How can my categories rank for my different branches? Tidied site up but now local rankings are worse

[PeteC12]

Dear Mozzers ,

I am wondering if someone could please help with some advice and assistance on the following for our Tool hire site:

Basically I like to know how we can rank for our categories for our different branch locations ?.

We have a branch finder page and separate branch pages but I do not know if I should have an internal link from all our branch pages to all my different categories or not or is google clever enough to know that I have x locations and x categories and I should rank all the categories in all the locations. I think my site structure is fairly straightforward and on the face of it similar to what others do who have multiple branches .

For example I enclose a link to 2 of our categories - carpet cleaner hire category and a floor sander hire category

carpet cleaner category - http://goo.gl/cMyS4i

floor sander category - http://goo.gl/4ipUyA

Heres a link to our Branch Finder - http://goo.gl/UyTQdK

Heres a link to one of our Branches for example - Bristol Branch - http://goo.gl/9TXHTK

And heres our link to our google plus Bristol page - google plus bristol branch page - https://goo.gl/h0IwAK . We have link from our bristol page going to the bristol google plus page and visa versa.

Currently within our internal linking structure there is No direct link on the branch pages to the categories ?. Is this something we need to do or not necessary ?. - If we do it , then it may mess up or confuse the page as I someone need to get all the category links on the branch pages ?

We have lots of good unique content , lots of citations for our branches and categories etc but we just don't seem to rank at all well for any of our categories in local search.

For example if somene was to search for - Carpet cleaner hire "City Name " or Floor sander hire "City Name" (City name being where our branches are). We dont rank very well for most of our cities. Even without putting the city name in we dont rank to well in local search.

We used to have individual pages for our categories in each of the cities we have branches with unique content on all and these did rank quite well in a few cities but never top 3 in most and we got rid of these last month (start of Oct) as I was told that google may see this as quite spammy or doorway pages if I have a carpet cleaner hire Bristol page or a floor sander hire Bristol page etc ?.. All my location landing pages now just 301 back to the appropriate category.

I am wondering if getting rid of these landing pages was a good idea as by tidying things up , I've seemed to have lost my local rankings for my cities.

Can someone please advise if what I did was right and what else I should look at doing ?> Could it be an internal linking issue I need to sort ?

Any assistance much appreciated.
thanks
Pete

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Pete,

I can see how this is confusing, and honestly, the amount of time it would take to come up with a totally ideal strategy here is likely more than you will be able to attain in a forum discussion like this one. However, there are 2 typical approaches in your scenario.

Approach 1:

You have a page for each service (which is what I think you are calling 'categories') and a page for each city you serve. This is the simplest method, relying on having a totally awesome page for each service and each city. The site tends to be smaller with this approach, but it can work if the pages are good enough, have enough internal and 3rd party links, age, use, etc.

Approach 2:

In this approach, you build a page for every possible service/city keyword combo. Most of the time, what I see when businesses take this approach is that they end up with a great number of low quality pages, and duplicate content often becomes a part of the scene. The only time I would recommend this approach would be if there is a) truly unique content to offer one each page, b) adequate funding to ensure excellent copywriting, and c) a reason this will be more helpful to the users that Approach 1.

If you're using a location finder for your customers, be sure the links can also be accessed some other way (like in a menu or sitemap). And be sure no steps have been taken to attempt to represent service locations as physical ones. This could include putting up weird or false NAP on website pages, or building citations for non-physical locations.

So, those are the basic approaches, and after you've figured out which strategy you're using, I would recommend doing a formal Local SEO audit to see if you can dig up an explanation for your missing local pack rankings. https://www.google.com/search?q=ultimate+local+seo+audit&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

I really hope you'll get more feedback from the community, but I do think the complexity of your website and your dilemma is likely going to require a deep dig, which may be beyond the scope of what community members can offer.

[PeteC12]

Hello Miriam,

Many thanks for your comprehensive and detailed answer. By the 2 approaches you mention, it looks like we did actually originally use approach 2. For a long period until approx 2 years ago, this was very successful until google changed the algorithms . We then went through a process of writing new content of at least 350-500 words for every location/category combo which did improves a little but no way back to where it was. We did however manage to keep probably a larger search visibility footprint than we would have normally had got. On the negative side though, I did think , this could come across as spammy as there is only so many ways one can re-spin similar content without it sounding poor. Also apart from the NAP appearing on the location/category pages, the content wasn't really adding anything unique to that specific location although we did try and localise them by adding in directions , landmarks and major roads etc and other local transport info to get to our depots etc.

Although most, locations/category combos ranked in the top 10-15, most of them were hovering between 6-10 , and only a few top 3. It was def. getting harder and harder to improve on these even with local citations etc and using schema markup.

I posted a couple of questions to John Mueller on a hangout and also to the google webmaster forum  and the general feedback  I got , was that these could be classed as doorway pages. Whilst John Mueller suggested that branch pages were okay, and he did say you could probably have a few location/category pages if you offered a service in that area, he was very non committal and encouraged against doing this technique for obvious reasons although, i think if done correctly, it could work perfectly well for some time to come.

We therefore re-structured our site recently to follow your approach 1 and  setup 301's for our location pages to go back to the relevant category pages. I think this improved the overal internal site structure and we therefore had less link dilution.

We are ranking for our services <city>in serps and in some cases we are ranking exactly the same or slightly better than when we had the combo/location page but the page being returned in serps is the branch page in most cases as opposed to the category page.  I do think this going to be best long term although, I think i will experiment a little by possibly adding a few service pages to one or two of my branches and see how that affects things.</city>

I also think that the internal structure in approach 2 diluted everything far to much and weakened many of my landing pages as a whole.

I also looked at that link you sent regarding the local search audit and ordered the book from Amazon. Will keep you posted on the results from my landing page experiment of adding a couple of service pages to a location or two. But I am glad that It looks like I've been on the right track (thereabouts) with regards to both approaches you mention.

Many thanks

Pete

[MiriamEllis]

I like and agree with your above conclusions and ideas, Pete. And it won't hurt to do a limited experiment with a few pages, and just see how it goes. Something else to consider - if you don't want to get back to the point where the site is feeling watered down, you might consider video marketing, instead, for some of those keyword combos. How affordable and reasonable that is would be based on your particular resources Wishing you good luck!

P.S. I just noticed my link was funny in the original reply. Meant to link directly to: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit. So sorry - I hope that wasn't confusing.

[PeteC12]

Hi Miriam,

Many thanks , I will take a look at the local seo audit. Will keep you posted on the limited experiment etc.

Kind Regards

Pete

[MiriamEllis]

Good luck, Pete!