How Far is Too Far to Show Up in Local Results

[KaitlinNS]

Hi everyone,

I have one client that is located about 45 minutes (25 miles) outside of a large city and I can't seem to help them rank within that large city.  They're a relatively new business in the service industry (meaning they'll travel to an individual's residence) and in the surrounding cities closer to their physical location, they rank extremely well.  In this large city, they have 3 keywords in the top 10, 2 snack pack rankings and then everything else is below 51!

I have a feeling that distance depends on many things, but I am wondering if anyone has ever figured out how far away is **too far **to be considered local by Google.  My feeling is that sure it would be nice to rank locally for this large city as it would open them up to a really large customer pool, but that maybe 45 minutes away is just not local (I know I personally don't consider that "local").

Again, I understand that ranking locally depends on a really wide range of factors, but I'm considering only distance in this question.

Thanks so much!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Kaitlin!

The radius from which Google draws local and localized organic results is really dependent on competition. There won't be a single answer to your question, because it's going to be different in each case. For example, if you are located in a very rural area with few options, Google will reach out beyond the borders of your town to adjacent towns to return results to make up a full set of results. In some cases like this, there won't even be a 3 pack, but solely organic results.

When you are dealing with a large city, you are much less likely to see this outreaching behavior on Google's part, because they will have plenty of results right near the user within the city. The only exception to this would be if the business is offering something very unusual and there are few or no competitors inside the city.

For a Service Area Business, the rule of thumb is to go for local pack rankings for their city of location and organic rankings for their service cities. It's rare for a service area business to rank in the local pack for any city where they lack a physical location, unless, again, they are offering something very rare.

Doing research on Maps will help you determine the general radius from which Google is drawing results for a particular query, but it's extremely important to remember the user-as-centroid phenomenon, especially when dealing with cities. Google will show different results to users at one end of the city than to those at the other end of it. Educating clients about the fact that there are no static rankings is vital these days

Hope this helps!

[KaitlinNS]

Thank you! That's where my mind is too on this- I agree on all points!

[Gyorgy.B]

Ranking in a city 25 miles away for a new business is quite a challenge, even if you do ongoing local SEO. Competitors in the city are probably doing local SEO too and are more important from Google's perspective. Why would Google show a business from a different region if there are many local, trusted service providers?

Getting a local address and optimising that listing might be a cheaper and more effective solution.