How to Rank Your Site Locally

I live in Atlanta, so my market is massive. If people search long tail keywords + city specific locations (i.e., How to sell my house fast Sandy Springs), how can I rank for that location if I only target the city Atlanta?

I must give credit for this strategy to the Carrot team (they are awesome in general), but I wanted to explain to you all how I use this strategy.

Using Keywords to Rank Higher

If you want to rank in Google, you should have content on your site that Google can index. I use blog posts with targeted keywords, pictures, and videos. I find my long tail keywords by searching for the main keyword like “we buy houses” and then going to the bottom of the page and taking suggestions that Google has given. Anything that Google is suggesting are phrases that people are searching for. They want to provide you with relevant content so they are going to suggest searches that match what you’re looking for as much as possible, which is normally what other people have already been searching.

I usually build out a spreadsheet listing all the keywords that I find. Once I have my list, I will start brainstorming on content to write around the keywords. The trick here is that you don’t really want your keywords to drive your content. You want your content to drive your keywords. So, it’s important to build out your page based on emphasizing someone’s situation, talk about the problem, and tell them how you can solve that problem for them. Then when you’re done, you can go back in and put in the keywords where they would naturally occur.

Don’t force keywords into your content. Keyword stuffing is not going to help you.

Finding Your Cities / Areas to Target

I searched for “Largest Cities In Atlanta” and was directed to Wikipedia. Where your search takes you is going to be different.

This page that I found sorted the cities within Atlanta by population. I chose the top 15 that are in my farm area and added them to my spreadsheet. You can choose more or less based on your farming area. That’s just what encompasses my farm area.

City Specific Pages

Let’s assume I keyword searched “We Buy Houses” I have my main page built out that I wrote content for and put all my associated keywords into. This page is naturally populated with Atlanta.

Now I have both my keywords and my cities that I am targeting, and I have already built my page out for my keyword.

I will now duplicate my “We Buy Houses” page and go in and change the market city and zip codes so that my site will repopulate with my new city. Instead of the page saying, “We Buy Houses Atlanta,” it will say “We Buy Houses Sandy Springs.”

I will repeat this for all of my cities and keywords that I want to target on my spreadsheet to optimize my website for all of the main keywords and cities that people are searching for.