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Geo keyword stuffing? Local landing pages that work - getting rid of the gibberish

GerryFoster

4 Pounder
Jan 19, 2018
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Gerry
I may have posted something similar to this in the past, but I am unsure. Excuse me if I have and appear a dolt. My frustrations with OEM-approved SEO are building.
I'm just wondering if anyone here has an example of a good or even great local landing page for a dealership. I'm looking for something that serves customers NOT search engines.

This will be used as an example in an attempt to shift focus AWAY from geo stuffing. I have been fighting this fight for a while and I am starting to wonder if there's even a value here. I understand and accept that Google treats automotive differently than some other verticles. They are far more forgiving when it comes to thin or duplicate content etc etc. Is it the same with Geo stuffing? Are we truly serving our customers the best experience with pages literally built JUST to rank? I've been in SEO for nearly a decade now and geo stuffing goes against every SEO fiber in my body - yet it seems to be industry standard, which truly baffles me.

How does buying a chevy in portland at our portland chevy dealership near Yarmouth help customers in south portland with any service needs they might have for their Chevrolet Avalon in the freeport area?

Am I alone? Overthinking? Should I just get back to the grind and shut up? Can GOOD local SEO be done for car dealerships or is it just about proximity when searching?
 
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Am I alone? Overthinking? Should I just get back to the grind and shut up? Can GOOD local SEO be done for car dealerships or is it just about proximity when searching?

You're NOT alone.

I'm sure @Greg_Gifford could shed some light on this if he's around. Maybe he will read his alert and jump in to share some thoughts.
 
Brother - welcome to my hell! The most important thing to remember is that NONE of the OEM-approved SEO vendors have ANY CLUE how SEO works. That geo-stuffed BS never worked in the first place, but they've all been doing it for years... And it FOR SURE doesn't work now - so you're totally right to gag every time you read it.
All of the content on a dealership site should sound conversational - when you read it out loud, it should sound like something you'd say to a real person... That's what customers want, and what Google wants. Mentioning the city every 5th or 6th word, or mentioning 15 cities you also serve (or that you're near) won't help you show up in those areas... Local search results are based on a dealership's actual location AND the proximity of the searcher to that location.
 
You're NOT alone.

I'm sure @Greg_Gifford could shed some light on this if he's around. Maybe he will read his alert and jump in to share some thoughts.
I would love to see an effective and well-done "local" landing page. It's a hard find. In other verticles, great landing pages are actually fairly easy to find, but automotive, as we all know, is a very different animal than other verticals.
Brother - welcome to my hell! The most important thing to remember is that NONE of the OEM-approved SEO vendors have ANY CLUE how SEO works. That geo-stuffed BS never worked in the first place, but they've all been doing it for years... And it FOR SURE doesn't work now - so you're totally right to gag every time you read it.
All of the content on a dealership site should sound conversational - when you read it out loud, it should sound like something you'd say to a real person... That's what customers want, and what Google wants. Mentioning the city every 5th or 6th word, or mentioning 15 cities you also serve (or that you're near) won't help you show up in those areas... Local search results are based on a dealership's actual location AND the proximity of the searcher to that location.
do you have any specific dealerships I could take a look at or show as an example to leadership in-house as to how you can not geo stuff anything ever and still...rank?
 
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Hey Gerry, I work on a team that makes websites and offers monthly SEO and we've been trying to solve this EXACT thing for the past couple of years with mixed success. The best balance I've found so far is creating geographic-targeted landing pages that are designed to mirror the home page. It's not bullet-proof, but it works so much better than trying to get a home page or an about page to rank for multiple locations by just stuffing geos.

The way I figure it is that from a search perspective, if you're googling "Nissan dealership near Dallas, TX" - you probably expect to find the home page of a Nissan dealer, but Google really isn't going to rank a dealership 30 miles outside of that city just because they stuff that city as a secondary or tertiary GEO in the text of the page.

This is an example of that kind of page for one of our dealers: https://longviewnissan.com/nissan-dealership-near-tyler-tx/

Anecdotally, I've experimented quite a bit and found that the title tag, the URL, and the H1 make a big difference, but Google seems pretty indifferent to the density of the geographic keyword and that trying to target multiple cities with one page bears diminishing returns.

We usually create separate pages for "used car dealership near city" vs. "OEM dealership near city" for that same kind of reason.

Would love feedback and thoughts on our approach, like you said - so many industries have this figured out and automotive has tons of room to make gains.
 
Gerry - what do you mean when you say "local landing page" - like a page designed to get the dealership to show up in a different city than where they're located? or just a page about a product or service that the dealership provides that's in their own town? Cause those are 2 totally different things. The first one won't really work for most dealerships - after the Vicinity Update in December, it's exceedingly difficult to get a dealership to show up in other cities (unless it's a rural dealership and there simply aren't any competitors in nearby towns)

Other than that - it wouldn't be a local landing page, it would just be a regular page on the site that doesn't have all the bullshit keyword stuffing that most dealers/OEM-approved SEO providers typically stuff in there

also, those "car dealership near [city]" pages don't work - especially after the Vicinity update - but also because customers don't search that way
 
Gerry - we have landing pages created for a bunch of cities that we are not located in.

Each of these pages generates ~50-100 visits per month.

This might not seem like a lot, but when you consider the same search terms on Google Ads might run $5+ cpc, it quickly generates an ROI!

All of our pages have custom content written for each city targeting the search term "used car dealer in/near X city." We're using a similar strategy as @sean.k by making our landing pages look similar to our homepage.

And as you'll see in this Google Analytics chart, the Vicinity Update hasn't really had an impact on us.


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Gerry - we have landing pages created for a bunch of cities that we are not located in.

Each of these pages generates ~50-100 visits per month.

This might not seem like a lot, but when you consider the same search terms on Google Ads might run $5+ cpc, it quickly generates an ROI!

All of our pages have custom content written for each city targeting the search term "used car dealer in/near X city." We're using a similar strategy as @sean.k by making our landing pages look similar to our homepage.

And as you'll see in this Google Analytics chart, the Vicinity Update hasn't really had an impact on us.


View attachment 5915
I would be curious to know what you would consider a conversion for those visits and the conversion rate. I don't necessarily care about rank or visits (fellow SEO's shock incoming) - I want conversions. I don't want to serve search engines I want to serve users. If I get 3000 hits and 3 of those continue on to look at our used cars - thats 2,997 hits that are "wasted."

@Greg_Gifford The Automotive industry as a whole seems to "get away" with a lot of tactics or even simple overlooks that other industries do not. Examples of this could be

  • duplicate content (lack of penalties)
  • inconsistent NAP data (lack of search penalty)
  • Duplicate Title tags and meta descriptions
  • shitty metadata as a whole
  • badly implemented schema
  • a lack of intelligent use of canonical tags
  • shitty content written for search engines and not users
  • Header tags designed to capture informational search intent but nested into pages that do anything but answer questions.
I suppose my question is: is putting in the actual hard work of making a dealership site align with Google standard practices even worth the effort or time? I am going to have to show the executive team that doing SEO the CORRECT way has better results than just allowing the co-op bought services to run wild with KW stuffed useless pages. Is there a real advantage to link scaping and paring the menus down to have ONE link to relevant pages vs trying to get important links on every sub-menu? I suppose what I want to know is - does Google care? is it ALL vicinity? is the map pack all that matters? is local organic not relevant or if it is, do best practices matter?

Ultimately I want to know if the result is worth the work. if I spend 200 hours reworking content to be relevant, adjusting links, correcting analytics errors (can we talk about self referrals for a second), making sure our pages are serving user intent, answering questions, and providing value to our website users vs the bullshit that get placed there now...will it move the needle enough to justify the time invested?
 
I would be curious to know what you would consider a conversion for those visits and the conversion rate. I don't necessarily care about rank or visits (fellow SEO's shock incoming) - I want conversions. I don't want to serve search engines I want to serve users. If I get 3000 hits and 3 of those continue on to look at our used cars - thats 2,997 hits that are "wasted."
We have goals setup that only fire when we receive a lead with name, email address, and phone number. This SEO landing page generated traffic surprisingly converts higher than some of our other traffic sources.

In GA there's no way to de-dupe goals, so it is possible that someone submitted multiple form leads that contributed to the 19.7% conversion rate. But regardless, these pages generate a ton of leads (and sales) for us!

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