Business in one location, be found in others?

[HB17]

Hi all,

A bit of an interesting one but I am sure you can all help.

My client has a business in a town called location A. Surrounding town A there are several other towns - My client wants to make sure they also appear in SERPs for these surrounding areas, even though their business is not physically located there. E.g.

Product town A
Product town B
Product town C
Or even just being physically searching from one of those locations and typing the product name, they want to be on that first page.

For example if you live in town B which is 20 miles away, my clients still wants to appear right at the top of the SERPs as they are competing against other businesses for that area. They also want to appear for town C, D, and E, all of which are surrounding town A.

How can I make this happen? Would I need to create multiple landing pages and focus the SEO on each individual location? I'm just worried Google would see duplicate content but with varied location keywords. I don't have any room left in the page title to add every location.

They do legitimately serve these areas, if you are looking for their product there are a few competitors around but this is in their 'territory' so to speak.

Any help big or small would be great.

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Harry,

Agree with Ryan here that your client is in an excellent position to rank organically (if not locally) for additional cities, given the non-existence of competitors in his 30 mile radius. However, you have 2 major challenges to address and overcome.

1. A car dealership is a brick-and-mortar business without any obvious relationship to any city beyond its own. This is not a service area business that goes to towns B, C and D to repair plumbing or trim trees. So challenge #1 is to sit down with the client and do an honest assessment of whether the two of you can discover a legitimate connection to cities B, C and D. Just off the top of my head, this might include:

• Sponsorship of events, sports teams or other things in cities B, C and D

• Rotating regional specials, as in, bring us a piece of mail with your address in City B and receive a 5% discount on X at our dealership

• Participation in industry-related happenings in these other cities. For example, blog coverage of an antique car show, an auto race, a vintage car club, teaching at a driver's training school or teaching road safety to students.

• Blog coverage of industry-related news or laws pertaining to cars, traffic, safety, etc. that is applicable to each of the specific cities

• Endorsements of or tie-ins to businesses in the other cities. For example, partner with an auto garage in City B to provide some kind or special for doing business with both companies.

These are the types of things you need to brainstorm. If no relationship to the other cities exists, then the customer can't move forward. He must either mine his business model to discover these relationships or begin to build them so that he can prove he is a relevant result for these other cities.

2. Challenge #2 hinges on the quality of what you and the client develop together. You mention that you are already working on city landing pages. The client should aim for just 1 page per target city on the website and make it as interesting, useful and strong as possible. Do not create thin or duplicative pages. This is not a good marketing strategy for any business, under any circumstances. Once you have got the basic page in place featuring the 'relationship' content, consider developing an on-site blog to continue on with this work, producing new writing on an on-going basis about contests, events, specials etc. You don't have to do tons of this, because of the lack of competition. Even a single blog post a month for each of the target cities will likely get you pretty far in what you're hoping to achieve, because of the client's fortunate lack of competitors. In all efforts, stress quality to the client and this should be a viable strategy.

Hope this helps!

[RyanPurkey]

One idea around content would be to create a portion of the City B, C, D pages as a test drive map and description. That way you're talking about the different neighborhoods, landmarksm and such as you describe the route. Make it legitimate though. Plan out a route that actually tests the different characteristics of the vehicle. Something like that would be useful to user, regardless.

As mentioned earlier, you can probably expand to a lot of the places via service area based on the service portion of the dealership.

Those things combined with being the only brand of dealership in the area should help influence "brand dealership city X" as pointing to you as the nearest resource.

[HB17]

Thank you both for your answers.

My client is indeed a car dealership and in some cases is the only dealer offering that brand in 30 miles or so, so I can see why they want to appeal to near-by towns as well as just the town they are in.

I have explained about the limitations with Google and physical locations, but they are still keen to show up in 'car dealer location A' SERP when they are actually physically located in location C.

We've made a few location-based pages targeting those locations which do seem to work, but we're starting to have 10 or more pages that are fairly similar so I'm getting worried about duplicate content.

What would best practice of appealing to the non-physical location based towns be? We couldn't possibly list them all through out the site as there are so many, it would be like saying 'we sell new cars in location A, location B, location C, location D etc...'

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Harry,

The first thing here is to explain to the client Google's bias toward physical location. In most cases, your client will be outranked in the local results by any competitor who has a physical location where your client has none. With that understanding, please, find your business model in this article and read the suggestions. I believe you'll find them to be helpful, but if you still have questions after reading, definitely come back with them!

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Harry. To rank for those other cities you'll want content around them as well, but is the product area specific?  Maybe if it's a car dealership or larger purchase you could do a few things like add service area to their local listing based on where they'll do pick up and drop off for repairs; or if an appliance type of business, installation based service areas. If you're a bit more specific with your example people here could come up with more precise ideas.