Local Content Silos: Rank Sites with Multiple Locations in Local Search

[djbaxter]

Local Content Silos: The Secret To Local Search Success
by Greg Gifford, Search Engine Land
June 22, 2015

How Do You Get A Site With Multiple Locations To Rank In Local Searches?
The answer is actually pretty simple. If you have a single website for a business with multiple locations, you?ve got to use local content silos.

We?ve been using local content silos for years, and as Google has tweaked the local algorithm, they?ve only become more powerful. After last summer?s Pigeon Update (which occurred last Christmas for those of you in Canada, the UK, and Australia), which put more emphasis on ?traditional web ranking factors,? local content silos have been working like a charm.



With local content silos, you have to change your thought process and create ?silos? of local information on the site. While your major product pages should all be internally linked, your local silos are mostly isolated ? so each silo only internally links within its own silo.

Read more...

 

[mborgelt]

Local Content Silos: The Scret to Local Search Success

Greg Gifford over at SEL has a great article on multi-location businesses and ranking in local searches. As a big proponent of this strategy I'm glad someone wrote a detailed article on how it is properly done.

Local Content Silos: The Secret to Local Search Success


What are your thoughts?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Re: Local Content Silos: The Scret to Local Search Success

Michael,

David had already posted that one about 1/2 hour before. So I merged your thread into his so we would not have a split convo. But no worries at all. I'd much rather have 2 posts on the same topic than no one posting at all, because they assume someone else did.

I read earlier but was not able to post. So thank you both for sharing with our members!

 

[Susan]

Re: Local Content Silos: The Scret to Local Search Success

I almost posted this a 3rd time! Ha, ha. Great article - thanks for sharing!!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Re: Local Content Silos: The Scret to Local Search Success

I almost posted this a 3rd time! Ha, ha. Great article - thanks for sharing!!

Yep it was THAT good!

Thanks for the great info Greg!

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Re: Local Content Silos: The Scret to Local Search Success

I think the silo method definitely has an impact. I've seen some positive results when done right, and not spammy copy and paste jobs. Unique content on each city/services page is something Google loves to see.

 

[barry]

Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

Hi All,

I recently read about the concept of local content silos , and I'm thinking of recommending it to one of my clients. But I'm kind of petrified to do so, because I don't want to run in to duplicate content problems and ruin their organic SEO.

So I just wanted to run this by this forum to put my mind at ease.

We have locations in NY, NJ and Phili. Phili is actually the most important one. So, I'll reserve the main section of the site for Phili, and optimize it with "Philadelphia", and have lots of Phili-related content. I don't want to create a separate "Philadelphia" section of the site because I don't want my home page's authority to go to waste (I saw this point mentioned by Linda in another post in this forum).

Then I'll have a separate section of the site which will be site.com/newyork, make sure that the content there does not link with the Phili section (as recommended in the search engine land blog post), and pretty much have the same pages as on the Phili section, only optimized for NY.

Then I'd do the same thing for NJ.

Am I getting this right?

Thanks

 

[Linda Buquet]

Re: Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

Thanks for sharing Barry!

Somehow I totally missed that one. Think I was on vacation.

But Greg Gifford REALLY knows his stuff, so I would think it has some merit, although building silos is a strategy I'm not familiar with, so I can't really speak about it 1st hand.

I'll Tweet and see if we can get a discussion going.

What do you guys think?

Has anyone here tried silos or are you familiar with the concept?

 

[Greg Gifford]

Re: Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

aw, thanks Linda...

Barry - it's definitely a strong strategy. Darren Shaw from Whitespark and I were talking about it during our Local panel at SMX Advanced.

It works - but yes, you have to be careful with dupe content. The hardest part of the strategy is creating "real" content for each area/silo. If you can pull that off, you should be golden. And, since you say you're only targeting 2 other areas, that shouldn't be hard.

Make sure you get some local links pointed in to those local silos as well (makes them work much better than just pointing links to the main area).

Feeding local reviews in to the local silos also helps with avoiding dupe content and providing useful info...

 

[Linda Buquet]

Re: Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

Thanks so much for catching my tweet and weighing in Greg.

 

[Susan]

Re: Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

I think the emphasis here is unique and relevant content for each silo - not the same content just re-optimized for a diff location. Obviously, Greg knows this area better than most - but wanted to add my emphasis on the content piece. The linking part, it sounds like you have down.

 

[barry]

Re: Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

Thanks so much everyone. I hope you don't mind if I take this opportunity to ask a really basic question.....I've been working in SEO for a while but only recently started getting my hands dirty in the local side of things.

If I do all this local SEO stuff, will that ONLY help my rankings in the local pack, or will it help my regular organic rankings within my target location as well?

 

[Susan]

Re: Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

HI Barry - thanks for your question and post. In my experience doing the "local" stuff can also have a very positive impact on the organic results in a specific geo region. When putting together any SEO strategy for a physical location(s) I always start with local SEO "stuff" first and then work my way out. Hope that makes sense.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Re: Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

Hi All,

I recently read about the concept of local content silos , and I'm thinking of recommending it to one of my clients. But I'm kind of petrified to do so, because I don't want to run in to duplicate content problems and ruin their organic SEO.

So I just wanted to run this by this forum to put my mind at ease.

We have locations in NY, NJ and Phili. Phili is actually the most important one. So, I'll reserve the main section of the site for Phili, and optimize it with "Philadelphia", and have lots of Phili-related content. I don't want to create a separate "Philadelphia" section of the site because I don't want my home page's authority to go to waste (I saw this point mentioned by Linda in another post in this forum).

Then I'll have a separate section of the site which will be site.com/newyork, make sure that the content there does not link with the Phili section (as recommended in the search engine land blog post), and pretty much have the same pages as on the Phili section, only optimized for NY.

Then I'd do the same thing for NJ.

Am I getting this right?

Thanks

You've got it right. Just make sure all the content is unique.

I'm curious if you will be using subfolders or subdomains?

 

[barry]

Re: Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

Hi All,

I presented this to my client. They are intrigued but nervous about it. Does anyone have an example of a site that uses local content silos successfully?

 

[Tim Colling]

Re: Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

Hi All,

I presented this to my client. They are intrigued but nervous about it. Does anyone have an example of a site that uses local content silos successfully?

This is very timely. I just signed a client with five locations and so this is particularly important for me right now.

Like Barry, I would love to see some examples of this in real life.

Thanks!

 

[barry]

Re: Local Content Silos: The Scret to Local Search Success

Hi All,

Does anyone know of an example of a site which has implemented this successfully?

 

[Gsmithmike]

Re: Local silo's - is this actually a good idea?

Hi All,

I recently read about the concept of local content silos , and I'm thinking of recommending it to one of my clients. But I'm kind of petrified to do so, because I don't want to run in to duplicate content problems and ruin their organic SEO.

So I just wanted to run this by this forum to put my mind at ease.

We have locations in NY, NJ and Phili. Phili is actually the most important one. So, I'll reserve the main section of the site for Phili, and optimize it with "Philadelphia", and have lots of Phili-related content. I don't want to create a separate "Philadelphia" section of the site because I don't want my home page's authority to go to waste (I saw this point mentioned by Linda in another post in this forum).


Then I'll have a separate section of the site which will be site.com/newyork, make sure that the content there does not link with the Phili section (as recommended in the search engine land blog post), and pretty much have the same pages as on the Phili section, only optimized for NY.

Then I'd do the same thing for NJ.

Am I getting this right?

Thanks

Have been doing this for almost 6 months for a client and it is working just fine, Connecting the particular local page to the exact Google Plus ( Google Local Page) is a Must. Also you should check and see if you have microdata and all location signals correctly on the page.
- I would really work on to have unique content on each page! Each city, or area has couple of unique spots that you can even mention in your content, this will really customize the content for the location and give it a boost.
- I usually began by mentioning some statistical of facts about the region or city i am trying to advertise local and then what the page has to offer.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Just realized we had 2 threads on this.

Merged Barry's into David's original thread so we would not keep having great comments in 2 places and have interested folks miss some of them.

 

[barry]

Hi Everyone,

I have a few more questions about this:

- It seems to me that Walmart does not implement local silos. For example, on this page which is dedicated to one of their stores, there are plenty of links which go to other pages which have nothing to do with the location of that store. Not that Walmart needs our help, but should I take this to mean that if the top navigation was not there, this page would rank better (since the info in the top nav is not location-specific)? Is it bad to link from a silo to a general product page?

- Do you think it is necessary for each page of a silo to be in its own subdirectory? For example, if I have 3 pages in a silo (the "home" page, and two others), do they need to be site.com/baltimore, site.com/baltimore/page-1, and site.com/baltimore/page-2?

Or can it be site.com/baltimore, site.com/baltimore-page-1, and site.com/baltimore-page-2?

- Lastly, does anyone have any examples of sites that do this?