Citations for service providers and different locations

[FeuzaReis12]

My clients are mostly photographers who work from home, so service based and dont have a full address listed or fear to and many want to service bigger cities and not cities they live in, or want more than one city and state. What are best practices for SEO for multiple locations as well as service providers?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Feuza,

Linda has pointed to one of the best recent articles on this topic of needing to build citations while hiding the address of the business. I will add to this that your photographers are fortunate enough to be in an industry in which writing up locally-optimized descriptions of their photo shoots should be easy. Much more scope for the imagination here than if they were plumbers, right?

Whether your clients do this via an on-site blog or a library-like gallery of articles about their different shoots in different towns, there is great opportunity for content development that showcases their work in the different cities where they would love to gain visibility in the SERPs. They can write up weddings they shoot if they do that, or if they are nature photographers, they can write about the different regional and national parks, or if they do business photography, they can write about the companies they are shooting in different cities. And, remember, too, that they can geotag their images on social sharing sites like Flickr, Panoramio and Picasa. Pinterest could also be a great area for them to be active, too. Lots of opportunity here!

[FeuzaReis12]

Linda, this is very helpful, yeah photographers think once can magically appear some where if not paying for google adwords and such. Many work from home and fear showing their real address. They are obsessed with ranking local but some of this huge towns its an impossible task and I try and educate them as much as possible.

Thank you for your input, I will check out that article

[LindaBuquet]

Hi Feuza,

In Google local it's tough to rank in the local 7 pack unless your address is actually in the city you are trying to rank in. You can try to rank in organic in those other cities, but depending on competition, normally you can't get in "the pack" unless you are located there.

But again varies by industry and city. Test it. Google: "City + KW" and see if everyone's address is in that city.  Sometimes in smaller towns or low competition industries it will be mixed results.

As far as citations go - they don't move the needle that much with the blended algo. I mean they are important and you need to have a good base. But adding more won't necessarily increase rank. The current algo is more about organic ranking factors.

But as far as citations for service area businesses with hidden address... it's good to still get citations with address, because Google will match them to the address inside dash.

If you have clients that really don't want their address showing anywhere online, Phil Rosek has a post with a list of citation sources that don't require address. http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/