How can we geo-target our website optimization for cities besides our physical location?
-
We have a client that is a solar energy installation & leasing company in Austin, TX that wants to target the Houston and Dallas markets. We can do a Place Page for their physical offices in Austin and San Antonio to drive traffic for those cities. But we’re not sure the best way to help them rank for Houston and Dallas, where they don't have a physical address. We’re considering a separate landing page for each city, optimized for the geo-term. Will that help them to rank in the 7Pack in Houston and Dallas, if there’s no Place Page? Will it help them rank in the organic listings for that region? Can you offer any other suggestions for how to help them rank in 2 cities where they don’t have physical offices?
-
"Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed."
http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?answer=107528
Yes.. I believe you recalled that correctly.
-
It could be possible to rank in the 7 pack with an address outside of the target city, but it's very very difficult to do. You would need the local signals like local landing pages, and you would need a very non competitive term. I believe you would have better luck getting a small office in the Houston or Dallas and manning it with some staff.
Outside the 7 pack you can easily rank for cities that you are not located in by traditional SEO methods. Creating a landing page for the GEO area and then creating local links and anchor text links will get you to the front page.
-
Thanks for the info about UPS stores. I didn't know they offered this service.
-
good point on the PO Box. UPS store offers address with suite numbers as opposed to PO boxes, but as I said it isn't necessarily "Best practices"
-
If I recall correctly, Google Places only accepts physical addresses, not PO boxes.
If you wanted to move in that direction, then a virtual office would be the preferred method. You can have a physical address, mail forwarding, and even a local phone number with an answering service if desired. Prices usually range from around $100 - $150 depending on your needs and location.
You can achieve the desired result with a strong landing page and links with proper anchor text from the target area. I would only go to the extreme of using a virtual office if there was a lot of money involved and there was an urgent need to improve your rank after you are already on the 1st page of SERP.
-
Landing pages are always effective - especially for localized geo marketing. If you want to do a physical address, you could always do a PO box or a UPS store box that will provide an "Address" location. I am not sure if that is necessarily "ethical" but if you are offering the products in those cities, I don't think you'll encounter too much grief. I wouldnt add the PO box or UPS Store address to google places, but you could create a landing page that would have a little more content on it.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
For a URL, is it better to have Keyword +City?
I am working on some landing pages and trying to do well in Local areas. Is it better to have my landing pages set as mysite.com/keyword+location or mysite.com/Location+keyword. or does it even matter anymore? So for a plumber selling water heater services. is it better to be: site/hot-water-heaters-jacksonville-fl or site/jacksonville-fl-hot-water-heaters? I normally do keyword+city.
Image & Video Optimization | | netviper0 -
Using Amazon Product Reviews on my Website
Does anyone know if I can use Amazon Reviews for products that I put on Amazon? I "own" the listing on Amazon because we are the exclusive manufacturers of this product so the review is only referring to products that were sold through our company. Thanks,
Image & Video Optimization | | EcomLkwd0 -
Multiple Google Places Accounts - Same Physical Location
Hi there, One of my clients is a local law firm. I have created, populated and verified a Places page for them, but now I have discovered that they had previously created one for each of their attorneys at that location. According to Google's quality guidelines, this is totally fine. However, I am wondering if I should try to verify each of these accounts within Places to enhance their listing coverage? One thing I've already tried is modifying some of the listing details via Map Maker, but it would be nice to just make edits en masse, I think. Any suggestions?
Image & Video Optimization | | G2W0 -
Best practice using Video to increase website pagerank?
Goal: Leverage videos to get links and traffic back to website not video hosting platform site (e.g. YouTube) to generate website leads **Issue: ** If we place a video on a website using video YouTube embed code and video sitemap for the crawlers to index our video DOES show up in search results BUT that link goes back to YouTube. Great for increasing views on YouTube but not increasing link popularity for client website. Question: What are recommendations / best practice for SEO (such as using another player like Viddler, etc.) that will get video results from search engines back to the website? We want to leverage videos to build links and generate leads to client site.
Image & Video Optimization | | jfeitlinger0 -
Optimizing for Google Hotel Finder
Hi! As the Google Hotel Finder was also launched in Europe some days ago I was wondering if there is already some best practices for optimizing the entries. I guess that most of the information is directly integrated from the respective Google Places Page... Any insights or views on this topic?
Image & Video Optimization | | adwordize0 -
Anybody knows of agencies who produce/optimize/market video content?
Hi everyone. Hope someone can help me hook up with a video content provider. Need one to produce optimized video content and market it, too. Did a Google search and found some. But I trust a crowd-sourced answer so I try here at SEOMoz. Anybody?
Image & Video Optimization | | macmallseo0 -
Local search optimization for national product?
Hi all, My company sells a direct-to-consumer product nationwide. We have competitors that sell through local distributors. Therefore, many customers think that this is a product that must be bought locally. Because so many people search for this product locally, we want to be able to rank for local searches. But, because we sell nationwide, we don't have localized content. We have a competitor that created a page for each state which lists every zip code and city name in the state, but that seems pretty labor intensive (and not all that effective). Any ideas on how to address this problem would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | responselink0