Ask Kalena

Hello!

I have a client that offers a delivery service for their nursery products to approximately 90 towns within a 100 mile radius. We currently have a page on the website listing each town and the corresponding delivery charge in a tabular format.

We would like to begin targeting each town on an individual basis in order to attain better visibility in the SERPs for search queries including my clients’ products & specific town and/or county.

My initial thought, was to build a separate page for each town announcing delivery service to the particular area. However, this would entail a lengthy and time-consuming process, while raising duplicate content issues as well – unless a separate product & blurb was created for every page/town scenario… Can you suggest a more efficient approach to accomplish our goals?

Thank you for you time and input – it is appreciated!

Dino

Hi Dino,

Whenever you plan to make changes to a website you should ask yourself the question :

Am I doing this for my users – or am I doing it for the search engines?

If any planned change is exclusively for the benefits of the search engines, I would think long and hard before going ahead and doing it, as it could be considered ( by both your users and the search engines) to be spammy, and may have a negative impact on both rankings (search engine) and conversions (users).

In this instance, I would consider that a page dedicated to each specific town is probably a better user experience, than a single page with a list of 90 towns on it, so for me it passes the test.  However, as you have pointed out, simply having 90 pages of the same content – with just the location name changed, is not going to help your rankings (because of duplicate content issues) so if you go down this path, I’d recommend that you customise or rewrite the content for each page (“spinner” software may help with this).

You could also consider grouping the different towns into separate regions.  This could result in (say) 9 or 10 pages each covering a group of towns within a particular region.  This presents you with an easier task for providing unique, relevant  content.  It also has the potential benefit of being found on related searches for nearby towns (within the same region) which your client does not currently deliver to (and maybe could).

Writing content for lots of new pages is not a trivial task, so don’t kid yourself (or your client) that SEO is easy…. However, it can often be those little extra steps that you are prepared to take (that your competitors can’t be bothered doing) that makes all the difference between a #1 and a #11 ranking.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting (SEO Brisbane)

Dear Kalena,

Is keyword stuffing a bunch of the same keywords or is it a bunch of unrelated keywords?

Willie

Hi Willie,

The term “Keyword Stuffing” describes the practice of  repeating a particular phrase (often many times) within the text on a single page.  Typically this would be done with the same or closely related keyword phrases – with the aim  of trying to raise the profile of that particular web page for search queries on that keyword.

Usually a few mentions of a particular keyword phrase (or related phrases) would be acceptable (and normal), but it quickly becomes very obvious to users if a particular phrase is repeated over and over again within the content of a single page.  This type of “unnatural” repetition of keywords can be very annoying from a users perspective and may actually incur search ranking penalties. If a search engine considers the page to be “over optimised” it is unlikely to achieve good rankings.

Whilst mentioning your target keyword a few times within the content of your page is sensible, overdoing it can be detrimental.  In most cases when you are writing content, you should be trying to write it for the benefit of  the user rather than the search engines.

If you are concerned that some of your pages might be “keyword stuffed” an easy test is to simply read them through.  If the pages read well, are informative and feel “natural” then you are probably OK.  If the content is awkward and there are obvious repetitions of particular keywords, I’d suggest that you consider re-writing the page.

A handy online tool that I often use to get a feel for what a page is about is Tag Crowd.  This tool allows you to specify a URL, or paste in text, and it will create a Tag Cloud of the content provided.  If one or two keywords jump out at you from the tag cloud it generates, it is possible that your page may be over-optimised.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO (Brisbane)

Dear Kalena

I am searching the web looking for an idea of how to redo my mortgage site.

I plan on optimizing many pages of content and am finding out that  local SEO companies that are placing high on search rankings barely have 150 or so words of body text– and that is on the home page. I thought the 250 words minimum was a “black and white” rule.  Is there some kind of exception to this? If there is, it sure will make my life easier.

Alistair

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Hi Alistair

Guess what? No rules in SEO are black and white.

200-250 words of text was actually just a rough guide that my friend (and SEO rockstar) Jill Whalen came up with over 10 years ago when she began optimizing web sites.

It’s just a lot easier to integrate keywords naturally into 2 or 3 paragraphs of text than it is to squeeze them into 1 paragraph of text. Why make it difficult for yourself? Give yourself more room to add keywords and feed search engines what they need to survive – text.

That said, if you believe you can naturally squeeze all the keywords you need into 150 words and still have your home page text sound logical and natural to read – then go for it!

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Like to learn more about SEO? Download my free SEO lesson. No catch.

I ran out of time to write a blog post today, but did manage to answer a reader question over at SiteProNews so I thought I’d point you all to that as I know many of you are interested in keyword research.

William wrote to me asking two questions about keywords:

1) How do you know if a keyword merits time and energy?

2) How do you know which keywords your competitors are using?

I answered both of these in my post titled  How Do I Choose What Keywords to Target?.

Just a quick heads up that we have recently added another course to our curriculum at Search Engine College.

After years of running PPC campaigns, I’ve come to realize that writing copy for PPC ads requires a completely different mindset to writing copy for web pages or writing articles. The same rules simply don’t apply. Not only do you have to try to hook your audience, but you have an extremely limited number of characters to do it in.

Copywriting for Pay Per Click is a new course designed to help you craft PPC ads that speak to your individual markets like you do. In simple, direct, everyday language that explains why they need your product/service without the hype or the shouting. It will remove any writer’s block or marketing bias you might have when it comes to promoting your service and help you embrace the limited advertising format that you’re faced with when drafting PPC ads.

Here’s a sample excerpt from Chapter 1:

“It’s usually very important to include a keyphrase in the headline of these ads.  The keyphrase helps the site visitor instantly know that your ad has what s/he’s looking for.  I don’t believe it’s nearly as important to use a keyphrase in the description/body copy of PPC ads.

Depending on the length of the keyphrase, it can hog all the available space that should be used for differentiating yourself, explaining a special or limited-time offer or otherwise enticing the searcher to click your ad as opposed to the dozens of others they’ll see.”

Written and tutored by copywriting whizz Karon Thackston, Copywriting for PPC is an ideal companion to our PPC 101 and PPC 201 courses or as a stand-alone course if you’re already running PPC campaigns and want to achieve higher conversion rates.

So what are you waiting for? Enroll now and join our first round of graduates.