Multi location strategy - tracking keywords

[Mutatio_Digital]

• I have very recently taken on a local business to manage and quite new to all of this. Your posts on the subject of multi-location SEO have been incredibly useful and the original blogpost on Local landing pages by Miriam Ellis is in my reading list and I am sure will be revisited regularly.

  I have another question on this obviously complex subject, what to do about tracking your keywords in MOZ Pro? I have subscribed and set up my main keywords and linked each to the 40 different service locations for our business, which is based in a single location but services a wide area,  however this now gives me 400 keywords to track, which seems way too much and unmanageable. Can you give me some advice on how to make this much more effective?

  Many thanks,

  Sarah

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Sarah,

Just keep the 400 and make sure you can track even more, you probably don't want to rank on all of them at the same time but doing it this way you'll make sure that you can keep track of the general trends for your keywords that you focus on. We usually do this and have thousands of keywords in several regions so we can track performance across them for the same page + keyword combination.

M.

[Mutatio_Digital]

Thank you Martijn, should I also keep national for the main keywords even though we dont want to attract national traffic?

[Guest]

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[MatthewEgan]

What you touch on is a major flaw with every rank tracking tool I've ever used, because the national results for local focused keywords might not be what actually ranks in that city.  That said, it's one of those "it's as good as it's going to get" kind of things, and it at least gives you a good baseline.

Now I want to add to what Martijn suggested above to not track the spin-off pages, because those individual locations are incredibly important to the people at those locations, the focus isn't all on the homepage.  Fortunately Moz has an old tool that can help you, though you will likely hit a limit (my current limit is 100 keywords tracked) based on your account level with Moz.

It's the old Rank Tracker, which still exists and it is seperate from the Campaign Level rank tracker, using this tool you can track a single keyword to a single URL, so it's not just showing you keywords for the entire campaign, just a nice straight forward "how does X rank for Y" and it'll e-mail you if you set it up to do that.

Moz Rank Tracker - https://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker