Local SEO: 1 Location Covering Multiple Surrounding Cities
-
I am setting up local pages on our main site for each of our dealers. Some of them cover multiple cities. For example, one dealer in Santa Rosa, CA, but also covers San Francisco (50 mile drive). While I know that with Google+ Local I can add coverage radius or zip code/cities covered, what about on that dealer's local page on our site? Should I create local pages for each city covered or cram local optimization into one? Keep in mind I only have one address to work with for each dealer (P.O. Boxes or Virtual Mail Boxes are NOT a good solutions).
Looking for any white hat tips before I implement for all 100+ dealers.
-
Google updated their webmaster guidelines about a year ago to specifically frown on lists of keywords like this. See:
-
Got it. Thank you!
One more question... Could a list of counties, small surrounding cities, towns, districts boroughs, etc covered on each dealer's local page add value or be seen as a negative? Imagine a NYC dealer targeting boroughs Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island or on a smaller scale an Indianapolis Dealer targeting districts Broad Ripple Village, Massachusetts Avenue, and Fountain Square. Asking because I have a list of each of these for each dealer from their old websites. And yes, I meant list. Not a paragraph about each as they are now.
-
So glad to help! I'll number my recommendations for easiest reading:
-
Use only the legal business name for each dealer. Do not add keywords of any kind, nor change the legal business name in any way. If the company is ABC Plumbing, this is how it should be listed in all cities. Use the legal business name with absolute consistency on the website, the Google+ Local pages and on third party citations.
-
Each dealer must have his own local phone number. Do not use a toll free number, a vanity number, a call tracking number or a shared number. If you want to put a toll free number in an image on the website landing pages, that's fine, and you can list a toll free number as the secondary number on the Google+ Local pages, but always put the unique, local number first.
-
Yes, the complete NAP will exist only on those website landing pages that relate to the cities in which the business is physically located. You will not be putting NAP on the 'location-less' city landing pages. That's good that you have the resources to create unique copy for these pages! You can optimize these pages for the service cities and the business name, but do not put the address and phone number of the physical office in the neighboring city on these pages.
That should cover it. Good luck with the work ahead!
-
-
Actually, I just looked at what I thought was our Santa Rosa, CA dealer and their address is actually in Rohnert Park, CA (15 miles north of Santa Rosa). So to go a little further, should the dealer be listed on Google+ Local and their local page as "ABC Plumbing Rohnert Park", "ABC Plumbing Santa Rosa" or "ABC Plumbing San Francisco"? FYI - Currently, they are optimized as "Northern California", which I do not feel is helping at all.
-
It is a pretty competitive market, so I am not sure of its reach. Looking at competition though, I think if we optimize correctly we could still rank even from Santa Rosa.
-
You are correct, it is an in-home service. And Miriam, once again you are awesome!
Currently, only 12 of them cover 2-3 cities, but this will most likely increase over the next year. We have the resources to implement a local page for each of the 2-3 cities they cover and create good unique content. If we were to do this though, there could only be one "true" NAP (true as in a street address registered with Google+ Local, etc). While these secondary city pages will not have back links from local listing/directory sites, it seems it would still be better to go this route then cram into one page, right?
If I were to create these secondary city pages I could change the dealer name to include each city name "ABC Plumbing Santa Rosa", have them get a local number for each city and include just the city/state. Also, I mentioned that they get a local number for each city they want to be optimized for, is this true? If their main NAP uses a toll-free number could each of that dealer's local pages use that same number, or would that be a duplicate issue? Leaning toward local numbers for each city anyway for better ux, but curious if it matters.
-
Good Morning!
If I'm understanding your question correctly, you are saying that you have 100+ dealers. The term 'dealer' may be confusing to me, as I'm associating it with something like car dealers (brick-and-mortar businesses without a service radius). Do your dealers travel to cities to have face-to-face transactions with customers, like a plumber would? As you've mentioned that you're using the service radius tool on the Google+ Local page, I'm going to assume that these employees do travel to various cities within their service radius to give service. If I'm wrong, please do explain.
So, back to the equation here. You have 100 dealers, and let's say that each of them has a 50 mile service radius with 20 towns and cities in it. If you went the route you're asking about of creating a page for each of these cities, that would mean developing 2000 pages on the website (20 X 100). While this is not an impossible task, it is an enormous one, and the chief danger in it would be the creation of thin, duplicate content that could lower the quality of the website. So, if you were to use this strategy, the requirement would be the manpower and money to create 2000 excellent pages on the website. These city landing pages would need to feature unique content, perhaps showcasing each dealer's projects in a given city.
A half-hearted approach, however, would do more harm than good, so if the business lacks the resources to pull this off, then a better strategy would be to create 100 pages (one for each dealer) optimized with the complete NAP encoded in Schema and featuring an overview of the dealer's work in his city of location. I would not recommend optimizing these pages for the other cities in the service radius. Google's Webmaster Guidelines frown on lists of cities served, so this would not be something you'd want to put on these pages. You could include some type of map on these pages illustrating the service area, to get the point across.
If you are forming a long-term strategy under a long-term contract with this business, then once you've got the 100 pages developed, you might create a plan for beginning to develop service city landing pages for each dealer over time, at a rate that is commensurate with the client's resources to get this work done correctly. It would likely be the work of many months or years to cover every town and city, so finding a way to scale this would likely be the chief challenge in such a project.
Again, if I've misunderstood the business model, please do clarify.
-
Hi, I think without a dealer in San Francisco with a physical address then you need to optimise the page on your site for the dealer you have in Santa Rosa complete with citations for their location (Name, Address, Phone number).
The success of the Santa Rosa dealer's page for searches for San Francisco will largely depend on the competitiveness of other dealers listed on the Internet that are selling the same products with local citations closer to San Francisco. If there are limited dealers to be found for San Francisco then Google will spread it's net wider to find other relevant results. That said, your Google+ Local listing showing coverage should help your site page.
I hope that helps,
Peter
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
-
Is good for SEO update blog post dates after update post content
Hello I am updating some posts of my Blog, adding new and fresh content and rewriting some of the existing. After doing that I am thinking to update de post publishing so that I appears on front page of the blog and user can read ir again. But I don't know if it is good for google to change the publishing date of the post that he had indexed 5 years ago. Also I don't know if google will read it again if it is old and see the new changes in order to improve it in search results
Algorithm Updates | | maestrosonrisas0 -
How to Change Geo Target Location of Country Specific Domain
Hi - I have a country specific domain (www.updater.in), used it for writing blog articles Now when i go to site settings in Webmaster - the Geo target by default is coming for India, and no option of changing geographic target. Is there any way to let Search Engines know (despite .in domain) that site Geo Location is not country specific, but is meant for users from all across !!
Algorithm Updates | | Modi0 -
Will we no longer need Location + Keyword? Do we even need it at all?
Prepare yourselves. This is a long question. With the rise of schema and Google Local+, do you think Google will now have enough data about where a business is located, so that when someone searches for, a keyword such as "Atlanta Hyundai dealers" a business in Atlanta that's website: has been properly marked up with schema (or microdata for business location) has claimed its Google Local+ has done enough downstream work in Local Search listings for its NAP (name, address, phone number) will no longer have to incorporate variations of "Atlanta Hyundai dealers" in the text on the website? Could they just write enough great content about how they're a Hyundai dealership without the abuse of the Atlanta portion? Or if they're in Boston and they're a dentist or lawyer, could the content be just about the services they provided without so much emphasis tied to location? I'm talking about removing the location of the business from the text in all places other than the schema markup or the contact page on the website. Maybe still keep a main location in the title tags or meta description if it would benefit the customer. I work in an industry where location + keywords has reached such a point of saturation, that it makes the text on the website read very poorly, and I'd like to learn more about alternate methods to keep the text more pure, read better and still achieve the same success when it comes to local search. Also, I haven't seen other sites penalized for all the location stuffing on their websites, which is bizarre because it reads so spammy you can't recognize where the geotargeted keywords end and where the regular text begins. I've been working gradually in this general direction (more emphasis on NAP, researching schema, and vastly improving the content on clients' websites so it's not so heavy with geo-targeted keywords). I also ask because though the niche I work in is still pretty hell-bent on using geo-targeted keywords, whenever I check Analytics, the majority of traffic is branded and geo-targeted keywords make up only a small fraction of traffic. Any thoughts? What are other people doing in this regard?
Algorithm Updates | | EEE30 -
SEO for FMCG
Hi folks I'm basically hoping for some tips for great resources specifically focusing on SEO tactics for global FMCG ... Obviously I'm doing my own research but would love help from the community if possible with; 1- material on general SEO 2- Material on local SEO 3- Material on Image SEO 3- material on Video SEO any help would be greatly appreciated
Algorithm Updates | | Intrested0 -
Physical locationof the server vs customer base vs SEO penality?
HI All, We are an Australian business with our hosting currently based in Australia. We have recently been considering moving hosts for a few reasons. In particular when we have done analysis of hosting in the US and also with Rackspace say in Hong Kong we have found that the prices can be significantly cheaper or with more bells in whistles provided in the hosting of a dedicated server offshore vs Australia for the same price. Therefore from this point of view we would be much better off moving our hosting to the US or HK with Rackspace. There are the issues such as latency to take on board but lets put that to the side for the moment as we are mostly interested in understanding if offshore hosting will impact us from an SEO perspective and if so how and can these impacts be mitigated. So our first question is a) if we move our hosting offshore, will this impact our SEO? b) if it does impact our seo, how will it impact (ie lose rankings for organic pages due to IP address being offshore)? c) is A is also an impact are there ways of eliminating these impacts outlined in B? d) net - if the impacts on seo can be mitigated will the net result still be negative or could we still be seen on the same footing as a domain hosted in Australia? Thanks Sean
Algorithm Updates | | sbcinv0 -
Bing SEO?
I've put in a lot of time on my site to make sure it is full of good relevent content and has a healthy back link profile. I rank well on google but not on Bing. How do I go about optimizing my site for Bing and what does Bing look for that makes them rank sites differnetly than google? Also what other search engines should I be looking to optimize for? As a note I am a Realtor with a Real Estate website.
Algorithm Updates | | bronxpad0 -
How useful is a mobile version of your site (for SEO sake)?
We're investigating a mobile version of our e-commerce site. Is it worth the investment regarding search engine optimization, or is this something that wouldn't have a big effect?
Algorithm Updates | | 9Studios0 -
Can You Recommend An SEO Consultant To Support Our Panda Recovery Efforts?
Hi, I'm looking to find an SEO consultant to help me review my organic search strategy following the recent Panda update. Can you recommend somebody? Thanks, Adam
Algorithm Updates | | adampick0