Do canonical links effect local search rankings?

[BearPaw88]

Hello,

I have just been doing some reading about canonical links. Part of my role at my family business is to look after all of the SEO and digital marketing for our business. I've been really pleased with the results i've managed to get as we currently rank in the top 3 in the organic search for all of the keywords we've been trying for.

My question is though, The Moz scan of my site came back and said we have some duplicate content. Although i've written every page completely from scratch I am sort of saying the same thing. We cover a few different areas for our business and we are in the service industry and i've always thought it was better to have a page dedicated to an area. We are a removals company and I would  always type in for example 'Removal companies in London' I wouldn't just type in Removal Companies. It is very location specific which we've found out by asking our customers what they have/would type in.

Because of this, I was thinking perhaps this duplicate content is harming our sites SEO so I wondering, if i implemented a canonical link from all of my local area pages to my main House Removals page to say that there is where the content originated.Would it negatively affect the current ranking of my local pages (as it's pretty good) or would it actually increase the strength of our SEO and improve it?

Any help would be hugely appreciated

Cheers,

Robert

P.S i'm only self taught and i'm trying to learn as much as i can, please be kind.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would put canonical tags on your site for the pages that you want ranking. I would also take a look at this content audit to make sure that your content is top notch and structurally correct.

From there, I would make sure that your site is country targeted in WMT and take a look at the following resources:
How to Have a Successful Local SEO Campaign in 2015 (Moz)
How to Perform the Ultimate Local SEO Audit (Moz)

You can also take a look at citation services like Whitespark to help you.

Hope this all helps! Good luck!

[BearPaw88]

Hi Patrick,

Thanks so much for replying. So, if for example i had a main parent page called house removals which is effectively where we explain the business and how it works and what we do. Then just to appear in some more local searches we had pages coming off of it called 'house removals london', 'house removals birmingham' and 'house removals manchester'. The pages that are ranking are the location specific pages. If i was to put a canonical tag to link them back to the house removals page would we lose any of our ranking and would the house removals page effectively just take the place of the sub page?

I'm a little bit nervous to put canonical tags in because it's taken me a while to get us ranking so well.

Thanks for all the other advice I will definitely have a look through,

Cheers,

Robert