Local Results For Additional Service Categories
-
Hi Mozzers,
My client is prominent in local search for their primary activity, but I would also like them to appear for other service categories they offer. Assuming I add these other service categories in +Local and build corresponding service pages on the site, will this be enough to cause them to appear for these other services?
The additional pre set service categories offered in +Local don't match those offered in local citations, so I can't really support these that way.
-
Thanks Miriam. I understand that all of this is dependant on the amount of competition, domain authority, and links to specific pages, as it is with any page. The is and does stuff I think falls under the category of including as many variations of the related phrase as possible, which I also try to do with any page.
-
Hi Wayne,
Thanks so much for the clarification! I would put it this way - the primary category chosen will be the one your client has the best chances of ranking for, and this will typically also be the main, or one of the main, terms the website is optimized for. Carefully choosing your secondary categories is also very important, and building out content on the website that matches these terms is a very good, strong step. However, whether this alone will enable the client to rank will be completely dependent on how competitive the client's unique market is. If he has few competitors for these other terms, this could be enough, but if the competition is tougher, you may have to go the extra mile to start seeing results. The extra mile might include earning links to these pages, social efforts, video marketing, etc.
I do want to clarify that none of Google's pre-set categories reflect services, however. All of them reflect what a business is (dentist), not what it does (root canals), so it's important to keep that in mind.
So, I think you have a very good initial plan: carefully choose the 9 other, non-primary categories and build out content for them. See where this gets the client. You might find he's now ranking for a few of the categories, but that for others, additional efforts will need to be made. Hope this helps!
-
Since the service categories I'm using are chosen from pre-sets in the new dashboard, these are what Google thinks my client is.
If the other categories are closely linked and are also services they offer and are highly relevant, what would I risk in adding them? We're only taking about 5 additional categories and pages. Isn't this simply a common sense way to inform Google about the complete range of services the customer offers?
-
Hi Miriam,
All my questions are about local pack results. I'm quite familiar with organic.
1. Yes, local pack, not organic. Ranking well for primary keyword, which is also a Google pre-set category in new dashboard.
2. Yes, they want local pack results for other keywords.
3. Exist in pre-set categories in the new dashboard
4. Yes, they exist for Google's pre-set categories, but don't have really equivalents from places where I can build citations.
If I build out the services category pages on site to match Google pre-set categories, will this be enough to cause them to appear in local pack results?
-
Hi Wayne,
I want to be sure I'm fully understanding your question. Are you saying that:
-
Your client is ranking well in the Local pack of results for their primary keyword (i.e. landscaper san francisco) or are you talking about the organic results?
-
The client wants to get Local pack results for other keywords (i.e. fence builder san francisco) or are you talking about organic results?
-
These other keywords exist in Google's pre-set categories in the new dashboard or are you talking about the old Places dashboard custom categories?
-
These keywords exist in Google's pre-set categories but you're finding that they don't exist on other sites like YP.com, Best of the Web, HotFrog, etc., where you are building citations?
Please offer as much detail as you can so that the community can provide the best possible answer. Thanks!
-
-
Short answer: Probably not.
Long Answer: Google wants you to use to use your service categories to describe what you ARE rather than what you DO. In other words, you ARE a Bakery. Customized birthday cakes is something you DO.
So if you want to go down this path of creating custom categories and corresponding landing pages, you can and you may even achieve short term results, but I would not recommend. That's just too much work and risk in my opinion.I would stick with trying to achieve local results for the opportunities that exist in your 'core' category and try to obtain organic serps in the service categories.
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
-
Keyword Cannibalization on Professional Service Firm
Hi all: We do ongoing SEO for a tax law firm. Their home page, which contains very little text is marked up in the title tag with the phrase 'tax attorneys and preparers.' We are getting warnings from our SEO software that individual bio pages for practitioners are cannibalizing the homepage for the keyword 'tax attorney.' Should I be concerned? The head of this firm is a very well known 'tax attorney.' Its kind of hard to describe him differently but we keep getting told his page competes with the firm's homepage for this search string. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey1 -
Seo consulting service for just one site ?
I make a living off my site, so everytime I have to make a critical decision on SEO, I have a lot of fear that I could make things worse and lose everything. I can find solutions here and google, but there always a lot of different opinions, so I was thinking in hiring someone to pick his brain and do what he/she thinks its best in my case. What do you guys think about this ? Do you have someone to recommend ? That you see his work with good results ? I have a wordpress blog (micro businnes), so my budget is not big.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Glinski1 -
Too many Tags and Categories what should I do to clean this up?
Hello, Everyone! I am trying to do a clean up for one of my client sites. I'm noticing that the Categories and tags are way out of hand. It looks like random tags and categories were just added because they could be added. Are all of these tags and categories contributing to duplicate content? And if so What method should I go about to cleaning this up? The only thing that seems logical to me is rel=canonical. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Striventa1 -
Not showing up in search results for non-branded terms
Hello! Can anyone see any glaring reasons why this post: "98 Book Marketing Ideas That Can Help Authors Increase Sales" isn't on page one of Google — or even page 10! — for the term "book marketing ideas"? Many other sites with lower domain and page authority — even ones linking to this article — are ranking on the first ten pages for this term, and I can't figure out why we're not appearing anywhere. The same thing is happening for ALL of our other blog posts, and the keywords they're optimized for. According to GA, the only terms we're getting clicks from are branded keywords. This subdomain is now 2 years old, and the domain bookbub.com has been around for 5 years. Our domain authority is 61. We have the Yoast SEO plugin installed and are following all the standard SEO best practices. We have enough external links to at least be ranking within the first 10 pages of this Google search. I feel like there's something technically wrong, maybe in the code or backend, but nobody here can figure it out, and our hosting provider WP Engine has no ideas. Moz is returning crawl errors on our site, mainly "Error Code 804: HTTPS (SSL) Error Encountered" and "Error Code 803: Incomplete HTTP Response Received." I have confirmed with WP Engine that everything is set up correctly on our end, and that this is a known Moz issue. I've reached out to Moz's support team about this, and am awaiting a response. But what else am I missing? There's got to be something — I've been blogging for 10 years for different companies and my own personal websites, and I've never come across anything like this before. I'm completely stuck! I'd appreciate any insights you can offer. Thanks in advance! 🙂 EDIT: I heard back from Moz on those errors. The 804 errors are a Moz-side issue — their crawler isn't equipped to be able to handle SNI. They're looking into a resolution, and this wouldn't affect search engine crawlers. Regarding the 803 error: "When you see an 803 error, that means your site closed its TCP connection to our crawler before our crawler could read a complete HTTP response. You don't see this error when you go to the page in your browser because content-length is an outdated component for modern browsers and they will disregard this error, but the intention of our crawler is to report any errors that might be occurring. So the crawler is configured to detect and report such errors." The only thing I can think to do here is go back to WP Engine with this information, but other than that, I'm not sure what this could mean or how to fix it, or if this might be the underlying technical issue keeping us from ranking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bookbubpartners1 -
Does having a video rich snippet keep your result from being top 5 in Google?
It makes sense to me that Google wouldn't want a rich result above the fold in a SERP that would compete with their PLA's. All my videos are on my product pages, so the queries that produce them always have PLAs in the SERPs. I've been run a few tests on this and it seems as though these snippets keep my result below the fold on the SERP (position 5-10). Thoughts on this? Experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobbieWilliams0 -
To index search results or to not index search results?
What are your feelings about indexing search results? I know big brands can get away with it (yelp, ebay, etc). Apart from UGC, it seems like one of the best ways to capture long tail traffic at scale. If the search results offer valuable / engaging content, would you give it a go?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Alternative links in the search results.
Hello, This is a short question Please look at this SERP screenshot: http://imgur.com/1EMen Who do they get the other links under their results. Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
What Backlink Services Do You Use or Recommend?
Hi, I need some help w/ link blding and would like to outsource some of it. Can you recommend any reputable company thats affordable? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0