Calling SEO experts

Can someone help with an SEO query.

If your service is locally based it is easy to optimise your site around your local town and area; however, if you are providing a nationwide service how is it best to optimise your site.

We provide computer support (remotely) but if someone is searching for "computer support in xyz town" we would not come up.

Should we create a different page for each major town in the UK? I also understand that duplicating content is a real negative for SEO...so would we need to create very different content for each page  - which would be a lot of work or is there a better way of achiveing this?

Many thanks in advance.
 

Hi Phillip, 

Afraid there isn't really a better way of achieving this - a unique page of content for every region you want to target (only go for major cities etc. that's where the search volume is), and back it up with link building (very important).

The extent of resources (link building) you will need to apply to a particular region wil depend greatly on the relative level of competition around each query - typically, the bigger the city the harder it will be to rank for. 

Each page of content should ideally be sufficiently unique - you would also be better advised to optimise for the user, rather than the search engine, so make sure the content is engaging, too. 

It all comes down to keyword research - how many people search for "remote computer support" for example.

Many thanks Gareth and Sarah some very useful thoughts.

Following on from the very good advice on keyword research from Sarah... It's good to sprinkle those keywords in the main copy of your website pages as well as in places such as page headers and alt tags etc... the meta data. It all helps with SEO. A good copywriter should be able to write you some website copy that is optimised for those researched and carefully chosen keywords without it being obvious - ie, without it affecting how well the page reads or the flow of the wording.

It's a slightly knotty one, and with things changing a bit in SEO at the moment its hard to be too definitive.

You can potentially rank for anything you want without building heaps of content, but there are other factors.

If Google is giving me localized results for computer support, those localized results will be from businesses with a Google Places listing for my area.

From your end you can drive people to your site without a "Cardiff/Whatever Computer Support" page, but you obviously want some kind of landing page that converts....

Regarding duplicate content, Google have a convention called rel=canonical to indicate duplicate content, (and avoid penalization),

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

but I am not sure it is relevant to you, because you would be creating slightly different pages for every city, (even if the difference was simply the name of the city).

Run the home page through a test to see what score from A+ (being the highest) downwards, it will highlight in red the recommendations to improve the score of the content from an SEO perspective - SEO keyword should appear in etc etc, number of words of copy etc...

Website content must be different from the SEO articles pushed out 'off-site' and those articles if attempted to be re-used, must be at least 30% different to get through the duplicate content ban. We do lots of this.

Hi Phillip

You raise an interesting question.

When considering optimising webpages for keywords, you need to consider

1. The number of searches per month for those keywords
2. Their keyword difficulties.

Both elements are required for useful keyword research.

I have provided a brief analysis with explanation of some keywords that you may find of interest on:-

http://www.keywordseopro.com/case-study-4N-Philip-Waite-zuumedia.html

I hope you find this of interest.

Kind regards

David

Its a question of mathematics!  The resource you can throw at this.

You have to build more authority than the competition, but effectively you will be competing with local companies supplying the same services as you - and if they have a proper SEO strategy, then it will be tough to better them for a local search.  My approach would be to build a matrix of the most searched geo-location keyphrases that reflect your service offering.  I would then pick your own local area first and then build a competitor profile for that and work out the best position you can achieve based on their PR.  Then build out from there.

Here are some blog posts that might be useful on the importance of SEO in website design.

Good luck

Matthew

That's the money shot right there.  And here's what I found out and why you should do keyword research being doing anything else, be it stuffing your headers and metas or pages or footers with anything... (don't do that, unless you want to rank well in altavista)

I jumped in and did this the wrong way..  I optimised by building back links and shoving words in all sorts of places for the sales training business I'm involved in, and a town.

So, if you tap in "sales training southampton" or portsmouth.. or hampshire - I tend to appear page 1, number 1.

Which is great!  But here's the real kicker,

Real people don't search for sales training + town, There's sod all search volume.  I could have found that out from keyword research, instead I found it out the longer, more time intensive way. (The phone didn't ring.)

People in my industry search for something more vertical like "telephone sales training" or "IT sales training" - which I didn't optimise for, so I have been losing all those searches...and the money that goes with it!!  Do extensive research first, and do it several times if necessary.  There's plenty of sharp bods on here who can help you with that.

AGAIN:

Quote:

"It all comes down to keyword research - how many people search for "remote computer support" for example."

Many thanks for everyone's very valuable input.

Phil

lots of good advice up there for you to follow.

My own advice that I dont see above is the very first thing you should do is run an adwords campaign and very carefully track the actual leads you get from them - phone calls and web enquiries - down to the keyword level.

Then you know exactly what keywords to go after with your organic SEO.

Otherwise you could spend a lot of time and money going after words that never generate any leads or sales.

Hope this is helpful.

Alan

I would always start the other way round. I always advocate organic SEO rather than PPC. The keywords report for exact phrase match and volume of enquiries for local (UK) searches will give you all the evidence you need. It will show you as well the cost of the phrase for CPC pay per click and the value placed on it - popularity. So you avoid spending on PPC. Once you've got your organic SEO working, then may be consider adding in PPC so you get 'double bubble' ie appear twice on page one, together, - very powerful. This is a very good report which shows that SEO beats PPC every time. Or PM me and I'll send you a PDF of the report if it's easier.

Ok, but what page would you actually point it to? 

The canonical tag is to be used to signify that, essentially, you know duplicate content exists (for the purposes of usability), but you want the search engine to favour one version of the page over the other, so you are essentially saying: 

• PAGE A: This is the authoritative source (use this).
• PAGE B (duplicate): This is a duplicate. 
• PAGE C (duplicate): This is a duplicate. 
• And so on. 

For example, you place a canonical tag on a local "Birmingham" page, what are you going to point it to? You still need unique content in some shape or form (and switching keywords here or there isn't really ideal). 

On top of that, it's just a suggestion, it doesn't have to be honoured (even though, granted, on the whole it is). Ergo, it's irrelevant. 

*The only possible option would be cross-domain, but I very much doubt that woud be an option. 

I'm still seing some businesses who seem to do well with large numbers of duplicate content pages with only the place name changed.  I have had clients ask about doing this and advised against it as I am sure this will eventually be penalised by Google.

I'm afraid there is no easy answer but a lot of effort on developing a lot of different location based content.

Regards,

Mark

PS Phil - Come and see us at Kingston soon - It has been too long.