One physical location but we serve 7 counties
-
I am a new business and I have one physical location but we serve 7 counties in CA how should I plan to list it?
-
Hi Shay,
Good question! I'll do my best to provide a thorough answer here, because the topic is somewhat complex. I'll number my points for easier reading.
-
If your business has a single physical location but serves clients in multiple locations (like a plumber, a mobile notary public or a carpet cleaning business) your business would be classified as an SAB (a service area business). Special rules and opportunities apply to SABs.
-
It is of primary importance to understand how Google views local search. In Google's eyes, any business is a most relevant result for its city of location. So, a barber shop in Chicago is a most relevant result for people search for 'barber shop chicago' or searching for 'barber shop' from a Chicago-based device. This also applies to SABs. So, even if a plumber located in San Francisco also serves clients Oakland, Mill Valley and Berkeley, Google still sees him as a most relevant to San-Francisco related or based searches because that is where he has his physical location.
-
What this means is that SABs can typically only pursue Local rankings for their city of location and and must pursue Organic rankings for all of their other service cities.
-
This means that you will only be creating one local business listing at each local business index (like Google Places for Business, Yahoo Local, Bing Places for Business, Yelp, etc.). This listing will revolve around your core business NAP (name, address, phone number) You will NOT be creating local listings for your service cities. Please especially familiarize yourself with the Google Places Quality Guidelines so that you do not risk penalties for accidental guideline violations: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528
-
You will be working toward high Local rankings for your city of location via a variety of methods, including having a very strong, locally-optimized website, getting listed in various indexes, getting cited by other types of publications such as local blogs and websites and earning a diverse, slow but steady variety of reviews , among other things.
-
For your other service cities, you will be employing traditional SEO methods in hopes of gaining visibility for these other places you serve. This will typically included the development of city landing pages on your website (see: <cite>www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403</cite>) and earning links from influential places.
-
I'll close with a common SAB question. SAB owners often ask if there is any chance at all of them being included in the local results for their service cities. The answer to this is, it can happen, but it's uncommon. If a business happens to be in an area of very low competition (like the only carpet cleaning company in a large rural area) then it does sometimes happen that they will show up in the local results for more than just their city of location, but this tends to be the exception rather than the rule.
With the right approach and lots of hard work, SABs can see tons of benefits from promoting themselves on the web. There are extra hurdles to jump, but it can be done. Hope this helps!
-
-
What do you mean exactly by 'plan to list it'? Biggest thing is to not mislead where you are located or where you can serve. If you want to make it clear on any site or profile list your physical location and say something like 'Serving the counties of 1,2,3...'.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Consolidate to one robust web property?
I am new at my company. I was brought on to generate more leads via their websites. Although, they aren't letting me do what I think is best. So I need help convincing them. Can you please help me prove them wrong? We are an online reseller/distributor. We sell our products under one brand. We sell a wide variety of widgets that are manufactured by several different companies. We have 9 unique web properties and 50 landing pages. Each website and landing page is on a unique domain, design, and purpose. I would like to consolidate everything to one robust, e-commerce website that will reside on our primary domain. My bosses are convinced that more websites are better because it will prevent our competitors from ranking above us. We can "block" them from ranking on all the main keywords. They are also convinced that domain name plays a major role in SEO. But I've got that part covered What do you think?
Branding | | reusabletranspack0 -
1 Website, 2 Business Names, 2 Locations
I took on a dentist office as an SEO client. They have 1 website, 2 business names and 2 locations. Each location has it's own business name. They are both within the same city as well. I'm not exactly sure where to start with them since they have 2 different business names. If it were 1 name with multiple locations I would just create a Contact Us page for each one, but is that the best thing to do when the location names are different? Should I create a different website for each location or is that smart because then they are competing against each other? Any help from the community on the direction I should take would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Branding | | SilhouetteBS0 -
Google + Brand Page for Multiple Locations
We have had our Google Places pages up and running now for a bit, and we are looking to start our Google + Brand page. What is the best way to handle a Brand page with multiple locations? Create a page for each location so we can connect them to their Places equivalent? Create one overall brand page and not connect it to the Google Places? A lot of the information I am seeing is around a year out of date with Google saying "something is coming" but no updates since then, so how have others in similar situations handled it?
Branding | | BeOnAir0 -
Two domains for different countries? or one big domain with folders?
I know this might sound as a newbie question or maybe not, here it goes. I've had a client for the past 2 years, and we have accomplish many good things for his local website .com.ve (venezuela). It's been so good that he is opening a branch in Dominican republic .com.do. The content, strategy and even the services are exactly the same, but the owner wants to have different site for each country. Of course he only wants to pay for one domain. I do want to share our success ont the .com.ve with the other domains and he actually owns the "global" domain .com with his brand name. So, what should I reccomend... Develop a second site and start from scratch? Migrate my blog from the .com.ve site to the .com site and give each country a separate folder? /ve /do?. What it's the best scenario for me to have all the traffic we have earned transfer to the global brand and to have separate info for each country... Thank you so much for your answer that I kno would be great. Dan
Branding | | daniel.alvarez0 -
One writer, multiple brands - optimizing rel=author across several blogs
Our company has a few different brands, each with their own domain and site. These are not microsites intended to drive traffic to a main site; they all have independent e-commerce functions, full product lines, etc. Imagine we run Plumbing Widgets Inc, Kitchen Remodeling Company, and Springfield Countertops. It's not immediately obvious to surfers that one parent company operates all of these brands, and we're fine with that. Considering that it enables us to own a lot of SERP real estate for some money KWs, we're more than fine with it. We'd like to create a blog for each of these sites/brands. Here's where it gets tricky. After doing some reading, I am persuaded that using rel=author will help us with SERP CTR and possibly rankings themselves. I am going to be writing all of the blog content, at least to start. I don't think I want to rel=author myself on all of these discrete blogs, do I? And surface the fact that one person is the head writer for the blogs of all these brands? Creating blogging pseudonyms doesn't seem like a good idea, since part of the value of rel=author is genuine social engagement, and creating social personas that seem genuine is probably more trouble than it's worth. (Not to mention icky and dishonest.) Should I choose a customer service rep or manager for each brand and use their names and social identities (with their permission, obviously)? It seems like that would involve challenges of its own. I've ghostwritten for one business owner before, but this is on a larger, more complex scale. Any insights are appreciated!
Branding | | CMC-SD0 -
Using Multiple Locations for Google Business/Maps
Hey MOZers, I currently work for a company with several other offices in other countries. Is it possible to set-up Google 'Business' and Google 'Maps' pages so when a user in a given country queries 'our business' on either Google 'Search' or Google 'Maps' they will receive the relevant business information for that country. For example, if an internet user in Canada enters a query for 'our business' in Canada (and we have an office in Canada) is there anyway to set up our Google Business page and Google Maps page so that user receives the contact information for the Canada office, rather than the US office? Conversely, if someone in the United States enters a search query for 'our business' is there a way to set it up so that the user receives our address in the states?
Branding | | NiallSmith0 -
Where is the best location for your blog?
This is one querstion I've been thinking about for a while: where is the best location for a blog on your website for SEO purposes? In this case I'm thinking the blog as part of a commerical website. Sub domain: You could put it on a subdomain such as blog.mydomain.com which seems quite popular (blog.kissmetrics for example) but surely this is giving the blog.mydomain sub domain the SEO value and not the www.mydomain sub domain. The one value I see here is that you could host this on another server and so any links to my main website would be from a different IP address. You could also point the sub domain to a WordPress.com blog. Internal: There are two ways the blog could be run internal to the website: 1) if the website is a WordPress.org installation you could just use one category as the blog or 2) a fresh WordPress.org installation in a sub folder such as www.mydomain.com/blog. The benefits I see with #2 is that any guest posters would only have access to the blog and not the main company website and you could make the look and feel of the blog to be more "bloggy" than the main commerical website. External: TBH I don't think there is any benefit to running a blog completely external to the commerical website (such as a WordPress.com blog) unless the company provides online services so that if the main website goes down, the blog will still be running. So, from the above, which is the best way to run a commerical site blog? Or have I missed some other options?
Branding | | Essjay0 -
Dental Office With Two Locations And Same Practice Name
Dentists buy other practices all the time. Sometimes they change the name of the practice and other times they keep the name. I am working with a dentist on a new website because their old one is riddled with flash (and is ugly too) She has two practices but they have the same practice name. One of them caters to half English speaking and half Spanish speaking patients. I'm thinking I should create a separate website for each practice mainly because we may want to design the graphics and text for the appropriate patient language probably with a English/Spanish translation button on the website? For localization, wouldn't it be better to have a url for each physical site? Suggestions?
Branding | | Czubmeister0