Online Marketing Today

“Hi Duncan. I run a small web development business providing LOCAL businesses affordable web development. My problem is local geographical keyword research and development… for example, would Google consider:- “Rosebud Plumber” “Mornington Plumber” “Frankston Plumber” a spam situation on the phrase “plumber” and if so… how would I go about on and off page optimization in a geographical situation where I need to use the occupational phrase in different locations. Cheers” ~ Rob.

Hi Rob,

Whether or not Google would consider this a spam situation (what most people refer to as keyword stuffing) depends entirely on how you implement it (and your interpretation).

If you were to simply list all of the related geographic keyword terms on the bottom of your home page in a gigantic list then potentially yes – it could be seen as a keyword stuffing situation. The more terms you include, the more it’s likely to give the impression.

Having said that I have seen many examples of websites that continue to rank well that have done this. I guess it depends on people’s interpretation of what constitutes keyword stuffing (but more importantly Google’s algorithm interpretation).

 For example, you have your home page and at the bottom you might have the following…

“We provide information on local plumbers in Rosebud, Mornington, Frankston, etc…”

…to me that’s fine because it’s true. However it can look at bit odd.

To eliminate the appearance / purpose of doing this as being keyword stuffing you should also link each locations name to the most relevant page containing information on the plumbers in that specific area.

So “RoseBud” would link to your “RoseBud Plumber” page.

“Mornington” would link to your “Mornington Plumber” page and so on.

Essentially what you’re doing then is providing a mini navigational facility for people arriving at your home page to navigate down to the specific geographical location that is most relevant for them – and there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

It will also pass “geographical theme relevancy” to each specifically optimized page down via the linking structure helping to improve their respective search engine rankings.

In addition you’ll also want to ensure you include a decent proportion of unique content on each individual page – rather than a copy and paste version of your primary “Whatever Location Plumber” page. Otherwise you run the risk of a duplicate content penalty making those pages in the search engines largely redundant. Unique content is ultimately the key here.

Now I’m not entirely sure if the above locations are different cities, towns within cities, or suburbs with towns etc.

If you have multiple level geographical structures like that, obviously you can’t link to them all from your home page as it would be too overwhelming and look a heck of a lot like keyword stuffing.

So in such as case you would replicate what’s mentioned above with only your top level categories (say cities) being linked to from your home page. On the “Cities” page you would have another unique mini navigational section that links to the respective “Towns” related to that city. On the “Towns” page you would have a similar setup linking to the different “suburbs” within the towns.

Of course all of that depends on the hierarchy of your category structure but you get the idea.

If your website is a blog there is another way you can add geographical theme relevancy to the individual pages and that is by the use of “Tags”.

So for example on your “RoseBud Plumber” page you would add tags for all of the different locations within RoseBud (obviously limiting yourself to a reasonable number). You can also do the same thing back up the category / geographical location hierarchy.

The ironic thing about tags are that within a blogging platform sense they are fine (and Google has no issue with them), but try doing the same thing on a static website and it will look like keyword stuffing. Figure that one out.

Anyway I hope this has helped. If you apply one or both of the above suggestions you should see a very marked improvement in your geographical search engine rankings without fear of being accused of keyword stuffing.

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