tony spencer

Since the days of creating my first geotargeted site for Raleigh, NC I’ve struggled with the best sequence of (or ) combination to target. For instance, which of these combinations would capture the largest number of visitors?

• Raleigh Real Estate
• Raleigh NC Real Estate
• Real Estate in Raleigh
• Real Estate in Raleigh, NC
• Raleigh North Carolina Real Estate

Tough call. A few years ago I took a guess and went with a combination of two keywords and tackled it like this:
Raleigh Real Estate in Raleigh, NC.

Well I think that looks a tad spammy so I want to find a better practice that can achieve the same results. So I have been polling family and friends by asking things like “If you were new to the area how would you search in Google to find a place like 518 West?” (Its a local Italian restaurant). Of course my sample size is way small but the response I’ve been getting are all over the board:

• Raleigh Italian Restaurant
• Italian Food Raleigh
• Italian Restaurant in Raleigh

and on, and on, and on. There seemed to be no consensus. So my advice for the best approach is to create multiple pages if possible targetting different variations. If you have enough trust rank and inbound links with varying anchor text you can probably nail two variations on one page.

I also did a few high profile queries like Chicago Accountant and Accountant in Chicago and it seems that the SEOs out there are targetting and nailing more than one term by mixing up the inbound links and displaying several combinations on the page. You’ll also begin to find that Google is getting good at the LSI thing and they can relate North Carolina to NC as seen in this query for Raleigh North Carolina Real Estate where my raleighlist site shows up in the middle of the SERP’s even though the page has no mention of ‘North Carolina’.

If you are SEOing for local geotargetted pages how do you go about it?