This session was presented at the LSA’s Localogy event in New York City on October 11, 2018.

1. Data Driven Local Pages
The Essential Strategy for Multi Location Organic Performance
Russ Jones | Principal Search Scientist at Moz | russ@moz.com| @rjonesx

2. ABOUT RUSS
Who does this guy think he is?
• Principal Search Scientist
• Algorithm Research
• Proof of Concept Design
• Internal Consulting
• Chief Technology Officer
• SEO Consulting
• Marketing Software Development
Moz: 2015 - Present
Virante: 2005 - 2015
@@ rjonesx

4. Types of Competition
What types of sites and features tend to appear on local SERPs?

5. Types of Competition
What types of sites and features tend to appear on
local SERPs?
Local Pack
• Most of Local SEO focuses on this
SERP Feature
• Good local pages optimization can
actually improve performance here
• With only 3 listings, you have a lot
more chances to get at least some
traffic by targeting the general
organic results.

6. Types of Competition
What types of sites and features tend to appear on local SERPs?
Local Brick & Mortar
• Single location provider
• Tend to do well because of
homepage links

7. Types of Competition
What types of sites and features tend to appear on local SERPs?
Aggregators
• Another opportunity for you
to get traffic
• If an aggregator is already
ranking in your space, take
advantage of it.
ADVERTISING

8. Types of Competition
What types of sites and features tend to appear on local SERPs?
Local Pages
• Occupy the most organic
space, although near the
bottom.
• The same site can have
multiple listings
• Susceptible to traditional
SEO tactics
• But….. Scaling is hard for
large brands with thousands
of locations

9. DO ORGANIC RANKINGS
STILL MATTER?
Distribution of OrganicPercent Organic
Despite the fact that Local Packs and Adwords take clicks away from
organic, the majority of clicks still go through those traditional 10
blue links.
…….

10. 31%
of Traffic Went to
Organic Local Pages
in this Example Search

11. Relevant
Obviously, content must be
relevant to the location and
the business
01
Authority
Links, links, and more links.
Link equity still matters.02
Unique
Distinct content that makes local
pages more than just boilerplate
mail-merge content
WHAT MAKES A GOOD LOCAL PAGE
How do we differentiate between a good local page and
an average local page?
03

13. MVP
* Denotes minimum value page, not most valuable page.
*

15. the natural language processing task of generating
natural language from a machine representation system
such as a knowledge base or a logical form.
Natural Language Generation
NLG

16. SULLIED SEARCH HISTORY
NLG HAS A DIRTY HISTORY IN SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

17. RICH ACADEMIC HISTORY
NLG HAS PROVEN A VALUABLE ACADEMIC ENDEAVOR

18. WHITE HAT NLG PRINCIPLES
HOW CAN AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED CONTENT BE WHITE HAT?
Editorial
Oversight
Sufficient
Attribution
All Existing
Quality
Guidelines

19. TRANSFORMATIVE
RADICALLY TRANSFORM LOCAL LANDING PAGES WITH DATA
Current Page
• No actual city pages, just lists
of locations
• 22,000 Pixels Tall (cropped to
have mercy on PowerPoint)
• No valuable text content
NLG Page
• Relevant information to
customers
• Integrated sales pitches based
on relevant, data-driven sources
• Properly sourced and attributed
throughout the content.
• Locations still give proper focus
at top of the page.

20. Identify content fragments
that can be drawn from data
sets
Step 02
Connect extracted data to
content fragments and join
together
Step 04
Identify Geolocations for
content creation
Step 01
Identify, collect, and extract
data sets for content
fragments
Step 03
NLG PROCESS
Pulling together data sets for scaling geographically specific content.

21. LOCATION SELECTION
CITY, ZIP, THAT IS THE QUESTION
Keyword Lists
This is one place where Moz
Keyword Explorer shines. By
taking all of the cities, counties,
zip codes, etc. and combining
them with keywords into
Keyword Lists, we can get
average keyword difficulty and
potential scores, making it easier
to determine how to segment
local landing pages.

22. BRAINSTORM CONTENT FRAGMENTS
WHAT QUESTIONS DO CUSTOMERS ASK THAT DEPEND ON LOCATION?
Questions
Start by combining your
keywords with questions using
tools like AnswerThePublic (free)
or Moz’s Keyword Groupings
and Question Filter. We can
immediately see that data about
weather is important to location.

23. BRAINSTORM CONTENT FRAGMENTS
WHAT SAFETY DATA IS AVAILABLE ON THE WEB RELATED TO LOCATION?
Safety
There is almost always data on
safety related to products and
industries that can be drawn
back to a location level. For
example, car crash data is
available at state and local level.

24. BRAINSTORM CONTENT FRAGMENTS
Comparison and Trends by Location
Trends
Every geographic area in the
United States has its own
preferences and trends. Finding
data sources for those trends is a
fantastic opportunity for
creating fresh, local pages that
actually drive sales.

25. BRAINSTORM CONTENT FRAGMENTS
Establish Fragment Structures
Input + geo
x y
z
Russ jones is the smartest
Person in the whole world and I
think that everything is going
to be better because he is
responsible for this text.
Russ jones is the smartest
Person in the whole world and I
think that everything is going
to be better because he is
responsible for this text.
Russ jones is the smartest
Person in the whole world and I
think that everything is going
to be better because he is
responsible for this text.
Example:
1. Determine Weather Matters to Roofing Company
2. Determine Which Weather Patterns Matter
3. Connect Pattern to Content (Image, Text)
4. Inject Data into Content (Temperature, Dates, Forecast, etc.)
5. Include Sales Objectives

26. WHAT DOES A GOOD FRAGMENT LOOK LIKE?
NOT ALL CONTENT FRAGMENTS ARE MADE EQUAL
Russ jones is the smartest
Person in the whole world and I
think that everything is going
to be better because he is
responsible for this text.
Russ jones is the smartest
Person in the whole world and I
think that everything is going
to be better because he is
responsible for this text.

27. WHAT DOES A GOOD FRAGMENT LOOK LIKE?
NOT ALL CONTENT FRAGMENTS ARE MADE EQUAL
Russ jones is the smartest
Person in the whole world and I
think that everything is going
to be better because he is
responsible for this text.
Russ jones is the smartest
Person in the whole world and I
think that everything is going
to be better because he is
responsible for this text.

28. Identify Data Sources
Internal Data Sources

29. Identify Data Sources
Google Data Source Search

30. Identify Data Sources
Google Trends

31. Identify Data Sources
NOAA CAP FEEDS

32. Identify Data Sources
STATISTA

33. Identify Data Sources
Simple Google Fu

34. Connect
Extract data from sources and combine with fragments
Prep: API Data
API data is the easiest to ingest,
but make sure that you are
setting some sort of caching
such that the data isn’t updated
at an unreasonable rate. I find
that daily caching is most
sufficient for weather based
content generation.
Source:
openweathermap.org/api

35. Connect
Extract data from sources and combine with fragments
Prep: Static Data
Static content sources such as
exports from Google Trends,
Statista documents, internal
data documents, etc. will need
connectors built that can read
and categorize the particular file
into various fragments
necessary for generating the
content of the local page.

36. Connect
Extract data from sources and combine with fragments
Prep: Scrape Data
First, follow robots.txt. Second,
consider using a JS enabled scraping
technology given the increased usage
across the web. Finally, broadcast a bot
with a URL to a page that describes
what the data is used for. No need to
get in any copyright trouble.

37. Connect: The Magic
Prepare Connection Relationship Between Content Fragments
1. Each Location URL becomes a numeric HASH
2. A page like /raleigh/nc/tires now has a numerical representation of
84813703492547364070150612159484115290053
3. These numbers now represent which options we will choose in building our NLG content
$hash = preg_replace(‘/[^0-9]/’,’’,hash(‘sha256’,$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’]));

38. Connection example
84813703492547364070150612159484115290053
1. Let’s assume we set the rule that if the first number in the numeric representation is greater than 0, we will
include information about weather. The number is 8, so we will include weather information.
2. Let’s assume that we created 5 different textual representations of how to deal with each type of weather
formation with which we are concerned (rain, snow, and high heat)
1. “Given the ##chance## of snow in the region…
2. “We have a ##chance## of snow in ##city##...
3. “A current ##chance## of snow in ##city## means…
4. The ##chance## of snow in ##city## puts us at risk…
5. Did you know that the high risk (##chance##%) of snow in city…
3. We can use the 2nd number to determine which of those 5 choices we use. 1 or 2 would choose the first
sentence, 3 or 4 would choose the second, so on and so forth.
This pattern of using the numeric representation of the location means that the content is more unique and
does not change every time you refresh the page. Instead, the content remains consistent as long as the
underlying data sources (like the weather prediction) do not change.

39. In this example the weather was chosen, a
particular paragraph type was chosen, the safety
information about wrecks in the area and the
google trends were chosen.
The hash for a different city page might choose
to use completely different set of fragments. You
can even use the hash to determine the order. For
example, maybe if it begins with an odd number
then the weather goes second rather than first.

40. GRAYHAT?
Is this gray hat or even black hat?
Do your users have better, more useful, unique content than they would have had otherwise?
Did you assign an editor to read the content and make sure it is accurate?
Are your customers better served?

41. Something, Something, Local