Does google read addresses on “Contact Us” page and use it for rankings.

I have a website that I want to rank for the search terms “podiatrist Houston”. The office is located in Pearland which is a town about 25 minutes from Houston on the outskirts of the city. I am going to have the domain name podiatristhouston.com, so I will have some EMD juice coming for the keywords “podiatrist Houston”. On the contact us page I am going to have the local address in Pearland. Will google read the address from that page and then realize the business is not in Houston, therefore not rank it high for the search terms “podiatrist houston”. I am not talking about local search results, just regular organic SERPs. Does anyone know the answer to this?

Thanks

 

Regardless of where the actual location is, if you have a page or pages, and on page optimization that references other locations, like Houston, you can get visibility for the Houston location. Moreover the page(s) might well get picked up and get more visibility for searchers from the web pages with the title for a different city.

You have to do this carefully. Don't create a ton of pages for every town in the region with duplicate material excepting the town names. Do it selectively.

 

earlpearl...It's not really appropriate for my site to have a specific page for Houston. It doesn't fit with my user experience. Plus I want the homepage to rank well. Let me ask you this. If I robots.txt the page, google will not crawl it and index it, but will it still take note of the address on my "contact us" page and use it in it's algorithm for ranking? Or is that a way to solve the issue.

 

First with regard to the first question: If you have a contact page and its address is Pearland with street number and phone number google will see it organically and locally. It will show higher for searches with local intent relative to pearland.

I suppose if you have the url with podiatristhouston it will help you for houston searches. If that topic is reasonably competitive with other podiatrist sites and the only thing you've done relative to Houston is use that domain, than it probably will lag other sites for searchers for podiatrist services in houston and/or searchers living in and around houston searching for podiatrists.

So much of this is subject to web competition. But definitely having the contact page with Pearland address, a local street, and the phone number will be a significant step in establishing Pearland as the local site as opposed to Houston.

Which will weigh heavier...the url or the address. my experience tells me the actual address will weigh more heavily.

 

earlpearl...

I know that with google local places the site will show up in pearland because I can manually add it there. But I am wondering if google will find out the address from local and link it up with the website. I have heard that local serps versus non-local serps are very independent in a lot of regards, but I am not sure if this is how google finds the address for non-local serps. One thing I am thinking about doing is putting a robots.txt file on the contact us page. But do you think google still reads it and uses that info even if they don't index it? I also thought about putting the address in a javascript obfuscator so that google can't read it. Do you think either of these solutions would work?

 

In organic google will identify the location. It will provide the website/a page for searches for podiatrists for the Pearland area, whether they include Pearland in the search phrase or not. In other words even if the search does not include pearland, but the search is for podiatrist Google will interpret that search as possibly local and include in its serps local searches (that was all part of the Venice update from early 2012). So the answer to your top question would be yes.

I'd want google to read the address. I want local customers. That is where my business is located. From a user perspective I don't care what the website says or how it is coded or some other elements. As a user I'm going to search for podiatrists. One of the key elements for me will be the podiatrists that are closer to me rather than further away, regardless of the website language or coding or marketing.

Its not the only reason to make the choice but its a major component on how people shop. All the search engines learned that over years. As a business operator we learned that over years. I wouldn't want to screw around with that.