Can you please add Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex or at least Counties to local keyword search areas?

[sbatx]

I would like to request that a "Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex" option be added to the keyword search areas. As it stands, each city must be individually chosen, which is not only very time consuming, but also acts as an insurmountable multiplier for the keywords used in our campaigns.

Most businesses in DFW serve the entire Metroplex, which consists of around 200 cities. Even the core largest number well over 50. Almost all of these cities are within about 50 miles of each other as well. Asking the majority of businesses to only focus their SEO monitoring efforts on a few cities in the Metroplex would be like asking a Hyper Wal-Mart to only monitor about 10% of their inventory at most, and more likely 1-5%.

Alternately, if you could instead have County choices for DFW, that would help a lot. The counties of DFW are:

Collin County
Dallas County
Denton County
Ellis County
Hood County
Hunt County
Johnson County
Kaufman County
Parker County
Rockwall County
Somervell County
Tarrant County
Wise County

The three in bold are typically the most important for businesses in the Metroplex, though each of the outlying counties listed contain dozens of cities as well, each with their own particular specialties, focuses, and demographics.

[tawnycase]

Hello! Tawny from Moz's Help team here.

Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than just adding in a new location to our database.

The locales are tracked as a defined region with borders established by Google. It's hard to say exactly how Google is defining these areas, but it is likely related to ZIP codes and IP addresses.

I found this article while I was researching — it doesn't have exact answers to this question either, but had some valuable insight into Google's local search results: http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-pigeon-algorithm-211771. Section 7 of this resource would be the most relevant to how those locations are defined.

The locales we include in Moz Pro are specific to the Google search engine only, and our list is based on a finite postal code database, so you may not see every locale you would like to track in the list. It is helpful to be very specific when entering the locale, and it can help to include a specific neighborhood, state, or county name when entering the locale (e.g.: Melbourne, Victoria vs. Melbourne, Australia).

That means you might see more specific areas than the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, but probably won't see locales as broad as an entire county.

​If you still have questions we can help with, feel free to drop us a line at help@moz.com and we'll do our best to sort everything out.

[sbatx]

Is there not a way to cluster a given number of areas under an additional category with some sort of if/then code?

For instance, if there were 26 cities total in the world (A-Z) and an additional location "Metro City" were added to the list manually. Then an if/then were added so that Cities A-F were not only given the attribute of City A, City B, ... but also given the attribute of Metro City.

Then, if a user chose Metro City as part of their monitoring, then Cities A through F would be monitored, but instead of giving separate results for each of those 6 cities, it would give one sum total for all those cities added together, under the category Metro City.

The reason I press the issue is because, while going to a granular level is extremely useful for certain areas and businesses, it is nearly useless for others. The DFW Metroplex is a prime example of this, as the vast majority of those 200+ cities are within a 30 minute drive of each other at their farthest point, because of the extensive highway system it has. Add to that, there are numerous corners that apply to multiple cities, because of the strange border lines, so you might literally have a 1000 square foot area that covers 3-4 separate cities, or one city that is bordered by 10 others, that one could drive through in 5 minutes at legal speed limit.

Likewise, I know it can be done, because Facebook and Google already allows for less granularity when choosing demographics based on location. See the following link on Google Trends that already allows for the Dallas / Fort Worth area.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US-TX-623&q=Stuff

At the very least, could Moz developers look into this as a future offering?

[tawnycase]

It's my understanding that we're not able to add in locations in that way, but I'll be sure to pass your feedback along to the product team. Maybe the developers can find a way of making this work.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[sbatx]

Thank you so much Tawny! Perhaps they could at least incorporate Google's current method of grouping for the DFW Area.