey Rand,
Perfect timing! Let me add an international perspective to the post and show some of the challenges we face.
I work in the UK office of a large car hire company and our remit is generating international business for EMEA travellers out of their source country. I've been bugging my Google Travel rep on this for some weeks now because for queries like "car hire Orlando" made on Google.co.uk the user is only served .com domains in the Maps section. We would clearly prefer the user to come through our local .co.uk domain instead of our .com (for country POS pricing etc.) so I've been persisting with this but his official line was:
"We will show the domain based on the location intent of the query... Google's general view is that matching the domain and the geography of the query is the most accurate scalable way to go"
Are they saying that companies with only a .co.uk domain are they ineligible to appear in Maps/Local for queries that contain US destinations?
So if I searched for "car hire Paris" on Google.co.uk the last thing I would want to see in the 7-box is a bunch of .FR domains linking me through to French language sites. In fact, this doesn't happen today; .co.uk domains appear for such a query.
And if travellers in .FR search for "location voiture Miami" for example, no Maps results appear in the SERP but they do for local in-country queries such as "location voiture Paris" and local .FR domains appear. Same thing across EMEA.
I'm trying to get clarity from them on what is and isn't possible as there doesn't seem to be much consistency, even with the geo settings available to us. I appreciate the shared language element of the .uk and .com part of this but that doesn't lend itself to a particularly good user experience when you have UK customers landing on a completely US-flavoured site.
This is especially true for car hire - you guys in the US have various forms of insurance included in your credit cards which we don't have here in Europe. UK travellers clicking on our Maps/Local listing and making a booking on our .com site using the incorrect POS country can wind up with serious problems later...
SB.
Meetup? Not sure if you'll read this, but what sort of meetup are you speaking about? Are there regular SEO Meetups? I'm local in Seattle as well. We traded emails a couple years back. One thing I really admire is how humble you've been despite your "SEO Fame" you've collected over the years.
I was reading the SEOBook interview a tad yesterday and had no idea you had tough times before. It's great to see a deserving guy get what is due. Anyway, always enjoy your website and definitely the "transparency!" Cheers!
Another great blog Rand.
With the duplicate content issue in mind, what would you suggest when trying to rank for various very competitive local terms in a large city? If you took London for example, and you were a plumber, you'd look to optimise for each area of London because search patterns dictate it. Would you suggest individual pages for Plumber Chelsea, Plumber Islington, Plumber Kensington?
If yelp has page for restaurant with address and location, will that page rank ahead of restaurants own page ? for eg
California pizza restaurant has its own static website , has no blog and is rarely updated.
Now yelp has page for California pizza restaurant with one user rating.
If some one searches for pizza in california , which page will rank ahead ?
I looked like an idiot when my client asked me about this today. Of course I had to Google it when I got home. It's reassuring to hear you say it's one of the most challenging SEO tasks.
Would be really cool to see an update to this post. As I am sure most of these tactics are still useful, there are quite a few that have changed.
Very old information but still very usefull.
Are there risks of reducing your national organic search results?
So are there any risks to a national business for working too hard to rank on local terms. My concern is could Google possibly associate your site with a specific local area to the extent that it hurts your rank for non local searches? Our major focus is a shipped gift offering to addresses within the US and Canada. We are an ecommerce only play with no retail locations.
In order to accommodate our customers we also offer same day gift basket and balloon delivery. These orders are delivered through a network of local companies. We have what we refer to as town pages for these products within our site and recently added a local sub-domain featuring a page for each product type for every city in the US and Canada. The content within the sub domain local pages picks up local listings from a variety of databases. Truthfully the content is still weak. We are gradually improving as more data becomes available. So far we have NOT focused any link building efforts or significant content development on these pages and have relied on organic search exclusively with some success. Google has picked up all of the pages. How they rank are totally dependent on the local competition. In towns with little competition we rank well. In larger towns where local search is stronger we do not rank as high.
I have been reluctant to submit the local domain site and pages to local directories for fear that it might cause us to be associated with only one area that might damage our main national business. For example, I do not want Google to decide that we are for example a Seattle only company and fail to display our results for New York. Is there any risk or validity to this fear? Is there anyway to avoid or mitigate the risk?
I run a couple business websites in my city and have a had a lot of good results for SEO for local searches. A good trick to use is to trade links with other company websites that are located in your city. I also leave comments on local blogs. Using these tactics have helped me out. If you have a Google Places page for your business, have your friends and family give good ratings every month or so. This will help the map results.
A very timely article as I am about to launch into a local SEO project for a long time client! Lots of great resources here, and if I discover any UK only based resources I'll report back here. My approach is going to be leave no stone unturned in terms of local information so will be looking in depth into Google places as well as the equivalent offerings from Yabing!
So I ran across an old ball SERP and I wanted to know how this reflected Google Ranking Algorithium. Long story short, I had a entry on a SERP which contained only an IP. I understand that fact in itself isn't odd, but the term I was searching for was a highly completive one. I know that domain name length, registration length, ect all impact Panda. But my question is does it really matter if you can run up to the top 5 when you just reference off an IP??? Does this not contradict some of the information previously posted?
Here is all the info, can someone please shed some light on if this was a mistake or if I actually found something here? I posted the SERP results and everything here.
https://ryandunn.co/a-good-domain-is-only-half-the-battle
"if I searched for "car hire Paris" on Google.co.uk the last thing I would want to see in the 7-box is a bunch of .FR domains linking me through to French language sites. In fact, this doesn't happen today; .co.uk domains appear for such a query."
A few months on, this is exactly what is happening. That same search (and many other similar examples) now reveals SERPS dominated by those French Google Place pages. It looks like many national service providers and retailers are being killed by Google Places.
As for the virtual office tactic, isn't Google cracking down on this ?
Great post. I have found that having location in URL helps. One of the competitors don't do SEO and still having good ranking just because of URL.
One problem I see with local SEO and creating relationships with local businesses is that many business owners still lives in dark ages and have no idea about internet let alone SEO.
Which is sort of good = less comeptition
Sort of bad = hard to get links and cooperation
It probably depends how much local you go. I would there are more opportunities if you target Seattle compare to Shoreline.
A tricky subject to tackle. Has any one found using 'Google Snippets' help with the Geo searches?
Help in what regard? SERP's? CTR? I have seen some improvements in the latter, but haven't seen any jump in serp's because of the use of snippets, but maybe there are others here with more experience. I have only worked with two sites that google actually included the snippets even though I have added them to many I have worked on so my experience is somewhat limited.
Great post Rand. As for link building techniques it might be a good idea to see what other companies offer related services in the same area and see if they are willing to exchange links. Yes, I know link exchanges are typically frowned upon - however if they are just a very small part of your link profile then it can be very valuable to your site... and of course YOURS USERS which in the end is the number one goal right? :)
Hey Rand,
If you have analyzied ranking for hotel websites in any country or city wise listing you will find top 10 results contain sites like tripadvisor, expedia & other famous travel websites. They might be using specific link buiding techniques like submitting links to various regional business & web directories.
I have seen results they have been well in mulitple keywords in various region, keywords like accomodation in New York, affordable hotels in New York, if you use this keywords for other city as well you will find that the almost same sites are listed in top 10 results.
One of the biggest link building tool they have is the Badge tactics Rand wrote about with the example of Yelp!
Right now I have in my mind the Trip Advisor one, that is quite common to see in not chain hotel websites, B&B and so on
Another tactic they quite surely use is content syndication and affiliate marketing (booking.com, for instance, has a very well developed affiliate policy).
I haven't really seen that at all Jenni, to be honest. A .uk domain is not a good indicator of UK-relevance as anyone in the world can register one and my 12 years of experience suggest that it makes very little difference whether you have a TLD or a .uk extension on your domain (this may not be true in other countries where there are stringent requirements to register a country-specific domain). What matters are things like the physical location of your web server, your geo-targeting settings in Webmaster Tools, the physical location of the sites that link to you and of course the factors that Rand lists when it comes to the search terms people use in terms of content and links.
If you check out any UK affiliate forum, one of the main recommendations they give is to register a .co.uk (or if not available, a .org.uk) above anything else for this specific reason. Of course having a UK host (or whatever specific country-based host) is desirable as well...but these people are domain name buying experts & they offer some great SEO advice, so it's worth having a browse.
I'm not saying it's the only factor in country-specific results; of course it's not. But you can save a lot of time by getting the basics right, particularly if you're unsure which option to go for.
To own a country level domain name is useful especially if you have a physical presence in the country the domain name refers to, because it gives a coherence frame to the users, apart that - as it is said by the same Webmaster Center - Google will especially focus the indexing for the regional Google Serps.
If you are a multi-national website you could use this tactic too, but it is not the best one (you would loose DA power splitting it in several Tlds)... but it would be better to own the regional tld for Brand marketing and 301 redirect it to the main domain name. That is what do sites as Booking.com (which has the IMHO bad costume to geo presenting the country mirror on the main domain name) or Venere.com (if you write Venere.es you're redirected to Venere.com/es). TripAdvisor is a remarkable execption, and I would like to know the reason behind this choice (I believe there's an UGC reason behind) and Oyster.com use a subdomain for its french language mirror (a mistake IMO).
For many non-US SEOs out there, a country-related domain name extension can make a big difference. Whilst more national than local per se, if you start with a .co.uk name (for example), then you have more chance of ranking well in Google UK than if your site ends in .com or any other extension.
I don't know if this also has a positive/definable impact on local search results, but I'd be interested to hear from anyone that has experience either way.
I'm also interested to see if Google changes this emphasis in the future as their tools & analysis improve; it seems to be a bit of a primitive primary way of assessing which results to show for a UK search.
- Jenni
One advice for good rankings on Maps / Local is to create LOTS of consistent data accross every resource Google might be using.
What if I am one of those resources? Let's say, I have a site which offers a listing of Seattle men's suits, and I would like to get more traffic for the content I am providing. Is there anything I could do?
What about business directories? #justasking
Ok, but I am aiming to get more traffic from google maps.
If you are a resource you will have an incredibly harder time generating results our of Google Map listings as these are "Google Places" listings that are intended to be based on a physical location. If you supply an address then that will influence all the local queries you will show up for... I.E. "Portland Keyword" if you are in Portland. As a resource you will also be limited in the number of other websites that you can gain trusted "Reviews" and "Citations" from that factor into the Google Map algorithm.
If I understood your situation correctly and you are not a local business type, then I would probably not allocate resources to Google Maps listings and instead devote those to Social and Link Building to increase search visibility for your content.
In the word's of Leo Di Caprio's Howard Hughes, "Way of the future"...:)
"Seattle Men's Suits" while others use "Mens Suits San Diego."
Search engines are not enough smarts to understand what's the location and what's the keyword despite the order they appear?
They understand the difference between the location and the keyword, but they often show different results when the same query is phrased in different order. Even plurals often cause different results, so it's important to pay attention and optimize for all variations.
The fact that words are sometimes used in a different order is a vital difference and one which the search engines understand only too well. Although phrases containing the same words may be on the same subject, the emphasis placed on each word can be entirely different because of the order of the words. This also applies to every day spoken language. If you place a word at the beginning of a sentence, you are usually placing more importance on it for that reason (in the English language at least) and therefore more weight is usually given to the first word in a search query by Google's algo when determining the order of the results.
If you search for "KW1, KW2, KW3, KW4, KW5", then KW5 is almost an afterthought, or at least nowhere near as important to you as KW1. All the other 4 KW's must be more important to you because you specified them first.
If you search on the same keywords but in this order "KW5, KW4, KW3, KW2, KW1" now you are expressing that the most important aspect (which could be characteristic or place etc.) of what you are searching for is KW5.
Therefore there is a very good reason why the search engines show different results and it is because they understand the subtle differences in the meaning conveyed by words when they are placed in a different order.
I haven't read all the comments yet, so I may be duplicating something, but is there research for how Google's 'circle of friends' feature (results based on your online interests Google collects) affects local results? I've found an increasing difference between results when logged in via Google Toolbar vs. non-logged in results. For example, my company's site pops up when I'm logged in more than it does when I'm not, providing inaccurate testing data. It would be interesting to see if social media integration and mentions/likes/status inclusions by Person A's "friends" or "connections" of a company increases Person A's chances of having a local result pop up while they are logged into Google.
Perhaps this is too meta, but hey, after the whiteboard friday's meta-meta topic a few weeks ago, nothing's off limits, right?? Any thoughts?
Its a real challenge when you work in local postcodes, areas, counties etc and want to show up for any potential search. With local businesses these searches may only get 5 or 6 searches a day and to miss one because they searched with a postcode instead of a town name is annoying. I've seen people list off 20/30 postcodes and towns they deal with does anyone know if google just see's this as trying to show up for loads of results and penalises you, or do they realise that businesses often cover a large area and therefore accept a list of towns (within reason) as understandable and count this towards potential search matches
This is a very useful post for us, as we face this problem every day. It helps me better understand what is going on in local search. It is very frustrating and confusing to rank very well nationally, but then to have to compete with local businesses that no one has heard of, have poor quality sites, don't support local community events or organizations, don't advertise, etc., and have them outrank you in the local scene where you are physically located. I think this information will help improve our odds. If you are located in a small suburb of a big metropolitan area, that is another hurdle.
Do not blame local business websites... yes, some of them are quite poor in content and design, as they are substantially home made (or made-by-daughter-fiancee)... but maybe they are out there since the beginning of web because of an wise illuminated intuition of its owner. But local search it's all they have in order to fight against Web Goliath Sites, as they cannot compete for branded keyword related searches (to not talk about head to middle tail keywords).
And, from an user perspective, I find useful to see also local business websites in the first page for local searches, because this offers me the opportunity to reach and contact directly an B&B or an charme hotel without having to pass through a Booking.com kind of portal. And many are really useful and well thought (and to book a room cheaper).
The problem is another, and IMO it is quite general related to the poor search results we all are noticing later (as testified also by two almost contemporary tweets by Danny Sullivan and Rand himself just yesterday).
Especifically about the problem you point out in your last sentence, you're right: Google Places especially is too much city centric and this is quite absurd knowing how real cities area are planned... I mean, not even playing SimCity you put all the commercial area, industry and services downtown.
Thank you very much for your thoughtful answer. Great points for me to think about and very helpful indeed. For those who are local and national, serving clients from both areas, and trying to rank well in what has become two different arenas, things seem to be becoming a bit more challenging.
Do you have any specific suggestions for a site like, listedagents.com?
I'm also seeing Domain & URL matching as a more-heavily correlated factor in high local rankings, but perhaps it's due to the fact that there are fewer competitors trying to rank for the terms, and that so few (compared to non-local results) are squeezing as much as they can out of the weight on-page optimization offers the algorithm.
On another note, thanks for the tips on local link-building! Great stuff...
you can always add the states or cities your company serves at the bottom of your website, I do this in all my websites and it works pretty good specially when someone types any of my targeted keywords + the state or Country, example; Bucket Truck in California. even though I'M located in Florida, also not adding your physical address in your home page or the page you want to rank for multiple locations helps.
you can see what I mean by going to my website www.centecequipment.com
Nice