Huntsville SEO across four counties and a next-door city named Madison.

Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia co-founder, was born in Huntsville, and Wikipedia runs on links that say where they go. Vague link text turned up on 45% of the homepages we tested, against 32% in our 31-city sample. Links a search engine can't follow appear on 11 of 42, 26% against 21%, a smaller gap. Links with no name at all run 50% and 46%, about the same. A failure means some link on the page came up short, and that's what we'd go hunting for. The other basics are near the sample: business markup on 44% against 45%, a search description on 74% against 82%, and one H1 on 56% against 61%.

Then there's the map. Huntsville sits in Madison County and also reaches into Limestone, Marshall and Morgan Counties. Madison the city sits close by, along with Harvest, Meridianville and Owens Cross Roads. Madison County alone has 14,624 business establishments. A searcher typing "Madison" could mean the city or the county, by our guess, and a firm that says "serving the greater area" hasn't told anyone much. Name the places you really cover, on pages with something true to say about each. If you don't go to Harvest, don't write about Harvest.

For a firm selling to other businesses, our opinion is that the valuable page is the specific one. A machine shop or a bookkeeper that explains one service for one kind of client has given a careful searcher something to find and forward. A law office can do the same by practice area. That writing is the slow part, and there's no shortcut we'd sell you. SEO plans begin at $575 a month, depending on complexity and setup. The measurements are in the Huntsville report.