Local SEO + Searcher Intent Targeting for Home Builder
-
Good Morning, All!
I work for a home builder - www.HibbsHomes.com. Their site has hundreds of pages and blogs and I'm looking at consolidating many of them as they're older and use an older SEO strategy.
Can you take a look at their portfolio? http://hibbshomes.com/custom-home-builders-st-louis/st-louis-custom-homes-portfolio/
I'm wondering if I should consolidate the various projects into their own pages by house type and city - rather than having all on one page? Both for SEO and for easier searchability.
How would you organize this for these?
The benefit to setting up city pages is the local SEO rank (St Louis has so many suburbs).
The benefit to setting up pages by home style or size would be for user experience. How do I improve this for both?
And... how do I optimize for conversions better?
-
Hi D E!
Thanks for the opportunity of looking at your client's site. A foundational concept to understand is that the company's local pack rankings will depend on their physical address, not on the addresses of the homes they build in various communities. So, as the home builder is in Saint Louis, their local pack rankings will be most achievable for searches containing the words 'st. louis' or stemming from Saint Louis-based devices. They are unlikely to rank in the local packs for any city other than St. Louis because of Google's documented bias towards physical locale of the business.
So, where we move beyond this kind of understanding of how local packs work is when we are going after additional organic rankings, instead of local ones. For this purpose, building out content that showcases the homebuilder's work in specific neighborhoods or in neighboring cities supports goals of ranking organically for searches that use these geographic terms. For a good example of how to build landing pages that serve users making these types of searches, please read: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
In that post, you'll see an example of how a house painter could create a landing page showcasing his projects in a specific community, so that seems quite similar to what you're hoping to do.
That being said, I can't predict whether city landing page or style-of-home landing pages will convert better for your particular client. Are you tracking how people currently interact with the website? When a potential customer contacts the business, are the asking what styles of housing are available, or are they inquiring about neighborhoods? Answering questions like these will necessitate some serious research.
Without knowing all of the details, I'd be inclined to think that you could have both a set of landing pages based on the neighborhoods of St. Louis, and then a separate gallery depicting popular home designs, regardless of what part of the city the homes are in. You'd have the best of both worlds that way, but if there's a reason why you have to choose one or the other, only real research into the preferences and needs of the client's customers can provide a data-based answer.
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
-
Title Too Long - Seo importance
Hey; What do you think Title Too Long for Seo importance my site adress almost all page Title Too Long warning is showing http://prntscr.com/ndykgw from many sites this way, how much difference does this order make?
Local Website Optimization | | mesutcandan0 -
Mixed branches / targeting countries results in the SERP
hi all, I have one hard nut to break and I would like to kindly ask you for any idea / help 🙂
Local Website Optimization | | execom99
we have web page localized to multiple languages targetting different countries.
e.g. we have: domain.com/int/ ... default in english, in search console / Internation targeting / Country with Target users in "Unlisted"
domain.com/uk/ ... english for UK, Target users in "United Kingdom"
domain.com/de/ ... german content for Germany, Target users in "Germany"
... etc. Each branch (country specific) has its own sitemap.xml covering approx 50-60% of all the pages for the specific branch and for most of these pages we have set hreflang (rel="alternate") for most important product pages. There are some issues in the sitemaps we are fixing (e.g. no returning link) so my assumption is that google may not use the sitemap, therefore, hreflang is not in use (it is part of sitemap). For example, one branch can have 150 pages submitted and 30 indexed in Sitemap detail of search console. The problem is, that when for example I search for the product name from Germany (google.de and German's IP through VPN in browser's incognito mode) I'm receiving mixed results. Our product names and technology are rather english, e.g. "cloud protection" and it is also phrase German user would search for. But in SERP he gets results from our domain.com/uk and also from our domain.com/sg which is completely wrong. Is there a way to really prevent it ?
thanks
T0 -
Creating a subdomain for IP targeting based on city
We are currently located in OKC and are opening a new location in Dallas. After much research, I found the best way to do the website is to create a subdomain a redirect people based on their IP location so our current SEO will help give substance to the new location. My question is, should I recreate the whole website under this subdomain using Dallas instead of OKC throughout or should I just recreate 1 or 2 pages? This is all very new to me and I need as much help as I can get lol.
Local Website Optimization | | KylieM0 -
How accurate are google keyword estimates for local search volume?
We've all used the Google Adwords Keywords Tool, and if you're like me you use it to analyze data for a particular region. Does anyone know how accurate this data is? For example, I'd like to know how often people in Savannah, Georgia search for the word "forklift". I figure that Google can give me two kinds of data when I ask for how many people in Savannah search for "forklift". They might actually give me rough data for how many people in the region actually searched for the term "forklift" over the last 12 months, then divide by 12 to give me a monthly average. Or they might use data on a much broader region and then adjust for Savannah's population size. In other words, they might say, in the US people searched for "forklift" and average of 1,000,000 times a month. The US has a population of 300,000,000. Savannah has a population of about 250,000. 250,000 / 300,000,000 is 0.00083. 1,000,000 times 0.00083 is 208. So, "forklift" is searched in Savannah an average of 208 times. 1. is obviously much more accurate. I suspect that 2. is the model that Google is actually using. Does anyone know with reasonable certainty which it is? Thanks,
Local Website Optimization | | aj613
Adam0 -
Ranking nationally but not locally
Hi everyone, I'm working with a client that has a strange situation. He's ranking for his target keyword on a national level but when searching locally, he's in the 100s (see attached). Any idea what could be going on here? He did have an old domain that got hacked that is redirecting to his current domain. Thanks, Tim lmSSXdT
Local Website Optimization | | TimKelsey0 -
Improving SEO with no blog
I have a client who understands the value of content for SEO - however getting them to provide some content has proven an impossible task. I've tried every way to make it easy for them. I've offered to come over to their office myself and see if I can just take 15 minutes of their time and record their answers to a few questions. The response is that's a great idea, we'll set up a time...and no time is ever good. So I've thought, what can I do without them? Unfortunately, their industry is so technical and so niche I'd need to have a law degree to even begin to understand exactly what they do, and as they are in law it's probably better to have no content than content with something even slightly incorrect in it. For now, all I can do is summarize and share news from a government website to their social media accounts. It's not highly effective. Their on-page SEO for the main site is completely optimized. I've placed them in every free listing I can possibly find - both industry and local sites. I have them update me on any local events, conferences and/or trade shows they attend for possible backlinks. What else can I do? I suppose I fear that if I can't provide them any additional results, they will stop seeing the value in SEO services, and I'd have a hard time disagreeing as I can't think of what else to do for them. Thanks for any help!
Local Website Optimization | | everestagency1 -
Subdomain for ticketing of a client website (how to solve SEO problems caused by the subdomain/domain relationship)
We have a client in need of a ticketing solution for their domain (let's call it www.domain.com) which is on Wordpress - as is our custom ticket solution. However, we want to have full control of the ticketing, since we manage it for them - so we do not want to build it inside their original Wordpress install. Our proposed solution is to build it on tickets.domain.com. This will exist only for selling and issuing the tickets. The question is, is there a way to do this without damaging their bounce rate and SEO scores?
Local Website Optimization | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing
Since customers will come to www.domain.com, then click the ticketing tab and land on tickets.domain.com, Google will see this as a bounce. In reality, customers will not notice the difference as we will clone the look and feel of domain.com Should we perhaps have the canonical URL of tickets.domain.com point to www.domain.com? And also, can we install Webmaster Tools for tickets.domain.com and set the preferred domain as www.domain.com? Are these possible solutions to the problem, or not - and if not, does anyone else have a viable solution? Thank you so much for the help.0 -
Does building multiple websites hurt you seo wise? Good or bad strategy?
HI,rategy. So I spoke to a local Colorado seo company and they suggested to find whatever keywords is the most searched under my GWT's and put .com behind it and build other sites for other keywords. I was curious about this type of strategy. Does this work? This seo guy said I could just get a DBA bank account and such for each domain name etc. I am not wanting to mislead anyone, but I am curious if for the sake of promoting other services, if creating other websites with partial and EMD's are worthwhile? Another issue I worry about is if I put my companies phone number, then next thing you know there is 3 or 4 sites that use that same phone number. To me this does not build trust with Google. But being I am learning, maybe this is a common strategy, or doomed from the start. Just curious what you think. Would you build other sites to try and rank for other services? Or keep one sites and maximize it? Thank you for your thoughts. I just do not want to pay $3000 per site if it will hurt not help.
Local Website Optimization | | Berner0