Target the homepage?
-
Hi SEOmoz!
I have a potential client who is piloting a web application in a specific geo market, but plans on expanding to 10+ cities in the near future (6-12 months).
He wants to rank for "[initial geo market] + [service]". Should I optimize the homepage for this keyword (which will be relatively easy to rank for), or encourage him to build out a geo-specific template (could take a few months to add this to the application) for this market, and try to rank that so it's scalable?
Thoughts are appreciated.
EDIT: In terms of the business type, this is a web application that helps people organize their travel. It isn't your local traditional restaurant that is trying to compete with others in their area. We would be competing with other nationally recognized travel applications (TripAdvisor, Yahoo Travel, etc), most likely.
-
To Keri's point, I can't provide the business name. Thanks for understanding.
In terms of the business type, this is a web application that helps people organize their travel. It isn't your local traditional restaurant that is trying to compete with others in their area. We would be competing with other nationally recognized travel applications (TripAdvisor, Yahoo Travel, etc), most likely. Should have provided this clarification upfront. My apologies.
-
Hi Tommy, From a purely local perspective, it is very important to understand whether the client has just 1 or 10 physical offices. If only one, then the main thrust of his website will probably need to be slanted most strongly towards his physical location. The hope here would be to gain traction in the Local SERPs, whereas any other cities he wants to target, but in which he has no physical office, will be unlikely to be able to achieve high visibility in the Local SERPs. These office-less locations would need to fight for organic rankings for his other desired local terms. There is some grey area here on my side because I'm not positive whether your client's business model is actually local or not. Is there a legal business name, unique physical street address and unique local area code phone number associated with at least one of his target cities? Or, is his business (and his product) totally virtual? In the latter case, then breaking into the local SERPs at all is going to be next to impossible because of Google's preference for displaying true local businesses for so many geo-related queries. I feel like I've started to answer your question, but details like the ones I've mentioned are what one needs to understand before making a positive decision about how to proceed with a campaign. Please, feel free to give further information if you can about the client's business model, product and physical geography - but you do not need to give names or use real keywords. Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question! Miriam
-
Thumbs up for Keri, it was my mistake to ask for a link.
-
Hi Tommy,
I've asked our associate who specializes in local search to come take a look at this question. She should be able to give you some helpful advice with how to proceed.
We understand that many times you cannot divulge information about your client or their business, especially if they haven't launched yet. Do feel free to tell us if that's the case here.
-
Hi Tommy,
Could we please get a link to the application?
In general (before checking the app. itself) I would go for a sub-folders / each city, then target the specific sub-folder for the specific city. The homepage could be optimized for the service keyword with the initial geo market. But that is only one opinion.
Maybe after a link to the application, we can get more detailed plan.
Hope it helped,
Istvan
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Homepage SEO optimization
Hello, I’m almost ready to lunch my new website https://thetravelhoop.com , I just need to create the content of the product page and put all the images. I would like to know what you think in terms of SEO of the home page (is the content that I want to rank the most). My doubt is that since it is a landing page, there is not a lot of text but mostly <h>. It’s not a styling decision of course (I know is bad practice) but mostly because they are supposed to be title/headings.</h> Do you think I’m doing something wrong, or do you have any suggestions? Thank you, Daniele
On-Page Optimization | | danielecelsa0 -
Is this still considered true about INTERNAL anchor text? "Penguin seems to be targeting overly aggressive anchor text (both internally and externally), especially from low-quality sources."
Recently I've heard a few people say now it's okay to be aggressive with internal linking. So a link from mydomain.com/news to mydomain/widgets can use spammy anchor text like "best green widgets in California" that are an obvious problem for links coming in from external site. Which is accurate?
On-Page Optimization | | corlin0 -
Would Panda target this?
Hi guys, We suffered a massive rankings drop in September 2012, same date as Panda 20, so we've been trying to fix the issues since with no little to no success. I think these Q&A's work best if I ask a specific question, instead of just screaming for help, so hopefully we're looking in the right place at least. One area I've been looking into, is of course, content (being a Panda penalty). However, I'm not sure what about our content is causing a problem. We provide a phone unlocking service and have over 6000 handsets that we can unlock. We only allow search engines to index 5 of them, due to these being those with unique product descriptions (there are over 100 more but we want to start getting our rankings back a bit at a time). We also let them index our manufacturer pages, news and support pages, 160 approx in total. On our handset and manufacturer pages we have much of the same content, with a few words difference to alter the price or the name of the manufacturer/phone. We also change our delivery times for some, as it can vary and have a "Why use us" section which is the same for each handset page. In my mind there is no point changing these areas to be unique to each page as they clearly describe our service and what we offer. Changing each one for each page, especially if we wanted to start adding our other remaining 5995 handset would be ridiculously. It would also clearly be manipulative is we're just rewriting the same thing in a slightly different way to benefit a search engine and not the users. Does anyone know if this type of content would be seen as duplicate content and would result in a penalty? And is there anything we can do about it? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | purpleindigo
Darren.0 -
Does Google use 302's to pass value to the target page?
Hi, I've received the below advice, is this correct? Throughout the site, the 302 (moved temporarily) status code is used for redirects, which Google will use to pass value to the target page. Is this correct? I was under the impression a 301 was used to pass value to the target page? Could someone explain the difference between a 301 and a 302, I'm not 100% sure. Thanks, Nathan
On-Page Optimization | | Heehaw0 -
It looks like there are several title tags on my homepage. This was done presumably to embed titles for pop up windows. This is causing an error report in DMOZ. Do the engines also veiw this negatively?
My homepage has a normal title tag, but when I look in the code I find the developer also added title tags for pop ups within the homepage code. Is this causing an issue with the search engines?
On-Page Optimization | | Furious-D0 -
Duplicated Products on Homepage and category pages
I have some of my best sellers located on the homepage of my websites. These same products may also appear on the category page as well. On the home page and the category page, the product title, short description, thumbnail, etc. are exact duplicates and I am afraid this is hurting me. I would appreciate any advice you may have on how to deal with this issue. These are some of my best sellers and most often, the homepage will outrank the category page for the product. Thanks in advance, lordhenry
On-Page Optimization | | jake3720 -
How important is it to include the target keyword phrase in the page URL?
If I want to target a keyword phrase to a particular phrase, but do not want to change the URL of that page, will that negatively impact my rankings? I am also wondering if I can get around it by creating a new, short URL that 301 redirects to the original URL. Would that be as effective as including the keyword in the original URL?
On-Page Optimization | | susannajbost0 -
Problem with fresh content on homepage
On my site my homepage acts as sort of a landing page that is geared towards getting the customer sign up (almost like a PPC landing page aside from a few navigation options...about, blog, contact and the legal docs in the footer). My blog is geared towards other businesses in the industry and the like minded tech people. My problem:
On-Page Optimization | | JasonJackson
From a user perspective I don't feel that blog snippets would add anything useful to the homepage. However, I feel like I fresh content would help my SEO endeavors. Suggestions? Note:
Should be mentioned that all my social stuff is deeply integrated into my /blog so importing tweets, for example, is out of the question.0