**This audit looks at how you might be causing more harm than good by doing too much SEO! If you’d like a FREE audit for your website then join our Facebook Group.**
Is there such a thing as too much SEO?
Yep there is, and it’s called ‘over-optimisation’ and it can negatively impact your SEO ?
That’s the main learning for today’s startup SEO audit, which is South Shields Dog Trainer posted by founder Nathan Leighton ?
Too Much SEO
“Nathan’s business offers dog training services across the North East of England, and they want to appear when customers search within many of the region’s towns and villages.
A tactic they’ve employed to do this could actually be having the opposite effect.
At the bottom of their services pages, there is a big list of these ‘keywords’ they want to rank for (see screenshot below)
The problem with this is that Google would see this as over-optimising your SEO, and actually hold you back from ranking well until you remove it – which I’d suggest you do.
Local Area Pages For SEO
So what’s the solution so that South Shields Dog Trainer rank on page for all of these towns/villages?
The solution is something we call ‘area pages’ within SEO.
Area pages are the best SEO tactic when you want to rank for lots of areas.
Essentially an area page is a single page where you detail the services you offer in that particular area.
That way you’re giving Google a page it can rank when some searches for ‘[keyword] in [area]’, eg ‘dog trainers in newcastle’.
Hope this helps Nathan Leighton!“(Andrew Allen)
Comments
“Could the area page for each suburb be the exact same content, but just replacing the suburb? Or would this be considered as duplicate content?” (David Bui)
“I’m afraid the content needs to be unique by a certain %, at least. If you have 200 words of copy that is identical across a set of pages (with the exception of one/two words) then you run the risk of Google not liking your content and downvoting it (as Google dislikes duplicate/repeated content).
I’m not saying it could not work in the short term, especially if there is little competition in the areas you are targeting, but there will always be a longer-term risk to doing so.” (Andrew Allen)
