Help with Using Keywords for Local results

[ColoradoChris]

Hello to all,
I wanted to ask if I am doing this correctly.
So I own a Bernese mountain dog website


I used the google keyword research tools to view keyword ideas.

I only service Colorado with training, handling, etc


So my questions are:


1 - Bernese Mountain Dog Puppies (the keyword) blow away the other keywords. So when you are looking at your sites most popular keywords, do you make the most popular keyword your homepage? Because it gets the most link juice? Like would you build the homepage around the best keyword instead of branding - like the company name etc?
Or does it matter? Basically just as long as you use it for one page?

2 - When you have keywords that have parts of other keywords, is it safe to use the longer keyword because it has parts of the other phrases? Such as Bernese mountain dog puppies for sale is a part of Bernese mountain dog puppies for sale in Colorado.


So if you use bernese mountain dog puppies for sale in Colorado, it will also hit the bernese mountain dog puppies for sale? ( without the In Colorado)
What type of strategy would you use for this type of situation?


3- Lastly, and thank you for your time - I watched a video from a grey hat seo guy. He said to take a keyword or phrase like say Colorado home builders, create a page like example.com/Colorado-home-builders/


Then make you h1 tag - The Best Colorado Home Builders


Add The Best Colorado home builders to your meta description


and one more time in your h2 tag


Then create a Bold, and italic The Best Colorado Home Builders in your unique content paragraphs.


So my question is - is this grey hat and bad? Or the standard? I do not want to get hit for over optimizing. So just wanted to ask you opinion first.
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In the end, I truly thank you for taking the time to read my questions. I appreciate everyone's help and greatly appreciate your knowledge.
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So my results look like this from Google Keyword / searches / competition / price


bernese mountain dog puppies 590 Low $0.45 1%
bernese mountain dog puppies for sale 90 High $0.42 9%
bernese mountain dogs 90 Low $0.37 0%
bernese mountain dog puppies for sale in colorado 30 Medium $0.76 0% bernese mountain dog breeders in colorado 20 Medium $0.32 0%
bernese mountain dogs colorado 40 Low $0.08 0%
bernese mountain dog puppy breeders 10

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Chris,

My carpal hurts so I can't type much.

1st off write for PEOPLE, your target customers, not search engines.

The home page should be around your most important keywords for what you actually offer, NOT the most popular KWs for things you don't even offer. So for example if you only do training, don't sell puppies or do breeding don't put that on the home page.

Think real world and think about what your customers want. Someone looking to buy a puppy is not a good prospect for your training yet. But if that's a popular KW then it might make for a good blog post or article on an internal page, since it is related.

Main keywords to focus on if you do Bernese mountain dog training in Colorado, should be keywords just like that as well as Bernese mountain dog puppy training in Colorado.

But do you really do training throughout the whole state? In local you'll usually only rank in the city you are in, so you should focus on city, state.

Need to be careful about over-optimizing too.

I suggest you start by reading Google's SEO guide.

http://static.googleusercontent.com.../search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

 

[MarkW]

At first thought, I would probably set up a homepage title tag like this...

"Colorado Bernese Mountain Dog Puppies | For Sale, Breeders, Info"

... I would alter that a bit after doing some research most likely

I would also set up an inner page with "for sale" listings and use this to target the "for sale" related phases. I have seen scenarios like this where the homepage ranks for the money "for sale" phrases, sometimes the inner page, ideally you get both pages ranking (this can definitely be done with 2 pages on one site, especially in that niche which can't be too competitive Id imagine). It's fine to target this with an inner page as well as the homepage IMHO, but that's more of a general SEO thing than a local strategy. I just did a few queries and none of them pulled up the local map pack.

Your second question; I wouldn't sweat that. If you just write the content the way it sounds best, you will have enough there to tell google what you are all about and they will figure out what types of queries to show your site for.

The grey hat points...

using ".com/for-sale/" certainly isn't going to hurt. Most of the community seems to think that the value of keywords in your directory URLs is an outdated ranking factor but the last indication that I heard from Google is that if you can use a descriptive phrase in your URL, this is still best. if it's already in your domain name, adding more keywords in the directories isn't going to help.

H1 tags... I still make sure I optimize those a bit.

As for the bold and italics, I know that's something that I used to make sure that I did on every website I worked on. I don't think that many people talk about that these days. I stopped doing that about 2-4 years ago because it was doing more to highlight my best keywords for competitors than it was for my rankings. That sort of thing is definitely not black hat or even really grey hat. It's just not going to help much, if at all, and it's going to tell onlookers and manual webspam reviewers that "an SEO has been here" so they are going to start diving deeper into what you are doing for whatever reason.

PS, I once drove a bernese puppy across 3 states for delivery, amassing crowds of beautiful women at every rest stop. Those are some cute puppies.

 

[Linda Buquet]

At first thought, I would probably set up a homepage title tag like this...

"Colorado Bernese Mountain Dog Puppies | For Sale, Breeders, Info"

But Mark, Chris said: "I only service Colorado with training, handling, etc"

So if he does not sell or breed dogs, but only does training, would you do home title for things he goes not even offer? And not mention the one thing he DOES offer?

 

[MarkW]

But Mark, Chris said: "I only service Colorado with training, handling, etc"

So if he does not sell or breed dogs, but only does training, would you do home title for things he goes not even offer? And not mention the one thing he DOES offer?

Sorry I just saw the "for sale" mentioned throughout and I got excited.

 

[ColoradoChris]

Thank you Mark and Linda

To be correct - I am an owner, breeder, and handler. We do have puppies a couple of times each year.

I know there are a lot of pet activist, and I assure you we are heavily regulated and do things right. So I was trying to not start any fires.

Mark you hit it dead on, Bernese mountain dog puppies is our best search term to target. So when I look at the search terms I see

Bernese mountain dog puppies for sale in colorado

So do I need those keywords in that order to work ?

So Mark you mentioned Colorado Bernese mountain dog puppies, for sale, breeders, info

I love your idea. But so I understand how it works, is the flow of the words how it must be entered for say title tags etc to match the search queries?

So if someone entered

colorado Bernese mountain dog puppies

Would they also find me under Bernese mountain dogs colorado?

Or is this why h1 tags and title tags are so important, to make sure everything matches?

I am trying to learn how to use these google search results properly.



I was looking for a white hat seo.

But see what started this is a guy in AZ said he does grey hay seo. He was affordable but the said what he does. He cursed and bashed Google, but said he could rank my site within a month by using the site now that has a couple of bad back links that were disavowed.

He would leave the domain for branding the homepage, but then when you clicked on say the puppy page, you would be taken to a clone site with an emd domain.

He said it would not carry any bad link juice as the main homepage would hold it all.

He wanted. 500 a month, but no contracts and we cannot report him to the irs.

So once again I lose faith in the seo industry, so I turn to others for help, like yourself who are caring.

Thank you so much for everything

 

[MarkW]

The EXACT order can sort of make a difference, so I suggest using something pretty close to the exact phrase on the inner "for sale" page.

If you use the tag I suggested, it would help you rank for "colorado bernese mountain dog info" or another combination of the terms there. It won't help 100% as much as if they were the first words in the title tag and they exactly matched the query, but the homepage is going to be bringing in all kinds of searches that are slightly general, so I tend to paint a broad picture with that title tag (I used to own a state-wide colorado website and the scope is about right for this IMHO)

Realistically, I would just make sure that you have "bernese mountain dog" in the exact order but the rest of it can probably be arranged in one of many ways and the choices will probably produce similar results as long as you have the key stuff in there.

As for the guy in Arizona... doesn't sound like a great idea. That's just a bit weird to ask someone not to report contractor payments to the IRS (and probably not legal). Methods sound questionable as well.

 

[ColoradoChris]

Yea this AZ guy keeps writing me to use his services. He said he always get penalties, but he said you handle them as they come in.

He said he was part of a black hat world?

Either way I just want to do things right.

So I am going to keep things clean from here on out.

I am just really trying to study and research how to use Google keyword tool and how to take what the keywords say and enter them into my website.

I greatly appreciate your help as you are all so great.

 

[Nevyana]

Hi Chris,

In my opinion, you'd better read a bit about the semantic search improvements that G has introduced in the past year. Semaantic search kind of changes this exact order keyword phrases that you are going after.

In the past it mattered a lot what you'd choose:
whether you'd go with puppies for sale in Colorado, or Colorado dog puppies for sale.
The same applied for Colorado attorneys and Colorado lawyers.

However, the case is rather different now - the order and the exact word used (one word instead of its perfect synonym) should not be focused on so blindly because the search engine already deduces on itself and could think on this basic level as to make associations and to relate entities to their specific typical attributes.

Thus I'd have to disagree with Mark, exact order does not make a difference. What makes a difference is creating an unambiguous text that is complete in its nature (it uses all the terms, characteristics, adjectives, phrases associated with the described service, product, experience, subject, etc.

I am not talking about kw stuffing but rather trying to explain the service for instance not in a single way but through various methods and thus you'd be able to fill the content with all those relevant, related and topic-rich words.


You should definitely work on your title tags - but remember that those vary depending on the inserted query, so they won't necessary show as you please - the order is not everything.