Local SEO Question

Whats up Everybody,

We have a unique task. I will be carrying out a search engine optimization task for a neighborhood furniture business. They are located in "City A". However they want to rank for "City B, C and D. These other cites are 50 - 300 miles from their location.

The goal is to create a single about page that will contain targeted keywords for city b,c and d. So when someone searches google our target page will come up.

The challenge I think is that furniture companies actually located in the targeted cites (b,c and d) will naturally rank on page one because their entire site is focused around the local keywords versus our 1-3 page campaign.

Initially the idea is to create 1-2 pages for each target location. Each target page will have relevant info for that target city of course. I plan to focus on both short and long tail keywords.

I'm wondering if anyone has any strategies or suggestions on things I can incorporate to rank on page 1 for local keywords, with the strategy discussed earlier, any and all help is appreciated!

Your plan to rank in organic local search, of having one site with multiple 'city' pages may work if there is low competition and/or the business's site is well optimized, but in my experience the only type of 'multi-city/single domain' type sites that rank well in local search are authority/directory type sites.

To rank in Google Places, the business will need an address (and phone number) in each of the target locations. If it's not located there, it may to be able to rent an address/phone number.

Hello, it shouldn't be that hard to outrank them anyway you slice it. Have you looked at the SEO of those other companies yet? I doubt it's amazing, and it shouldn't be that hard for you. I would just create 1 page with the exact keyword in the URL for all 3 cities, and then SEO those keywords for those pages. Another thing you could do is a YouTube video marketing them to those cities, and then title and SEO those videos for those cities. YouTube videos will get to page one with little effort if the comp is fairly weak. Just properly SEO those one pages and throw a round of social bookmarks and a round of web 2.0's at them and it should get to page one easily.

Let me chime in here with some personal experiance being succesful with this exact approach...

the above methods should work, but if you want to ensure dominating I would create a small landing page for each town.. then at the footer of the website have links saying "looking for furniture in town A?" - "looking for furniture in town B?" - ext.

Each link takes you to the unique landing page. The landing has a header that says "Our company caters to the town of A and is still the best deal in the area".

Something like that. If you need direction or help just shoot me a PM. I've done this for extremely competitive niches and am telling you that a furniture store will be cake. Good luck!

Edit** the links for each landing page should be named like so: yourwebsitename/furniture-in-townA

I'd make a page for each city off of the main site and rank that.

Have you looked at the organic serps? Are there Google Places listings?

in order for you to rank in google places, you need to have an address in the same metro area as the target searcher
for example
if you wanted to rank for "widgets in phoenix" and the address on the google places location was in avondale
you could successfully do it

but if you wanted to rank for "widgets in phoenix" but the address on the google places location was in tuscon
you wouldn't have a prayer

if you had the address on the google places location in tuscon, and rented a storage unit (no pmb or virtual mailbox, google's smarter than that) in phoenix that you could recieve mail at. you could register a new and seperate google places location in phoenix and then get out of the lease. now you can rank for phoenix.

good thread

thanks dude

let me pinch in.

You do not need a real address on all the metro areas to do google maps, you need to start with citations and wait until google knows about you (30 days), then use a ups store address.

Also, the landing page sound nice but is going to be more work. I do local seo, have 17 clients, one is a lawyers office and rank for 6 cities (no special landing pages). I added a blog in the same site and post regular, adding 2 links in each post, one to a inner page and the other to a gov. page (social security x example). Always add a 3rd link to a contact form at the end of each post. The typical blue link, 14 px font: >> Click here to get help right away! <<

I use article marketing (2 blog networks), ABC from dalberri and soc bookmarks. For the lawyers site, I ranked 400 + kws in the first 100 pages. (125 kw in first page).

cbar126 said:

let me pinch in.

You do not need a real address on all the metro areas to do google maps, you need to start with citations and wait until google knows about you (30 days), then use a ups store address.

Also, the landing page sound nice but is going to be more work. I do local seo, have 17 clients, one is a lawyers office and rank for 6 cities (no special landing pages). I added a blog in the same site and post regular, adding 2 links in each post, one to a inner page and the other to a gov. page (social security x example). Always add a 3rd link to a contact form at the end of each post. The typical blue link, 14 px font: >> Click here to get help right away! <<

I use article marketing (2 blog networks), ABC from dalberri and soc bookmarks. For the lawyers site, I ranked 400 + kws in the first 100 pages. (125 kw in first page).

Click to expand...

We use close to this strategy and we do this with no keywords in the URL. Though that would help.

In the Title, H1, bold and urls we do keyword city | Business name. Then we make the Meta Description attention getting like an ad that uses the keywords. YES, I know MD's have no technical SEO value except they can increase your CTR as keywords from search are highlighted. And a good offer goes a long way.

On each landing page for a service or product we anchor our top money term for the main website in a URL, a second URL for the top money term for the landing page and a third URL anchored as a call to action Like Schedule your appointment Now!

So 1 link to the main URL, 1 link to the landing page and 1 link to the contact us page.

The we link build using those URLs and keywords.

FYI: As google has said recently a top SEO listing doesn't mean your places page will list any hire.

We are testing using a link builder like SEnukeX with their places page as the money URL. The rotating the anchor text using primary keywords and city. We are also going add their address as listed on one of the top local citation sites like yelp as an anchor. I'm kinda curious to see the results on that one.

Depends on what you wanna' do. For places listings citations, and reviews (gotta' be careful with these) are what you need. For organic... well it's the same as ranking anything else.

i would suggest looking at your competitors webs (see how strong they seo are, what kind of links they'r using, what are the main kw they are ranking for), and then go from there.

monk13 is right, you need to have at least some sort of address in those other cities. Or else, how are you planning to claim your Places listing?

Anyhow, what's important for Local is to always have the same Name, Address, Phone # + Website (no matter where your company is mentioned), citation, reviews, ratings, crawlable name-address-phone# on main site, check-ins (on Twitter, 4Square, etc.), mentions on local blogs and in local directories, and well optimized main site/landing page associated with your Places listing.