SEO
10 verktyg du kan använda för SEO-konkurrensanalys

En framgångsrik sökmotoroptimeringsstrategi inkluderar konkurrensanalys. De verktyg som finns tillgängliga idag erbjuder otroligt värde till allmänt rimliga avgifter.
They help users accomplish more in less time, and many may find that the tools are so useful that they essentially end up paying for themselves. Here are 10 popular SEO competitive analysis tools, their pricing, and how you can use them to bolster the success of your SEO strategy.
1. Semrush
- Pricing: Plans start at $119.95 per month.
Semrush not only offers good data for search results analysis, but everything functions the way you expect it to – it’s that easy to use.
There is no need to read a manual to use Semrush’s SERP analysis tool.
Every link, button, and heading has a tooltip that explains what it is so that everything makes sense.
Semrush Tooltip Explains SERP Analysis Tool Data
Semrush Tooltip Explains Jargon




Semrush’s Authority Score is assigned to every URL listed in the SERP Analysis.
Like any third-party metric, the Authority Score is just a score based on factors like backlinks, traffic, and referring domains.
The metric makes it easy to make a quick judgment about a webpage without having to spend hours researching all of the factors for each webpage.
The research is already done; that’s what Semrush’s Authority Score is about.
That’s just one part of the Semrush SERP analysis, but it’s the part that is directly tied to competitor research.
Semrush is useful for researching competitor backlinks. The ease of use makes the workflow of researching links a pleasure.
There’s no need to read a manual. Everything is self-explanatory.
Starting an analysis consists of entering a domain name or an entire URL.
The resulting page shows various metrics that help you see the competition at a glance, literally.
There’s a graph that shows the growth of referring domains and also backlinks by year, which provides a quick idea of how aggressively they’re building links, organized by time.




Beneath that graph, there’s another visual representation of the backlinks organized by the categories of referring domains.
The categories are the general niche areas that the backlinks belong to.




When you click through a category, the tool presents a filter where you can add a word, a phrase, or a TLD, which means Top Level Domain (.net or .org), to find all the relevant links.
There’s also a drop-down menu for selecting “zones by TLD,” but I found that typing in the TLD works better.
Or you can get granular and click on the View Full Report button to see all of the categories in granular detail.
It’s easy to recommend Semrush because it truly is designed for researching competitors and for link building.
The tools for competitive research are easy to use and give a visual snapshot of their activities and offer a useful user interface for drilling down by category.
2. Ahrefs SERP Checker (Free And Paid)
- Pricing: Free checker tool, then starts at $99 per month.
Ahrefs has a free SERP checker that shows the same SERP data as the paid version, only for just the first few positions.
The paid version has more data. But if you’re on a budget, the free version is a useful start.
Below is a screenshot of the SERP overview that lists featured snippets, people also ask, and the sitelinks enhancements.
This extra data gives a good overview of what the SERPs look like, plus page and domain rating metrics.




Here is a screenshot showing more data from the SERP analysis tool.
All of the column headings show a tooltip that explains what each column means.




Ahrefs is a solid choice for search results competitor analysis.
3. Serpstat
- Pricing: Free version, then starts at $69 per month.
Serpstat is an affordably priced SEO platform that offers SERP analysis tools. It’s possible to sign up for free to test it out.
Serpstat is focused on analyzing the search results and is useful for Backlinks Analysis and Competitor Analysis.
4. SpyFu
- Pricing: Free analysis tool, then starts at $39 per month (or $16 per month on an annual plan).
SpyFu is a very reasonably priced service that is dedicated specifically to competitive research and offers many useful features.
The benefit of the tool is that it generates all the data necessary for competitive research.
SpyFu basically takes the “research” part out of competitive research tasks and provides the data.
The SERP Analysis tool, which can be used for free, offers unique information, such as indicators that signal a website rises or drops in the search results.




Another interesting feature is that it offers a Ranking Difficulty score, data on whether .gov or .edu sites are ranking, and the number of homepages that are ranking in the top 100 positions.




SpyFu Backlinks Report
Another unique feature is how SpyFu identifies what it determines are the strongest webpages to get a link from.
Just enter a keyword phrase into the search box, and SpyFu searches the backlinks of the top 5,000 ranked sites, including for similar keyword phrases, and identifies all the backlinking domains that the ranked sites have in common.
Even better, SpyFu allows users to filter those webpages by backlink types.
The backlink types one can filter for are .gov/.edu/, sites with affiliate links, blogs, news sites, forums, and directories.
Filtering for forums reveals all the strongest forum backlinks, filtering for .edu domains shows the best .edu sites to get a link from, and so on.
Another cool feature is called Backlink Kombat.




This tool allows you to enter two competitor domains and then exclude your own domain. It will then show you all the links the competitors have in common that your site does not.
I like using tools in creative ways to get even more or better data.
What I would suggest doing with the SpyFu Backlink Kombat tool is comparing sites that aren’t your direct competitors. This can help you discover opportunities you might not otherwise.
So if your topic is plumbers in City X, compare roofers in City X.
Competitor backlink research with SpyFu is incredibly easy. I would like the flexibility to filter by keywords (like Favorite Sites) or by TLD (to find .org or .us domains).
A limited amount of this data is free, and the complete data set is available to paid subscribers.
SpyFu is an interesting tool because it takes the extra step of presenting the data while minimizing research.
It’s easy to use, specific to competitor research, and reasonably priced.
5. Sandboxweb.io SERP Analysis Tool
- Pricing: Free version, then pricing starts at $19 per month.
Sandboxweb.io offers a SERP analysis tool that provides data on top-ranked competitors.
This tool shows the schema types, Core Web Vitals data, and word counts.
You can click on each competitor in the SERP to research further.
The free version of this tool offers a lot of information. But it’s limited to 10 keywords per month.
The data is somewhat limited, but it does offer a quick analysis.
6. Screaming Frog
- Pricing: Free version and a paid version at $209 per year.
Skrikande groda has a SERP analysis function. It’s not easy to use, but it’s not excessively difficult.
I’d like to see Screaming Frog make it easier to run this kind of analysis without getting technical.
If you take the time to figure it out, Screaming Frog can scrape the SERPs and provide analysis.
It’s also useful for analyzing competitors one at a time to get a sense of what sites they link to, how much content they have, interlinking patterns, headings used across the site, and many other competitor data points.
7. Inlinks
- Pricing: Free version, then pricing starts at $39 per month.
Inlinks is a content optimization-focused tool that can extract relevant data points from search results and competitors.
Inlinks features a SERP analysis function that offers multiple data points about the sites in the search results, such as semantically related topics and user intent data.
The user intent data and topic suggestion features are quite unique.
There is also a Topic Analysis feature that provides competitors’ related topics and other data that is useful for creating content.
Other SERP Analysis tools look at the top 100 through the top 5,000 for their analyses.
But in my opinion, what really matters most are the top 10 search results because not every site in the top 100 or even the top 10 is a competitor.
So, I really appreciate that Inlinks’ SERP analysis tool focuses on the top 10.
The Inlinks SERP analysis tool offers data on the following:
- Topic density.
- Internal and external link counts.
- Readability scores.
- List of H2 headings.
I asked one of the founders, Dixon Jones, to explain what Inlinks does regarding competitor analysis.
Dixon answered:
“Inlinks analyzes ten competing pages for any Keyword. It aggregates the combined number of times entities are used in the SERP and uses this to build a Knowledge Graph of entities related to a given search.
This is then compared to the entities in the content on YOUR competing page, highlighting material gaps in your content.
At a site level, Inlinks can build a knowledge graph of any site, but does not currently have many tools to compare whole sites.
We look at the verbs used to describe entities (in competing pages for a SERP) and cluster them into verb based intent.
This helps content publishers answer a genuine user query, rather than use words in the wrong context.”
Inlinks offers more tools; it’s more than just competitor analysis.
There is a free, pro, and enterprise level.
8. MarketMuse
- Pricing: Free version and paid plans starting at $600 per month.
MarketMuse is an AI-based content analysis tool that functions within the entire content creation workflow, from research to content brief and more.
What I appreciate about MarketMuse is that it looks at the top-ranked pages and offers a keyword overview of the topics.
A key competitor analysis function in MarketMuse is called Compete.
The Compete tool analyzes the competition and suggests what to write about and ways to do better than the competitors, such as covering overlooked related topics.
Compete’s unique selling proposition, in my opinion, is that it is focused on helping users create content that is better than the competition.
My understanding of MarketMuse is that it’s not just focused on helping users beat their competition.
The tool streamlines the entire content creation workflow, with competitor research being one part of the process.
There is a learning curve to MarketMuse.
9. SimilarWeb
- Pricing: Free version and paid plans starting at $167 per month for the starter package.
SimilarWeb is a unique competitor analysis tool.
It’s focused less on SEO and more on providing a clear image of the differences between the two websites.
There are multiple data points related to traffic, keywords, traffic share by country, and even a comparison of audience demographics.
SimilarWeb offers a free and paid version.
The free version offers a generous amount of data that helps users compare competitors.
10. LinkResearchTools
- Pricing: Starts at $599 per month. One-week trial for $17.
LinkResearchTools is an enterprise-class link research tool.
It’s the most sophisticated and comprehensive link-building tool I’ve ever used.
One of the qualities I like most is that it feels like it has a comprehensive inventory of crawled links.
The tool makes it easy to find links with normal searching, like adding a TLD, but you can also find links multiple sites have in common.
Most of the functionality is geared toward businesses that want to disavow backlinks, which is useless for link builders.
I’d like to see a tool that does away with all of the link-disavowing-related features and just focuses on researching competitor backlinks.
One can subscribe to most of the other lower-priced tools and use their combined competitor backlink research features and still pay less than LinkResearchTools.
For most people, that’s more than enough.
But the data in LinkResearchTools is, in my experience, possibly the most comprehensive backlink data available.
Backlink Analysis
Backlink analysis is more than just poaching keywords from competitors.
It’s a way to understand what the barrier to entry might be, which means how easy or difficult it might be to compete.
Competitor links can be a starting point for building better links as well.
Sometimes a group of links might stand out, giving you an idea of a direction to take.
Doing solid link building requires a flexible backlink analysis tool.
Konkurrentforskning
There are many useful SEO tools available today. They don’t do the SEO for you, but they make it easier to accomplish better results faster.
The tools also provide time-saving access to a huge amount of data that would ordinarily take days to compile.
Saving time, being more productive, and having the data to make informed decisions is the hallmark of all of these SEO tools.
Utvald bild: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
11 tips för att optimera prestanda Max-kampanjer


Performance Max campaigns are the pinnacle of automation in PPC, so it’s no surprise they continue to be a major topic of debate for PPC professionals looking to balance time savings with peak campaign performance.
The primary goal of Performance Max campaigns is to drive conversions, such as sales, leads, or sign-ups, for your business while maintaining a competitive cost-per-action (CPA) or return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).
By utilizing Smart Bidding strategies and dynamically adapting ad creatives, these campaigns help advertisers reach a wider audience and boost the results obtained from traditional, single-channel campaigns.
But their high dependence on AI doesn’t mean these are set-it-and-forget-it campaigns.
Automation can still benefit from the touch of an expert PPC manager. But because they are so different from traditional campaigns, there are unique ways to optimize Performance Max (PMax) campaigns.
PMax optimization broadly falls into three categories:
- Setting them up for success.
- Monitoring that the AI is driving the right results.
- Tweaking the campaigns to further optimize their performance.
Read on to learn how to get the most out of your PMax campaigns by addressing each of these three areas of opportunity.
How To Set Up PMax Campaigns For Success
Let’s start with what can be done to set up Performance Max campaigns to be successful out of the gate.
Remember that one big risk of automated PPC is that machine learning algorithms can eat up a significant amount of budget during the learning phase, where it establishes what works and what doesn’t.
Many advertisers don’t have the patience or the deep pockets to pay for machines to learn what they already know from their own experience.
1. Run It In Addition To Traditional Campaign Types
This advice is straight from Google, which says
“It’s designed to complement your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.”
And while running Performance Max as a stand-alone campaign is better than not advertising on Google at all, for professional marketers, it should be seen as a supplement to existing campaign types.
Running PMax campaigns in conjunction with traditional search and display campaigns offers advertisers a more comprehensive and diversified marketing strategy.
This approach allows businesses to capitalize on the strengths of each campaign type while mitigating their limitations, resulting in a more balanced and effective promotional effort.
Traditional search campaigns are particularly effective at capturing user intent through keyword targeting, ensuring ads are shown to users actively searching for relevant products or services.
Traditional display campaigns, on the other hand, are excellent at raising brand awareness and reaching audiences across a vast network of websites and apps.
PMax campaigns complement these traditional approaches by utilizing machine learning to optimize ad targeting and placement across multiple Google platforms.
This broadens the reach of advertising efforts, tapping into new audience segments and driving conversions more efficiently.
Combining these campaign types allows advertisers to cover all stages of the customer journey, from awareness and consideration to conversion and retention, while maximizing their ROAS.
2. Exclude Brand Keywords From Performance Max
One keyword-targeted search campaign you should always have is a brand campaign.
Then, ask your Google rep to exclude your brand keywords from all PMax campaigns so they don’t cannibalize traffic from your brand campaign.
Brand traffic should be inexpensive because it’s leveraging the power of your own brand. When users search for that, your ads will be the best match with the highest Quality Score and hence should be discounted significantly.
But because Performance Max’s mission is to generate more conversions, it may actually end up bidding on really expensive brand-adjacent queries.
For example, if I bid on the keyword “optmyzr,” I’ll pay around $0.10 per click when someone searches for exactly that.
(Disclosure, I am the co-founder of Optmyzr.)
But if I show ads for the keyword “optmyzr ppc management software,” I’m competing against every advertiser who bids for ‘ppc management software,’ my brand discount disappears, and those clicks will cost several dollars each.
In a branded search campaign, I can control exactly which traffic to target using positive and negative keywords. But in Performance Max, there is no easy way to manage keywords, so Google may use the really cheap brand traffic to subsidize the much more expensive brand-adjacent traffic.
Ultimately, you will get results within your stated ROAS eller CPA limits. And while that may be acceptable to some, many advertisers prefer to manage their brand campaign separately from everything else.
3. Create Multiple Performance Max Campaigns To Target Different Goals
The same reasons why you would run more than one campaign in an account without Performance Max apply to why you should consider having multiple PMaxcampaigns.
For example, online retailers often set different goals for different product categories because they have different profit margins. By splitting these products into different campaigns with different ROAS targets, advertisers can maximize their profitability.


Maintaining multiple campaigns also supports seasonal advertising plans that may require different budgets at different times of the year.
Google supports up to 100 Performance Max campaigns per account, so that indicates that it, too, agrees there are many different good reasons why an advertiser would want to maintain more than one campaign.
4. Manage Final URL Expansion
When you create a PMax campaign, you tell Google what landing page to send traffic to. But you also get to decide if Google can expand to other landing pages on your domain.
Think of it a bit as dynamic search ads (DSAs), which automatically match your site’s pages to potentially relevant searches and automatically generate the ads to show.
Final URL expansion should be used cautiously.
At the campaign’s onset, consider focusing all your budget on the landing pages you care most about. If the results are good, then expand to more final URLs automatically.
And always be sure to use rules and exclusions to ensure Google doesn’t show your ads for parts of your site you don’t want advertised. For example, exclude your login page (assuming that one is ranked high in SEO).
You can also exclude sections of your site that are the focus of other campaigns. A retailer could exclude all pages that include the path ‘electronics’ in their apparel campaign to ensure consumers interested in electronics are served ads from the most relevant campaign.
5. Add Audience Signals From The Start
Adding audiences to a Performance Max campaign helps enhance the targeting and performance of your marketing efforts.
While PMax campaigns already utilize machine learning to optimize ad targeting, incorporating audience information provides additional context that can further improve the campaign’s efficiency.
Adding audience information enables the machine learning algorithms in PMax campaigns to make more informed decisions when optimizing ad targeting and placements. This can lead to better campaign performance and a higher ROAS.
By specifying particular audience segments, such as in-market, affinity, or remarketing audiences, advertisers can tailor their campaign messaging and creative to resonate better with their target users. This enables more personalized and relevant ad experiences, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.
Advertisers should also attach their own audiences to Performance Max campaigns. For example, by attaching a list of all their existing customers, they can choose to have the PMax campaign prioritize new user acquisition.
Because it is generally harder and more expensive to find new users than to convince existing users to make another purchase, adding this setting can better focus the ad budget on what is most valuable to the business.
How To Monitor Performance Max Campaigns For Success
Even when campaigns are well set up, monitoring AI is always a smart idea because it can sometimes make questionable decisions.
When I accidentally turned on automatically applied recommendations from Google, I found that my brand keyword ‘optmyzr’ was removed by Google because the AI felt it was redundant to some other keywords in my campaign, particularly some misspellings of our brand name.
I investigated and found the keywords Google preferred delivered fewer conversions and had a higher CPA than the keywords it removed. So not only was AI semantically wrong, but it also made a bad decision for my bottom line.
So let’s look at some ways to monitor Performance Max campaigns.
6. Report Where Your Performance Max Traffic Is Coming From
Just like you may have monitored clicks and impressions by device types or from different geographic areas, in PMax you should care about the performance of the various channels where your ads are shown.
If you only look at the overall performance of a PMax campaign, you may be falling into the trap of averages.
Relying solely on averages can be misleading and might not accurately represent the true nature of the underlying data.
Averages can oversimplify complex data, reducing it to a single value that may not capture important nuances or patterns within the dataset, and this can mask the variability or range of values in the dataset, leading to false assumptions about the consistency or homogeneity of the data.




For example, is low performance on the display network made up for by the great performance of ads on YouTube?
On average, the campaign drives the results you want. But by eliminating some wasteful portions, results could be even better than what you asked for.
Even if the campaign is delivering the desired results, knowing about possible inefficiencies puts you in a better position to address those and tilt the playing field back in your favor.
Tools like Optmyzr make it easy to see where your budget is spent in PMax, and there are also Google Ads scripts that will add this type of clarity to your data.
7. Monitor For Cannibalization
Because PMax campaigns don’t include the traditional search terms reports and only include part of that data in insights, it can be difficult to know when it is cannibalizing the other campaigns you’re running in parallel.
When it comes to standard shopping campaigns and PMax for retail (which replaced Smart Shopping campaigns), the PMax campaign always takes precedence over the traditional shopping campaign. For this reason, it’s important to segment products to avoid overlap.
For example, you could advertise shower doors in one campaign and bathroom vanities in another. But if there is any possible overlap, even segmenting campaigns may not lead to the desired result.
For example, shower wands advertised in a traditional shopping campaign may be closely enough related to shower doors and get mixed into the PMax campaign for shower enclosures.
Regarding keyword cannibalization, Google says if the user’s query is identical to an eligible Search keyword of any match type in your account, the Search campaign will be prioritized over Performance Max.
But if the query is not identical to an eligible Search keyword, the campaign or ad with the highest Ad Rank, which considers creative relevance and performance, will be selected.
And even a keyword that is an identical match may be ineligible due to a variety of factors and still get cannibalized.
The best way to monitor for cannibalization is to monitor campaign volumes and look for shifts. Does an unexpected drop in a search campaign correspond to an increase in traffic to the PMax campaign? If so, dig deeper and use our optimization tip for managing negative keywords that we’ll cover in the next section.
Optimizations For Performance Max
While PMax promises to optimize itself on an ongoing basis thanks to AI, there are some proactive ways you can still help the machines deliver better results.
8. Use Account-Level Negative Keywords
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to add negative keywords to a PMax campaign without the help of a Google rep. And even then, they will generally only add negative brand keywords to help prevent cannibalizing a brand campaign.
But PMax campaigns can work with shared negative keyword lists if you email Support and ask them to attach one of your shared negative lists to your PMax campaigns.
From that point forward, you can simply add negative keywords to the shared list, and they will instantly take effect on the PMax campaign that is associated with the shared negative list.
While Google doesn’t share full search term details for PMax the way it does for search campaigns, it will show keyword themes under insights. This is one good source for negative keyword ideas.
You should also leverage data from traditional search campaigns you’re running in parallel to PMax.
So mine your traditional search campaigns for negative keyword ideas, for example, when users search for things like ‘free’ ‘login’, etc., that never convert well. Add these as negative keywords to the shared negative list that is attached to your PMax campaign.
9. Use Account-Level Placement Exclusions
When it comes to placements, Google has a predefined report that shows placements where your Performance Max ads were shown.




This is a great starting point to find ideas for placements to exclude.
To exclude placements from PMax, you’ll need to exclude them at the account level, since it’s not possible to add negative placements to individual PMax campaigns. You’ll find this ability under the “Content” section of the Google Ads account.




Just like with negative keyword discovery, consider using your account-wide placement data from all campaigns to find placements to exclude in PMax.
And if you run multiple Google Ads accounts, you can get even better results by finding money-wasting sites and apps in the display network to exclude across all the accounts you manage.
Or when working with a tool provider, they may even be able to help you find negative placement ideas from their own vast network of data.
10. Exclude Non-Performing Geo Locations
Even though PMax uses automated bidding, which doesn’t support geo bid adjustments, you can still leverage geo data in two ways.
You can either exclude locations that don’t drive conversions or use conversion value rules to manipulate the value you report for conversions from different regions so that the bids will get adjusted accordingly.
For example, if you report conversions as soon as someone fills out your lead form, but you know that people in Munich become paying customers at a higher rate than people who fill out the same form from Berlin, you can set a conversion value rule to value conversions from Munich more highly.
This helps automated bidding make the right decisions about what CPC bid will likely have the desired ROAS.
And that leads to our final optimization tip, which is a big one.
11. Feed Correct Conversion Data
AI can only do a good job for your account if you tell it what the goal is.
And the goal should be precise.
It shouldn’t be to get the most conversions possible if your real goal is to drive profits.
Or to get as many leads as possible if you want leads that turn into customers.
Setting up goals correctly can make a huge difference in how well PPC automation will perform.
Updating goals with margin data or with data from your sales team can be a significant effort, and that’s why I’ve listed this as an ongoing optimization strategy rather than an up-front setup task.
Get PMax up and running with the conversions you’ve already been operating with, and then work to constantly enhance that conversion data.
Slutsats
With these 11 tips to optimize your Performance Max campaigns, you can expect better results while also benefiting from the time savings promised by automated campaign types.
There are many more tips I didn’t cover here that you can discover by joining the dialogue online.
And there will be many more tips to come as PPC automation continues to evolve.
Fler resurser:
Featured Image: TippaPatt/Shutterstock
SEO
En strategi för att rangordna lokala söktermer


Location landing pages don’t get enough respect.
You set them up with your name, address, phone number & hours. Maybe you embed a Google Map for driving directions.
Perhaps you write some copy that no one will read, and if you have multiple locations, you repeat the same copy on each page and just change the location name.
If you’re feeling cocky, you put a call to action on it – maybe.
You set it, then you forget it.
And guess what? That actually works pretty well for local SEO.
I mean, what more does a potential customer want from a location page? Maybe an appointment scheduler?
But who cares about the customer? We smug SEO types all know Google is our #1 customer.
So, what does Google want from a location page? Let’s start with the basics.
1. What Is The Purpose Of A Location Page? (PAA FTW)
I can’t believe I have to explain this, but ChatGPT isn’t going to train itself. (At least, I don’t think it will.)
For retailers, location pages come in four basic types:
1. Location Detail Page
This typically represents the physical location of a business (e.g., SideTrack Bar & Grill at 30 W. Angela St. Pleasanton, CA 94566,).
2. Location Service/Department Page
This typically represents a specific service or department category available at the physical location (e.g., SideTrack Bar & Grill Catering).
3. City Page
This typically represents the city (#duh) where various physical locations are located (e.g., Pleasanton, CA),
4. State Page
This typically represents the state (#duh2) where various physical locations are located (e.g., California).
Depending on your industry, you may also want to consider County Pages (or Boroughs, Provinces, Prefectures, or whatever nomenclature your particular country uses).
For example, attorneys specializing in the laws of a specific county may find it useful to set up a page for that county.
There are likely infinite other options, but these are the main ones that 99% of you with location-based businesses need to consider.
For service area businesses (aka “SABs”), it’s basically the same setup, except you will typically want to create additional City Pages for the various areas you serve (e.g., Plumber in Livermore, CA, Plumber in San Ramon, CA, etc.).
This will help you target these queries in the Local Organic search engine results pages (SERPs) – those results that typically show up below/above Local Packs – and they can help your Google Business Profile (GBP) be more relevant for queries for those areas.
2. Why Do Location Pages Matter For SEO?
Despite their simplicity, location pages can play a big part in SEO for brands.
There are two basic types of search queries these pages are tailor-made for:
Brand Queries
These are perhaps the most important queries to show up on Google for.
When a searcher queries [Starbucks], [Starbucks near me], or [Starbucks Pleasanton], Google typically wants to show a location page for that brand.
If you don’t have a page for the specific location, Google may show your homepage, a nearby City Page, or perhaps a page for a third-party site like a local business directory that uses your brand name, plus the location for SEO purposes.
And, of course, there are all sorts of related queries like “Starbucks hours,” “Starbucks address,” etc.
Non-Brand Local Queries
These are the money queries where you can attract potential customers who may have never heard of you – or thought of you for the specific query.
Consider queries like [pizza], [pizza near me], [best pizza in Pleasanton], etc. Single-location businesses can often rank for these queries with just their homepage, which basically acts like a location page.
But multi-location businesses will typically need a page for that specific location to rank for these high-value queries in the organic results.
Links
Outside of the homepage, location pages are typically the best source of a site’s external links. Numerous local business directories link to these (aka “local citations”) and they tend to accumulate backlinks from local media sites and others over time.
They can then spread the link mojo throughout the site.
3. How Do Location Pages Affect Local Pack Rankings?
This is pretty straightforward. If you have a Googles företagsprofil (GBP) linking it to a location page for the area in which you are trying to rank is a critical ranking factor for Local Packs.
I have done plenty of tests where we changed the link to go to a page that did not target the city we wanted to rank in, and the Local Pack rankings suffered. When we switched it back, the rankings recovered.
It’s important to note: your homepage may have more location mojo than your location page for a given location, so you’ll want to test which one works better for GBP.
And as mentioned above, having a page for a given service area can help you rank for queries for those service areas.
4. What Are the Basic Elements Of A Well-Optimized Location Page?
Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP)
Your location’s business name, address, phone number, and hours. Make sure the name, and all other info, you use on this page matches the info on your business’s GBP.
Last year we looked at 100,000 SERPs and found that pages on local directory sites that exactly match the business name and other info of the relevant GBPs tended to outperform those that have partial or no matches.
Structure Your Data
Mark up all of the NAP elements i LocalBusiness schema. There are a number of specific business category schemas, so if there is something more targeted for your business, you’ll want to use that.
For brands with multiple related brands (e.g., IHG, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, etc.), you’ll want to acquaint yourself with Organization schema to help our robot overlords sort things out correctly.
And don’t forget breadcrumbs linking up to parent City/State URLs marked up with Breadcrumb schema.
Use Targeted Meta Data
The page’s title tag and H1 should ideally target the business name and location (e.g., “Starbucks Pleasanton, CA”).
You can certainly test adding additional targeting to see how it affects performance (e.g., “Starbucks Coffee in Pleasanton, CA,” “Starbucks Coffee Near Pleasanton, CA”).
Our research suggests that outside of the target category (e.g., “coffee”), the city is the most important element to be included in the title tag for “near me” searches – then the state.
Using the word “near” appears to help, but at the margins. Still, an extra 1-2% clicks couldn’t hurt, right?




5. Engagement Intangibles
“Engagement” is one of the fuzzier of the many fuzzy SEO factors.
So think about what else a potential customer might need to find a location page useful.
Calls-to-action (CTAs), like the ability to make online appointments, order something online, etc., likely send positive signals to Google about the usefulness of the location page.
6. Advanced Location Page SEO
This isn’t rocket science, so when I say “advanced,” I really mean “SEO tactics for someone who somehow got buy-in from the rest of the org to prioritize updates to the location pages that everyone forgot we even had.”
Here are some things we have seen work over time. Your mileage may vary, of course:
Optimized Copy
It’s perfectly fine to start with a basic copy block with a find and replace for the location name/city that explains what your business offers.
It’s relatively cheap and easy, and you can always go back and update the copy later. See what that gets you before spending more time or money on it.
That said, we tend to see more targeted copy outperform instances of using the same copy on each page. I recall a client site not moving in rankings for six months until we updated the copy on the location pages to be unique.
As with everything SEO, try to test this at a small scale before you make a bigger investment.
Hopefully, it goes without saying, but I’ll say it: using phrases relevant to the topic you are targeting in your copy couldn’t hurt.
Certain businesses may also benefit from adding “Points of Interest” (aka “POIs”) to the copy. For example, people often search for hotels with modifiers like “near the airport.”
So adding those phrases and POIs to your location pages can make your page more relevant for these queries while also improving the relevance for the target city “entity.”
That’s a fancy way of saying that because you mention JFK Airport, Google may think you’re relevant to the great borough of Queens, NY. Mentioning the neighborhoods you serve is also a good one.
Link To Nearby Locations
Multi-location businesses should link to nearby locations (the distance depends on what you think is best for customers) from their location pages.
There are two good reasons besides customer convenience to do this:
- The more locations you have, the harder it is for Googlebot to find them, so linking to them from these pages creates more reasons for Googlebot to crawl them.
- Adding the other location names to the copy of the location page may make it more relevant for Google. For example, if there’s a link to “Starbucks Livermore” on the “Starbucks Pleasanton” page, the phrase “Livermore” might give Google more confidence about the Pleasanton location, since Livermore is the next town over.
Use Topically Relevant Images And Videos
Since these lowly location pages get no respect to begin with, they often are launched with copy only.
But check this out: We have found that for some niches, merely adding relevant images to the pages can help with ranking improvements.
For example, if you have a truck driver school, consider adding a picture of a person driving a truck (#duh3). If you are a remodeler, maybe add some shots of recent projects.
A good rule of thumb is to look at the top-ranking pages in the Local Pack for your query and make sure you have just as good, if not better, images and/or videos on your location page.
Använda sig av Google’s Vision API to ensure it understands what your image is about.
Link To Product/Service Category Pages
Last year we looked at Local Packs across 10,000,000 keywords for 40 ecommerce categories in 5,000 U.S. markets (the things we do for SEO…).
One of our key findings was that location pages that linked to category pages (e.g., Target.com’s Dublin, CA page linking to its Video Games Category Page) tended to outrank those sites that didn’t do this.
This simple tactic can have a significant impact.
Pick the categories you want to prioritize and link away.
Add Local Reviews
Adding a feed of customer reviews to these pages, particularly if the reviews are from the page’s target area, can often improve performance.
One of my theories is that a regularly updated review feed gives Google a good reason to visit the page often and prioritize it.
Before you implement this, be sure to bone up on Google’s guide to user reviews och its rules for marking up “self-serving” reviews.
Notera: I have rarely seen a site penalized for violating these rules, but you may not want to be Patient Zero on this one.
Meet The Team!
We recently did a project for a moving company where we observed that many of the best-ranking pages in their markets had pictures of the local team.
According to my friend Carrie Hill of Sterling Sky,
“Any time someone goes into a client’s house, car, or business, I advise putting employee faces on websites, confirmations, and reminders.”
The Kitchen Sink
Other items that could make sense on your location pages and improve engagement include:
- Philanthropy and community connections.
- Local sponsorships.
- Hiring and careers info.
- Pricing info (marked up with Price schema, of course).
- Business license/insurance info.
- Social proof and trust signals like BBB accreditation for each location and/or “Voted Best Boba Shop in Pleasanton!”
Use Google Merchant Center Data To Increase Conversions
If you are running product listing ads (PLAs) you likely have a ton of data in Google Merchant Center that can give you hints on how to improve conversions on your location pages.
The TL;DR: Check your Google Merchant Center (GMC) to see what products get the highest impressions and click-through rate (CTR) when they are connected to your GBP in the SERPs.
This can be found in the “Local Surfaces” report. These products should be featured on the relevant location page.




Google is showing you that people are already interested in them.
See Google Merchant Center: A Local SEO Goldmine for Retailers for more detail on this wacky trick.
7. What Should I Not Do With Location Pages?
Over the past decade or two, we have tried pretty much everything you can think of with these things. Here are a couple of things you’ll want to be wary of:
Unnecessary Location + Service Pages
We’ve seen many brands launch location + service/department pages linked off the location detail page. For example, Home Depot has these pages for Home Services, Truck Rental, and its Garden Centers.
There are plenty of good non-SEO reasons to have these pages. If you are looking to rent a truck, having a specific page about renting a truck in your city might be helpful.
But be clear that this will often not be a net-new traffic play.
Why do I say this?
Because, after looking at organic traffic data to tens of thousands of location + service pages, we have observed that most of the time, 90% of the organic traffic to these pages is brand traffic, and they are likely cannibalizing searches you were already getting.




This is not the case in every situation, and it may be worth it to roll these out merely to improve conversions.
But you should be aware that these may not be a net positive in terms of organic traffic, and they may even have negative SEO effects due to increasing the number of “thin” URLs on the site.




In one case, we had a client with about 100,000 URLs launch these pages, which created about 1,000,000 new URLs. Guess how well that went.
Our rule of thumb is that if a department or service can get a GBP, it may be worth creating a local page for SEO purposes. This doesn’t apply to all cases, of course.
Location Pages With No Location
We recently worked on a retailer site that created pages for cities that were near their locations, but where they had no locations.
The pages looked like every other location page, but instead of presenting NAP info for a relevant location, it linked to the nearby locations.
This was a national site, so they had over 130,000 of these. And, of course, they were getting virtually zero organic traffic.
For SABs, this tactic is necessary if you want to rank outside of your physical location’s area (more on that in a moment). But it seems that, for queries that imply a searcher is looking for a physical location, Google doesn’t want to show you these types of no-location pages.
Oh, and don’t add insult to injury by creating local pages for every brand you carry (e.g.,/ca/pleasanton/flaming-hot-cheetohs). This client had about 500,000 of those and, you guessed it, virtually no organic traffic.
Beware Thin Content Location Pages
A common tactic for service area businesses or SABs is to create a ton of location pages for the areas they serve.
They may even make the content on them super unique.




The challenge is that we are starting to see these types of plays get manual actions for thin content.
Of course, Google does not seem to apply this across the board. I still see plenty of “thin” location pages for various queries.
So what can you do? It’s the same challenge every other SEO has.
Look at what type of content is doing best for a particular query type and create a better page. Let’s face it: when it comes to location pages, the bar is pretty low.
Only Create Pages When There Is Clear Local Intent
Vi har precis avslutat ett projekt för en advokat med praktiker i 30+ städer. De har 54 övningsområden och har skapat plats + övningssidor för varje. Det är 1 620+ sidor för Google att räkna ut.
Det första vi gjorde var att fastställa hur mycket "lokal avsikt" det fanns för sökresultat för varje övningsområde.
"Lokal avsikt" kan bestämmas av vilken % i en SERP som har "lokalt" innehåll (t.ex. lokala paket, städer eller delstater i titlarna, föreslagna eller relaterade sökningar, etc.).
Du behöver ingen platssida för en fråga med relativt låg lokal avsikt. Denna speciella advokat hade 300+ platssidor som riktade in sig på frågor som inte hade någon lokal avsikt.
I dessa fall skulle det vara bättre för SEO att omdirigera dessa sidor till en enda "nationell" tjänstsida.
Så innan du investerar mycket i att skapa platssidor, kolla först efter lokala avsikter. Det kan spara mycket tid och pengar.
Jag kunde fortsätta.
Dessa bedrägligt enkla sidor har nästan oändliga möjligheter för SEO, men min gissning är att om du har kommit så långt har du nu massor av JIRA-biljetter att prioritera.
Gunga galunga.
Speciellt tack till Carrie Hill, Amy Toman, Mike Blumenthal, Joy Hawkins, Brandon Schmidt och Will Scott för att ha lämnat feedback.
Speciellt tack till LSG-teamet för att de skrek åt mig som om de vore min mamma när jag skjutit upp när jag skrev den här artikeln.
Fler resurser:
Utvald bild: DEEMKA STUDIO/Shutterstock
SEO
AI Domain Name Generator & AI Writer tillkännagav av Web.com


Web.com, destinationen för allt-i-ett-webbtjänster, tillkännagav två nya AI-baserade verktyg som hjälper användare att välja ett domännamn och ge innehållsidéer.
Medan AI Writer-verktyget är till för kunder, använder du AI Domain Name Generator är gratis och tillgänglig för alla att använda utan att behöva registrera sig för någonting.
Web.com AI-verktyg
Web.com är en leverantör av hosting, domän, webbplatsbyggande, SEO, säkerhet och e-posttjänster.
Det är också en ecommerce plattform, i huvudsak en enda destination för allt som behövs för att lansera en webbplats.
Så det är en naturlig passform att introducera ett AI-baserat verktyg som hjälper kunder i början av deras webbresa när de väljer ett domännamn.
Innehållsidéer för produktbeskrivningar, artikelutdrag och innehåll för bloggar är också ett användbart tillägg som bör hjälpa deras användare att utnyttja OpenAI-tekniken.
AI-författare
Web.coms AI-skribent är ett verktyg som är exklusivt för deras kunder.
Verktyget fungerar med ett lättanvänt steg för steg-gränssnitt.
Först väljer en användare vilken typ av innehåll som behövs och sedan uppmanar den att välja kontextuellt relevanta alternativ som viktiga nyckelord eller tonen i innehållet.
Den skapar följande typer av innehåll:
- Artikel
- Landningssida
- Metabeskrivningar
- Metatitlar
- PPC-annons
- Produktbeskrivning
- Produktinformationssida
- Tjänster sida
- Socialt inlägg
AI-författaren arbetar också på följande tolv språk:
- arabiska
- engelsk
- franska
- tysk
- hindi
- italienska
- japanska
- Mandarin
- putsa
- ryska
- spanska
- ukrainska
Jag frågade Web.com om verktyget automatiskt kan infoga produktbeskrivningar och metabeskrivningar.
De svarade:
"Inte än, funktionen AI Writer i produkten genererar kopian åt dig, du kan anpassa den efter eget tycke och sedan kopiera och klistra in den.
Men den typen av integration inom webbplatsbyggaren kommer i nästa fas av produkten."
Så här fungerar verktyget:
"Den utvecklades för entreprenörer och småföretag som letar efter ett enkelt sätt att skapa innehåll för sina webbplatser, sociala sidor, bloggar, produktbeskrivningar och digitala marknadsföringskampanjer utan att behöva skriva det själva.
Det AI-drivna verktyget erbjuder en mängd innehållsuppmaningar och gränssnitt beroende på innehållsbehov, vilket gör det enkelt att skräddarsy innehåll efter specifika behov (t.ex. emojis för sociala inlägg).
Andra anpassningsbara element inkluderar designtoner, nyckelord och flerspråkig innehållsgenerering på över 10 språk, inklusive engelska, spanska, franska och mandarin, så skapare kan skapa webbplatser även på ett språk de inte behärskar flytande.”
AI Writer-verktyget är baserat på OpenAI, så det är ett bekvämt sätt för kunder att komma åt dessa verktyg i sitt arbetsflöde.
AI Domain Name Generator
AI-domännamnsgeneratorn är ett offentligt verktyg som hjälper användare att bolla idéer om domännamn.
Det utnyttjar OpenAI-teknik så att alla som är bekanta med att uppmana ChatGPT omedelbart kommer att känna sig bekväma med att använda det här verktyget.
Men verktyget är så enkelt att använda att någon som är ny på generativ AI borde kunna använda det.
Det som gör det här verktyget intressant är att AI-domännamnsgeneratorn är öppen för användning av vem som helst, du behöver inte vara registrerad användare eller kund för att dra nytta av den.
Jag gav det ett försök och genom att beskriva vilken typ av verksamhet domännamnet är till för och det genererade några ganska bra sökordsbaserade domännamn.
Mina preferenser tenderar mot varumärkesdomäner.
Så jag uppdaterade uppmaningen genom att lägga till "Använd inte nyckelord för domännamnet utan ge mig hellre ett suggestivt varumärke."
Och det fungerade!
Web.com beskrev deras verktyg:
"Traditionellt brainstorming och manuell sökning efter tillgängliga domännamn kan vara tidskrävande och arbetskrävande.
Genom att kombinera AI med vår expertis och erfarenhet som en av de största domännamnsleverantörerna i världen, erbjuder Web.com småföretag ett mer effektivt, kreativt och skräddarsytt tillvägagångssätt för att hitta de bästa tillgängliga och relevanta domännamnen.
En kund kan ge några ord för att beskriva sin verksamhet, och den AI-drivna domännamnsgeneratorn ger de bästa idéerna om domännamn, vilket avsevärt minskar tiden och ansträngningen som krävs för att hitta ett relevant domännamn.”
De AI-domännamnsgenerator är tillgänglig här.
Utvald bild av Shutterstock/Kateryna Onyshchuk
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