SEN Forum Pick: Does maximizing local search for our city hurt our visibility elsewhere?
SEN Forum Top Pick: Does maximizing local search for our city hurt our visibility elsewhere?
I believe I know the answer to this question, but just to be sure I have to ask anyway: Does maximizing local search visibility for our own city hurt, or limit, our visibility elsewhere? The market for downloadable products on our website has nothing to do with geographic location.
We are very pleased with the fast increase in Google visibility that has come after registering the company with several of the business listing services that Casey Markee mentioned in SEN this month (10 Reputation Management Tips to Dominate Google Results!), specifically CrunchBase, Acxiom, and Infogroup.
However, we have not yet touched listing services that emphasize local search visibility, like Moz Local, or the local citation sites listed on BrightLocal Blog. Also, we have refrained from adding markup to our company and product pages that is specifically local-search-friendly. We want to be sure that raising our visibility at home, does not reduce our visibility to people searching from elsewhere.
caseymarkee SEN's Lead SEO Consultant & Google Penalty Expert:
Hi Marty, I'm of the belief that you can NEVER optimize for local enough. So adding local schema to pages that have a local focus to me is just the smart move. That doesn't mean you aren't going to still show up for long-tail organic local-specific queries. In most cases, these complement each other very well.
Next, if you've already submitted to Acxiom and Infogroup (both primary data providers) then you probably don't need to worry about Moz Local at all. Citations are still important, especially the city-specific citations outlined on the BrightLocal blog, but submitting to all the Primary Data providers is probably just a little overkill.
Finally, back to the markup pages. I would NOT add local schema to your product pages. Those are doubtful local-specific. I would instead add the local schema to your "location"...
