Business location in small town - How to target meta title?
-
So it's common practice to include the city/state in page titles and within the content. However let's say that a business is located in a small town, but serves customers in surrounding, larger towns. You might say that it's not worth mentioning the small town because there would be few searchers in that area.
However, does Google take into account the distance a searcher is from the business location, in relation to the page title, as well as the Google my Business page? Obviously you can't go stuffing all of the surrounding towns into your homepage or main service pages. Is there any value in mentioning the small town, or is it fine to leave it out too?
What has been your experience?
-
Hi Oliver,
It might help to think of it this way. Whatever your town is (small or large) that is your local home base. This is the address you'll be using in all of your citation building, the footer and contact page of your website, and in at least some of your website content and optimization, all for the purposes of ranking locally.
For any other locations you serve, but where you lack a physical location, you'll be aiming at organic (not local pack) rankings. So, this will have nothing to do with your citations. It will all have to do with service city content you build on the website + additional outreach in the form of social and paid promotions.
So, even if your town is small, it's the anchor that proves you to be a local, physical business. It's what proves your eligibility to be included in Google My Business and other citation platforms. It's your best hope of local pack rankings.
Everything beyond your city of location is for organic outreach.
As for how Google will handle all this, given the user-as-centroid phenomenon, Google will customize local results for the searcher based on his physical location at the time of search. So, you do want to be sure you're making it clear that your physical location is at 'X' so that Google is convinced searchers near there are close to you.
Hope this helps, and might like this for further reading: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
-
Hi Oliver!
Mike's answer is spot on.
In reference to your question about Google taking the searcher's distance from the business into account I would like to provide some insight. Organic listing will not have as much to do with location to the search, but the results in the local pack do. Three important factors to keep in mind when trying to rank in the Local Pack:
- Relevance
- Distance
- Prominence
Relevance is impacted by the information in your profile relating to the searcher’s query. Ensure your profile is completely filled out with valid information, hours, photos, etc. Google will show results calculated by the user’s location in order to display business closest to them. Lastly, how prominent your business is within the industry is important. Prominence refers to offline factors (links, articles, directories), as well as positive reviews and SERP positions.
Hope this helps!
-
Oliver,
We serve the DC market with a commercial print shop in Waldorf, MD (15 miles outside DC) and I've focused all my SEO efforts on DC. We've had success with this strategy along with the convenience of lower manufacturing costs, as well as maintaining our Super-Fast expedited services model. We've done it and you may as well.
KJr
-
Fantastic answer Mike!
I would also add to look into services like Moz Local, Whitespark, or Yext, to get more relevant listings that help Google and other search engines verify your information and help you appear for searches related to your industry and service area.
Don't forget also that Moz has a great local SEO audit resource.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Patrick -
In a situation like this, I would turn to your Google My Business page and make sure that the locations or distance that you serve is set properly in order to reach all of the surrounding towns that you do, in fact, serve. It doesn't necessarily hurt to include your small town name in the meta title. While that will help with more immediate local traffic, Google does change titles and descriptions in the SERPs for certain terms they feel the page is relevant for but do not feel your other info adequately expresses. Google will take into account the location of your business but if your GMB page shows that you service a nearby area, they won't just discount you because you're in nearby small town instead of Big Town. In cases like that, you may find that Google alters the page title in the SERPs to show the name of the bigger town or completely remove mention of any town. So just because your title and description don't perfectly reflect every single area you might work in, that doesn't mean you can't show up for those local searchers.
It can also be useful to make pages on your site specifically talking about the services available to those bigger surrounding towns. So even if your homepage is more targeted to Small Town, you can have an organic landing page devoted to Big Town A and Big Town B with all your info, service information, a blurb about the town and how your business interacts with that area, and a nice call to action and/or contact form for that town. Just make sure not to copy/paste to create tons of targeted pages like that. You want everything to be nice and unique so there are no duplication issues.
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
-
Geo-location by state/store
Hi there, We are a Grocery co-operative retailer and have chain of stores owned by different people. We are building a new website, where we would geo-locate the closest store to the customer and direct them to a particular store (selected based on cookie and geo location). All our stores have a consistent range of products + Variation in 25% range. I have few questions How to build a site-map. Since it will be mandatory for a store to be selected and same flow for the bot and user, should have all products across all stores in the sitemap? we are allowing users to find any products across all stores if they search by product identifier. But, they will be able to see products available in a particular store if go through the hierarchical journey of the website. Will the bot crawl all pages across all the stores or since it will be geolocated to only one store, the content belonging to only one store will be indexed? We are also allowing customers to search for older products which they might have bought few years and that are not part of out catalogue any more. these products will not appear on the online hierarchical journey but, customers will be able to search and find the products . Will this affect our SEO ranking? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks - Costa
Local Website Optimization | | Hanuman881 -
Local SEO + Searcher Intent Targeting for Home Builder
Good Morning, All! I work for a home builder - www.HibbsHomes.com. Their site has hundreds of pages and blogs and I'm looking at consolidating many of them as they're older and use an older SEO strategy. Can you take a look at their portfolio? http://hibbshomes.com/custom-home-builders-st-louis/st-louis-custom-homes-portfolio/ I'm wondering if I should consolidate the various projects into their own pages by house type and city - rather than having all on one page? Both for SEO and for easier searchability. How would you organize this for these? The benefit to setting up city pages is the local SEO rank (St Louis has so many suburbs). The benefit to setting up pages by home style or size would be for user experience. How do I improve this for both? And... how do I optimize for conversions better?
Local Website Optimization | | stldanni1 -
Moving to a new Location: SEO Website
I'm moving to a different state and want to keep my business and clients in both locations. Is it better to build two separate sites, one for Ohio locations and create a new site for Tennessee content? (www.ohiosite.com & www.tennesseesite.com) Or is it best to keep one site, and install a second wordpress site in a separate folder like ( www.site.com + www.site.com/tennessee )
Local Website Optimization | | morg454540 -
Best practices for 301 redirect to a new location website.
We just opened a new location in a nearby city. We were already servicing this location from our main base. As such we had a special page for this location which raked fairly well. The new location will have its own website. Would it be better to 301 redirect the current location page to the new location website? Or should we simply link from the old page to the new location's website? Any best practices?
Local Website Optimization | | Vspeed0 -
How to handle clients who want to target far away from their location?
In general, How do you recommend handling clients that are persistent about targeting a location that is very far away from their physical location, i.e. the client is in Providence, RI, but wants to target Boston, MA. I typically give them a discussion about how they will not rank in the 7 packs, particularly post pigeon, but wanted to know if the Moz community had any other tips since this seems to come up so frequently. Thank you!
Local Website Optimization | | Red_Spot_Interactive1 -
Do you need exact match geographically targeted keywords for ranking within a specified city limit?
For example, I have a personal injury law firm in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I only care about potential clients searching within the city limits of Sheboygan (and not within the state of Wisconsin or on a national level). Do the following elements need to contain an exact match geographically targeted keyword if I only care about ranking locally in Sheboygan, Wisconcsin? (The type of keyword phrase I'm referring to would be Sheboygan Personal Injury Lawyers, Sheboygan Car Accident Lawyers, etc.) Title Tag Meta Description Main Headline Body Content Should I not include an exact match geographically targeted keyword in my content and trust that Google can make the association with where I'm located by other factors on the website? Website factors: Google local business page is setup linking to my website Other local listings have been claimed and setup properly My contact page contains our full address and phone number My footer contains our full address and phone number on every page
Local Website Optimization | | peteboyd0 -
Google Panda 4.0 update - Good for Small businesses?
Hi guys, We recently did a post on Google Panda 4.0 release. Check this here. Have you seen any notable changes in rankings for your website? Do you think that this update will benefit small businesses/websites? Looking forward to your comments.
Local Website Optimization | | FRL2 -
How can I do a Geo-targeted SEO for a lawncare services client?
Hi All! I am managing an SEO project for a new client, http://1800lawncaredallas.com and the optimization is yet to begin. It is a brand new website. The client serves only in particular locations in Texas. How can I optimize the site for these cities without making it look spammy or over-optimized? Is there a checklist that I can follow to optimize these pages? Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | wealthyminds
Rk0