Category: Local Website Optimization
Considering local SEO and its impact on your website? Discuss website optimization for local SEO.
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How to direct the right countries to different URLS.
Thanks - I'm struggling to find out if you can put multiple hreflang tags against one URL. I don't have different languages but I do have multiple currencies including GBP, EUR and USD. Marni
| MarniFP0 -
One of my man pages is not ranking and does not seem to exist.
Yep. Spot on advice from John. I always like to keep in mind how your page content would sound if you read it out loud. If you're not sure, do exactly that, preferably to a friend and get them to tell you when it sounds like you're labouring the point. Always, ALWAYS make the user experience your primary focus. If you can clearly explain to the user what it is you're offering - without repeating yourself endlessly- then the search engines will be smart enough to pick this up. Now there's no harm in using your keyphrase (and synonyms) a couple of times throughout your content but only when it's needed for clarity. I understand how Yoast's SEO plugin can give you green light fever, but as is often the case, less is more.
| Hurf0 -
How can I see if my users are coming from google.com or google.ca?
Bingo. Thank you gentlemen, I have a date with a new view in analytics.
| brettmandoes0 -
Blogs/content marketing or slower salesfunnel on webshop?
You might also want to consider repeat custom. Having a database of repeat customers can be huge for ecommerce. Increasing lifetime value is one of the keys to success here. A few ideas (I am assuming the CD key selling is legal, of course): Loyalty programmes (buy 'x' products and get 1 free, such as buy 'x' CD keys and get a random free one, obviously work your pricing to be sure you're in good profit, the freebie doesn't have to be an expensive one). Consider cross-selling at checkout. By offering an additional, related game at a decent discount, you may increase the average basket value considerably. Run seasonal promos, check Google Trends and other sources for when hotspots are (Christmas etc) and ramp-up your promotions - mailing out customers in a 'countdown' style fashion to build the PR (but monitor open rates and unsubscribes to make sure you're not annoying them!). Just before big game launches, piggy-back on the publicity & PR that the game generates and run discounts or contests - tie these in with you doing a video review of the game and upload to YouTube (you have a branded YouTube channel right?). Mail out to your list with the review of the new/just released game. Other than Lifetime Value increasing: Have you considered Twitch? Why not run a Twitch giveaway - Try to team-up with a popular streamer (if you're not well known yet, don't go for top-tier streamers at first. Find well known but approachable ones) and get them to do a sponsored CD Key giveaway. You'd need to make sure you get good coverage from the streamer (links from their chat, link from their bio for 'x' weeks, stream uploaded to their YouTube channel too if possible, with a link to your store etc). What about asking any YouTube game streamers if you can sponsor their channel? Obviously, the likes of PewDiePie would be a bit too expensive, but aim for niche gamers with a decent following, you may be surprised how cheap you can sponsor them (CD keys?!) for links/mentions etc. Just a few more ideas for you there, hope it helps
| MikeGracia0 -
The best option for expanding a website to another country
Hi, I can't really comment on what kind of a folder/domain structure to use for your new country site. But what I'd like to recommend is looking into the option of using the HREF Lang canonicals to make sure that Google understand that your content might also be available in another language /country. You can find more information about that here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en Martijn.
| Martijn_Scheijbeler0 -
Any ideas on how to stop a massive spam link building attack?
Good answer. I didn't think about looking at top pages or fetch and render. Interesting finds there, for sure. The top 10 pages according to OSE are: http://mywebsite.com/ http://mywebsite.com/?id=P8426&shouldPaginate=true&categoryId=3865 http://mywebsite.com/?cbg_tz=360 http://mywebsite.com/ISES-Wedding2008_Ritz/index.html http://mywebsite.com/about/40_0_916.html http://mywebsite.com/all-dolled-up/15_8_585.html http://mywebsite.com/beautifully-human/21_17_487.html http://mywebsite.com/belly-and-baby/20_13_371.html http://mywebsite.com/belly-and-baby/20_15_373.html http://mywebsite.com/belly-and-baby/20_28_409.html #1 is the homepage, it's fine. #2-#4 are duplicates of the homepage... have no idea how/when those were created. The remainder are all very odd 404 URLs. When put into fetch and render, #1 and #5-#10 show what is expected. #2-#4 show as a redirect to the homepage (yet, I get a 404). When I check #2-#4 in a response header tool, like SEOBook, it shows redirects to some other odd page (http://www.mywebsite.com/xmlrpc.php). That I know of, there hasn't been a penalty message in GWT. I say that because there is no message in GWT, and the client hasn't reported seeing any message prior to this happening. Thanks for the feedback Carson, I appreciate it. I like the story about the IP address being tracked back to a competitor - sneaky!
| Annapurna-Digital0 -
Best Practices: Different Phone Numbers on the Same Website
Happy Travels, Alan! Google permits the development of what are called 'multi-practitioner listings'. In other words, a real estate firm with 2 partners is eligible for 3 listings (one of the business and one for each of the practitioners). My advice: If you go with this approach, you would also build out a set of citations for each practitioner as well as those you build for the business. By citations, I mean other listings on platforms beyond Google My Business (Facebook, Yelp, Superpages, Localeze, Infogroup, etc.). You would typically link the business' listings to the homepage, and the practitioners' citations to their respective landing pages on the website, though you'd only want to do the latter once you have built an extremely good landing page for each of the two partners. Finally, wherever possible, choose different GMB categories for the two practitioners to try to skirt around Possum as best you can, so that your practitioners can avoid the heaviest effects of that filter. Alternatively, you can decide not to build multi-practitioner listings and can simply build out the GMB listing for the brand and skip building citations for the partners. This is simpler, does not get tangled up in Possum (unless there are other real estate firms in your building). If you go this way, I would still recommend building content on the website representing the two partners, for the sake of users. Does this make this a bit clearer?
| MiriamEllis0 -
Maintaining Rank During a Domain Change
Hi John, Thank-you for your insight. Question, what tools did you use to do the quick check on our site? Was it the screaming from app or something else? Just want to learn how you did that. I've went ahead and fixed the chained 301 redirect and fixed a number of the 301 redirects that were formerly not working as I initially thought they were. What tools would you recommend to me for creating the static xml sitemap and do I need to do this for all the old pages on the site or just the ones with more traffic? Also, once the static xml sitemap is created do I submit it on the new domain or the old domain? Probably a beginner type question here but just wanted to make sure Finally, the change of address via google webmaster console happened for these domains: http://www.citychurchfamily.org/ and this: https://www.citychurchfamily.org/ Should I do the change of address for both the non-www versions as well? Your help/insight is greatly appreciated.
| a_toohill1 -
Local SEO for Multiple Locations - Is this the best approach?
Hi Frank! Honored to know our Local SEO checklist provided a starting point for your work. That's great! So glad to be of help.
| MiriamEllis0 -
Local Search Location Keyword Use
Hi Mirriam, Makes perfect sense, that's exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks again for your help. Justin
| GrouchyKids0 -
Hreflang errors "no return tag" sitemap.xml , and local search landing page with wrong Languages
Hi June, Can you share the URLs so I can take a look? I won't be able to help other than just link to the standard hreflang guidelines unless I can look at the specific site. Craig
| CraigBradford0 -
What is the SEO effect of schema subtype deprecation? Do I really have to update the subtype if there isn't a suitable alternative?
See the comment(s) here from danbri (Dan Brickley, Schema.org webmaster), last one matters though and should address your exact situation. You may not even need to make any changes really, see if you need to and see if it is worth the effort and time. https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/1109#issuecomment-212480234
| TheSymmetran0 -
Do location pages boost the homepage?
Hi John! This is a good question. I highly, highly recommend watching Rand's Whiteboard Friday: https://moz.com/blog/google-may-analyze-evaluate-quality-content-whiteboard-friday This does a better job than I can, in a few sentences, to explain how an individual page of your website relates to your overall brand. I think this is where your thoughts are going with this. Please, watch the video and come back with further questions. In the meantime, what I'll say is that what you are actually trying to do is to build topical authority. So, if your business is a landscaping company serving the San Francisco Bay Area, all of those individual topical pages you are building to represent your service areas (San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, etc.) go toward building your overall authority. And, too, of course you can build internal links from your location landing pages to your homepage, if appropriate, but that may not always be the case. Hope the video helps!
| MiriamEllis2 -
Multi Location SEO Page Structure
Hi Mike, Thanks for the additional details. Okay, so I now understand that you have 2 physical locations and sell/rent a menu of products. You have 2 options. Option 1 You create a unique, strong landing page for each of your locations. This post explains the types of content you'll want to include on these pages. These pages overview your complete service menu, but focus highly on addition information that relates specifically to that locale. You'll want testimonials/reviews (see this post) and other types of persuasive content that engender trust in what your company does in that target city. Separately, you'll also create a set of pages for each of the services you offer. Describe each service in great detail on its own page. Link to these pages from the city landing pages and vice versa. You can mention locale on these pages, but the main focus should be on the items you rent/sell. Be sure all of the above pages are easily accessible from a top level menu. Continue to build out content on the site or attached blog over time. Option 2 You create a unique page for every possible keyword combination. So, you'd have a Memphis Floor Scrubber Rental page and a Nashville Floor Scrubber Rental page, and so on. You can take this approach, but only if you can avoid the pitfalls of redundancy/duplicate content. It's kind of old-school at this point to take this approach. Unless you can find a very strong reason to create all of the pages for the good of users, this method can be a bit of an overkill and can often result in a low quality site with a lot of thin or duplicate content instead of a high quality site with best-in-class pages. So... I typically prefer Option one for small-to-medium businesses, with maximum effort being put into making the smaller set of pages very high quality. And don't forget to link all of your citations for the Nashville location to your Nashville page, and the same goes for Memphis. Hope this helps
| MiriamEllis0 -
Does having a host located in a different country than the location of the website/website's audience affects SEO?
Thanks for your answer, Silviu.
| IrinaIoana0 -
I have a Wordpress site that ranks well and a blog (uses blogger) with slightly different URL/domain that also ranks decently. Should I combine the 2 under the website domain or keep both?
I agree with David that you should combine them onto one site (the main site), and build off from there. It will be easier to build up the domain authority on one website instead of trying to do it with two different URLs.
| BlueCorona0 -
Is it possible to rank for street name searches?
Oh, that's very kind of you to say, Chad. It's always my pleasure! Seems like you've got some great opportunities ahead for some interesting content dev.
| MiriamEllis0