LOCAL SEO / Ranking for the difficult 'service areas' outside of the primary location?
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It's generally not too hard to rank in Google Places and organically for your primary location. However if you are a service area business looking to rank for neighboring cities or service areas, Google makes this much tougher.
Andrew Shotland mentions the obvious and not so obvious options: Service Area pages ranking organically, getting a real/virtual address, boost geo signals, and using zip codes instead of service area circle.
But I am wondering if anyone had success with other methods? Maybe you have used geo-tagging in a creative way? This is a hurdle that many local business are struggling with and any experience or thoughts will be much appreciated
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I guess part of the reason is that local search results do not show up for some of your keywords, as in "SeaTac Bankruptcy Lawyer", and so organic results are the only option.
Yes you are very right some of this will not work for specific industry or unique geographic areas. Thanks again for all your input.
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This worked for organic. I've never had much luck ranking on the local search results outside of my immediate physical locations. However, I get plenty of traffic through the organic results; and frankly, I think that my clients prefer seeing my content to just seeing the local results.
However, the major caveat is that this is specific to your niche and may not work as well for certain businesses. Since I'm running a law practice, my clients like organic results because they like the information that is available in my targeted pages.
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Thanks for that insight greatly appreciated. No this is something you observed for organic results or local results as well?
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I can illustrate with a very specific example that will hopefully clear it up a little bit. I am a bankruptcy lawyer with offices in Seattle and Kent. Seattle was my major target because it is a major city and the largest in my target region. However, there are dozens of towns around Seattle. I wanted to get as much reach as possible.
When I did my keyword research, I found that searching for "SeaTac Bankruptcy Lawyer" mostly brought up results in Kent. The reason was that there are no bankruptcy lawyers in SeaTac with a web presence. The bankruptcy lawyers were concentrated in Kent. Since this was the case, a good ranking for Kent spilled over to a good ranking for SeaTac. This meant that instead of trying to focus on both Kent and SeaTac, I was better off focusing just on Kent. The result is that by ranking well for Kent, I get a geographic spillover to smaller towns around Kent like SeaTac and Auburn.
When you are doing local optimization, try to think of the metro area as a flow chart with the biggest city at the top (level 1) and the smaller ones coming below (levels 2 - whatever). You will find that the further you go down the flow chart, the fewer strong competitors there are. This means that ranking will for a city at level 3 of the flow chart gives you spill over to a city at level 4 or level 5 provided that there isn't strong competition at level 4 or 5.
So focus on unique landing pages for the cities at the lowest level where there is active competition. This will give you spillover to all the levels below that level. Then, once you have established those landing pages, work on landing pages at another level down. They key is that the landing pages need to be unique to avoid the duplicate content penalty.
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Thanks David for your sharing your process.
"and see if you can focus on locations that are spread throughout the metro area."
-for clarification what do you mean by this? Are you looking for areas with low competition and trying to find gaps, because you did mention you are focusing on areas that are known for attorney's.
Thank you, and awaiting more response
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I have the same issue with marketing my business. This is what has worked for me.
You don't have to rank for every town in the metro area. You just have to rank for the towns that people associate with your business. For example, I am a Seattle bankruptcy attorney. There are about 6 other areas that people associate with bankruptcy attorneys. This is because not every area has a lot of professionals.
What I did was look at my competition first. See where they are located throughout the metro area. Then do some keyword research with "Business name + location" and "location + business name." Then compare the results to the map and see if you can focus on locations that are spread throughout the metro area. Then write unique landing pages for each.
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