Strategy for a business that has many service locations, but no real storefront?

[vernonmack]

I've struggled for a few years now trying to find the right solution. Say a client (home services contractor) has only one "location" - only one physical address from which they manage operations. This is not a retail store, not an office where customers would go. Technicians are dispatched to a 50 mile radius to provide service. This 50 mile radius includes a large metro area and many small cities.

Let's take Austin, TX for example. Let's say Contractor ABC has it's office/warehouse in a smaller city just north, Round Rock, and the office's zip code is 78664. But they provide service to all of Austin and some surrounding cities such as Cedar Park, Pflugerville, Lakeway, Buda, etc.

Their competitor, Contractor XYZ, services the exact same areas, but they have the benefit of having a physical address in the heart of downtown Austin, zip 78701.

How does Contractor ABC effectively compete for rankings in Austin as well as the rest of the service area? More specifically, what is the best practice for handling NAP in this scenario?

Most recently our strategy has been to enter the actual physical address where required (not trying to pull one over on google and trusting that google makes the correlation to the metro area) and where we can, we just put the metro (Austin, TX for example). This is also for display purposes so that a potential customer in Austin or Buda doesn't think, "Oh, this company is in RoundRock, this is not for me."

I have multiple clients in this scenario and would like to have more clarity in this strategy before signing them up for MozLocal - P.S. any feedback on the current usefulness of that platform is also welcome!

[MiriamEllis]

You're welcome, Vernon. I completely relate to what you're saying. Google entered Local with a brick-and-mortar mindset, which has left SABs a bit on the periphery all these years. I know it can be tough. Good luck in the work ahead!

[vernonmack]

Thank you, Miriam! I wish your answer was a bit different, but it is what it is. I appreciate your thoroughness. We'll proceed as suggested and cross our fingers that Google will one day provide a way for SABs to be more competitive in local search...

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Vernon!

Good questions! There are 2 really important facts to understand regarding marketing service area businesses (SABs):

1. Google is highly biased toward physical location and sees each business as most relevant to its physical location. Unfortunately, this puts SABs in kind of a weird position because, in the real world, they are equally relevant to every city they travel to in order to serve customers ... but Google doesn't see it this way. When we want to be visible in Google's local and organic results, we must perforce play by Google's rules. (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en)

2. Representing your location data accurately is a must. Do not ever attempt to be appear to be physically located any place that you aren't. Per Google's rules, you should only build 1 Google+ Local page per physical location and whatever town that office is located in will be the one for which you have the best hope of ranking in the local pack results. With few exceptions, for any city you serve but for which you lack a physical address, your best hopes will be to gain organic, rather than local, rankings. Unless you are in a rural area or a very niche profession, you are unlikely to rank in the local packs for any city in which you lack a physical location. This is the reality for all SABs.

So, the local search marketing strategy for SABs generally looks like this:

1. Create a unique landing page on your website for each of the major cities you serve. Make these pages of the highest possible quality you can. The goal here is to hope for some organic visibility for these pages. You can read all about city landing pages here: https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

2. Create a Google+ Local page for each city in which you have a legitimate physical office. Be sure your Google+ Local pages are in complete compliance with the Google guidelines linked to above. The goal here is to gain local pack visibility for your physical location cities.

3. If the combination of efforts in steps 1 and 2 fail to get you good visibility for any city that's really important to you, the only alternative is to pay for advertising via Google's Adwords program, creating a campaign that helps your ad to show up for chosen cities.

Regarding Moz Local, our service will help push out your physical location data to our partner network, helping you get your data consistent on the 5 major local business data aggregators and 2 other important sites. We draw from and validate against the data we find on your Google+ Local pages and Facebook Place listings. Having consistent citations is a major component of achieving high local rankings, but this will all fall under the same heading as Google's guidelines: local rankings for physical locations only.

Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions about this!