Transitioning to from Brick and Mortar to Service Area Best Practices
-
Hi. I am a solo practitioner in a healthcare field. I have had a traditional office for 4 years but have been working virtually since March 2020 . I have decided to give up my office space completely and make an attempt at running my practice virtually. Can anyone share the best practices for making this transition from an SEO perspective?
I currently rank between 2nd to 4th for most of my local keywords (so, in the GMB 3-pack). I will be competing against brick and mortar businesses. Is it even realistic to think I can hang onto my current rankings?
I have researched virtual addresses and ruled them out. I have considered searching for someone in my industry and/or a landlord who will accept a small fee in exchange for allowing me to use their address on my website and in GMB, but I'm unsure about this as it seems like a rather unstable arrangement and the shared office space aspect may present a problem with google
As of now my plan is to change my address in GMB to my home address, which I will hide, and remove the street address from my website, but maintain the rest of the NAP. I will then create targeted pages for the three primary counties I serve. I have also decided to advertise a limited number of home visit options for clients in my home county in order to maintain an in-person component to the business.
Does anyone have any suggestions to improve upon this course of action?
As for my current local citations, should I just leave them as is (with outdated address), attempt to remove the street address but retain the rest of the NAP, or something else?
Any feedback is appreciated.
-
@custardextract Very helpful details. So, if you believe you will permanently transition to a virtual home office but will be seeing some clients face-to-face, then, yes, you will need to update all of your citations to reflect your new location. So long as you are still going to see some clients in person, you should be able to continue having a GMB listing, but you will certainly want to clean up your whole set of listings so that Google and, more importantly, clients, are not confused by conflicting data about where you are and how you operate. You should be prepared for the changes you have to make to impact your rankings, given the change in location.
-
@miriamellis Thank you, Miriam. I'm not yet sure what I will do after COVID. My practice is such that I could continue to work online permanently, but it will depend on whether I can make the SEO work for that. So, for the sake of this discussion let's assume that I plan to stay online permanently. If that happens, I plan to make a limited number of house calls so that my business will retain a face-to-face component to comply with GMB SAB guidelines.
-
@custardextract Your scenario is an important one, and I apologize that haven't receive a quicker response. I have one core question for you: if COVID ends, do you plan to resume seeing patients in-person? Or, is your medical specialty such that it is possible and is it your plan to permanently conduct all of your consultations remotely? And, related, if you did resume seeing patients in person, would you re-rent a new office or would you see patients at your house or make house calls?
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
-
What is the best structured data for my website
We have 10:branches for our agency where we are looking to attract local businesses to use our marketing services, should each landing page have structured data for ‘local business’? Any advice would be helpful
Local SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Page Structure for Law Firm with Multiple Services
Hello and thanks in advance for any help. I'll try to keep this simple. I am about to do some major SEO for our Law Firm. We have 4 practice areas and I will be focusing on Lemon Law Attorneys for this example. I always try my best to keep it clean, organized and for the user. This one just has me a little confused about which direction to take as its a little more complex. The business is 1 location. The office is in San Diego but we service all of California. CURRENT PAGE STRUCTURE
Local SEO | | ChrisCanada
.com (home)
.com/practice-areas/
.com/practice-areas/lemon-law-attorneys/
.com/practice-areas/service-two-example/
.com/practice-areas/service-three-example/
.com/practice-areas/service-four-example/ I did some research and got better keywords (listed below) KEYWORD & SEARCH VOLUME lemon law 40500
- california lemon law 9900
- lemon law california 9900
- lemon law attorney 3600
- california lemon law attorney 880
- lemon law attorney san diego 170 It would be nice to rank for both California and San Diego search terms but I'm ok if that's not the right way to do it. These are the options I can think of using Lemon Law Attorney as an example. I'd love to hear what you think would work best and im open to other options. PAGE STRUCTURE (Option A)
.com/practice-areas/
.com/practice-areas/lemon-law-attorney-san-diego/ PAGE STRUCTURE (Option B)
.com/practice-areas/
.com/practice-areas/california-lemon-law-attorney/
.com/practice-areas/california-lemon-law-attorney/lemon-law-attorney-san-diego/ PAGE STRUCTURE (Option C)
.com/lemon-law/
.com/lemon-law/california-lemon-law-attorney/
.com/lemon-law/california-lemon-law-attorney/lemon-law-attorney-san-diego/ PAGE STRUCTURE (Option D)
.com/lemon-law/
.com/lemon-law/california/
.com/lemon-law/california/san-diego/ PAGE STRUCTURE (Option E)
.com/lemon-law-attorney/
.com/lemon-law-attorney/california/
.com/lemon-law-attorney/california/san-diego/ The biggest problem I see if having to make unique Lemon Law content for both California and San Diego Lemon Law Attorney pages. I dont want the site to look spammy to the end user. At the same time I want to make sure im setting myself up for success from the start. Thank you,
Chris1 -
Company with multiple services | multiple locations/states
I have a company that rents, repairs, and sells product both new and used. They also have 3 locations in 3 states and service multiple cities out of the locations (ie... los angeles and orange county). Having a hard time redesigning the website so that it fits for customers to look around and for the best of Organic SEO. The issue seems to be fitting the locations in the mix in order to get the customer to the right area without being too confusing. In the end, I'm thinking well maybe the homepage should just be some content to get them to choose the location first then they can go into silos where they pretty much remain in the location for rentals, repairs, and sales but I'm not sure how having the locations on the home page would affect the site. Obviously, we would be trying to rank the silo locations more but they would be 2-3 pages in on clicks to get to the right section 'if' they started from the home page. We need to do this right from the beginning though because we are working on expanding nationwide one day. Thanks for any help on this manner. (PS> Thought about doing subdomains like locations.example.com or state.example.com and rentals.example.some and shop.example.com but I think that will dilute the rankings)
Local SEO | | Ryan_Marshall1 -
Correct setup: One business, one website, two bricks and mortar locations
Hi all, we have a furniture business with two physical stores and one website, which has the ability to sell online but we hardly sell anything but we're just about to start Google PLA on a few products, let's say our website is at: nicefurniture.co.uk We have nicefurniture.co.uk/first-location and nicefurniture.co.uk/second-location set up with all the store info, a Google Map, contact info, etc. This is linked to from the footer on all pages. Issue 1: I have been told conflicting things about how to best set up our Google My Business page. One person says set the URL for both to our homepage, nicefurniture.co.uk and the other says point each GMB listing to the store location pages OR we should buy www.furniture-first-location.co.uk as our URL and point the GMB listing to that. To me, that doesn't make sense as we'd be spreading our domain equity with a new domain, surely? Issue 2: How do I get each GMB location to show up in Maps, etc when people search for 'furniture location' or even 'sofa location' or 'dining table location'? Would I need to optimize the store pages on our site? Issue 3: Years ago we did set up another URL, let's say nicefurniture-cornwall.co.uk and on it there are about 500 pages, all with links pointing to our main website. Google Search Console for our main website lists this other website as one of our top linking domains. Does that mean if we remove nicefurniture-cornwall.co.uk we'll risk a drop in rankings? Many thanks for your input.
Local SEO | | Bee1590 -
Taking a plastic surgery practice to the next level?
We have a plastic surgery client in Las Vegas that we've been working with for about a year. We've got all the technical infrastructure of their site running well (running on Hubspot), we've gotten the appropriate keyword markup done like H1s, title tags, etc. We also disavowed a large amount of spammy backlinks that their previous SEO provider had built that was penalizing them last year. Now our ongoing work is primarily blog content production (topics are split between long-tail procedure-specific keywords and more general health and beauty content), as-needed new web page production, and content sharing over email and social media. Their organic search traffic saw excellent gains for several months, but organic search growth has flattened out now. What should we do to restart organic search traffic growth?
Local SEO | | ClearPivot0 -
Local Pages for National (Service) Companies
Hi there, I was wanting to know the value of local pages for a service company that operates nationally. They do not have a phone number or address, but they do maintain employees in each of the locations and are thus, keen to emphasize this fact with location pages. The location pages merely explain that they have staff in each of the locations and experience working there, alongside a variety of information that is relevant to the industry/market in that location. None of the location pages are currently ranking well at all - in fact, all of the ones I've looked at so far have had a page authority of 1. Most of the major towns, cities and counties for the entire UK have been covered which means the location pages constitute a significant proportion of all of the pages for the entire site. My questions are: Is a national service company likely to benefit from having location pages? And could it even be something they could be penalised for at some point down the line? Thanks very much, in advance, for your time. Kind Regards, Tom
Local SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
What is the best sites for Press Release
I am looking at all the various press release sites out there. I have a local business relocating and we want to use a press release to get the information out there and hopefully get the move picked up by a local newspaper. Any experience/suggestions on best PR sites?
Local SEO | | bricegump0 -
Merchant Loyalty Schemes? Who is the best in the business?
Hi There, I wanted to get some opinions on onlin merchant loyalty schemes such as Bellycard.com & Stamp.it? A quick Google search reveals lots of these businesses. Who in your opinion is the top provider in this field and why?
Local SEO | | skehoe0