Generic Keywords And Locations

Following on from our posts about geo-targeting for SEO and keyword length I was doing a little more research into our keywords. I noticed for the first time that some of our top 50 keywords were single words like “dentist” or “braces”, so I took a look at where the users were who did these searches and where they landed on the site.

Searches for "Dentist" landing on RevaHealth.com

Searches for "Dentist" landing on RevaHealth.com

Looking at the numbers the traffic really isn’t that significant by itself. What is interesting though is what Google is doing. When a user searches for a generic keyword, i.e. one that doesn’t include any qualifier – location in our case, Google is determining where the user is and trying to serve relevant results based on this. Best of all for us, they seem to be doing quite a good job of it too!

We have spent a lot of time over the years making sure all our SEO elements (URL, page title, etc) include location information on the basis that it reflects the content of the page and that users include it in their searches. Now it seems that Google are using this information to determine the location relevancy of the content of our pages.

While the location specificity is quite coarse in the example above, only going down to a country level, it will be interesting to see if over the coming months the landing URLs change to counties or cities, i.e. a user in Dublin lands on our page about dentists in Dublin rather than dentists in Ireland.

Keyword Analysis Tools?

During the last month 87% the quarter of a million keywords used to find RevaHealth.com were unique. The good thing about this is that it means our long tail SEO is working well. The bad news is that it makes it harder to get an overall picture of which keyword phrases or broad match pairs and triplets are doing particularly well.

If you have any recommendations for good tools to analyse the keyword data we have I’d love to hear about them. Just leave a comment below.

Geo-Targeted Sitemaps – Update

Do you remember our experiment to split our sitemaps for geo-targeted SEO? Ten weeks ago we implemented multiple sitemaps to geo-target the UK and Ireland sections of our website to their intended audiences. The initial part was easy – it took a few minutes to create separate subfolders and set a target country in the Google’s Webmaster Tools. The harder part was to monitor its influence and measure the results.

We chose a control group of 200 pages and monitored their rankings on Google.com, Google.ie and Google.co.uk. Many competing factors can affect the position of a page in the search results but we were hoping that as a result of geo-targeting the British and Irish pages that they would improve their rankings on Google.co.uk and Google.ie respectively.

Unfortunately that’s not what happened. Our Irish pages dropped in the search results by 1-2 positions on average, both on Google.ie and Google.com. On the other hand, the UK pages improved their rankings by 2-3 positions both on Google.co.uk and Google.com. It’s impossible to draw a valid positive or negative conclusion based on these results. However, we can say it hasn’t been a success and that’s why we’ve stopped the experiment and gone back to the old way.

We’re not very disappointed by these results as everybody knows that SEO-ing a website on a .com domain, all in English, but targeted to audiences in many countries all around the world is not that easy. We keep trying though, testing, experimenting and sharing what we’ve learned with you. Do you have any other ideas we could try out?

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Splitting Your Sitemap For Geo-Targeted SEO

One of the real challenges facing us at RevaHealth.com is how best to SEO the different sections of our website that should be targeted at specific countries, but don’t exist neatly in one subdirectory or sub-domain, or have localised (i.e. translated) content.

Two weeks ago we posted the results of our ccTLD SEO experiment, where we described our attempts to improve the rankings of some of our UK and Ireland targeted pages by redirecting them from our .com site to our .co.uk and .ie sites respectively.

Following on from a suggestion by Leo Fogarty and an article by Lisa Myers we have now implemented multiple sitemaps to geo-target sections of our website to their intended audiences.

First we created /IE and /UK subfolders on the .com site. Then we made sitemaps of the sections of the site to be geo-targeted to Irish and British audiences respectively and put these into these folders. Finally we submitted these sitemaps to Google’s Webmaster Tools, making sure to geo-target each of the subfolders containing the sitemaps to their intended target countries.

Specifically, we geo-targeted the folder www.revahealth.com/IE/ to Ireland, and put the sitemap with pages we want to target to an Irish audience into that folder. We did the same for the /UK/ subfolder.

By doing this we hope to improve our rankings on Google.ie and Google.co.uk, and to increase traffic to our UK and Irish pages. Setting a geographic target in Google Webmaster Tools shouldn’t impact our pages’ positions in the search results unless the user chooses the “pages from Ireland” or “pages from the UK” option. That’s why this experiment seems less risky and shouldn’t jeopardise our positions on Google.com.

We will keep you informed if we see any positive or negative effects. Have any of you tried this or something similar in the past? Leave us a comment and let us know how it worked out for you.

[UPDATE - 16/02/2010]

We’ve finished testing this now so go have a read of the results of our geo-targeted sitemaps test.

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