Google Is Linking to Wrong Local Page - How To Change?

[ruislip18]

Hi All

Thanks in advance for any support. I've setup two "local" pages to target the next door town for one of my clients.

One page targets "t shirt printing" and one page targets "embroidered workwear"

However when I search for "embroidered workwear town in question" google connects the search to my t-shirt printing page and not the embroidered workwear page. Would it be possible to advise on what I need to do for the correct page to be linked to the search term?

Here is  a link to the search term in question

**https://tinyurl.com/vvgr5r5 **

and the page that we would like to appear in the results, not our tshirt printing page

https://tinyurl.com/s77md9o Thanks in advance for any help

[MiriamEllis]

Thank you for bringing your scenario to the forum. So, as I understand it, your T-shirt page is ranking for the term you'd prefer your Embroidery page to rank for, in a city in which you're not physically located but to which you are adjacent. While it's always up to Google which page they feel is most relevant for a particular search term, here are some things I see when looking at these two pages:

1. You are duplicating content between the two pages. This speaks of a lack of effort on the part of the brand to build unique, high quality content for the customers. If you are going to create a unique page, create unique content for it.

2. I see in your menu that you have a section for "Locations".  From your Contact Page, it looks like you have just one physical location in High Wycombe. Looking at this, what appears to have been the strategy here is to create dozens of pages for locations in which the business doesn't physically exist, but would like to serve. Unfortunately, as I look at these pages, I would have to say that these pages have been created for search engine rankings rather than for human visitors. There has been little effort put into making these valuable resources for people, and if the brand's only connection to these other cities is wanting to rank for them/sell to them, that's really not good enough inspiration for publishing something worthwhile. A better approach would be to evaluate whether the brand has any actual connection to these cities. For example, let's say the the company had a large commission to embroider the work uniforms for a famous commercial pottery studio in York. You could then create a page about the job  the brand did  for this studio in York, complete with images, videos, text, and testimonials for the company. This would be a page that would have a real reason for existing, instead of the present state of these "location" pages that have been created. Google is likely viewing this entire collection of pages as being of low quality.

3)  Something odd is happening at the top of your Marlow Embroidery page. It's as if you've got a Title Tag in the text at the top of it (instead of in your code) reading: Embroidered Workwear Marlow | Embroidery Marlow | Workwear Marlow. This is not human-style language and doesn't belong in the customer-focused text on your page. To Google, this could look like an attempt to over-optimize the page in a spammy way.

Overall, the brand isn't taking an optimum approach to marketing itself to communities beyond its city borders. If this were my client, I would be advising the brand to discover if there are real relationships they can build with customers in other cities so that they have something useful and interesting to publish. The danger of continuing with the present approach is that it could easily be pushed down by a competitor who is willing to invest in higher quality content. The duplicate content issue needs to be addressed, and the Marlow Embroidery page ranking issue might be sorted out if you do this and earn a few good new links to it, but from just a quick look at the site, this brand may have greater overall needs than this, given the current state of their content strategy.

There's a very good opportunity for your agency to get this client onto a better path. Recommended reading: https://moz.com/blog/rank-beyond-location

Hope this helps and good luck!

[ruislip18]

Hi Miriam

Thank you so much for your detailed response.

You have exactly identified the scenario and I will work through the suggestions posted, this content I have inherited so will make a raft of changes as suggested

[MiriamEllis]

You're welcome. Good luck to you in the work ahead!