Google Places - What is the best Service Areas Strategy?
-
I've found a lot of useful info on this topic in these forums, but still can't seem to find the answer to my specific question.
Client has one physical location and services many areas.
I have seen various comments that claim setting a service area actually has a negative effect on rankings and the login makes sense to me, so we don't want to do that.
Using the actual physical address, seems to be what google would prefer, but the address is actually on the outskirts of the city and would mean that competitors that have addresses closer to the city center would show up before us.
Our current places listing has the actual address, but the previous SEO put the larger city, with the smaller city zip on the on the website.
City Center: San Diego, 92101
Actual: Street Address, El Cajon, 92020
On website: San Diego, 92020
It this large City + Actual zip code strategy any good?
Which of these 3 strategies should we use to standardize all of our listings?
*we will not be considering a location or mailbox per service are to use multiple listings at this time
-
Hello VernonMack,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. I think the most important point to respond to in your post is this one. You write:
Using the actual physical address, seems to be what google would prefer, but the address is actually on the outskirts of the city and would mean that competitors that have addresses closer to the city center would show up before us.
It isn't so much a matter of Google's preference, but a matter of adhering to their guidelines which specifically state that you must use your real physical address. Unfortunately, this means that businesses likes yours on the borders of major cities do not have the strength to overpower the rankings of competitors actually located within the big cities. As you can imagine, this is a very common issue for all local businesses located just outside of metropolitan locations. Google will always view you as most relevant to the city in which you are located, so for your company, that will be El Cajon - not San Diego. I cannot recommend attempting to mash up the city and zip of the two different locales.
You can, of course, create content on your website about any work you do within San Diego, but should not expect this to take precedence over your actual physical location.
I truly sympathize with the wish to compete for the big search terms, but the usefulness of Google Places depends on accurate representation of data. For now, you are located in El Cajon and should correctly list yourself as such. If it becomes clear to you in future that you need to move locations into the city of San Diego, you will be doing what some other local business owners have done due to Google's handling of location. For some businesses, moving shop just isn't feasible, but for others, getting that inner city address is a must and a smart move.
Hope this helps, and good luck!
-
I can't say 100%, but it looks like El Cajon is still in San Diego County, which might mean it's close enough to still count. Again, you might want to get a second opinion, but I don't think it would be too much of a problem using your actual zip code with San Diego. For instance, where I am (Maryland) there are several small towns that people just incorporate into the bigger city while keeping their unique zip codes.
-
Thanks, Nick. do you have any additional insight into the strategy that combine the large city with the actual city zip code? The listings (NAP) are currently all over the place we will standardize them once we have chosen the best format.
-
This is a tricky one - you're more likely to come up for the smaller city if you're far from the city center, but it's not as likely to get as many searches.
I'd suggest using whatever address most commonly appears on the web. One thing Google really relies on is a consistent NAP - Name, Address and Phone Number. If your website says San Diego, and you have other local citations (directories, etc) that say San Diego, go with San Diego - that should help boost all your local rankings.
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
-
Google indexing is slowing down?
I have up to 20 million unique pages, and so far I've only submitted about 30k of them on my sitemap. We had a few load related errors during googles initial visits, and it thought some were duplicates, but we fixed all that. We haven't gotten a crawl related error for 2 weeks now. Google appears to be indexing fewer and fewer urls every time it visits. Any ideas why? I am not sure how to get all our pages indexed if its going to operate like this... love some help thanks! HnJaXSM.png
Technical SEO | | RyanTheMoz0 -
Google Indexing of Site Map
We recently launched a new site - on June 4th we submitted our site map to google and almost instantly had all 25,000 URL's crawled (yay!). On June 18th, we made some updates to the title & description tags for the majority of pages on our site and added new content to our home page so we submitted a new sitemap. So far the results have been underwhelming and google has indexed a very low number of the updated pages. As a result, only a handful of the new titles and descriptions are showing up on the SERP pages. Any ideas as to why this might be? What are the tricks to having google re-index all of the URLs in a sitemap?
Technical SEO | | Emily_A0 -
My Google Author Pic Disappeared
My Google author picture, which had been in place for a couple of years, disappeared from all SERP results recently. I checked, and rel=author attribution is valid on every post, as is the link to to the Google + authorship page (which contains a link back to the web site). When I test URL's in the structured data testing tool the picture appears. I'm out of troubleshooting ideas. Any suggestions welcome.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Google Links
I am assuming that the list presented by Google Webmaster tools (TRAFFIC | Links To Your Site) is the one that will actually be used by Google for indexing ? There seem to be quite a few links that there that should not be there. ie Assumed NOFOLLOW links. Am I working under an incorrect assumption that all links in webmaster tools are actually followed ?
Technical SEO | | blinkybill0 -
Google Webmaster Sitemap *pending*
Hey guys, I've noticed that my sitemap has been "pending" for quite some time in Google Webmaster tools. This leads me to believe that Google is not indexing my site. Could someone help me and point me to what I'm doing wrong? My site is The Tech Block
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
How best to go about creating an application?
Hi there, I work within the travel sector, and I've had an idea of getting an embeddable application built, which would be of use to my company, but also lots of other companies (our competitors) and general websites in our niche. The idea would be that we'd get (and pay for) the application to be built, and then allow other parties to embed it into their site with a snippet of our code so we get the link back from them. There are obviously some technical issues here. The app will be built with Javascript (we can't use PHP on our web server , its a long story!) and I'd want a way to stop other swiping the code and using without the link to us. Is this going to be possible? Also, whats going to be the best way to get the link from them? If a competitor used it, they are less likely to do so with our company name plastered all over it, so it would need to be subtle, or an image link, or something. Not sure. Anyone done this sort of thing before? Thanks
Technical SEO | | neilpagecruise0 -
Does Google index XML files?
Does Google or other search engines include XML files in their index? More specifically, I am wondering how Google knows the difference between an xml filetype and an RSS feed.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Why do I see dramatic differences in impressions between Google Webmaster Tools and Google Insights for Search?
Has anyone else noticed discrepancies between these tools? Take keyword A and keyword B. I've literally seen situations where A has 3 or 4 times the traffic as B in Google Webmaster Tools, but half the traffic of B in Google Insights for Search. What might be the reason for this discrepancy?
Technical SEO | | ir-seo-account0