Category: Local Website Optimization
Considering local SEO and its impact on your website? Discuss website optimization for local SEO.
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Multi-Country Multi-Language content website
That's different, because arabic is not so globally known or spoken, and there's lot of people in UAE speaking only English, so it would make sense having an English version there.
| gfiorelli10 -
Content writing for single entity business (The use of I)
Hey Donald, What I'm understanding is that your clients use "I offer estate planning services" as opposed to "At Adams Law, comprehensive estate planning services have been designed to help you ..." And that you feel the second example seems more professional. I can see where you're coming from. I can also see that overuse of the word 'I' can start to look rather narcissistic. There's an anecdote about Teddy Roosevelt writing a book so full of the word 'I' that his typesetters had to purchase more of that letter! And, interestingly, this same topic has been coming up in the 2016 primary cycle in which pundits are counting the number of times one Democratic candidate is using the word 'I' vs. the other using the word 'we'. The upshot is, at least in my view, that pronouns definitely set a tone and say a lot about a person or a business. Here's what I think: Legal firms are supposed to sound professional because they deal in matters of serious import for their clients. Most people would not want to entrust their legal affairs to a law firm that seems sloppy or careless. So, a small but significant signal of professionalism is the company's name. Adams Attorneys At Law sounds very official, right? More so than "I do law and stuff like that." would. Then, too, web copy should always be modestly optimized with a brand's name, just for the sake of associating the brand's content with the brand's name in the user's mind. However, mention of the brand's name does not need to exclude use of personal pronouns like 'We' or 'I'. As in, "I want every client of Adams Law to be empowered with accessible, affordable counsel." Or "We will make sure you feel comfortable at Adams Law from your first phone call, to your first meeting, to your final settlement." You can use both. A key point of using first person pronouns is to indicate that a human being or group of humans are communicating something. This is meant to engender a sense of approachability - of someone manning the ship, right? "We are here to help you" is more indicative of a personal communication than "Adams Law exists to help clients". But how far you go with with this depends on the culture of your business. A lawyer who deals with family law may want to project more personal empathy than one who deals with taxes. Or, one who is managing wealth may want to project more of an energetic, hip vibe than one who is trying to appear aggressive because he takes criminal cases. I've written copy for so many different industries over the past 10+ years and my preferred pronoun for nearly all business models is actually not 'I' or 'We'. It's 'YOU'. For most business models, I advocate that 'you' be the most frequently used pronoun, and that 'I' or 'We' come second to that and the brand comes third. How you finesse this relates to how formally a business interacts with its customers. From stuffy to downright laid back, knowing the preferred tone of a client's culture is what should set the tone for all copy, creating consistency and a clear message. Hope this helps!
| MiriamEllis0 -
Pages ranking outside of sales area
Thanks so much for the advice. We gave the pages a couple months with localizing the title tags/content/description and it still didn't help out at all. They definitely don't want to go after a nationwide strategy. It seems to make sense to probably leave them alone. Thanks again!
| Make_Model1 -
Site Getting hacked
Hey, When you are fixing the website do you roll back to a save version of the website or just change password? Most likely there is Malware hidden away which if you do not remove will allow them to keep doing the same thing. I think generally backups go back 2 weeks but if your server provider has copied a hacked version you will need to remove the Malware manually - not fun. I would Google the plugins you are using and see if anyone has been hacked using that plugin.
| Xtend-Life0 -
Listing multiple schema Things (e.g. Organization, LocalBusiness, Telephone, Locations, Place, etc)
Everett, Thank you. Very much appreciate the detail. Will definitely check out JSON-LD.
| micromano0 -
Local SEO - Multiple stores on same URL
Hey There! You have 2 possible approaches here: Build a unique landing page on the website for each store if you feel you can create high quality content for each. This should be possible, if the project has the funding to post things like unique specials, events, products, offerings in each store on an ongoing basis. Link the Google My Business page and all other citations for each location to its unique landing page on the company website. A good example of this would be a site like REI.com. Go to http://www.rei.com/map/store and type in a geographic search. For example, searching for San Diego, CA, takes you here: http://www.rei.com/map/store#San Diego%2C CA. From there you can click on the map-based link to get to the individual page: http://www.rei.com/stores/san-diego.html. Look at what a nice job they've done with that page! If the project seems overwhelming, the alternative would be something more like this: http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/restaurant_locator.html. When you type in a zip code, it simply brings up a map. There does not seem to be a unique page for each store. No doubt, the corporation felt such an approach would be futile given that McDonald's has some 35,000 locations globally and they all serve basically the same thing (though I have heard you can get an unlisted green chile cheeseburger at the McDonald's in Window Rock, AZ. in Navajo Country). Which approach is stronger? #1, in most cases, but whether you can take that approach is going to depend on the funding for the project. Hope this helps.
| MiriamEllis0 -
All metrics appear to be better than our local competitors yet we our ranking doesn't resemble it. Help?
I realize this isn't an answer, but have you ever run a Full SERP Analysis on your keywords in the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool? There's a video on it here. It might be illuminating.
| MattRoney0 -
Which URL structure should I use?
I would agree with Miram Ellis, I try to make my URLs as small as possible and then use Google Custom Variables to categorise content on the site for Analytics. Therefore my answer would be: samhillbands.com/Charlottesville-VA-Wedding-Bands
| danwebman0 -
Ranking could be better - wondering why
Hi Peter, thanks for taking the time! I will follow your suggestions! Thank you very much once again ! Best regards Marc
| RWW0 -
Evaluating SEO vendor for my startup
I'm going to go ahead and lock this thread to future comments.
| MattRoney1 -
Dropping Lower and Lower
Thanks for the response Kane, I'll look into the SSL issue, I know there is mixed content loading which triggers a warning on firefox's address bar but I didn't know that chrome was showing an error. Thanks! I'll try and get the footer links updated like you recommended as well. I'll also look at adding additional content via a blog page so that things don't appear so stagnant. For the pages you listed, I'll work on getting those integrated into one. Thats definitely a good case where it makes sense to have one page since "best web design college station texas" contains the keyword "web design college station tx" so it should list for both. Thanks for the tips!
| spyke011 -
Ideas on creating location based service pages for SEO value while not worrying about local SEO?
Thanks for that important answer. Honestly, without a face-to-face interaction, this really takes this out of the realm of local optimization to be a purely organic context. If the products are the same for customers in each of the 3 cities in 5 states, are you confident that you have the strength on your team to find 15 really awesome topics for these pages that will make them not just filler but something amazing for your customers? This might depend on your product, if its application in one city would be somehow quite different from its application in another city ... I can't think of a ready example. Without knowing what the product is, it's hard to evaluate whether the approach you're considering has a good-sense foundation or could end up being a waste of your resources. It may be that you'd be better off sticking with PPC so that you're getting in front of your customers in various cities, as the true local component seems like it may be missing from this scenario. Hard to say without really knowing a lot about your business, the talent on your team and your customers' needs. Hope that makes sense.
| MiriamEllis0 -
Can you recommend any widgets or additions for a local landing page?
Hi Scott! Good question! Your specific industry is likely to dictate whether a widget will be useful, but I don't really know of a general widget that would directly impact local or localized organic rank. One might indirectly impact rankings if the presence of it enticed users to stay on a page longer, but I think it really depends on whether users found it highly useful and different than some app they already have on their cell phone (like weather!). I do recommend that you check out this 2015 post from Phil Rozek about building location landing pages. It's a good one: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/04/06/25-principles-of-building-effective-city-pages-for-local-seo/ Hope it helps!
| MiriamEllis0 -
Passing Juice through Multiple Locations
Hi Meier, I so urge you to take EGOL's advice as gold - he is legendary in his knowledge. The scenario you are describing with the PBN is not something that sounds safe or natural to either of us - so, this is your Moz squad talking here It might help you to put yourself in a user's shoes. Does it actually benefit you, if you're looking for key grinding or to get let into your locked car to be thinking about pressure washing at that moment? No. There is no natural relationship there. Do you want to go, via a link, from a pressure washing site to a locksmith site or vice versa? No. There is simply no relationship there. I also want to raise the issue here that the locksmith industry is one of the most notorious for its history of spam problems in the localsphere. Anything you do for clients in this industry is going to be in an atmosphere of heightened scrutiny (particularly at Google) and so a profile of unrelated, unnatural links would be just the sort of thing they'd be looking for to bring down the hammer. So, please exercise caution here!
| MiriamEllis0 -
Duplicate content, hijacked search console, crawl errors, ACCCK.
Yes, thank you so much, I will. What I'm concerned about is how bad this was in the first place. The way this company markets themselves is completely out of line with with the state of the build and the advice they give my employers. My bosses LOVE these guys because they are supposedly #technology #experts that do national speaking engagements about #success What I see from them is mostly paid product endorsements, outsourced workforce, and #broisms on social media. They're fast talking sales people that are delivering a product to people who don't understand what they are getting (or not getting) under the hood.
| beth_thesomersteam0 -
International SEO - How to rank similar keys for differents countries
I agree. Never automatically redirect, but rather ask users what language they prefer and set a cookie.
| katemorris0 -
Query results being indexed and providing no value to real estate website - best course of action?
Ideally, you'd set the meta robots in that page to noindex,follow. This will allow link juice to flow from all of those pages to the pages in your main navigation as well as removing them from the index. If you cannot modify the section of those pages, then, at a minimum, you could tell Webmaster Tools to ignore the pre and start parameters (specify that the parameter merely sorts the data on the page). Then, you'd end up with just 1 page indexed per city, which is probably a lot better than where you are now.
| MichaelC-150220 -
How to get traffic from Canada Only
It's a Med Spa business, or people from US will not go Canada to take Spa services and all those. My target audience is only from Ontario, Canada..
| 1akal2 -
Multiple Websites for a Large Home Service Company
Hi Lauren, Also wanted to add a link to a related discussion here: https://moz.com/community/q/does-multiple-sites-that-relate-to-one-company-hurt-seo
| MiriamEllis2 -
Google My Business
Hi Miriam, Thanks for checking back in. Yes, the businesses are different and the phone number, name and websites are different. Thanks for your help.
| Kdruckenbrod0