How Do We Satisfy Similar Content Needs For 3 States Without Sounding... Umm... Silly.
-
Hi Gang,
Background: We're a multi-state personal injury law firm with offices in IN, MI, and NM. Michigan and New Mexico used to have their own individual subdomain under 2keller.com, but we recently combined them so that all of our locations were represented in one mega-site.
Problem: Our practice areas include the usual array of plaintiff's law categories, e.g., Car Accidents, Defective Drugs, Motorcycle Accidents, etc. We want to write honest, useful content for each practice area in each state, but it becomes a bit challenging not to duplicate some of these pages. In many instances there are minor differences between the states with regard to things like what we can offer clients, what a client's rights are, how a client is compensated, etc. Even individual state laws are also very similar in most cases.
Question: Any ideas how we can avoid sounding duplicitous? Or does anyone have a suggestion about an effective way we might go about tackling the three states in a manner different from the one we have chosen? Or does it matter?
Any input would be appreciated!
Wayne
-
Cool, Wayne. I hope it does help!
-
(Wow... thanks, Miriam. I'm on my way out the door and scanned what appears to be an incredibly thoughtful answer. Look forward to digging into it when I get home! Thank you very much!)
-
Hi Wayne,
Great question and appreciate your stated intent to make the website as useful as possible for clients. I recommend you start by reading this post (you are business model III): http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
Basically, one approach I am recommending in that post is to optimize your core pages for your brand and service keywords and optimize your office landing pages for your geo keywords. Think about a massive brand like McDonald's. Apparently, you can order a big mac at any of their 30,000 restaurants. Their brand is so strong, they don't have to say, 'We offer a big mac in Boise, a big mac in Boston, a big mac in Detroit." They've got this : http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/full_menu_explorer.html for everybody, right? It wouldn't really be useful for customers if McDonald's had a separate menu page for every fast food joint in every city around the world.
Now, of course, you are not McDonald's and your brand doesn't have quite this authority, I'm assuming. Take a look at REI.com. Look at the way they've got all of their products and then, separately, they've got great landing pages for the cities in which they are physically located, with good, unique content on them. Here's a somewhat smaller brand you can take inspiration from.
Additionally, to continue on with your work of providing useful content to the different communities in which you serve, you might consider having a blog that does speak to the differences of laws, even if they are minor, in the various cities/states. But your overall website structure could look like:
-
Core pages, optimized for the brand and service keywords
-
Landing pages, optimized for the brand and geography
I'm not saying this is the only approach to take, but it strikes me as a simple and sensible one.
-
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
-
New business / content marketing
Hi all SEO experts, if a website is brand new, so published in the last 3 months- new domain name and website design. We have rebranded recently, using a new domain as entered new business partnership, there doesn’t seem to be much guidance on this at all, from various SEO websites, so our question is would you delay publishing new blog posts / content marketing as frequently because the company website is brand new? So would SEO’s decrease the frequency of publication of blog posts, because the website is new? Or perhaps it does not matter, and would still post every week as you would if the website has been live for a long time? So, in nutshell, what we are wondering is, is the “Google Sandbox” still in use?
Local SEO | | Ryan070 -
Advice needed; Scrap mature .co.uk and move to .com, or run two separate domains?
Asked before, we have a .co.uk domain name and it has grown with rankings over many years with many quality links made to it. Since, we also have acquired the .com of our agency brand, and want to also focus on US market - something hard to do with a UK domain. However, we aren't sure which route to go from here... Should we keep the .co.uk active and allow that to focus on the UK market, and grow the .com from scratch with a site that looks the same with slightly different content and interlink the two with regional flags. Or move across to the .com totally and scrap the .co.uk. I know we could do a redirect and save a good number of the links made on the .co.uk, but is that worth even doing? And what would the risk be of having two sites the same with similar content? Since this isn't an area I've dealt with before, we are interested to get some real advice to understand which decision is right given the scenario.
Local SEO | | thewebpreneur0 -
Searchmetrics Google ranking factors study says content gaining while links losing in importance ? Any View About this Post.
I am very Curious about it anyone please update about this http://searchengineland.com/searchmetrics-google-ranking-factors-study-says-content-gaining-links-losing-importance-265431
Local SEO | | MTPixels0 -
Why does Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) gives different results than a Google search for a very similar or identical query?
My client Dr. Harris ranks #1 in SERPs and Local results for many terms, including "hair transplant surgeon Denver" However, when I did a voice search w Siri ""find me a hair transplant surgeon in Denver" Siri said she could find no results. A similar search for a clinic returned 2 competitors, but not my client. How do I ensure we are served up in voice queries? This surgeon deserves it, he invented most of the technology in use in the world today.
Local SEO | | CalamityJane770 -
How can I personalize content based on a state/region? Is it possible?
I'm getting a lot of traffic from different regions throughout the US. I need to personalize the content in my website or on a certain landing page based on the users state/region. Is it possible? For example, forwarding a user that lands on page "x" to page "y" if he's from California and to page "z" if he's from South Carolina. And of course, can this somehow affect my rankings in Google? Thanks!!
Local SEO | | OrendaLtd0 -
SOS: NEED 70 Initial Users in 7 Days
Hi guys, I'm co-founding a company called Comp'd and we're currently in the final leg of an accelerator program right now. Our demo day is one week from today and we got our product out later than we would have liked. Long story short we need to get 70 new/initial users within the next 7 days or we're screwed. I'm asking anyone and everyone I possibly can for help. If you have any advice on specific things that I can be doing to make this goal happen, please share, I'll take any and every idea I can get. Some background on the product: -The product is a $25/mo subscription for unlimited concert tickets. We're also offering users their first month for $10 for easier onboarding. Also, we have the economics of this worked out, so those aren't a concern from a business perspective. -website at compdapp.com if you want to take a look. -Currently only available in Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska (though neither is a traditional "big" city like New York or Chicago, they're still cities with populations of 250,000-450,000 with thriving/busy downtown districts). -We've got about $7,000 in capital right now and are willing to spend what we need to. If you have any other questions just let me know, otherwise I'd really appreciate your ideas on how I should be spending my time to get users. This is an emergency situation and I'm willing to do whatever I have to to make this happen. Thanks guys! P.S. I know everyone's primary focus here is obviously online marketing, but we're all still marketers here, and if you have offline marketing ideas I'm more than open to hearing those as well, particularly if they can offer a quick or instant turnaround.
Local SEO | | Dillon_Whittier0 -
Geo content and where Googlebot crawls from.
Does anyone have experience with geo-specific content on their homepage and how the location of the Googlebot impacts rank and/or traffic? I ask because looking in Search Console today, I noticed the thumbnail image of our site is different than usual and it was pulling in a specific geo-location and wondered if there is any value/concern on how Google sees our site from different locations and if it could impact SERP's.
Local SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Is it necessary to implement hreflang for translated content on different ccTLDs?
Hello there, new MOZ here. I hope someone of the international SEO MOZs can share their opinion on a doubt I have. I've been reading a lot about hreflang and I understand the importance for subdomains and subfolders not only for targeting the same language in different countries (.com, .co.uk, .ca, etc) but also for websites partially or fully translated in other languages. However for these I've always seen examples where you want to have hreflang with subdomains or folders e.g. ru.example.com ; example.com/ru What if I have my translated websites on different ccTLDs - i.e. example.com example.ru. example.br example .fr Do I still need to implement hreflang or in this case is not necessary?
Local SEO | | selectitaly0