Setting Up Geo Location

[Local128]

I currently have a page that ranks pretty well for X City and is optimized for X City. However, I now want to change the strategy and set up the Home page for State and build X, Y and Z City pages under it. But I want to make sure that when I set the X City page, I somehow transfer the rankings from the home page to this page. I was wondering what the best way would be?

One idea was to put a canonical tag on the home page to point to X City page until it at least gets on the first page or so. Then remove the canonical tag and start separate efforts for Home Page for State and X City page for the city.

Please suggest if any other ideas.

[MiriamEllis]

Wishing you best of luck, Dickens!

[DickensLawGroup]

Thanks Miriam, super helpful!

Looks like I need to go and make some changes to my GMB listing.

I've done a lot of PPC and I'm REALLY trying to scale back my ad spend by improving my organic results. For the past 2 months or so I've really been pushing on guest blogging. I've seen some great results. 2 months ago my site was showing up on page 5 or 6 for most of my target key words. Now I'm on page 1 for a few of them and others are working their way up. Long term I'm really hoping to phase out PPC with great organic presence.

[MiriamEllis]

All good questions, Dickens, and it's my pleasure to keep chatting with you.

Local: You're understanding correctly - using the service radius tool is not going to enable you to rank in cities where you lack a physical location. Google may take this info into account in some way, but not typically in any way that you can see relating to actual rankings. Best practice is to set no more than a 20-30 mile radius if you wish to use the feature, but as I've mentioned above, your business model isn't an SAB, because you don't travel to clients in a radius to serve them face-to-face. If you were a plumber, I'd suggest setting the radius at 20-30 miles and no more, as there have been anecdotal reports of a larger radius than this actually causing problem. Actually, you might enjoy reading this old but interesting conversation over at the Local Search Forum on the topic of the service radius: https://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local/1754-best-practice-designating-service-area-miles-radius-listing-cities.html, but as I've said, your business is brick-and-mortar in Google's eyes and shouldn't be setting a radius.

Organic: Google does localize some organic results to either a minor or major extent, but this might be at a city level, a regional level, and possibly a state level, depending on what they believe the intent is of the searcher. So, let's say you publish a page called "Stopping Foreclosure in North Carolina". Ostensibly, Google is aware that Raleigh is in N. Carolina. Your best bet is that you've built the authority of this page by earning links to it. If your page has become authoritative enough, there's a chance it could show up for someone searching for "Stopping Foreclosure in Raleigh", but, if you have a competitor who is located in Raleigh and has built an authoritative article called "Stopping Foreclosure in Raleigh", I'd typically expect that to outrank your North Carolina article. So, there's a question of degrees of relevance here. Whichever organic results Google believes most match the intent of the user come heavily into play in what will make it to page 1, and geography does play a part when a user is specifying a city, not unlike if a user searches for "pizza raleigh". If your competitor's pizzeria is in Raleigh and he has a page called "best pizza in Raleigh", he's likely to beat out your "best pizza in North Carolina" article when a Raleigh-based searcher looks at the organic results for "pizza raleigh", or even just "pizza". The degree to which Google is localizing the organic results is something you'll need to observe on a case-by-case basis, because it's not one degree across the board.

So, all that brings us back to PPC, which you can set to appear for Raleigh searches, regardless of where you're physically located. Unfortunately, it can be an expensive investment, but publishing great organic content requires a financial investment, too.

[DickensLawGroup]

Thanks Miriam, that's some great info! A few follow up questions:

**Local. **How does the service radius work? Just looking at my GMB listing as a consumer, it doesn't even show my service radius, it just says the business is located in Charlotte and gives the address. Is the purpose of the service radius so that my business will potentially be pulled as a local result when someone does a search for something like "foreclosure attorney" from a location within the search radius I've entered on GMB? For example, someone in Raleigh does a search on their phone for "foreclosure attorney". I've included Raleigh in my service radius on GMB. But there's no chance that I'll show up on local results because my actual office is in Charlotte? I guess I'm trying to figure out why Google will let me have such a large service radius (I can include the entire state if I want), if there's no chance of me showing up in local results outside the city where my actual office is?

Organic. Unfortunately, with the type of law I practice I won't really be able to create any meaningful content for my site that is city-specific. In looking at other businesses, including law firms, that cover entire states (or other large geographic areas--even the entire country), I haven't really noticed any of them providing city-specific content. But they still show up at the top of organic results when I do city-specific Google searches. Any ideas how they do that? Is Google smart enough to figure out that my site is relevant to every city in North Carolina simply because my site says that I provide services throughout the entire state? For example, one of my H1 tags is "stopping foreclosure in North Carolina". When someone does a search for "stop foreclosure attorneys in Raleigh", will Google say, hey, Raleigh is in North Carolina, this website is relevant because it's about stopping foreclosure in North Carolina?

Thanks Miriam, I really appreciate your time and advice!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Dickens,

Thanks for the thorough replies to my questions, and Christopher, you might like to read this as well in case Dickens' scenario matches your own.

Okay, so this would be how to think about this:

Local

In Google's eyes, the only truly local component of your business is in Charlotte, where you meet face-to-face with your clients. This is the only aspect of your business you'll build a GMB listing for and other local business listings for. Do not use the service radius function of the GMB dashboard to attempt to represent the non-face-to-face aspects of your business. It will not help you rank locally in these other areas, because you have no physical location there. Just set yourself up as a local business in Charlotte on your citations, and don't confuse your business model (brick-and-mortar) with the model of a service area business (like a plumber). You don't travel to your clients beyond Charlotte like a plumber would.

Organic

Because you're unlikely to rank locally for anything beyond Charlotte, if you want to gain additional visibility for any other city, you should consider what you can do organically. If you can develop unique content on your website that is highly relevant to a specific city, publish it, but don't make the mistake of creating duplicate or near-duplicate content that simply swaps out one city name for another. If there is something that makes your services to clients in one city special (like maybe laws affecting only that city), then this might be a reason to publish this type of content, but if your services are identical across the state, taking the approach of building a page for every city in the state will, more often than not, lead to a library of very weak pages that have been built for search engines rather than people.

True service area businesses (like house painters) can easily take this approach because they can have a page showcasing houses they've painted in San Francisco, and another page showcasing houses they've painted in Oakland - they have genuinely done unique work in each city. For a legal firm, finding a purpose for creating truly useful content of this kind will be harder. I'm not saying it's impossible. Perhaps you can showcase famous legal cases in one city vs. another. As I've mentioned, depending on the type of law you practice, perhaps there are legal statutes affecting different cities about which you could write. Rule of thumb is, avoid any shortcuts that would result in weak, pointless or duplicate pages, as they are likely to water down your site instead of building it up.

PPC

If you determine that the organic SEO approach isn't right for you, then your best bet for beginning to get visibility in cities beyond Charlotte will be PPC. You can target specific cities that would drive the most business to you, rather than targeting the whole state, which might be a waste of your investment.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions!

[DickensLawGroup]

Awesome, thanks Miriam! Similar to Christopher, my homepage ranks really well for a search like "stop foreclosure attorney Charlotte NC", but I want to achieve similar rankings for any location in North Carolina.

1. I have a single office location in Charlotte, but I provide legal services to the entire state of North Carolina.

2. I do not meet face to face with clients in locations other than Charlotte..I usually don't even meet face to face with my clients in Charlotte.

3. I am willing and able to provide legal services anywhere in North Carolina. The services I offer are transactional and are almost completely handled via email, fax, and phone. On my Google My Business listing, I've currently entered Charlotte and the 14 largest counties in NC as my service areas. I'm thinking I should go ahead and just add every county?

4. I am curious about both organic and local rankings.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi DickensLawGroup,

Similar to what I've asked Christopher, please feel free to answer my 4 questions and I'll be happy to offer suggestions.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Christopher,

Would you be able to answer a couple of questions to help me better understand your scenario? From what I'm reading, it sounds like your website HOMEPAGE  ranks well for for something like "Plumber San Francisco", but your service radius has now grown to include other cities like Berkeley, Oakland and Mill Valley. Am I understanding that correctly? If not, please correct me. Please also answer these questions:

1. Is your business model brick-and-mortar and have you opened new offices in several other cities? Or, is yours a service-area-business with a single physical location (San Francisco) that wants to expand its service radius to include other cities in which it lacks a physical location (Oakland, Berkeley, Mill Valley)?

2. Do you meet face-to-face with clients in all of the locations you want to target?

3. You mention wanting to rank the homepage of your website for the state. Is your offering truly statewide? How many cities do you intend to target, if your offering is statewide?

4. Are you asking about organic or local rankings?

I'll look forward to receiving your answers. The more detailed you can be in responding to each of the 4 questions, the better feedback our community can provide.

[DickensLawGroup]

I am in a similar situation. My firm is located in Charlotte (and that is the location on my Google My Business listing), but I provide services to the entire state. Not sure how to get the best SEO results in other locations.