Helping our retailers rank in their town

[cfinlayson]

We're a manufacturer that distributes our product to dealerships all over North America. They are independent businesses, and handle all of their own marketing, their own websites, their own advertising, etc.

Our executives would like to find out how we can rank our own site when the product term is matched with their city, for example.

hot tubs richmond

So that the term would return to our site, so that we can refer them to the store, keeping in mind that some of our dealerships don't even have websites, let alone SEO programs to go along with them.

It's very important that we are able to put relevant customers to our dealerships.

I'd like to ask the professionals on this forum how would you approach this particular problem?

In case you haven't guessed by now I'm a bit of a noob, and value your opinions, having been reading the daily email, and the forum for several months.

I appreciate your help
Chris Finlayson
Marketing Coordinator
Beachcomber Hot Tubs
Welcome to Beachcomber Hot Tubs, connecting family, friends, and loved ones in a Beachcomber Hot Tub.

[bj]

If I were to handle this type of issue on one of my own sites I'd use a directory script (sans the submission part of it, easy to leave out of the template) and populate it with all the dealers of your product categorized and subcategorized geographically. You might consider letting the dealers themselves write their own descriptions, since they'll all probably have differences in approach as well as the differences that may crop up regionally/culturally. As long as there are a variety of search terms used that people would use to find your product, then this will probably do the job quite nicely.

The one thing you can't control is whether one of your dealers (or their competitors) might beat you out in the returns. But if you follow a lot of the advice on this forum you should be able to help your own rankings as well as those of your dealers.

I've skinned the directory script from Tolranet a couple times and found it very nice to work with. Since one of the projects I did using that script was a site that included a similar mix of places with and without websites, I know that script will do what you wish. Paul is one of the members here on the forum as well.

If I'm remembering correctly, this script offers an RSS feed, which will help your site in the search engines.

[Peter (IMC)]

I would go for a dedicated page for each of the retailers. Write about each retailer, giving all the information you can + a nice description. Your marketing team could call each one and do a simple interview to get the required info to write a nice piece of copy.

If their website has product pages, create links from each product page to all your retailers. (If you have literally hundreds of them you may want to be selective and use some kind of directory structure based on states and cities.) When a retailer has his own website, link to those too from the product pages.

BJ loves to use scripts for all her sites I believe,... but I would go for hand made pages which gives you more control over the SEO of each page and you will end up with more uniqueness in the various pages, which a directory script kind of prohibits.

[cfinlayson]

Thanks very much, this is excellent feedback.

Each of our dealers has a profile attached to our postal code lookup. If you visit our website, (click the link in my signature), and click "Find a Local Store" then click on the US in the world map, enter 98274 as a zip code, you'll see a typical profile for our store in Mount Vernon, WA.

Not every dealers has added the picture, website link, Family Story, etc. but the address of every store is there, and the profile is generated on the fly from data in a SQL database that the Dealer Locator references.

I'd love to be able to use the text stored in the SQL Database, perhaps have the data access page where I update the dealer information automatically generate a html page formatted properly when an entry is opened or modified. That way when the bots come, they'll see a seperate static page for every dealer, and I wouldn't have to spend a ton of time writing and rewriting each page.

Do you think that this type of automation could be done?

Chris Finlayson
Marketing Coordinator
Welcome to Beachcomber Hot Tubs, connecting family, friends, and loved ones in a Beachcomber Hot Tub.

[bj]

There may be an issue in terms of spidering if all you have is a zip lookup. A spider can't fill out a form. So you may need to add some sort of "drill down" text based navigation that a spider can follow.

Re the database, the script I mentioned uses mysql/php to do what it does, and yes, everything is autogenerated and updated whenever you edit in admin. The particular script I mentioned does have a "details" page for each business, and can have custom fields added. Paul is also very good about adding features that folks need. I asked him recently for an ability to have visitors review businesses on the individual details page a la restaurant reviews, and the next day he had a mod for that. Poke around on the forum, you'll see what I mean. Whether it will work with sql is not a question I can answer, ask Paul. If his script doesn't do that, there may be other similar ones that do.

Peter, I do like to use scripts since they offer features that are harder to add to a static page in a timely fashion, like rss features and notification of update services when new content is added, which, using a script, is all automated. And, also for the record, Google seems to love any script that uses RSS feeds and xml-rpc functions and will rank them better and quicker, or at least that's been my experience and the experience of a lot of other webgeeks.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by bj

There may be an issue in terms of spidering if all you have is a zip lookup. A spider can't fill out a form. So you may need to add some sort of "drill down" text based navigation that a spider can follow.

bj is probably right. You probably need to set up a simple directory type page to let the spiders access all the available dealer pages. For instance we set up this simple directory page for a client in the past:

Home Theater Specialists of America Retailer Locator

Looks a little spammy, but it gets the job done. In your case you would set up a page on your website fro each dealer, instead of linking directly to the dealer like the MyHTSA website does.

[crankydave]

Actually, I rather like the idea of a combination of both bj's and Peter's ideas.

A scripted directory style look-up that arranges dealers geographically. A snippet for each and a direct link as well as a link to a dedicated page with more extensive information.

Gives visitors an opportunity to sort through dealers in their area quickly as well as find out more extensive information if they wish.

Dave

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by cfinlayson

Our executives would like to find out how we can rank our own site when the product term is matched with their city, for example.

Submit your company’s listing to some of the top, i.e:
Yelp - Restaurant Reviews, Doctors, Bars, Salons, Dentists and More
Insider Pages - Restaurant Reviews, Beauty Salons, Dentists, Preschools, Spas and more.
Citysquares.com - Buy Local
Judy's Book - What's on sale near you.
MojoPages.com

Submit to Internet Yellow Pages, i.e:
SuperPages.com: Yellow Pages & White Pages
Yellow Pages and more phone book services at Yellowbook.com
Add Your Listing - InfoSpace
Yellow Pages, White Pages, Maps, and more - Switchboard.com

Submit your site to Local Search Engines, i.e:
https://www.google.com/local/add/login
Yahoo! Local Merchant - Overview
Ask Business Search
Ask Business Search

Submit your company to Data Providers, i.e:
Acxiom Corporation
Geosign Corporation - Shaping the Online Landscape
ADD or CHANGE YOUR LISTING

Contact information on your site: Have a physical address and phone number within an <address> tag at least on your contact page and at least one other page, best option would be the homepage. If you can have it on all page, is thte ver4y best way to go. Such information builds trust rank value for your Website too.

Incorporate Microformats in to your web site.
More about: location-formats - Microformats

Use geo meta data to tell search engines your location.
More about: GeoURL (2.0)

[incrediblehelp]

More ideas here:

8 Simple Steps to Make a Page More "Local"

[Peter (IMC)]

Peter, I do like to use scripts since they offer features that are harder to add to a static page in a timely fashion, like rss features and notification of update services when new content is added, which, using a script, is all automated. And, also for the record, Google seems to love any script that uses RSS feeds and xml-rpc functions and will rank them better and quicker, or at least that's been my experience and the experience of a lot of other webgeeks.

bj, I wasn't complaining, I just remember you mentioned before you like to use blog scripts and addapt them for easy content management. At least I think it was you that mentioned that before.

I'd love to be able to use the text stored in the SQL Database, perhaps have the data access page where I update the dealer information automatically generate a html page formatted properly when an entry is opened or modified. That way when the bots come, they'll see a seperate static page for every dealer, and I wouldn't have to spend a ton of time writing and rewriting each page.

In that case you can hire a programmer, but make sure you hire one that works for an SEO company... That way you make sure the pages are nicely optimized. He should add fields for page title and meta keywords and description for each page by the way and also some other fields.

[bj]

bj, I wasn't complaining

Peter, I didn't take it as "complaining", and I'm sorry if I sounded that way. This is just another friendly discussion with differences of opinion, and maybe I didn't make myself clear.

I was just pointing out that in certain ways running scripts that have good SEO features such as all the rss and xml-rpc stuff will dynamically create pages that are even more SE friendly than hand coded pages, even if you lose just a bit of control over maybe a few of the details such as meta tags. In my experience the syndication aspects are more important features for getting a site listed well than most of the other on page SEO factors (other than the actual content) though it is true that some scripts are better than others re all this stuff, so choosing good scripts to deploy is key. One of my gripes with most shopping cart scripts is that Search Engine Friendly Urls are usually such a PITA to achieve, if they're achievable at all.

I guess this would be an interesting experiment, to start two sites side by side, one hand coded and one dynamically generated by a script that has the rss stuff, and see what the result is. I do know that everyone who uses WordPress in particular raves about how easy it is to get a site listed. I did notice that when I added a (scripted) directory with an rss feed to my site I got bumped up a bit, too.

One thing I didn't mention is the time factor. When I find something I wish to add to my WebGeek Directory, it takes me approximately a minute to add it. If I had to edit a handcoded page it would most likely take me three to five times that long. When it's quick and easy to add content then we are more likely to do it more often. That is HUGE where the SEs are concerned.

Back to the original discussion. The above is why I suggested the script I did as a way to deploy the content that will put your dealers on the map in a very literal sense. If you're on a server that won't run this script, or you already have some sort of script in place, then alternatives that will add better navigation as well as the feed stuff when you add dealer specific and keyphrase rich content will help in your efforts to achieve your goal.