Optimizing for State Names v. Abbreviations: SMX Local Update

Here’s a quick tip I picked up at the SMX Local SEO panel. From Matt Van Wagner of FindMeFaster:

According to Matt he was working on a nursing home chain campaign and they found that using keyword+full state name (e.g. “nursing home New York”) outperformed keyword + state abbreviation (e.g. “nursing home NY”) for both organic local search optimization and paid search. A good tip for when you are creating pages that target where you do business.

And avoid using autogeneration if you can as it can result in some unfortunate terms emerging from your database onto your pages and ads (e.g. “ILL nursing homes” for Illinois).

I’ll try to catch up with Matt to get more details.