Rank Locally and Globally (or at least Nationally)
-
I work with an interior design whom I've persuaded to purchase a virtual street address in the town she wanted to work in years ago. She has a Skokie, IL business address that has been claimed and confirmed across the internet. Now, she is growing and wants her new website to not only be optimized for the more affluent areas of Chicago but she also would like to gain Global notice, (I'd settle for National). My problems:
- She doesn't want to purchase a street address in Chicago because it is a pain to go get her mail.
- What do I do about all her directory listings and review sites that have her located in Skokie if I can persuade her to get a Chicago address?
- Do I leave the Skokie address and add more content targeting keyword phrases with Chicago?
- What should be my initial focus here? I feel it is a smaller target and less competition to go after Chicago but she wants to start spreading her wings and work all over the world.
Help!!
-
You come through again, Laura! I really appreciate the links and guidance you have provided. Now, to explain this to my client -- wish me luck.
-
Unfortunately, there are a lot of business directories that require your street address. If she wants her home address to remain private (understandably), it will be tougher to rank locally but not impossible. You'll need to work harder on other local ranking signals to be competitive.
Fortunately, there are quite a few sites that allow you to hide your street address even if your city is still shown. Here's a great guide for this - https://www.brightlocal.com/2014/07/10/citation-sites-allow-hide-address/. Some of the information may be out of date, so you'll have to double check with each site.
If she serves clients at their location rather than hers, her business is considered a service-area business (SAB). Joy Hawkins had some good advice for SABs in her Moz post at https://moz.com/blog/intro-local-seo-service-area-businesses.
-
Thank you so much for your clear answer and links to further information, Laura. Our initial concern, (years ago when her profiles were claimed in Skokie), was personal security. My single, female client did not want her home address published on the Internet.
Now, it appears one of our problems is solved -- where to purchase mail service. I will suggest she simply cancel her PO box street address and change that address to her home address for important items. (She receives mostly junk mail at the Skokie address anyway.)
Another question - since her purchased Skokie address is listed as her business address, I'm guessing now I will need to change her address on all the local profiles and citations rather than create a second location, (I will definitely hide her address on all listings possible).
How do you think I should handle those listings where hiding the address is not possible?
-
Hi Janet,
As Laura has mentioned, unfortunately, virtual addresses of any kind are a violation of Google's guidelines and subject to punitive action on Google's part should they discover them. The only way your client should be marketing herself locally (meaning building citations and trying to earn local pack rankings) is if she has a legitimate physical address, whether in Skokie, Chicago, or any other city.
Lacking a physical address, the client should confine themselves to organic SEO efforts or PPC.
-
Will she have an actual office at this new location in Chicago with staff, or are you talking about a virtual address rented for the purpose of making Google think you have an office at that location?
If your answer is the second one, then let me stop you there. This type of virtual address goes against Google's policies and can have negative consequences. See https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en for Google's guidelines. They've been going after these types of virtual offices for a while now. See also http://www.localsearchforum.com/help-support-google-local/978-virtual-offices-home-address-google-plus-local.html.
Leave the real address and focus on building organic traffic for Chicago. If she really wants to grow to a national level, you'll have to work on growing the brand to a national level through social media and content marketing. Unfortunately, there are no SEO quick fixes in this situation.
-
I see you have a situation where your client's objective is to work all over the world, currently has/wants some business in Chicago and but is staying in an address in Skokie. (Correct me if I am wrong)
- She doesn't want to purchase a street address in Chicago because it is a pain to go get her mail.
There are mail forwarding services. You pay for this services however, it removes the pain of travelling to Chicago.
- What do I do about all her directory listings and review sites that have her located in Skokie if I can persuade her to get a Chicago address?
It is essential to add her Chicago address to her website. The next thing to do is to add another location in Google My Business (Create an account already if you haven't) on top of her current Skokie location. Google will be able to understand she has 2 offices under her brand.
For Directories like Yelp, you do not need to change the address of the listing. What you do is add another location/listing with the same brand name and information, with the Chicago address. (See how chain outlets do it on Yelp)
This goes for other directories too to gain strength for local citations in Chicago. Google will be able to understand when they crawl the web.
- Do I leave the Skokie address and add more content targeting keyword phrases with Chicago?
I assume this is for content on her website. I would strongly encourage you to mention in your content on her website that you have another office/address. However you do not need to overdo it. Once again google will be able to pick this up and understand. I have 2 offices in 2 different countries. When I search for "mycompany country" google always displays the address of the correct office. (I only mention each address twice on my entire website)
Of course doing all this will not rank you on google when someone searches for "interior design chicago". From here onwards, you will need to SEO for the keywords you would like to fight for to gain first page.
- What should be my initial focus here? I feel it is a smaller target and less competition to go after Chicago but she wants to start spreading her wings and work all over the world.
Let's take one step at a time. First Chicago, then the world. I believe if you focus your resources and energy, you will gain more grounds optimizing for for a location. Moreover, from a business point of view, it's hard to get someone to pay your client to fly all the way to another part of the world unless your client's company is famous. Thus even if you managed to get on page 1 for "interior designer in London" I am pretty sure, the folks there will lean towards a local designer.
That being said, if your client wants to spread her wings and work all over, I think a better chance is to win an award with a magazine and get notice then to find work around the world via google.
- You might also want to test if your client can get results by running PPC on other locations/countries. This will save you much time and explanation. If it yields results, then expand your PPC campaigns!
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
-
No Appreciable Effect of Moz Local?
I've been using Moz Local for over a year and these are the results for $129?! ... https://moz.com/products/local/check-listing?ubrecheckid=152151793&ubrechecktoken=zc2pg9Ic2qkADDYL Please advise.
Local SEO | | ianpritchardphd0 -
Rankings preferring English URL
We've recently had a redesign of our website and we have both a Dutch and an English version. However, in MOZ for both NL and BE-NL it seems to favor the English URLs. This never used to be the case and I'm wondering why it's happening and whether it could actually be hurting our SEO, as search engines would favor local languages for search queries.
Local SEO | | Billywig0 -
Local Site stuck on page 2 for years. Can’t penetrate page 1! Help!
Hey there Moz community! This is the first time I've ever asked a question here so please forgive if I slip up on any etiquette. I manage a website for a small Orlando Florida family law and divorce law firm who are targeting search phrases that include those "Orlando divorce attorney" variants. The site is located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/ If you run a search for "Orlando divorce attorney" along with close variant search terms our law firm website for about the past two years has hovered at the top of the second page of google but has never actually penetrated page 1. When you examine metrics such as page authority, domain authority, trust, and other traditional metrics it tells you that our site should be on page 1 but alas it's not happening. We have, however been featured quite often in the three pack for the local listings for the target search terms. Though valuable, our goal has always been to be featured in the top three of the organic search results. To add to the confusion we have a practice area page located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/orlando-divorce-lawyer/ dedicated to divorce and expected that page to rank for these divorce attorney search terms but it will not rank for the search terms and instead our homepage ranks for them every single time regardless of how we swap around the optimization on the page. Never had any manual actions. any help you guys can offer is greatly appreciated and I really appreciate your time!
Local SEO | | Seanthewood1230 -
We're merging 2 separate websites into 1 but need to ideally rank service pages for both locations
I have a dilemma, we're merging 2 websites, one an Australian branch and one a UK one. We've decided to have a UK page and a AUS page so agency.site/uk/ agency.site/aus/ but what is the best tactic for the service pages? ideally, we'd like a web-design service page to rank in Australia and the UK but not sure if this is actually possible, or whether to duplicate the pages and localise them i.e. /web-design-leeds/ and /web-design-melbourne/ What's everyone's thoughts on this? localised landing pages with some duplicate content or one master page with both locations mentioned? Thanks!
Local SEO | | Unbranded_Lee1 -
Houston Printing Company Removed City from Main Page - Will Our Rankings Change?
We operate a full service printing and direct mail company located in Houston (www.catdi.com ). We have been in business for quite sometime and had enjoyed top tier position on page one for many years. However after revamping our website and main page it was determined that we used "Houston" way too often. Our keywords are ( Houston Printing , Printing in Houston)
Local SEO | | NEWCHOPPER
I suppose to the pros it looked and it seemed a little spammy with all the references to our city. But after the changed we have now dropped to mid - bottom of page two. Should we worried or does after sometime
will be move back up? I dont want to hastily change back but to our surprise those aren't really searched terms I would hate to see our positions and ranking fall because of this change. Thanks CATDI PRINTING0 -
Happy Local New Year from Miriam
First, I want to thank all of our awesome community members here who continuously post interesting, tough and good Local SEO question in the Moz Q&A forum. I love chatting with you all, and I hope you'll keep asking away, giving us all the opportunity to muse and learn together. I think 2018 is going to be challenging and fun, and have a few thoughts on that I'd like to share, hoping you'll reply with your own tips and predictions. In the new year, I believe: Quality is going to further solidify as the most apparent differentiator of local businesses, giving those companies with the most considerate and excellent service and policies the upper hand. Memorably good customer service will drive the high-star reputation and word-of-mouth marketing that leads to success. Small local businesses have an advantage here, in their agility to implement the most genuine home-town excellence, but bigger brands can strive for this, too. From skilled phone service, to adequate in-store staffing, to employee training, to dedicated management of all online local assets, to initiatives that make a lasting, positive impression on consumers, quality is the key ingredient to loyalty, which is what every local business should most pursue in 2018. Speaking of loyalty, I would especially advise SABs to leave no stone unturned in earning it. Google's LSA program will be a serious disruptor of business-as-usual in this sector, changing the makeup of local SERPs and striving to become the middleman in the service industries. SAB owners won't love having to rent back their customers for a fee to Google, so developing Google-independent streams of leads and repeat customers will be vital in any city where LSA rolls out in the coming year. Serving in a smaller town? Begin working on Google-independence anyway, particularly via word-of-mouth marketing so that you have these streams running in advance, should LSA move beyond the more densely-populated areas. While developing Google-independence, don't overlook Google opportunities that are still free. I think Google Posts was the most interesting development of 2017, and there has been some anecdotal evidence that weekly use of this form of knowledge panel microblogging may give a small ranking boost. Be an early adopter and take advantage of that. 2018 may be the year in which Google finally cracks down on two things: keyword stuffing of the business title and review spam. I'm sure they're tired of the complaints surrounding the former and if Google's commitment to identifying quality remains in place, sooner or later, they have got to deal with this false signal of relevance the same way that have with EMDs. As to the latter, Google's increased focus on reviews over the past year is apparent in the sheer number of emails they are now sending out regarding them. Also fascinating to see that we're closing out 2017 with third-party reviews finally reappearing in Google's local products, after years of absence and trouble with the FTC. Overall, Google knows that their review corpus is dependent on consumers trusting it, and better spam detection methodologies and better/faster response to review spam reporting has got to be on their to-do list. This could be the year! For local businesses, protection lies in abandoning any type of spammy practice (from keyword stuffing to self-reviewing). And, being proactive if you are the victim of review spam. Report it. Raise a polite but firm hullabaloo. Let Google know you hold them to reasonable standards of accountability in their role as public arbiter of brand reputation. The best Local SEO agencies and local business will dig deeper into the history and tactics of organic SEO than ever before. We need to understand Hummingbird, RankBrain, and matching content to the buyer journey with the best of them. We need to master not just linkbuilding, but the relationship building that makes it most authentic and of most lasting value - and this is an area in which local businesses have a massive advantage over virtual ones, in that we can actually meet our neighbors face-to-face to build beneficial bonds. And we need to get a real handle on the technical side of SEO, understanding how site structure, handling of the robots.txt file, and the management of indexation and accessibility issues impact us. When we put high-level knowledge of all these considerations together with our Local SEO know-how, we can be successful in new, exciting ways we may have overlooked in the past. Oh, there's so much more I could say about the interesting things I see coming in 2018, but I'd love it if you'd talk now. What do you see in our industry's near future? I'd love to know. And let me take this opportunity to wish you all a fun, exciting and prosperous new year!
Local SEO | | MiriamEllis11 -
Local SEO in business acquisition context
Hi everyone, I have a client who just acquired 4 business. Basically, the 4 compagnies will stop existing and my client will integrate the production at his own adress under his compagny name. My issue here is that my client wants to know what is the best solution for his local results. The 4 compagnies still have a website that present the new business name will a CTA redirecting to the new website. Their GMB account are still active. I was about to delete the 4 GMB accounts so when a customer do a brand research, the organic result will show the old business website that will present the new business with a CTA on the website. My thinking is that since the old and the new compagny will compete on the same keyword since they are in the same industry, I don't want the old compagny to be in competition with the compagny of my clients. Is there a better solution that could benefit the local SEO ? Thanks y'all !
Local SEO | | alexrbrg1 -
Adwords Express Keyword Ranking Hack
I heard a rumor that Adwords Express offers a tool that lets you check real time Marketing Google ranking results (colleague brought this up) Has anybody heard of this?
Local SEO | | RosemaryB0