Local SEO practices you should change

As an entrepreneur who takes charge of your local SEO, you sometimes fall into the trap of “easy” optimization practices that are not guaranteed to be fresh.

I see it every day…

Local research is a discipline in its own right that is constantly evolving and it is increasingly important to remember it.

What was effective some time ago is not necessarily effective today. You need to adapt your optimization efforts and adopt the latest and most effective strategies.

Here are some outdated SEO practices dedicated to “local Google” that are still too widespread. For each of them,

• I’ll turn up the strategy side,
• I will explain why it is wrong and,
• I will propose a more up-to-date approach to remedy this.

The Competitive Local Keyword NDD (EMDN) is a bad idea.

Probably the oldest technique in this post, it consists of associating a domain name and a location qualifier in order to touch an exact query (EMDN)

These are website URLs that consist of a combination of one or more keywords or services and the location of the company, instead of containing the company name or brand. (I talk about it in this article about domain names)

The typical example is www.plombier-kuujjuarapik .ca (it’s in Nunavut 🙂 )…

These types of NDD clearly have an aftertaste of search engine manipulation.

It was a very common choice in the pre-Panda, pre-EMDN (Exact Match Domain Name – Sept 2012) and pre-Pigeon years, we still come across it too often because many digital marketing “pros” recommend it, flooding Google’s index with this type of address.

Even though optimized URLs still have some impact on search results (for how long?), as a local business, your optimization efforts should focus on targeting “local keywords” in other parts of the site, specific pages, blog posts whose content and SEO signals will be written on purpose.

I would add that writers, journalists, influencers may rightly hesitate to send links to this type of exact match domain, because they feel intrinsically associated with a practice of spam on the web.

NDD branding

Domain names corresponding to a brand give themselves an easier chance of Web-geographical expansion. By choosing an NDD that is too localized, too specific to a city, you limit your activity and handicap its referencing to other locations.

You can also set up a series of sites that will target a specific location, but this is just as outdated and unsustainable. Each site has its own authority, so each site will have to be fed content and linked independently — multiplying a large amount of effort and cost.

Instead, consolidate a site’s domain authority by choosing a brand-related domain and reserve your geo-targeting for page content and page-level meta.

Don’t rely on region or city extensions

The “new” top-level extensions (TLDs) allow their owner to customize their website through their physical location, such as brandname.paris. While this is an aesthetically pleasing solution and a creative form of branding, it doesn’t bring any benefits in terms of local SEO.

Jon Mueller talks about it in this post “Google’s handling of new top level domains” last year.

Even though DPNs appear to be region-specific, Google will continue to manage them as generic top-level domains (gDPNs), with no preference over the “.com” or any other typical DPNg.

Mueller indicated that “there may be exceptions in some isolated cases, as we see how they are used in practice” — however, right now (May 2016), this is Google’s official view.

Localized top-level domains (www.par-example.nyc) have no advantage in terms of local SEO.

Just like with exact match root domains, your website’s ranking efforts are better directed elsewhere as part of local SEO.

Stop localized orphan pages

Satellite/orphan pages were for a long time a common tactic for SEOs.

Orphan pages are defined as pages created to expand a site’s “search footprint” and typically have the following characteristics:

• they are not part of the user’s journey, but rather are hidden (orphaned), at the bottom of the site map;
• They are only used to capture a specific search query, usually long-tail and with a specific qualifier (e.g., a place name).
• They do not offer any unique information about existing pages that are already available in the main navigation path of the sites.
• In local search, doorway pages typically target a keyword related to a specific service or product, followed by a location variable.

Many sites still use this practice, although Google updated its consideration on it last year – in short, Google penalizes sites or removes these search engine results pages (the “S.E.R.P”).

I know this point of view is debatable…

Don’t just focus linking on areas of high authority.

This point should not be misinterpreted; Links to high-authority sites are invaluable to your ranking potential.

Any site, local or otherwise, should constantly aspire to be linked by sites with a high DA (domain authority) or TR (trust rank).

However, you should not lose interest in links to domains of lower authority, including nofollow links.

From a local linkage perspective, these are sites that are important to your community, such as hotels, B&Bs, municipal sites, libraries, associations, etc.

As a local business owner, you should not ignore these portals on the pretext that they have low domain authority.

As long as they are led by a real team of people and provide real value to your local community, they will also bring inherent SEO value to your local business.

Once indexed, these links will show Google that your business is actively engaged in the life of the surrounding community.

Link building to low-authority domains is a topic that Greg Gifford (he’s excellent) addressed during his local marketing talk at BrightonSEO in April 2016:

The advantage of this practice lies in its ability to go unnoticed; A competitor who analyzes the good performance of your site is likely to scratch their head because they won’t be able to determine the activity that is driving your online success.

Not setting a very large area on MyBuisness

Google MyBusiness gives its users the option to set a service radius around their physical address. This allows customers to see how far a company is willing to travel to visit a customer.

However, some business owners set the largest radius possible in the hopes of being ranked across multiple locations. Unfortunately, in practice, this doesn’t work because in reality you’re only likely to be referenced around the actual physical location of your business.

The radius configuration should be used realistically and accurately show what your company’s catchment area is.

If your service area is really large, you should not change this parameter, but do not expect to move up in the ranking on the results of multiple locations.

The reality is that if you want to be listed on multiple sites, you’ll need a physical address in every major city. And in that case, you should consider buying a virtual or satellite business address… and make as many google business pages as needed.

Choose the most targeted Mybuisness category possible.

To choose the category(ies) of your business in Google MyBusiness, take the time to:

• Look carefully inthe list given here
• Go ahead of your competitors’ category

Don’t try to invent them, it’s no longer possible, nor do you try to assign yourself categories that are not yours.

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The local search engine is independent

Like other aspects of SEO, local search represents a sector that is gaining a little more “intelligence” every day.

You have to remember that at the heart of Google a sophisticated machine learning algorithm does a colossal job and that trying to deceive it, cheat, abuse it is not only risky but is increasingly useless.

Forget spam, and weave your local web

These five examples of useless local SEO tactics are still common today when local SEO work should be free of any attempts at manipulation by Google and focus on the quality of the content and the reputation of the company on the web.

What useless tactics do you still see? Feel free to express yourself in the comments below.

Article freely translated by Petar Jovetic, read also the local SEO articles of Moz.