Is it deceptive to attempt to rank for a city you're located just outside of?
-
I live in Greenville, SC (who has a large "Greater Greenville" reach). I work for an agency with many clients who are located just outside of the city in smaller towns, sometimes technically in counties other than Greenville. Often, they provide services in the city of Greenville and aim to grow business there, so we'll use "Greenville, SC" throughout site copy, in titles, and in meta descriptions.
Are there any negative implications to this? Any chance search engines think these clients are being deceptive? And is it possible these clients are hurting their ranking in their actual location by trying to appear to be a Greenville-based company?
Thank you for any thoughts!
-
Just to piggyback off of Miriam, we do a lot for clients in the home services category who want to show up in markets like this. Our clients are service area businesses, so we build targeted pages that talk about the service they provide for that market. What we have found is that by making that page unique to the market has helped us with gaining some of that sweet page one visibility.
You will almost never rank higher in a market outside of your physical location, but yes, it's possible to get some visibility. Just make sure you're being honest in your representation to customers. An SEO strategy that ends with an angry, non-paying customer is not a strategy at all.
-
Hi Brent,
Great topic! So, fundamentally, yes, the business isn't being honest in representing itself to the consumer public as being in a city where it isn't actually located. So, from an ethical standpoint, this is problematic.
From a search standpoint, Google is going to rely on the physical address of the business. If the company's website and citations state that it's at 123 Anderson Road in White Horse, SC, no amount of optimizing for Greenville is going to fool Google into thinking that the business is physically located there. Because of this, the company cannot expect to rank in Google's local packs for Greenville-related-or-based searches, unless there is almost no competition in this company's geo-industry (like they are the only gas station servicing a 25 mile radius).
I know - it's a drag that a business just outside of city borders is typically out of the running for local pack rankings, but Google's bias towards physical location is very strong. Where does this leave a client like yours? It depends on the exact nature of its business model. Some questions:
-
Do your clients' customers come to the physical location of the business, or is it a service area business (SAB), like a plumber, that services customers in a variety of towns?
-
Does the company also have customers in the town where it's physically located, or is it only getting customers from Greenville or other cities?
Please, let the community know what you can. If you're not able to share the identity of the client, that's okay, but the more specific you can be, the more customized feedback you'll receive here.
-
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
-
Can High Traffic and Bounce Rate Hurt Local Rankings?
I just began working on a campaign for a dental office who happened to rank really well for some general search terms around post-op care. They received a ton of traffic for a small local site-- 26k organic visits YTD-- but since they focus on providing services locally, their conversion rate for organic search is pretty abysmal. On top of that, a couple of their high-traffic pages are contributing to a 90%+ average bounce rate on the site. Clearly the goal of the website doesn't involve attracting a national audience, but tons of traffic couldn't possibly be a bad thing... right? On the flip side of the coin, their local visibility is terrible. Their DA is comparable to their competitors, but in local SERPs they're nowhere to be found. Could one of these factors be affecting the other? Could their high visibility, but lack of conversions, from a bunch of organic traffic be hurting their visibility locally? I'd be interested hearing from other SEOs who may have faced similar situations in the past.
Local Website Optimization | | formandfunctionagency0 -
Weird SEO Problem - No Longer Ranking in Some Areas
Hi Everyone, I’ve got a weird SEO issue that I hope you’ll be able to help with. I’ve broken it down in to the key points below: Impressions for our primary and secondary keywords dropped dramatically on 02.10.17. Impressions have only dropped on non geographical keywords. “UK” variants are still ranking well. Investigation shows we’re not ranking outside of London at all for primary and secondary keywords. Primary and secondary keywords are still ranking well in London, the city where we’re based We’ve looked at our competition who do rank for the primary keyword both in and outside London. We noticed we have our “postaladdress” in our schema. The competition don’t have their address in their schema. We updated our schema 2 weeks ago and now use the Yoast schema which is the same as our competitors use. Approx 1 week after removing the schema we started showing up for primary and secondary keyword again, but very low - fluctuating between page 15 and page 24. It’s been 2 weeks now and no improvement. AHREFS and google webmaster, both incorrectly detail that we rank top 5. Which is true to a degree, but only in London. Thank you in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | rswhtn0 -
Best practice for local keyword ranking in URLs
Hi, I have a large artificial grass website with many franchise location landing pages. At the moment i have most of the landing page URLs like this www.domainname.com/uk/city/ My TLD does not contain the keyword "artificial grass" so should I follow the location with the keywords /city-artificial-grass/ or is Google pretty savvy these days and will it know that I am an artificial grass company? I'm after the best recommendations for this if possible. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | Easigrass0 -
One locations page, or multiple pages?
Hi, I represent a franchisor who does all marketing- including local seo- for our franchisees. I've read a lot about local SEO and understand the basics, but have some remaining questions. 1- If our typical territories are quite large and encompass more than one major city, should we create multiple location pages for the same franchise owner? I believe the answer should be yes from an SEO stand point, but the problem is that most of our franchisees naturally just have one business address (their home). Since PO boxes and virtual offices aren't the way to go, what's the best course of action? And when I say major cities, I'm really talking about major cities (and not just small towns/boroughs). Can they just use a friend's/relative's address? 2- There's a lot of info out there about "locations pages," but it's not really clear whether or not you should really just have ONE page for each location, or several pages with different content? For instance, it looks like a lot of businesses are creating just one, "home-page" looking landing page for their individual locations, with everything from services to testimonials on just that one page. Is this preferred over creating several different local pages for that one location? The latter is what we currently do. From the user stand-point, it looks like each franchise location has it's own "mini website" on our main website. For instance, a landing page optimized for the local business name, a local services page, a project/photo gallery page, local review page, etc. It seems like a lot less work just building one landing page for each location, but is the payoff the same? I'm torn between the two strategies- is it really worth the extra work (in terms of traffic + local ranking) to build out the individual pages for the one location? Thanks Moz Community!
Local Website Optimization | | kimberleymeloserpa0 -
Local SEO - Adding the location to the URL
Hi there, My client has a product URL: www.company.com/product. They are only serving one state in the US. The existing URL is ranking in a position between 8-15 at the moment for local searches. Would it be interesting to add the location to the URL in order to get a higher position or is it dangerous as we have our rankings at the moment. Is it really giving you an advantage that is worth the risk? Thank you for your opinions!
Local Website Optimization | | WeAreDigital_BE
Sander0 -
How to approach SEO for a national umbrella site that has multiple chapters in different locations that are different URLS
We are currently working with a client who has one national site - let's call it CompanyName.net, and multiple, independent chapter sites listed under different URLs that are structured, for example, as CompanyNamechicago.org, and sometimes specific to neighborhoods, as in CompanyNamechicago.org/lakeview.org. The national site is .net, while all others are .orgs. These are not subdomains or subfolders, as far as we can tell. You can use a search function on the .net site to find a location near you and click to that specific local site. They are looking for help optimizing and increasing traffic to certain landing pages on the .net site...but similar landing pages also exist on a local level, which appear to be competing with the national site. (Example: there is a landing page on the national .net umbrella site for a "dog safety" campaign they are doing, but also that campaign has led to a landing page created independently on the local CompanyNameChicago.org website, which seems to get higher ranking due to a user looking for this info while located in Chicago. We are wondering if our hands are tied here since they appear to be competing for traffic with all their localized sites, or if there are best practices to handle a situation like this. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | timfrick0 -
Multi Location business - Should I 301 redirect duplicate location pages or alternatively No Follow tag them ?
Hello All, I have a eCommerce site and we operate out of mulitple locations. We currently have individual location pages for these locations against each of our many categories. However on the flip slide , this create alot of duplicate content. All of our location pages whether unique or duplicated have a unique title Tag, H1, H2 tag , NAP and they all bring in the City Name . The content on the duplicated content also brings in the City name as well. We have been going through our categories and writing unique content for our most popular locations to help rank on local search. Currently I've been setting up 301 redirects for the locations in the categories with the duplicated content pointing back to the category page. I am wondering whether the increase in number of 301's will do more harm than having many duplicate location pages ?.. I am sure my site is affected by the panda algorithm penalty(on the duplicated content issues) as a couple of years ago , this didn't matter and we ranked top 3 for pretty much for every location but now we are ranking between 8 - 20th depending on keyword. An Alternative I thought, may be to instead of 301 those locations pages with duplicate content, is to put No Follow tags on them instead ?... What do you think ?. It's not economically viable to write unique content for every location on every category and these would not only take years but would cost us far to much money. Our Site is currently approx 10,000 pages Any thoughts on this greatly appreciated ? thanks Pete
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Different page for each service at each location? Where does it end!
If we have 15 different locations and 10 different services, do we need to make keyword targeted landing pages for each combination? Is that actually the best method or is there some alternative? For example, if we are a law office specializing in slip and falls and car accidents, do we need a page for EACH location for each service (ie. Miami Car Accident Lawyer, Miami Slip and Fall Lawyer, Orlando Slip and Fall Lawyer, Orlando Car Accident Lawyer) etc. to maximize our ranking potential in each location? Is there a better way or are we left with this until Google gets "smarter"?
Local Website Optimization | | RickyShockley0