5 replies to this topic

[NikSimms]

Hello, and sorry if this has been asked before.

I have a website called www.examplescene.com which is a directory kind of site about [a city] in the UK. The site is a little old (sorry) but it gets about 100 visitors a day and has some high positions on certain keywords i.e. [city] libraries, map of [city] etc.

Now the site has been going for some year but has never had a ranking for the keyword '[city]' 

 

Before the site gets redeveloped I was wondering if anyone can shed any light on the issue.

 

Many thanks

 

Nik

Edited by Jill, 20 December 2012 - 10:39 AM.
removed actual site name and keyword as per forum rules

[torka]

The keyword [city] without any other modifiers will be significantly more competitive. It's not surprising a site would rank highly for phrases and not for that single word. Are there other cities with the same name anywhere in the world? If so, that would add yet another layer of competitiveness.

 

In other words, whatever you've been doing you'll probably have to do "times ten" to see top rankings and traffic for just the city name.

 

Are you sure you really want to rank for just the city name in the first place? That's a very high-level, generic sort of keyword that doesn't give much of a clue as to the visitor's intent. It's going to take a lot of work to get there, and the payoff may not be proportional to the effort. With my own sites, I find I get higher-quality traffic (i.e. better converting) by targeting more specific, focused keywords -- which also usually happen to be easier to "get." But perhaps that's just me.

 

My

 

--Torka

[NikSimms]

Hi Torka,

 

Thanks for the feedback but this is a focus on the keyword 'Bolton' within Lancashire, United kingdom. The site is ranked with other related keywords and ranks higher than quite a lot of competitive sites with similar content. I'm not after being ranked highly using the keyword 'Bolton' but in the top 1000 would be good.

If you google 'bolton lancashire' it is in the top 5. Maybe it's the .com that is preventing it from showing under the UK. BTW webmasters tools are set to local UK for the location.

 

Cheers

Nik

[chrishirst]

If you google 'bolton lancashire' it is in the top 5.

 

For you, maybe.

[piskie]

Single word place name is almost always going to be more difficult to hit than a phrase.

As Bolton is a significant size I'm not surprised you are not so high for that single word search as you are for phrases containing Bolton.

Google returns 119 million results of pages when searched for just the single word Bolton.

[torka]

Not to mention that the single word "Bolton" could also refer to dozens of other towns called Bolton in the USA and elsewhere (I found a Bolton in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and New York without trying all that hard), the singer Michael Bolton, the controversial American political figure John Bolton, etc etc etc...

 

This is what i mean when I say many one-word terms are too generic to worry about. Just because somebody -- even somebody in the UK -- searches on the one word "Bolton" that doesn't necessarily mean they're looking for anything about your city at all. So I wouldn't be terribly concerned about where you rank for that one-word term.

 

As long as you're doing well with other more specific terms -- those that are clearly related to the city in Lancashire -- then you don't need to be greatly concerned about the generic one-word term, IMO. (At least, not concerned enough to be putting any significant effort into trying to increase your rankings for the word.)

 

--Torka