Questions
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Is there a way to "protect" yourself from non-local traffic?
My first thought would be to have an IVR on your phone system with a "Press 1 if you're located in the XXX metro area, press 2 if you're located outside this area." Then if callers press 2, you have have an apologetic message that states your business qualifications. If that's not possible for some reason, you could use redirects based on geolocation with services from Maxmind. Alternatively, paid accounts on Cloudflare allow geoip rules that could redirect visitors from outside your IP range to a "sorry" page. My opinion on this is to modify your business processes to accommodate out-of-area customers.
Local Website Optimization | | kwoolf0 -
Service Area Location Pages vs. User Experience
No worries at all. Where you put the pages in the menu should not impact organic traffic in terms of people coming directly from the SERPs to one of these landing pages, but it could impact the flow of traffic through the website (someone entering on the home page and then not seeing that you have these landing pages underneath and about tab or someplace else). So, ostensibly, this could impact the depth of the visits your website receives. The main point of giving these pages their own navigation heading is to increase on-site awareness that the pages exist. From my work with SABs over the years, I've noticed that it has become an expected standard practice to give these pages their own main menu tab, to be sure they're being found by users for whom specialized content has been created. I don't have any recent studies to prove this out, but it's always been a rule of human usability to stick with formats users are already comfortable with. I, personally, wouldn't be inclined to look for my city's landing page under an 'About' tab, but for an authoritative answer on this for your specific brand, you'd need to conduct a usability test in which you see exactly how users are interacting with your website. Sometimes, the results of those studies are extremely surprising. So, end of the day, it's always up to the owner to decide how he wants to structure his website. What I've tried to offer here would be standard best practice advice. But, the only way to know whether having a unique tab for service city content or putting these pages somewhere else helps/harms usability and conversions is to do a formal study. If you don't want to invest in that right now, you could at least ask a few friends who aren't at all familiar with your site to use it while you watch over their shoulders. You might ask them a question like, "What would you do if you were trying to find out if we serve X city?" and then see how they try to find the answer. Things like that might lend some data to your decision about site navigation.
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis1 -
Google displays multiple titles for same article. What does this mean?
Hi Green_Web, It looks like you have the same default title tag for all of your blog posts. The main pages on the site look like they have more suitable title tags. The blog section looks like it's in WordPress and has a default title tag in place, which hopefully is not hardcoded into the post template. If you don't have access or have the ability to edit titles, I would suggest talking to the devs and get them to use the post name in the title, but ideally, you would be able to independently modify all page titles through a plugin like Yoast. The reason you may be seeing a more suitable title tag sometimes is that Google won't always use your specified title tag in SERPs - it can sometimes use your h1 heading (for example) if it thinks that is more relevant to the user's search query. Cheers, David
Technical SEO Issues | | davebuts0 -
Should I mention locations in service-specific landing pages?
Hey James, Just want to offer a proviso here: the fact that Google localizes results automatically for queries they feel have a local intent does not mean that the optimization of the local business website can simply overlook local keywords. In fact, it's fundamentally important that each page you create targeting a specific city/neighborhood includes those city terms. Not only does this optimization signal to Google what your page is attempting to be relevant to, but it's also so important that human users know that your Sugarland page is for them in Sugarland, or that your Dallas page is for them in Dallas. I can see why Google's automatic localization of results might cause people to think they can overlook geographic optimization of the website, but to do so would be to fail to send the clearest possible signals of relevance to specific geographic intents or users-as-centroids.
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis1