Does having the local area name in a domain effect your results when branching out?
-
We have a domain which performs well within the local search and has got good authority and trust but we are now moving further afield to rank for keywords country wide. Our current domain contains our local area, does this effect your chances of ranking for broader searches? You don't seem to see many general searches bring domains up with the location keywords within their domain.
-
Ryan's point about localized search being drastically different. So the real question is whether you offer products or services that require localized identification. If so, having your initial local area in the domain will definitely not help your effort.
As for the example of the New York times, they can get away with showing up when not searching for local specifics because they're one of the biggest sites with some of the highest SEO authority from 3rd party sites on earth. So of course they can get away with it. If you want to achieve the same (for non-local search phrases), you'll need to go to extreme lengths to build your site's SEO authority as well.
Personally I'd say that if your site depends on local related search, you'd be better off with a domain that doesn't have the local aspect in the name. Build out content in a locations funnel - starting with the geographic areas you determine to be a mix of the most important and some that are semi-important (and thus easier to rank for over time).
That way, you can create individual pages (or ideally sections) that have each geographic location in the URLs. This is much less challenging to get ranking for over time than the root domain being about just one location, because the root domain placement of a keyword is much stronger than a sub-folder.
High quality SEO will be key in the geographic funnel. Citations from other sites in each of those locations will be really helpful as well.
-
Our current domain contains our local area, does this effect your chances of ranking for broader searches?
No.
If I type "newspaper" in to Google, the first result is New York Times. Since I live in California that is definitely not a local result. You can definitely rank well for broad searches with a localized name.
The moment a user adds a local name to their search, the results will drastically change. If I add the term "California" to the newspaper search, the New York Times is no longer even on the first page. I probably would have to go quite deep to find them.
How you expand depends on the nature of your business. I would recommend a press release or other announcement which generates publicity around your recent expansion. "London Cable Installation now offers service in the Liverpool and Manchester areas". This will help you rank better for localized searches in those areas.
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
-
Is there a tool out there to check any domain that might be pointing to my existing domain?
Is there a tool out there to check any domain that might be pointing to my existing domain?
Technical SEO | | adlev0 -
Redirect Chain Domain
MozPro is highlighting some redirect chain issues with our domain that I do not recall ever setting up in our redirect list. In our Moz Pro Campaign I see the Site Crawl has flagged 36 Redirect Chain Issues. I understand how the redirect chain errors can happen but I do not recall ever manually redirecting our domain, yet I have http://stickylife.com, https://stickylife.com & https://www.stickylife.com all associated in one of our redirect chain errors. When looking at our redirect files I do not see any of these domain redirects and wonder how this has happened and how to fix it. It appears as though our HTTP and HTTPS is causing some redirection. I wonder if this is coming from our DNS settings?
Technical SEO | | StickyLife0 -
Redirect typo domains
Hi, What's the "correct" way of redirecting typo domains? DNS A record goes to the same ip address as the correct domain name Then 301 redirects for each typo domain in the .htaccess Subdomains on typo urls still redirect to www or should they redirect to the subdomain on the correct url in case the subdomain exists?
Technical SEO | | kuchenchef0 -
Changing a domain name, pages redirection
when changing a domain name, should we redirect all the pages to their new pages or only the indexed pages? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Blog.domain or domain.com/blog
My client can't do domain.com/blog because he's on wix. I'm thinking blog.domain.com. Do you have any resources for the pros and cons of this? I understand that google looks at them very similarly now, is that true for google +?
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Cache pages in search results
My URL is: pure mobile . ca when searching on google for "puremobile note 2 defender" the search results are coming up with the incorrect title pages of my search results - for some reason all the search results are coming up with "unlocked cell phone" at the end of the title. but on the android and on my desktop - they show the correct title of my pages. we used to deal with unlocked cell phone ( over a year ago) - and all meta tags and title tags have been fully updated. how can i let google know to update these results.
Technical SEO | | puremobile0 -
How to alter the search result to this?
When searching for "kredittkort" on Norwegian Google I get a search results that looks like this. I want to replicate this, but I'm not sure what information they've provided and how they've done it. It's seems like their both listing products AND have sitelinks connected to a subsite. How is this possible? The sitelinks aren't even subpages of the ranked site. How have they managed this? Also, is the product previews they have?
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Why Google did not index our domain?
Hi, We launched tmart 60 days ago and submitted to google, bing, yahoo 20 days later. But google had never indexed our website still when yahoo indexed it in one week. What we have checked or tried: 1. We got 20~50 inlinks in one month and now 81 inlinks via yahoo site explorer. 2. This domain has registered for 13 years and we purchased it from sedo last year. We
Technical SEO | | zt673
did not find any problems from domain archive pages. 3. Page similar: the homepage is 50% similar to one of our competitors when we just launched.
So we adjusted the page structure and modified the content one month later and decreased the similarity to 30% (by tools from webconfs.com) 4. Google Robots: googlebot crawled our website every day after we submitted for indexing.
We opened GWT account for it and added the xml sitemap last week. GWT said nothing
was wrong except the time of page loading. Our questions: Why google did not indexed our website? What should we do? Thanks, wu0