Russia is a huge country and your website will need a certain geotargeting if you want to be visible in a certain local SERP. Yandex algorythm Arzamas has allowed to define the region of a website or a user. Now search quieries are divided into location dependent and location independent ones. Most location dependent quieries are commercial and conversion ones as a target user is still often motivated to buy goods nainly in their town of residence.
This innovation was a good chance for local companies to see their websites in SERP – they won’t now have to struggle for higher positions against Moscow firms which have bigger budgets for internet marketing campaigns.
But location targeting has its own little deadlocks. Let’s take for example a local company in, say, Ekaterinburg, that produces some rare stuff – wooden toys or whatever. It was founded in Ekaterinburg and it has its clients in there thanks to a small internet shop and a small office. Their website was marked by Yandex as Ekaterinburg and soon it took top positions in local SERP.
Shortly the orders have grown and the firm hires new staff. Now it is ready to expand its business to the neighbouring towns and regions (Perm, Tumen, etc). How is it possible to get good positions in local SERPs and receive the target traffic? Here’s some advice from SEO expert Yeugeni Privalov. He offers ideas proven by his practice.
Register with Yandex catalogue
Sites listed in Yaca.yandex.ru are allowed to assign up to 7 regions to their website. It costs about 300 dollars to register. Still there are things you need to remember: first you’ll have to email Yaca support to ask them to assign a location different from your original one. You’ll have to prove you have an established branch in the new region with a postal address and a telephone number. Now that your new location is verified, any search quieries from, say, Izhevsk, will have your Izhevsk office website in SERP, and quieries from Chelyabinsk will get Chelyabinsk pages. This means your Ekaterinburg website becomes localised for each selected town, which will bring a significant growth of traffic from these locations.
Target locations in the names of subdomains
It is reasonable to create certain locations targeted websites at subdomains and name the subdomains by the towns you target, e.g. townname.yoursite.ru
Then Yandex could automaticaly assign a location to your subdomain website. Don’t forget to mention contacts that locate your branches at each of the subdomain websites (address, landline telephone with a city code). It is useful to place your targeted location keywords within the content of your regional website.
But you need to keep in mind that if you decide to copy your main website onto a subdomain varying only contact details without any sufficient changes to the content you will just and get no visible results but only the doubling of the content. Your subdomain website should ideally be a different website even if you provide the same products or services in all targeted locations.
If you want to get to the top in some distant regions where web and SEO services are still weak on the local market, you are sure to rule local SERP only due to good quality and well-optimised content of your website. Success guaranteed – just do everything right.