Pages ranking outside of sales area

[Make_Model]

Hi there Moz Community,

I work with a client (a car dealership), that mostly serves an area within 50-100 miles at most from their location. A previous SEO company had built a bunch of comparison pages on their website (i.e. 2016 Acura ILX vs. Mercedes-Benz C300). These pages perform well in their backyard in terms of engagement metrics like bounce rate, session duration, etc. However, they pull in traffic from all over the country and other countries as well.

Because they really don't have much of an opportunity to sell someone a car across the country that a customer could easily buy at their local dealership, anyone from outside their primary marketing area typically bounces. So, it drags down their overall site metrics plus all of the metrics for these pages. I imagine searchers from outside their primary sales area are seeing their location and saying "whoah that's far and not what I'm looking for."

I tried localizing the pages by putting their city name in the title tags, meta descriptions, and content, but that doesn't seem to really be getting rid of this traffic from areas too far away to sell a car to.

My worry is that the high bounce rates, low time on site, and general irrelevancy of these pages to someone far away are going to affect them negatively. So, short of trying to localize the content on the page or just deleting these pages all together, I'm not quite sure where to go from here.

Do you think that having these high bouncing pages will hurt them? Any suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jaclyn,

What a good question. Here's what I'm reading in your post:

"These pages perform well in their backyard in terms of engagement metrics like bounce rate, session duration, etc."

"My worry is that the high bounce rates, low time on site, and general irrelevancy of these pages to someone far away are going to affect them negatively"

Without a full analysis of your analytics data, I can't give a 100% confident answer on this, but my gut feeling is that if the pages are performing well locally, the conversions resulting from this may be more important than the concerns about bounce rate as it relates to national users.

That's interesting that you haven't seen any effect on the traffic from editing the titles/tags of these pages. Have you given it a couple of months? Or did you just do this a week or two ago?

One thing your question has made me curious about, and for which I don't have an answer, is whether Google is sophisticated enough to notice that a low bounce rate locally and a high one nationally means that the site is really more relevant to local users. National SEO should not negatively impact Local SEO if done properly, but I've not thought of this in terms of bounce rate, specifically. I'm actually going to ask another team member what they think about this and will update this thread if I get further feedback. It's really an excellent question!

[Dr-Pete]

I'd tend to agree with Miriam. While I understand your concerns, we're still not really clear on how Google uses user metrics, and their impact on ranking is limited at best. New developments like RankBrain are more likely to factor them in, but I don't think high bounce rates from poorly localized visitors is a huge concern.

Now, weight that against the risks of just cutting these pages out of the index or ham-stringing them somehow, and I think the risk of damaging your site is much more than the risk of some mediocre user metrics for some parts of the country. Your ability to rank nationwide may not convert well, but it could have general organic benefits, be attracting links, etc.

If you were asking me if you should pursue a nationwide strategy when you're a local business, then I'd say "no" - that would be money and time poorly spent. In your case, though, you already have that traffic - I fear that trying to remove it out of uncertainty over quality is only going to do you more harm than good.

It's tough to say without seeing the pages and searches in question, but if you feel these pages are generally of decent quality to organic search visitors, I'd leave them alone.

[MiriamEllis]

Thank you so much for popping by, Dr. Pete. Jaclyn, it was Dr. Pete's second opinion I asked for

[Make_Model]

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!