Has anyone found a best practice for ranking a client who has one central office location, but a large, regional service area that they want to rank for?

[BehrDesign]

All the most recent local search ranking is based upon physical addresses, but what happens when someone provides services and has staff 100 miles from that central office location, but no physical address to work with?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Kevin,

Good thoughts from Kevin Ramirez regarding content development and Richard Horvath regarding ensuring that the content you develop is unique!

The challenge here is that Google is biased toward physical location. Thus, an SAB (service area business) must typically plan to go after local pack rankings for its city of location and organic rankings for its location-less service cities. The type of content you will be developing is typically known as city landing pages. You can read more about this here:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

[TheeDigital]

I like Kevin's strategy but one thing I would stress is focus on the content being unique. You don't want to get penalized for duplicate content.

Awhile back cologne' company Burburry had their US page flagged for looking too much like the Europe page. So keep that in mind.

[kauthonk]

I've done it by making pages for each specific area.  Here's an example.  I lived in Baltimore for a while but I wanted to do business in the surrounding counties.  So, I made a page for Baltimore County, Eastern Shore, Carroll County and others that I wanted to get listed in.