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Hi there, at first sight, there are several issues. non-www and www versions arent redirected do not have a crawable sitemap.xml many of the sigle pages dont have a friendly URLs performing a search: site: site:universityforddurham.com appear over 8.000 results. The indexing part i believe is caused by the the lack of sitemap and the lack of friendly URL. Best of luck. GR.

Hi Jordan! Regarding your local landing pages, I think you'll find this Moz Blog piece really fills the bill: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages Regarding optimization, with just 2 cities, you may be able to include both in the tags and titles on some of your main pages (home, about, contact) but that kind of depends. So, for example on your homepage title tag, you could have Green Tree Bank: Serving Jackson, OR and Yola, CA Or, you can skip that approach and just go with the brand and a message on main pages' tags and focus very heavily on geographic terms on the landing pages. It something to experiment with. Main thing is, those landing pages should be viewed as 2 of the most important pages on the website, as they are the ones your citations should link to and your customers will be reaching most easily via those citations. Make these pages shining stars, expending all possible resources to offer an exceptional, persuasive experience in order to maximize conversions. Hope this helps!

Hello Benjamin, This is an interesting problem. I'm going to provide my opinion, but I highly recommend studying up on International SEO, which you can do at the links below: https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/ I don't know what the plugin does, but if it generates a new URL (e.g. adds ?loc=ca or something like that) for the location change you'll want to use rel="alternate" hreflang="*" tags, which would look something like this: Google recommends putting one language per page, so that would be a different URL for each version, as highlighted in red here. **However, it sounds to me like all of this is done client-side using JavaScript, and that the URL doesn't change, only the content.** If this is the case - as long as you are serving the same content to Googlebot crawling in Canada as you are to a visitor in Canada you probably won't have any issues, as described here: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/06/how-google-defines-ip-delivery.html . For the situation you described, it seems like you could put both keyword variations in the content and that would be good enough. But then you don't want to spell specialising with an S in one line and specializing with a z in the next. Another thing to look into is whether both versions of the content appear in the code, or just one or the other. You definitely don't want to have multiple versions of the content in the source code. But you also don't want to hide both versions via JavaScript, only to load one or the other client-side. That creates even more problems. One would think there would be a Vary: Location response header, similar to how responses are provided when content varies by user-agent or cookie: https://www.fastly.com/blog/best-practices-for-using-the-vary-header . Alas, I can't find any use cases of this and it's not a "thing". I'm not sure why this is, but maybe an International SEO Expert like Alayda Solis would know. I'll ping her into the thread if she has time.

Thanks for this. Great idea. I always have my Wife take a look. Will extend that to the teenagers and my parents. That will tell a lot. Great tip! Cheers.

** I was just curious if anyone knew if the duplicate content would suppress traffic for locations that aren't in the same city.** If Google sees pages on your site that are substantially duplicate.  It will filter all but one of them from the SERPs. ** is it even possible to re-write the same 750 word service page "uniquely" 250 times? Ha.** Yes.  The reward is enormous.  Ha.

Not a problem Brian. I'm interested to see what sort of impact these changes make!

Hi Oliver, It might help to think of it this way. Whatever your town is (small or large) that is your local home base. This is the address you'll be using in all of your citation building, the footer and contact page of your website, and in at least some of your website content and optimization, all for the purposes of ranking locally. For any other locations you serve, but where you lack a physical location, you'll be aiming at organic (not local pack) rankings. So, this will have nothing to do with your citations. It will all have to do with service city content you build on the website + additional outreach in the form of social and paid promotions. So, even if your town is small, it's the anchor that proves you to be a local, physical business. It's what proves your eligibility to be included in Google My Business and other citation platforms. It's your best hope of local pack rankings. Everything beyond your city of location is for organic outreach. As for how Google will handle all this, given the user-as-centroid phenomenon, Google will customize local results for the searcher based on his physical location at the time of search. So, you do want to be sure you're making it clear that your physical location is at 'X' so that Google is convinced searchers near there are close to you. Hope this helps, and might like this for further reading: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

Hey Radi, What you are talking about is hyperlocal content, which, if developed deftly, can be great for both visibility and conversions. However, if it's obviously a stretch to create this kind of content for a specific business model, it can end up looking really spammy. Issa is on the ball stating that the content for these hyperlocal landing pages would need to be strong and unique, and this is pretty much where the rubber hits the road: does you client have something unique to say about his product/service in each of these hyperlocal markets, or is it really just all the same from one neighborhood to another? You mention that your client sells plastic plants. My guess is that he is selling the same goods to each suburb, so unless there is something unique you can think to for each suburban audience, my concern would be that these pages might be being created for no other purpose that SEO. Sadly, as you've pointed out, a competitor is getting away with it. This is where Google lets SEOs down: teaching the business community that low quality is rewarded. Can you think of something better for this client to do, that isn't low quality? Maybe video marketing? A social campaign? Acquisition of awesome reviews/testimonials? Something about businesses in each suburb that used plastic plants? What I'm urging here is to use your marketing smarts to see if there is a higher path you can take the client along, rather than agreeing that he should imitate a low quality competitor. One thing to bear in mind with this ... that spammy competitor may be getting away with this today, but they've got a sword dangling over their head. They may be only one Google tweak away from anonymity. Should that happen, and should your client have invested his marketing budget in more interesting, creative work, he could find himself standing tall as others fall away.

Haha, thank you, Patrick!

Hmm, I'm not a huge fan of clients who refuse to implement their marketers advice, but photos are at least a start, accompanied by stories. BTW, Bob, this would be a good article to share with a client in this market: https://www.ethicalseoconsulting.com/25-email-lead-generation-tips-from-social-media/ Some good marketing ideas in there that your client might latch onto, given the visual nature of his business.

Hello I don't see problem if you redirect users after they choose their market. But you may add an option to change another market in case of mistake.

Hi, This article gives a pretty good rundown of the steps needed (well the intro bit and then straight to step 4). Look out for the cookieDomain: auto setting which is a bit of a gotcha in many cases. Technical reasons behind the cookie domain issue can be found here. Hope it helps!

Hi Rosemary, You are right to be concerned about promoting virtual locations. The only safe thing for them to do is to honestly state their real, physical locations and develop organic content around other cities they serve but lack locations in.

That's partially a question of how soon the linking pages get indexed/recrawled, but in general it's very fast. On our last project where we had an issue like this it only took ~4 days before our pages were showing up correctly in the search results. We were targeting two pages specifically, and built around 8 links per page. Keep in mind though that the homepage is almost certainly going to be stronger than any of your other pages, so rankings might slip a bit at first when the engines start to attribute the pages correctly.

Thanks guys, very helpful!

Excellent response Marcus.  Thanks for your feedback.

As long as you use cross-domain rules, you will be absolutely fine - you are far from the only person who has a need or desire to do this -Andy

Best practice with URL's at all time, is to keep them short and to the point. If this page is about sectional garage doors, call it so, but don't expect to get anything from it in terms of a boost. You get a page that makes sense, and that is most important. -Andy

hello i would like to show you my case study.... i did a seo service for a website in my country for a really competitive keyword 'wedding dress'. total of 15,000 searches a month! from checking my competitors (the firsts google result) i found out easily they used  wix!! nice website - not to go crazy about. with really thin content - only big image slider and 5 words on the ranking page now how did they get there? compering to others who offers much better content! they did a really good link building. their links are coming from major big websites! and their on page seo is ... sorry for the word ... !@#$hit

Hi BBsmyth! Are you able to provide any examples for Kate?