Another Look at Meta Geo
This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely their own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.
Some months ago there was a little discussion about meta geo tags following one of Rand's Whiteboard Friday presentations. It seemed like the tags were dismissed as being open to exploitation and probably ignored by the search engines. Lately, though, we've been having a lot of success with helping our small business customers improve their visibility in the organic results and in their position in the Maps listings, and we feel there might be a connection to the meta geo tags although we haven't proven it.
Of course, small local businesses are low hanging fruit for SEO improvement anyway. Some keyword research and on-page SEO can vault a little business to the top of the SERPs in short order if it's not in a large, metropolitan area. Even without inbound links. So focusing on the geo keywords is a no-brainer. When we started adding the geo meta info, we saw that our small businesses were also showing up higher in the map results.
It certainly can't hurt, and it seems like it may be helping, so in addition to the on-page SEO, we encourage our small biz customers to register with Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. That way they can edit their listings. Plus we add meta geo to their pages.
It would be helpful to do a more scientific study where we set up five similar sites and track their performance. I'm thinking they would have to be in five different lines of business to avoid duplication and competing against ourselves. So we would need to pick 5 types of businesses that get roughly the same amount of local search volume in a given geographic location. And they would need to be up against roughly the same amount of competition. Then we would register 5 new URLs and build 5 new sites as follows:
- One site would have all the normal on-page SEO, targeting local geo keywords
- One site would have all that plus the meta geo info
- One site would have all that, plus the meta geo, plus register with Google Maps & Yahoo Maps
- One site would have no references to local geo anywhere BUT the meta tags
- And one site would have all that, register with Google Maps & Yahoo Maps, but NOT have the meta geo
That should provide authoritative insight into the topic. If anyone feels motivated to do a study like that, let me know. Or if you have a better suggestion for a test scenario, let me know. Otherwise I'm going to add it to my list of "things I need to prove to myself" and when I get it completed, I'll report back with my findings.
FYI, these are the meta tags added to the <HEAD> section:
- <meta name="geo.region" content="US-TX"/> (if this was in Texas, for example)
- <meta name="geo.placename" content="Fort Worth,TX"/> (city, state)
- <meta name="geo.position" content="32.74862,-97.32927"/> (latitude; longitude)
- <meta name="ICBM" content="32.74862,-97.32927"/> (latitude; longitude)
Easiest way to get latitude and longitude from Google Maps
- Go to maps.google.com
- Enter your address/zip code/airport code/city,state, and click on "Search Maps"
-
When your location pops up, don't zoom or move the map, just type the following into your browser:
javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));
You'll get a popup with the coordinates! (Kudos to Wendy Boswell for this handy tip)
Easier yet - turn this bit of code into a bookmarklet
Copy the JavaScript above and right click on your bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. Then click "New Bookmark..." Paste the code into the "Location" field and give it a name.
Now when you want to see latitude and longitude for any location, just click the bookmark and it'll automatically pop up coordinates for you. Kudos to chris.lucier for the bookmark suggestion!
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