Local SEO: 1 Location Covering Multiple Surrounding Cities

[the-coopersmith]

I am setting up local pages on our main site for each of our dealers. Some of them cover multiple cities. For example, one dealer in Santa Rosa, CA, but also covers San Francisco (50 mile drive). While I know that with Google+ Local I can add coverage radius or zip code/cities covered, what about on that dealer's local page on our site? Should I create local pages for each city covered or cram local optimization into one? Keep in mind I only have one address to work with for each dealer (P.O. Boxes or Virtual Mail Boxes are NOT a good solutions).

Looking for any white hat tips before I implement for all 100+ dealers.

[MiriamEllis]

Google updated their webmaster guidelines about a year ago to specifically frown on lists of keywords like this. See:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

[the-coopersmith]

Got it. Thank you!

One more question... Could a list of counties, small surrounding cities, towns, districts boroughs, etc covered on each dealer's local page add value or be seen as a negative? Imagine a NYC dealer targeting boroughs Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island or on a smaller scale an Indianapolis Dealer targeting districts Broad Ripple Village, Massachusetts Avenue, and Fountain Square. Asking because I have a list of each of these for each dealer from their old websites. And yes, I meant list. Not a paragraph about each as they are now.

[MiriamEllis]

So glad to help! I'll number my recommendations for easiest reading:

1. Use only the legal business name for each dealer. Do not add keywords of any kind, nor change the legal business name in any way. If the company is ABC Plumbing, this is how it should be listed in all cities. Use the legal business name with absolute consistency on the website, the Google+ Local pages and on third party citations.

2. Each dealer must have his own local phone number. Do not use a toll free number, a vanity number, a call tracking number or a shared number. If you want to put a toll free number in an image on the website landing pages, that's fine, and you can list a toll free number as the secondary number on the Google+ Local pages, but always put the unique, local number first.

3. Yes, the complete NAP will exist only on those website landing pages that relate to the cities in which the business is physically located. You will not be putting NAP on the 'location-less' city landing pages. That's good that you have the resources to create unique copy for these pages! You can optimize these pages for the service cities and the business name, but do not put the address and phone number of the physical office in the neighboring city on these pages.

That should cover it. Good luck with the work ahead!

[the-coopersmith]

Actually, I just looked at what I thought was our Santa Rosa, CA dealer and their address is actually in Rohnert Park, CA (15 miles north of Santa Rosa). So to go a little further, should the dealer be listed on Google+ Local and their local page as "ABC Plumbing Rohnert Park", "ABC Plumbing Santa Rosa" or "ABC Plumbing San Francisco"? FYI - Currently, they are optimized as "Northern California", which I do not feel is helping at all.

[the-coopersmith]

It is a pretty competitive market, so I am not sure of its reach. Looking at competition though, I think if we optimize correctly we could still rank even from Santa Rosa.

[the-coopersmith]

You are correct, it is an in-home service. And Miriam, once again you are awesome!

Currently, only 12 of them cover 2-3 cities, but this will most likely increase over the next year. We have the resources to implement a local page for each of the 2-3 cities they cover and create good unique content. If we were to do this though, there could only be one "true" NAP (true as in a street address registered with Google+ Local, etc). While these secondary city pages will not have back links from local listing/directory sites, it seems it would still be better to go this route then cram into one page, right?

If I were to create these secondary city pages I could change the dealer name to include each city name "ABC Plumbing Santa Rosa", have them get a local number for each city and include just the city/state. Also, I mentioned that they get a local number for each city they want to be optimized for, is this true? If their main NAP uses a toll-free number could each of that dealer's local pages use that same number, or would that be a duplicate issue? Leaning toward local numbers for each city anyway for better ux, but curious if it matters.

[MiriamEllis]

Good Morning!

If I'm understanding your question correctly, you are saying that you have 100+ dealers. The term 'dealer' may be confusing to me, as I'm associating it with something like car dealers (brick-and-mortar businesses without a service radius). Do your dealers travel to cities to have face-to-face transactions with customers, like a plumber would? As you've mentioned that you're using the service radius tool on the Google+ Local page, I'm going to assume that these employees do travel to various cities within their service radius to give service. If I'm wrong, please do explain.

So, back to the equation here. You have 100 dealers, and let's say that each of them has a 50 mile service radius with 20 towns and cities in it. If you went the route you're asking about of creating a page for each of these cities, that would mean developing 2000 pages on the website (20 X 100). While this is not an impossible task, it is an enormous one, and the chief danger in it would be the creation of thin, duplicate content that could lower the quality of the website. So, if you were to use this strategy, the requirement would be the manpower and money to create 2000 excellent pages on the website. These city landing pages would need to feature unique content, perhaps showcasing each dealer's projects in a given city.

A half-hearted approach, however, would do more harm than good, so if the business lacks the resources to pull this off, then a better strategy would be to create 100 pages (one for each dealer) optimized with the complete NAP encoded in Schema and featuring an overview of the dealer's work in his city of location. I would not recommend optimizing these pages for the other cities in the service radius. Google's Webmaster Guidelines frown on lists of cities served, so this would not be something you'd want to put on these pages. You could include some type of map on these pages illustrating the service area, to get the point across.

If you are forming a long-term strategy under a long-term contract with this business, then once you've got the 100 pages developed, you might create a plan for beginning to develop service city landing pages for each dealer over time, at a rate that is commensurate with the client's resources to get this work done correctly. It would likely be the work of many months or years to cover every town and city, so finding a way to scale this would likely be the chief challenge in such a project.

Again, if I've misunderstood the business model, please do clarify.

[crackingmedia]

Hi, I think without a dealer in San Francisco with a physical address then you need to optimise the page on your site for the dealer you have in Santa Rosa complete with citations for their location (Name, Address, Phone number).

The success of the Santa Rosa dealer's page for searches for San Francisco will largely depend on the competitiveness of other dealers listed on the Internet that are selling the same products with local citations closer to San Francisco. If there are limited dealers to be found for San Francisco then Google will spread it's net wider to find other relevant results. That said, your Google+ Local listing showing coverage should help your site page.

I hope that helps,
Peter