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Category: Local Website Optimization

Considering local SEO and its impact on your website? Discuss website optimization for local SEO.


  • Hi there! I'm building a website that is divided in a "marketing" and "shop" sections. The 2 sites are being authored by two companies (my company is doing the marketing one). The marketing site has all the company products while the shop will sell just some of those. I'm facing the problem of duplicated content and want to ask you guys if it will be a problem/mistake to use the same product description (and similar url) for the same product in both sites, and the right way to do it (without rewriting product descriptions). the main site will be : www.companyname.com
    the shop will be: shop.companyname.com thanks
    Francesco

    | svitol
    0

  • My site shows up on the first page of 'google.com' but not on the other search engines like google.co.uk / google.co.in / google.com.au. It shows up on the 3rd or 4th page for the most part. My competitors' sites rank consistently across all geographical versions of Google. Is there something i am missing out on? My website is a web applicaton and not a business listing.

    | dlsound
    0

  • Hello Moz folks, About 2 months ago we launched a brand new site - edmontonweb.ca I have gotten some amazing advice from the folks here at Moz, and amazingly enough, we are now ranking in the top 2 in our city for keywords like "Edmonton web design." We are very excited, but the question now, is how do we stay on top? We are updating our blog on a weekly basis, we are continuing to build inbound links, but how can we do more? I have considered summarizing blog posts in "guest blogs," and linking back to our blog post (so not all the inbound links are directing at the home page). I have considered a more active presence through press releases. Could these strategies be effective? Do you have any other suggestions on strategies we could utilize to stay on top?
    Thanks, Anton TLAUNCH Core Inc.

    | Web3Marketing87
    0

  • Hi All, We have an ecommerce Website with multiple locations for our stores and we currently display separate location specific pages for the different categories and sub categories. This has helped us previously to rank well for local search in each of the areas we have a store but over the last few months since humingbird, our local rankings on some things have dip a little . We want to implement a branch locator of some description to improve the user experience. From looking at other websites with branch locators, they tend to a separate button/page with which you can search for a branch etc. However, they don't have location specific pages. My query is should I do it so if  a user comes in on a specific category location page and follows it through to product page , then to have a tab on the product page displaying the local branch from which he can come in. My thinking here is that , is that it would help confirm my local citations and help improve local rankings. Or Should the local branch be displayed on the local category pages instead or as well ?. If a user comes in from the homepage or not on a specific location page, then the branch locator will allow them to search for a specific branch. Should I also put in a branch locator as a separate page or can It be in more places. I don't want to damage anything which may have an effect on rankings due to citations and NAP on the location specific pages. Any advice or good examples to look at would be greatly appreciated thanks Sarah.

    | SarahCollins
    1

  • I've noticed when traveling that a local search (be it city, region, or state) yields different results depending on my physical location.  This is very anecdotal, but with an incognito search in my clients city I'll get one result, in a different city about 30 miles away I'll get a slightly different result, in a different state but still only about 30 miles away I'll get another slightly different result, and many states away the result is different still. This isn't very scientific data, but I think something is going on.  Have people experienced this?  Is anyone aware of research or has an understanding of what can bias a local search in different directions depending on the distance from the area represented by that local search?  These don't seem to be fluctuations in ranking, the results are widely different, but mostly constant in their respective locations. Any guidance would be appreciated.

    | Oren.
    0

  • Can We Rank Well in Local Google without Physical address and Phone Number??? If Yes. How??

    | Dan_Brown1
    0

  • Hi . I seem to spend more time asking questions atm. I have a site I have revamped www.themorrisagency.co.uk I am working through sorting out the 80-90% duplicated content  that just replaces a spattering of geographical and band styles  eg: http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/band-hire/greater-manchester/ 'manchester' being changed to : http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/band-hire/oxfordshire/ etc So I am going through this slow but essential process atm. I have a main http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/band-hire/ page My question is: Would it be sensible to (using Yoast SEO plug in)  use a canonical redirect as a temp solution from these dup pages to http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/band-hire/ Rather than remove them What are your thoughts as I am aware that the damage using a rel= could make it worse. Thanks as always Daniel

    | Agentmorris
    0

  • Hello... I have a website for a local spa in ecuador, this website have a  blog with some tips about health... and suddenly one of the articles goes viral on south america profiels on FB and I am receiving 40k visits by day from other countries that are not interested to me because my site is for a local bussines in ecuador... I already block some countries by IP , but Im still receiving visits from other south america countries, for this reason My hosting server company put down my website and I can not put it back online beacuse this thousands of visits use more than the 25% of the CPU of the server and the hosting company put down my website again... I really need to know what to do, I do not want to pay for a expensive special server because all this visits from other countries are not interesting to me .and as I said before my bussines is local.

    | lans2787
    2

  • Just wondering what meta info is must have these days. For example" |   | http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> |
    |   | name="Subject" content="Invision Technical - Spokane Web Design an Development services" /> |
    |   | name="keywords" content="Spokane Website Design, Spokane Web Design, Website designers spokane Washington, Spokane web site Design firm, Web design spokane, spokane web designers, spokane web hosting, spokane web development, spokane web marketing services."/> |
    |   | name="description" content="Spokane Website Design by Invision Technical. Quality website designers in Spokane Washington. Call (509) 590-0655 for your Spokane Web Design needs."/> |
    |   | property="og:title" content=" Invision Technical | Website Design and Development"/> |
    |   | property="og:description" content=" Web Design | Development | Web Hosting | Logo Design | Branding | Custom Software | Search Engine Optimization"/> |
    |   | property="og:image" content="http://www.spokanewebsitedesign.org/fb.jpg"/> |
    |   | name="abstract" content="Invision Technical - Spokane Web Design and Development Services."/> |
    |   | name="distribution" content="Global"/> |
    |   | name="copyright" content="Invision Technical, All Material Is Copyright"/> |
    |   | name="robots" content="FOLLOW,INDEX"/> |

    | Superflys
    0

  • Hi, Sorry if this rambles on. There's a few details that kind of convolute this issue so I'll try and be as clear as possible. The site in question has been online for roughly 5 years. It's established with many local citations, does well in local SERPs (working on organic results currently), and represents a business with 2 locations in the same county. The domain is structured as location1brandname.com. The site was recently upgraded from a 6-10 page static HTML site with loads of duplicate content and poor structure to a nice, clean WordPress layout. Again, Google is cool with it, everything was 301'd properly, and our rankings haven't dropped (some have improved). Here's the tricky part: To properly optimize this site for our second location, I am basically building a second website within the original, but customized for our second location. It will be location1brandname.com/secondcity and the menu will be unique to second-city service pages, unique NAP on footer, etc. I will then update our local citations with this new URL and hopefully we'll start appearing higher in local SERPs for the second-city keywords that our main URL isn't currently optimized for. The issue I have is that our root domain has our first city location in the domain and that this might have some negative effect on ranking for the second URL. Conversely, starting on a brand new domain (secondcitybrandname.com) requires building an entire new site and being brand new. My hunch is that we'll be fine making root.com/secondcity that locations homepage and starting a new domain, while cleaner and compeltely separate from our other location, is too much work for not enough benefit. It seems like if they're the same company/brand, they should be on the same sitee. and we can use the root juice to help. Thoughts?

    | kirmeliux
    0

  • We have just taken on a client who is really struggling in the rankings, even for noncompetitive terms. Here is the URL: www.freshsmiles.co.uk they are targeting 'dentist york, dental implants york, teeth whitening york, orthdontist york' The content on the site seems very good (we have been working on ensuring that the content is duplicated and of good quality) They have also been doing blogs http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/blog/ We've installed webmaster tools and there are no manual spam action warnings and I have checked the inbound links to the website and they don't seem spammy. Any help would be much appreciated! thanks in advance Marcus

    | dentaldesign
    0

  • Big city A is the target optimization for services. Suburb city B is the location of the business. Will having big city A in the title tag of pages confuse the NAP consistency and local SEO for the site?

    | LyntonWeb
    0

  • We have a brand with a major website at ourbrand.com.   I'm using stand-ins for the actual brandname. The brand is a unique term, has 200 local offices with sites at ourbrand.com/locations/locationname, and is structured with best practices, and has a well built sitemap.xml.  The link profile is diverse and solid. There are very few crawl errors and no warnings in Google Webmaster central.  Each location has schema.org markup that has been checked with markup validation tools.  No matter what tool you use, and how you look at it t's obvious this is the brand site.  DA 51/100, PA 59/100. A rouge franchisee has broken their agreement and made their own site in a city on a different domain name, ourbrandseattle.com.  The site is clearly optimized for that city, and has a weak inbound link profile.  DA 18/100, PA 21/100.  The link profile has low diversity and generally weak.  They have no social media activity.  They have not linked to ourbrand.com <- my leading theory. **The problem is that this rogue site is OUT RANKING the brand site all over the USA on Bing.  **Even where it makes no sense at all.  We are using whitespark.ca to check our ranking remotely in other cities and try to remove the effects of local personalization. What should we do?   What have I missed?

    | scottclark
    0

  • Hey Guys, I appreciate all of the amazing responses you have been posting over the last two days.
    I have been a little tied up with Joomla 1.5 transfers, but I will make some comments soon! In the meantime, here is an interesting one: I have an existing domain with a little bit of DA - www.edmontonweb.ca as well as a parked domain with no DA - launchwebdesign.ca I have been advised to redirect (301) to the launch domain, but I still wonder if the current domain is better - after all it is very short & was registered over 5 years ago. Since launching the new site it has been about a month. We are currently #1 for almost every term on Bing & Yahoo (web design, edmonton web design etc.) but 14th on Google for "edmonton web design." Do you think switching the domain is a good call, or keep trying with edmontonweb.ca for a bit longer? Thanks guys, Anton

    | Web3Marketing87
    0

  • Hello Google Local Experts I'm a little stress, to put it mildly.  I have been working hard to get to grips with Google+ and Google Local.  I have followed all the advice on Moz that I can lay me hands on. Following advice, I have added my private address (in rich text snippets) to the header of my own site.  I've not felt particularly comfortable about doing that, but it's clearly one of the messages Google Local requires to be sure that your site is authentic. My concerns got concrete last evening when a new follower on Google+ started to send me private messages - culminating in asking where I lived.  Despite family demands I went straight to my site and removed my house number.  Now I know I'm messing up my NAP - but Ahh - my About section points straight to my site which at that point had my full address in Bold on each page of my site. I really am upset about this and think that Google should be rethinking their demand for displaying a companies address on the site.  If you are self employed you are put in a vulnerable position which is morally questionable. Please would someone give me some advice on the best way to address my worries in the short term? Please could someone with a bit of clout point this potentail danger to women out to the powers that be in Google?

    | catherine-279388
    2

  • I have a client that has an international website. The website currently has IP detection and redirects you to the subdomain for your country. They have currently only launched the Australian website and are not yet open to the rest of the world: https://au.domain.com/ Google is not indexing the Australian website or pages, instead I believe that the bots are being blocked by the IP redirection every time they try to visit one of the Australian pages. Therefore only the US 'coming soon' page is being properly indexed. So, I would like to know the best way to place a geolocation redirection without creating a splash page to select location? User friendliness is most important (so we don't want cookies etc). I have seen this great Whiteboard Friday video on Where to Host and How to Target, which makes sense, but what it doesn't tell me is exactly the best method for redirection except at about 10:20 where it tells me what I'm doing is incorrect. I have also read a number of other posts on IP redirection, but none tell me the best method, and some are a little different examples... I need for US visitors to see the US coming soon page and for Google to index the Australian website. I have seen a lot about JS redirects, IP redirects and .htaccess redirects, but unfortunately my technical knowledge of how these affect Google's bots doesn't really help. Appreciate your answers. Cheers, Lincoln

    | LincolnSmith
    0

  • We have a group of automotive dealerships by a website provider that causes issues when trying to verify our sites. Because they use Analytics for their data program, they install a code into our websites-stopping us from doing so properly in our back end. We also cannot verify ourselves in webmasters or adwords. We can't actually "own" any of our sites since they run a java query script from within the website. They also do not allow the use of iframes or scripts, so we can't even use the container to verify these sites. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated as I am sure there is some way to break this to get our data and be verified.

    | spentland
    0

  • My site is a directory that serves several regions.  Each region has it's own "home page" with specific content for that visitor about their region.  Right now we use Google location recognition after you visit the home page to redirect you to your regional home page. I am in the process of reviewing the best way to implement our home page for SEO purposes.  Any advice or recommendations on how to present home pages that are location specific would be greatly appreciated. Thank you Steve

    | steve_linn
    0

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