Questions about On-site Location Content for Service Area Businesses
-
Hello all,
I've got a couple tough questions about how to go about creating locations pages for my business, and I'm wondering if you can give me some much needed direction.
I'm about to launch a professional house cleaning business which will serve Philadelphia and a couple surrounding counties. I plan on aggressively expanding to other large cities, and while I plan on building a Philly locations page, I'm unsure of how to rank organically for all the individual towns/municipalities in the surrounding counties in the middle without having a physical business location there.
Should I even hope to rank for these smaller towns? Would a page where the county is in the h1 tag, and say the top 10 largest towns in that county listed underneath in h2 tags help me reach searchers in those top 10 largest towns? How about paying ~$100 for a physical street address in each county and submitting that NAP to local directories of the larger towns, as well as getting a Google My Business page and using the service radius option?
Is there some other strategy that I'm missing?
I'm just at a loss for how to compete without AdWords for the people searching in the smaller towns when my competition is businesses with NAP/citations and their main page dedicated solely to that smaller town. Google seems to have made it even harder with Pigeon coming out recently. I serve those areas just as readily as my competition, yet the customer will predominantly see them SOLELY due to the fact that most of my competition are incapable of serving or choose not to serve wide areas. I understand that these businesses are dedicating a lot of resources to those small towns, but it does seem a sad fact that it doesn't mean they're any higher quality of a company than mine, yet they get a leg up.
ANY advice or direction would be greatly appreciated, and would come with a huge internet bear hug.
-
Hi PT:)
You might also like to check out this blog post on local landing pages:
http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
Hope this will be helpful!
-
Hello PTHerrington,
You certainly have your work cut out for you, that's for sure.
If I were you, here's what I'd do:
- Analyze where my competitors are weak when it comes to online local marketing, and exploit those areas especially. It sounds like the main advantage they have are offices in those towns, which you can't duplicate. I personally wouldn't bother with the PO Box option. I doubt it will help a whole lot with your end game from actually netting more customers.
- I'd start with a good Google AdWords budget while you're trying to build rank organically. Over time hopefully you'll have to spend less and less on AdWords, but out of the gate you'll need it to get traction over organic competitors. Ideally you'd have really good landing pages that drive them to a page for that town, or county if towns are not feasible. (Of course, if you worked hard on a handful of pages for individual towns for organic, those could double for PPC nicely.)
- People generally don't search as much for services on a county level. So I'd argue you should focus on a few small, key town pages, and try to fill them with as much local content as possible and try to educate your consumer a bit, beyond what your competitors are doing. Over time those pages could get rankings, but doing the H1 county thing with H2 town names I don't think will deliver.
Here's an example of a woman who created good local content and from it grew not only a pet sitting business for herself, but a thriving franchise business other pet sitters have replicated in their cities. I'd assume her area was dominated by larger kennels etc., and she appears to be a one-person operation. http://www.copyblogger.com/bella-vasta-case-study/
- Be sure obviously to check out Moz Local, and listen to Greg Gifford's webinar on local SEO. He helps local car dealerships, and that webinar is packed with good, practical ideas you can execute on.
In summary, I'd argue don't try to cover everything. Just pick a few towns and test out what works, and then slowly expand out with additional pages. You can always mention other cities you operate in. But don't try and bit off your entire coverage area with regional pages.
Most companies do little more in local SEO than register a Google Places page and have a physical address. So if you try to create a little more value and optimize heavily for those towns, over time I bet you'd see some good results.
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
-
Why won't a business show up in the local pack when all signs point to that it should?
Hello! I've been trying to figure out why a business won't show up in the local pack even though their GMB has more reviews, seems to be doing everything right, and just doesn't show. The business is "A Senior Journey", and should be showing up for searches relating to "senior placement services tucson" or "senior placement tucson", but no dice. Been doing a competitor analysis and they are doing better or on par with all of their competitors. The same businesses in Tucson that are competitors show up both times, even Phoenix locations, but not A Senior Journey...any ideas? Thank you!
Local Listings | | WebMO-Tech-Rep0 -
Google my business: How "Listing on Maps" are calculated? They are too high for us!
Hi Moz community, Our business listing on Google show some unbelievable statistics. According to their insights, we have 21K "Listing on Maps" and 1K "Listing on Search". This is impossible. Have you ever faced this? How these are calculated? There is no way that our business will be searched 20 times more on maps than usual search. Please clarify. Thanks
Local Listings | | vtmoz1 -
Changing the business name in citations and GMB
In Australia, some businesses are Pty Ltd (Proprietary Limited) hence, their business name ends with xxx Pty Ltd. How accurate do we have to be when building citations or updating citations that Pty Ltd is included in the business name? We've got clients who have left out Pty Ltd in their previously built citations and we're wondering if it's worth the time to actually update them to include Pty Ltd. Also, does changing a business name affect its rankings? This is more than just "Pty Ltd", it's changing from XYZ to ABC. We've previously had to change a client's address on their GMB and this had a negative effect on the client's rankings. Will changing the business name have an adverse effect? Thank you in advance for your advices!
Local Listings | | Gavo1 -
Local Listing - Service Business with Three Areas Served
A client of mine owns a business that is a service (i.e. they do not have a storefront). They service three major markets - Atlanta, GA; Charlotte, NC; Nashville, TN. When talking to the Google My Business team, they said we needed to set up only one listing based on where we were headquartered (which is Atlanta) and then list that we service the other markets so that it shows in the listing. So we have one business listing set up as a service but headquartered in Atlanta and show the service area as Atlanta, Nashville and Charlotte. Does this seem correct? There is a lot of competition for them so looking to boost local search as much as possible. Thanks!
Local Listings | | maghanlinchpinsales0 -
Google My Business listing - listed at CLOSED (how do I open)
Good afternoon Mozzers, I hope you can help me. I have a business listing, which is listed as being "PERMANENTLY CLOSED". In fact the business is OPEN it has just changed business name. I have ownership of the listing. I have "reported an issue" to Google and asked them to list as open, however how long will this take? Is there anything I can do to fast track this and limit the business impact? Any help welcomed, Ben
Local Listings | | Bendall0 -
Non-www or www from outside links to my site?
I'm new on SEO and recently redid this my website. This website is a local business that just sell around my city, so I started linking the website on listing sites. I found one directory that didn't allow me to add a non-www, so I change on every listing site or directory to www, It seems you can get your google ranking harmed if there is variations to access your website.I know that everything will arrive on the same page no matter I have a non-www or www, but the Website is Hosted on Godaddy and it seems that they don't use the www version even if you want. So my domain is non-www. On the other hand I just have been notified that google webmaster tools couldn't verify my account and I did it again and is verified now. Cheking again on WMT, it doesn't show the previous links that were under "Links to Your Site" it just show "no data available". Here in MOZ it show different results between non-www and www Why is this happening? What should I do? And in which way my google ranking can be affected by this?
Local Listings | | Brumas0 -
Do business citations (without links) on penalised website have a negative effect?
Hi there I've been doing some research into directory sites that my clients are listed on and noticed that some appear to have flat-lined in organic search traffic indicating a penalty. I would like to know if clients with business citations on these penalised websites (without links to clients websites) will be having a negative effect on SEO? Thanks
Local Listings | | Kerry_Jones0 -
Yext Power Listings and SEO Question...
Hi, I was wondering if anyone that has used Yext's Power Listings has experienced any negative (or positive) organic SEO results. As you know if you've used Yext, it creates a ton of links from directories. I think they're mainly no-follow links, but wanted to check if anyone has had experience (either good, bad, or neutral) regarding impact on organic results. Thanks.
Local Listings | | mrodriguez14400