Here's one that dropped for keywords "Sacramento plumber":
Plumbing | Air Conditioning | Heating | HVAC | Sacramento CA | Bonney They were ranking for all the cities on their city keywords. You can follow the links on the home page to see how they did that. Nice site, and nicely done. That sat in #1 forever.
And here's a site I did some consulting for. They were on page 40 and now are at the top of page 2 for "Sacramento plumbing":
Sacramento Plumber, AC & Heating Contractor | Crystal Blue Plumbing, Heating & Air Sacramento CA Plumbing & HVAC Services He's been doing right in the sense that he's been really working hard to get press and social media mentions for their good service. But I can see he's up to no good again cause he's spamming his reviews. All those Tim S. reviews are his own and he spammed them with keywords.
And then look at all his duplicate city pages. You're not going to be able to convince him he shouldn't be doing that because they're working! And why shouldn't they?
Here's my thought on this. Crystal Blue services all those towns in the Sacramento area so he has a right to rank as much as any other plumber who might have a physical office there. To say Google should give preferential treatment to those residing in a town isn't really right because the ones there might be inferior. So everyone should have a shot. What I like in what Tim is doing is he's collecting reviews in all those cities and clearly showing that in the review map. Google sees that. That has to help. (How did he get that map, BTW?)
Now if he has a right to rank in each of those cities, he should be able to optimize for those. And wouldn't having a page for each city be the way to go? (At least now with the way Google works.) Like you, I've advised local clients to get unique, hyperlocal content for those pages which can be difficult or not to do. But how much easier to just copy optimized pages for each city and just swap out the city. We hate seeing it, but honestly, if a business really deserves to rank there, should Google really require these local businesses write so many unique pages? If they write a great page on their air conditioning services, why not be able to reuse it. When someone searches on those keywords in each city, that's the page that comes up. It's better if it's the same. After all, how many ways can you sell your air conditioning service? And what difference does it make if the content is the same? Visitors will probably never see the duplicate content and isn't Google more concerned with the user experience? Having worked with these clients, I really wish that was the way to do it. So much easier.
But even easier if Google would just concatenate geo keywords onto each unique page once it verifies you deserve to rank in those cities. In other words, have one page and Google does the magic of optimizing for each city. Does that make sense? Of course that gets us back to, but how does Google know you deserve that? And then we get back to hyperlocal city pages. <sigh><sigh>
Anyway, this topic got my doing some research and I uncovered something pretty cool! It's too much to say here, so I'll blog it and let you know. Can't wait to share it and get your feedback. </sigh>
help! our video campaign is working well with 2 page 1 and 2 page 2 video rankings. but the client's online manager asked us a couple weeks ago to make a lot of changes to tags, descriptions, and IMAGES, etc. nothing spammy at all...at least to us
