Business has single location but serves six state region

[GFujioka]

Hi all, looking for strategies to optimize for a company that has one office but serves the entire six state New England region.

Their keywords tend to be highly competitive, i.e. fire damage cleanup, fire damage repair, fire damage restoration, water damage cleanup, water damage repair, etc.

Their competitors that rank well tend to be franchise operations such as Servpro and Paul Davis Restoration. Often several different geographic franchisees for the same franchisor appear for the same search term and ostensibly compete among themselves. In these cases they are serving boilerplate websites differentiated by "Company name of this area" or "Company name of that area".

We are beginning a local citation initiative. Is it possible local strength could dilute regional strength?

In some of my research on the topic I've read suggestions that companies in this situation optimize with local partners or affiliates in the other states. This company dispatches their own personnel and does not work with partners or have affiliates to speak of.

Thanks for reading this. I appreciate any thoughts or suggestions.

[MiriamEllis]

So glad to hear that, and good luck with the project! Sounds like it will be a big one!

[GFujioka]

Miriam, thank you so much for your thoughtful and helpful reply. It is very instructive. I also read the referenced post on your site regarding city landing pages and found it a very helpful resource providing multiple perspectives on my client's situation. Your answer and the article will be of great value devising a strategy going forward. Thanks again.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi GFujioka,

Good question. Let's start by discussing the definition of a citation. A citation may be defined as a partial listing of a business' NAP (name, address, phone number) anywhere on the web. So, by nature, citations revolve around physical locale...not around service radii. So, for example, a business with a physical office and local area code phone number in San Francisco, CA could ostensibly serve Los Angeles, CA, Portland, OR and Seattle, WA., but their citation campaign would have to revolve around just one locale - their physical one - because citations are all about NAP. Your client has a single NAP, according to your description, so your citation campaign must focus on that.

If the client's competitors have multiple physical addresses paired with unique local phone numbers, then they will definitely have the advantage over your client, because they will not only be able to build out citations for each physical locale, but will also be able to have a unique Google+ Local page for each physical locale. In other words, your client cannot compete on a true local level with a competitor who actually has a physical locale and unique local phone number in Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, because Google's local results are based on having NAP within the target city.

Where does this leave your client? He must do all he can for his single physical locale (get listed in Google+ Local, build citations, etc.) to participate to the fullest he can in Google's Local products, but the rest of his efforts for his location-less service cities will need to be organic in nature - not local. So, instead of citation building for these location-less service cities, your efforts will likely include content development, link building/earning and social media to help him build organic visibility in places where he has not real physical presence.

You might like to check out this recent post of mine on the subject of city landing pages:

The Nitty Gritty Of City Landing Pages For Local Businesses

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403

I think that might be really helpful for you to read at this point in creating your client strategy. My bet is that blogging and social media marketing coupled with a strong effort to earn links will be this client's best hope of gaining some organic visibility for cities/states where he does not have a physical presence.