Geographical search tendencies

by 5 replies
6
This is a local SEO question

In your experience, have you noticed people searching for stuff by [city, state] + [product/service] OR [product/service] + [city, state]

In other words, I get slightly different results quite often if I were to search the following...

Tampa, FL Plumber
Plumber Tampa, FL

Personally, I am in the habit of typing in the city/state first, but what I do might not be what the majority of people do. What do you think the majority of people search on?

thanks.
#search engine optimization #geographical #search #seo #tendencies
  • Im the same, I search for Town Name + Service.

    I have thought about this alot recently and one of my new offline clients asked me the same question yesterday.

    Id be interested if anyone knows what the majority of people search for first.

    Peter Jones
  • Thanks for replying.

    I dig through my Analytics data almost daily. the problem with that is most of my pages are optimized for city/state + product/service. I'm skewing the data by doing that.

    Does anyone have their pages optimized the other way, and what are your Analytics results showing?
  • they take the text which is in the page so its actually fluctuates
    • [1] reply
    • If you have "Tampa, FL Plumber" somewhere in your title tag and description meta tag, Google should not be grabbing text in the content as results. It'll grab the description meta tag.

      Often, I'll put both variations in the title and description... such as, "Tampa, FL Plumber - Bob's Plumbing - Experienced Plumber in Tampa, FL"

      This way you catch both variations of the traffic, plus you lock in what description is in the search results. I don't want Google picking it's own results... I want to force Google to display what I want the searcher to read.
  • I actually search by zip, and I'm sure you'll find through kw tools that a lot of other people do the same. Local results also pop up more often when you use the zip.

    I wouldn't get super caught up in the semantics of Tampa, FL Plumber vs Plumber Tampa, FL and just think more about improving your website & brand as it seems like Google especially is accounting for these types of differences automatically for sites that are bigger, working harder on their website etc.

    Also make sure you're using the address tag in your content/footers and you'll most likely have better results:
    <address></address>
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
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