Optimizing for different locations.

[triman]

I have a client in the service industry that is based in Springfield Ma area. The website does well for his keyword search words in the Springfield and western Mass area on Google and Yahoo. Since he lives about 10 miles from the Connecticut border and 25 miles from Hartford Connecticut he would like to get indexed well for these areas also. Could I have a page optimized for that area without out hurting the good ranking for the areas he is already doing well in? Any suggestions to get his business ranked well in both areas would be much appreciated.

[MyRentals]

I believe a site can rank well for about a total of 10 keywords if the site is organized accordingly. Of course there's various permutations of how the 10 keywords can be arranged and overlap in use. So in reality, a site can have around 50 search phrases that over time, can be optimized for the public finding a site within the search engines.

By fully analyzing the current site, which pages appear in the search results and WHY those specific pages. Then you should be able to work out how to introduce the bordering areas as different pages into the site in a way which suits the overall feel of the site. Search engines are good at being able to categorize different aspects of a website, and they are also geographically aware of location keywords and their validity to neighboring areas.

Do it right, and over a few months, you can see the search engines expanding the result listings for the bordering areas as well as the core that the site is doing well on now. Identifying the right keywords which people actually search on is just as important - but that's beyond the scope of your question.

[raj kumar]

The website does well for his keyword search words in the Springfield and western Mass area on Google and Yahoo. Since he lives about 10 miles from the Connecticut border and 25 miles from Hartford Connecticut he would like to get indexed well for these areas also.

what do you mean? indexing is not area specific.

[collusion]

What you are talking about is local seo. The larger campaigns would not only have optimized pages with unique content for that regional area, but they would also register phone numbers with that area code and addresses which forward so they can get listed on Google Maps and other local listings. That adds to the credibility of the page for a local keyword/phrase. In addition to this process, they setup social profiles with that contact information included and it all works together to get local regional rankings organically. It's a very detailed process and takes a lot of work.

[shawn93676]

Your client can still keep the same address, just for those pages that he wants to target for other areas should have the city, towards the top of the header, place city in the title tags, bolded throughout the web copy, pictures with City name in the Alt-tags and a few links going out to other websites in the city for example the local city .gov pages. This is of course for on-page optimization.

Off-Page Optimization should include Anchor Text Variation for the keywords and City, come from Local Directories, other local sites with the same city name, Those pages should be listed in the business listings like Manta, Yelp, Google+ Local, Bing Local, Yahoo Local, SmartGuy, Local Social networks like FourSquare, iLocalDirect, Nextdoor and local maps like Google Maps, Tom Tom, Apple maps Etc.

I do this with my clients that live in the Tri-State are here on the Colorado river in Bullhead city, and it works time and time again without fail!

[rickanderson]

you can do well with landing pages targeting those areas but you can do better by building whole new sites targeting key words for specific geographic areas.....some might call it over kill but when your livlihood is on the line i say go large or go home. eg i have over 50 sites targeting numerous key words over 6 municipalities....an all roads leading to rome sort of thing....works wonders....

ra