What is Your Experience with Keyword + City?

[patrich]

I am curious to here how some of you approach search terms that are the keyword followed by the city. For example, lets say it is car repair houston.

How would you approach this term. Writing an article doesn't make sense to say car repair houston, but would make sense to say car repair in houston. Would adding the "in" before the city name make it less relevant or does it not matter because "in" is a stop word?

Never tackled a search term like this, I usually try to go after the terms that make sense to begin with. lol

[Roberto L]

According to the keyword researching for the words people typed, I think people prefer simple phrases without standard grammar, e.g. they may search tours Beijing Xian, or a complete question about one thing.

So I think car repair huoston/houston car repair is better than car repair in huoston or car repair at huoston, and some related phrases like where to repair car in Houston, car repair houses... can be included in your content or keyword descriptions.

[nicoledeal]

Originally Posted by patrich

I am curious to here how some of you approach search terms that are the keyword followed by the city. For example, lets say it is car repair houston.

How would you approach this term. Writing an article doesn't make sense to say car repair houston, but would make sense to say car repair in houston. Would adding the "in" before the city name make it less relevant or does it not matter because "in" is a stop word?

Never tackled a search term like this, I usually try to go after the terms that make sense to begin with. lol

The "in" is not going to negatively impact you, as no one is going to search for the exaxt phrase "car repair Houston" anyway. Well, not many.

You should also use multiple variations of your keywords and optimize multiple pages slightly differently. Don't get stuck with just one keyword, optimize for different keywords and do not be afraid to "re-optimize" based upon which keywords are working, which keywords are moving up, and which keywords are not producing.

If you are in or near Houston, by all means try to capitalize on that and target your traffic by adding the city.

[SimpleSEOTips]

I know what you mean about getting a balance for search engines and visitors alike. In my experience I have used the title tag to target terms which might otherwise look gramatically incorrect. The title tag bolds in the search results and if it is an exact match to what people were searching for in the first place then it does no harm. A rough title tag I would use based on your example above would be:
"Car Repair Houston - Affordable Houston Car Repairs"

Within the body of your page I would be a lot more inclined to use the proper grammar. Google should be smart enough to read between the lines and see that "in", "and", "on", etc. are common words which compliment the main search term.

Just my 2 cents but personally the Title tag (and possibly H1) is the place for exact keyword search terms to reside.

[rakesh1600193]

from my point of you can just work with
car repair houston
houston car repair

There is no need to add 'in'

you will have automatically improvements for the other keywords.

[andertonj]

I can say with my experience that this combination works, even for me it did. Chances are likely to increase of getting more visitors from targeted city. I did this on my two websites and I saw quick results so, I must say all SEO professional should try this once.

SEO Dublin

[ankushkohli]

Ya its fine to use the city name with a keyword. The stopword like "in, on, at" can be used but try to avoid as much as you can. However, you can use them in content or article like that.

[marktaylor001]

All I can say my experience that this combination works, although it is for me. Opportunities are likely to increase to get more targeted visitors to the city. I did my two websites, and I saw results so quickly, I must say that every SEO practitioner should try this again.

[lancejeffersons]

Instead of car repair houston, You can make it as Houston Car Repair..It is easy to include on your article writing and promo ad writing..