Expanding to Other Geo Locations

[Searchout]

Our company originally started in one city, now it is in multiple and the city we started in is actually now less important to our business than some of the new cities.

We've of course have Google Places for Business listings for all our cities and are listed in the other prominent directories for each City (Bing Places, Manta, Superpages, etc etc)

We have created once city page for each city in our domain.  All this has improved our Local SERPs for those cities but they pale in comparison to our dominance in the city we started out in.  We did have the first city in our home page title, we took that out.

The obvious problem is from an SEO standpoint your home page is your "strongest" page but how do you make your home page rank top for multiple location intent searches:  "{city} {target keyword}"  ?

The 3-pack is KEY.  For example, for one city we make it into the local 3-pack but we are not in the organic SERPs on page 1 outside of the 3-pack.

As far as I can tell the major factor in 3-pack ranking is of course proximity of business to the user's location or user's location intent.  I would say followed by the natural ranking factors (or at least a large subset of them) that Google uses for its normal organic rankings, followed by Google Places reviews.  You would think the Google places reviews really make a difference, but not as much as you think.

So how do you dominate local searches in different cities when competing against local-only companies?  My only guess is you need to create as much content as possible.  You don't want to make micro sites I think as you lose all the link juice going to your main site.  But how much content can one make that isn't duplicative.  You can describe the same products and services over and over for each city but that's not useful nor wise.  I guess you could do some re-writing.  But other than a different address, phone, and staff members, if your service is identical for each city it doesn't leave a lot of room for useful content creation to improve local search SERPS.

I guess this begs the overall question, can a multi-city company ever dominate local SERPS when the search has a location intent (city name in the search) it there is even just a couple competing local companies doing some SEO work. it seems it is an extreme uphill battle if not next to impossible. (Never say never.)

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Hey Searchout,

I've been seeing that too!  We get a little blue face next to the review and the words highlighted in blue.  This is great for people who write their own reviews and cheat because google is going to start showing customers real words when customers type in what they want.  I find fake reviews are always written by the same person and are variations on a theme.

Have you also noticed your GMB listing dynamically serves what you do? When someone types in Root canal we come up as Smileworks 'Endodontist' and when they type in Invisalign we appear as 'Orthodontist' It's because I marked our specialists up as specialists in the schema.  I had no idea what It would do but just thought 'well hey, we have specialists so why not tell the world' and google made something of it.

There's going to be more of that coming in the future i'll bet you.

PS: 'm not talking about the crappy services yell and the like try to sell you when you claim your citation.  I'm talking about a Whitespark Audit.  It's different.  They understand - like really understand - the score. And they do a TON of work for a few hundred bucks. Here's my results. Not bad when you think of that uplift as a percentage of 4,000 positions. Best money I ever spent.  But I don't know why I bother sometimes.  Nobody does it. they think it's a scam or that I'm an affiliate. I don't care about their company and there's also other ones out there who do the same thing.  just that these got us a really great result so I tell everyone. - then they ignore me lol!

xMSqv

[Searchout]

I'm still a firm believer that NAP audit and correction services are primarily hyped as far as their actual effect on rankings.  No one gets paper phone books anymore and there's no reason to buy advertising from the likes of Yellowpages, Superpages, etc, so they are desperate to create new revenue streams.  Hence when you submit your business on all these sites they automatically show you a list of even more obscure sites you are not on or your NAP doesn't match.  Our best performing location has two different NAPs out there about a mile from each other.  One was an old mailing address.  It's 3-pack 99% of the time for all our target keywords.  My determination is that what makes the difference is that the business is listed with one of the main three databases Axciom, Localese, Infogroup.  Paying attention to NAP in all the second and third tier directories using a paid service is a complete waste of time and money in my opinion.  I've scoured the Internet for any sort of well done study to prove the effect on rankings of NAP consistency. They can't be done as there are too many other ranking factors anyone I've found to publish any sort of article on the subject is in the industry that sells those services.  You think you moved the needle making your NAPs more consistent, but most likely the timing was just coincidental. I know I sound jaded, but I've just been around the block too many times and see the money making schemes from a mile away.  If you got time and money to waste, it definitely can only help if at all.  If you NAP error is in another city or something, then obviously you'll have conversion issues.  I'm talking about missing suite number on some or Street versus St. That kind of stuff. But I've gone off on a tangent sort of, sorry.

Here's an interesting tidbit I recently noticed.  Words in the reviews are a ranking factor believe it or not.  You will notice on Google 3-pack, sometimes you will see an excerpt of a review with one of your search keywords highlighted.  I threw in an obscure word into a search test once where we should never come up in the 3-pack for and we did because the word was in one of our user's reviews.  Very interesting.

I also think Google likes schema markup and makes much more of a difference than NAP consistency every will.

[MiriamEllis]

Good, Ed. I was sure you, specifically, understood this, but was concerned that others might not understand the distinction between being legally named something, and keyword stuffing the GMB business title field.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Couldn't agree more. Although we are tiny compared to some sites and still outrank them purely on content and user task accomplishment.  Most of the big players have hammy or thin content written by their agencies. Any expert in her niche can do better than this and wipe them out.  It does take more time in the map pack though.  I can seem to find meaningful correlations between different terms ranking and not ranking.  So I figure it must be based on external factors out of my control.

So I just bang on with the best practice and hope for the results some day   I would invest in some sort of local citation audit though.  You can get them for cheap and they will make 100% sure NAP&W is right as right can be.  This moved the needle for us although our starting position was not super strong so it may not move the needle for a company who's been accurate and dilligent with their local and H-local citations from the get go (we weren't)

ALso if you've got anyone with a degree in your business get them to sign up to their university alumni organisations, build relationships and then go for a guestpost in the news section.  If it's the University you're new location is in this can be a real gold star local link.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Yep That's absolutely right. And also having the name of what you do in there is local spam.  But we just have different legal entities (sometimes more than one) for each location. It's better that way for SEO and taxes here in the UK (all legal of course).

Don't worry, I'm ALL OVER Stopcraponthemap and have had companies taken off the Liverpool maps like 'Dermaroller Liverpool' and 'Invisalign Liverpool' - actually a company called 'Pure Dental' was doing that. A dentist?  You'd think Dentists wouldn;t try to cheat the system but they were.  Even with the hardest of hard evidence and photographs and screenshots from Companies house, it's still really hard to get them taken down and can take weeks.

Being a guide helps. And reading what Joy says also helps. Our first company was called 'Smileworks Liverpool' because there were so many other 'Smileworks' dentists.  I actually just wanted to stand out from the rest but it ended up being hugely beneficial for us.

Even two years ago google was saying 'we rank entities' but they still don't.  So I want to spell it out for my customers and for google.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Searchout!

Some great points from Ed here. I'll add a few thoughts, in case it helps:

1. Yes, local pack rankings are key and you are right that they are not static. Don't over-focus on rankings, because searcher-proximity causes so much variety. While it's nice to see rankings go up, it is far more meaningful to see actual conversions go up (visits, phone calls, bookings, in-store traffic, sales, forms, etc.)

2. If your brand has built enough authority (think Taco Bell) you are likely to find yourself ranking for pretty much everything with very little effort. If you're not Taco Bell yet, then, yes, you need to work on the old combo of content+links and invest whatever effort you can in wise engagement with the ever-growing list of Google Local Knowledge Panel features (reviews, photos, Q&A, posts, bookings, menus including the new service menus, descriptions, etc.) Track and see what is moving the conversion needle. No one thing is going to do it. As you mentioned, review count and star ratings do not move the ranking needle as much as you might expect. You see businesses with fewer or worse reviews outranking those with more and better reviews every day. When you see that phenomenon, it makes you realize that focusing only on reviews would be foolish, but, at the same time, you don't determine from this that reviews can be ignored. They are part of a bigger picture.

3. Basically, what you are shooting for is building the overall authority of your brand while implementing best practices at a location-specific level every step of the way you can. Over time, you are trying to become one of the Taco Bells of your industry, at which point, for reasons we can't fully explain, your "authority" seems to build strength on its own. On your way there, be sure you are complying with all guidelines, making use of all relevant features, investing in creative content, and most importantly, offering the kind of service that makes your customers do much of the work of building your authority.

Hope this helps!

[MiriamEllis]

So great you are sharing your research here, Ed!

One thing I wanted to point out. You mention:

"Also I've got the city names in the names of my business.  So there's BusinessTown and BusinessOtherTown as the names of the companies.  This is really important. "

Important to clarify that, unless you've legally named each of your branches X+CityA, X+CityB, etc., then it's a violation of Google's guidelines to add city names to your GMB listing business titles. Wanted to be sure this is pointed out, as the keyword stuffing of the GMB title with city names is, perhaps, the #1 form of local spam.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Absolutely right. If it's B2B then there's this thing that nobody ever goes into that will give your pages the edge over the competition.  It's a little thing called 'the price'

B2B are often very cagey about prices and that makes people wary.  So maybe some location specific price articles will do well.  If you don't know the price then just put in a range or use a case study with all the details and put a price tag on it so people can get an idea.  Users (so google too) are getting really frustrated that prices for B2B things are not available and I've found my best performing pages are price pages.

Dentists also are cagey about prices.  It's very B2B in that respect.  You have to come in so we can assess you and talk to you and it's how long is a piece off string etc. but that's not true.  If you're honest with yourself you can put basic prices and ranges on there and it will help enormously - if you haven't already.

I agree with the local citations, they seem stupid but NEED to be done. Outsource NAPS to someone who can write and make sure you're on them all.

As for google local star rating.  I too was disappointed.  We have 250 at 4.9 and some competitors are above us in the maps with 3.9 and 40 reviews. It IRKS ME! lol.  But once you get to a magical 150 point, we saw the dial move. Also review diversity is important.  So just google reviews is no good, I rotate the girly and guys on the front desk to ask for Facebook, Google, Trustpilot and 'Save Face' a local reviewer each week of the month.  Remember to email people at home for reviews.  If they're all coming from your IP they'll be discounted. Unless you get a VPN, but I worry that might land me with some sort of penalty.

If you have an alt tag on the page that says Houston and the Schem says NYC. Google will (In my opinion and experience) favour the Alt text.  The 'strongest place' if you like for microdata is in the header of the site.  That's set in stone and overrules and review widgets or the data highlighter. Problem is you keep needing to go in there and update your number of reviews each wee for the stars to show in the serp.  Do you have stars showing in your new city serp results.  You can get them instantly organically with a WP plugin called Google reviews Business and you get a really nice slider that breaks up text with your 5 star reviews.  Also can you port reviews over from one city to another?  That's worth looking into I remember a conversation somewhere about that but don't remember whether it was a yes or a no.

Search your newer city for those little opportunities with the chamber of commerce, the local government, write an article for a local bank or the local newspaper (if you can get in). I am on this 'high growth local bank' membership where they just give you a link from a huge DA (but local) bank for just paying like a £25 subscription fee and going to a few meetings. We speak to our competitors about things we sell that they don't and things that they don't sell that we do and literally write articles and link to one-another.  If you need a surgical nose job we send you to a local cosmetic clinic here in the city.  They LOVE that and always return our patients to us (because they want the relationship to continue) and they've linked to us and it's had a huge impact on local pack.

You're doing the right things.  Get hyper local though and start engaging with the local community (where it will get you links). Also I wrote for the local university. GOLDEN link - one of the strongest we have. And the people at Universities are dying for technical content about SEO and marketing.

Hope this helps. email me if you like (on profile) . I'll send some examples of the "No BS" prices articles you could model your article on them.  They are ranking Nationally here Position 1-3.

[Searchout]

Thanks for such a lengthy reply.   Much of it I'm not surprised as I sort of assumed it's a time issue combined with DA which benefits both local and national.

To give more specifics.  The business is a B2B service business.  The problem is, the service also has a highly popular associated product.  So I guess in a way I'm lucky as the thing that segregates people looking for product info versus service info is in most cases a location intent.  The product search will never have a location intent.  The service search will sometimes NOT have a location intent.  That is fine with us as we only have a by appointment only location only in a small subset of cities.

I've been testing and testing too.  I've been surprised how little weight Google puts on number of reviews and average review rating. I guess it's because that aspect can be fairly easily 'gamed.' It seems the proximity to user location or intended location and normal organic ranking factors like DA are king.  The former being most important obviously for local 3-pack when you have competitors with similar non-map organic rankings.

We also have our original city name in some of the image alt tags etc on our home page.  Our business location schema is perfect.  I think one factor is some of the other cities have not shown up yet on some of the business directories the original city has - but really, how much weight does Google give Superpages and the like when you virtually never see those domains in the SERPS with a location intent search?

I think the key is time and keep creating good, original content optimized for each city.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

OK I can help you with this because it's what I've been working on for the last three years.  Testing, testing and then more testing.  First of all, are you a brick and mortar business?  When you say you've expanded into new cities does this mean that you have a new store or physical address in these new cities?  I'm going to assume because you've got GMB for the new cities that you have a physical address.  So the things to consider are these:

There are kind of three types of searcher that I look at when solving these types of SEO problems.  You've got searchers who are searching 'product+location' these are actually diminishing in number and more people now are just searching 'product' or 'buy product' or 'product near me' and are using voice and maps and expecting google to know where they are and use their location.  So you're right, being in the map pack is key.  So I have some traffic from the product+location people and they are usually high commercial intent.  They want to buy.

Then the people who just type 'product' and who are near my location will have a higher number of searchers but lower searcher intent.  Because they may just be looking for information and happen to be in my city. These are also more difficult to optimise for.  Over-optimising location keywords is something to watch out for.  But do remember to use the location specific anchor text in your internal linking structure.  That's helped me lots.  I say something natural(ish) like, For Braces visit our main page: _Braces Liverpool.  _This seems spammy but google said slightly over-optimising internal links isn't going to hurt you like external ones will.

Then there are the people not in my city who type 'Product' - this is very high volume and very low commercial intent.  Because if you are a local business and someone 100 miles away types in 'product' and you show up, they are unlikely to visit your store.

However, I still optimise for all three of these searchers. I have some articles that are for information only and I want them to rank nationally, pick up TONS of traffic and give my site authority and traffic and send nice user signals to google. I'll often also have the featured snippet or national number one position.  These articles almost always also rank locally for Product (where searcher is in vacinity) and product+location. So don't just focus on product+location because you don't get enough traffic and google doesn't give you as much authority.

So you should have your location city name in the URL of your new city locations and optimise for local searchers by getting your local citations absolutely perfect.  This means Moz Local, maybe spend some money on a Whitespark Citation Audit.  This was the best $300 I ever spent and they helped me get from 4% map pack to 11% and that's out of literally thousands of positions.  It's a dynamite service and I'd 100% recommend.

Also bear in mind that your new cities are newer and it takes a few months or even years to start really ranking for local searchers.  I've taken - in some cases - 18 months of consistent optimisation and testing to get into the local packs where other competitor services have maybe been there for 5 years!  You can't just expect to pop up number one in the map pack straight away.  You need to build loads of local and hyper local citations and also LINKS from other local businesses and local partners in those new cities.  This takes time and tons of effort.  You can't expect to dine out on your strong original city. But also don't expect to internally compete with yourself if you're a new address in a new city with a new location in the URL, business name etc. Re-write the articles for that city like you're starting again but model them on your old successful ones.  You'll find doing it a second time it's 100% better than the first.

I'll be honest,  I don't know whether it's been all my SEO work or just time that's gotten us to the number one spots locally and on the maps and sometimes I actually find it easier to rank nationally than locally.  National ranking is easy.  You just need the best article, comprehensiveness and and a strong DA / great click through rate in the serp.

Also I've got the city names in the names of my business.  So there's BusinessTown and BusinessOtherTown as the names of the companies.  This is really important.  Google says it no longer matters about having the name of your product or service in the URL and business title but it's less clear about the location and I've found it to be a massive help.  Joy Hawkins or rand might disagree here but this is what I've found from testing it out.

Link signals and GMB signals are the key.  Plus lots of reviews for your new location on it's GMB profile.  Like 150+ is where it seems to start making a big difference. This is still the best article on the subject. From our friends at Moz.  Also check out Joy Hawkins who is the oracle of local and I think she's a mod on this very platform although I might be mistaken. She will have a better answer for you than mine and loves helping people.  Also I hope EGOL chimes in because they can help too.

But I'm betting your problem is father time.  It's frustrating but Google just doesn't trust newer businesses to take up a spot in the three pack unless you're really giving it gangbusters optimisation in ALL of the areas outlined in the article by moz above.

Hope this helps some.  Give us some more specifics to go on and let's get right into it.  I love this stuff

PS: There was a very interesting case recently of a Zero Day Exploit where a genius hacker found a way to steal DA from another website - Check it out here it gives us an insight into the fact that google does indeed transfer DA across cities, states and even countries - so give it time (but don't do what this guy did! It's black hat and dangerous stuff. Just an interesting story not a suggestion.