How Many Cities
OK so you are a Honda dealer outside of Atlanta Georgia. There are dozens of little cities around you. The big question is, which ones would you want to target for search optimization? That answer in just a minute. First here’s just a little bit about how search engines think when trying to deliver the best on most relevant search results.
Though Search Engines look at look at many factors such as back-linking, and the text in those links, they also still look at the text and the content on a page. (Note: there is a huge difference between text on a page and content.)
It’s common for a car dealer to want to be found in every city around them for 100 or more miles, but that’s in part, “The Kiss of Death”. First of all, through Get Local technology search engines know where you are, what you are selling, and a whole lot more. If you add two cities, such as Roswell and Atlanta to a page, at that point you have two words, each with a weight of 50 percent. Now let’s say you have 10 models so there are 12 words on the page.
Now each word has a value of 8.3 percent. Now add an additional 10 cities and each word has a value of 4.5 percent. Now take the very common practice (with some SEO companies) of adding a bunch of FLUFF on the page and you have a word density that’s almost non-existent.
If those cities are non-competitive, meaning they don’t have a dealership with your brand in them, you may do very well in them. That and 3 dollars will get you a good cup of coffee - but it won’t sell cars! All it does is muddy the water for cities that are valuable to you, making them less successful.
The simple answer is to target your city and if you are outside of a major market, target it as well. To try to capture the whole world is a big mistake. Car buyers who are ready to buy have a very specific way of searching for their next vehicle. We call it searching for buyer terms. (That’s a topic for a later post) Those terms never involve cities that don’t have car dealers in them. They rarely involve the smaller cities just outside of a major market like Atlanta.
When you or your SEO company adds a bunch of words to one or all of your pages have they done you any good? No!!! FLUFF does not equal content. Content can actually be as little as one word - if that word is relevant to the site theme, back-linking and a few other factors.
Shoot for the right target, don’t get greedy and you could be well on your way to generating more traffic.
Steve
ScreenCrafters - No Contact, No Commitment, just results.
If someone asks you to sign a contact for SEO, don’t walk, run in the other direction. Requesting a contract is a strong indication they are not confident they can keep you based on their results.