Is there a way to "protect" yourself from non-local traffic?

[Greenery]

I'll start with the story, but the main question is at the bottom. Feel free to scroll down :-).

I've got good news and bad news regarding a client of mine. It's a service area business that only serves one metropolitan area. We've got a great blog with really valuable content that truly helps people while firmly establishing my client's industry expertise. As a result, local traffic has spiked and the company generates more leads. So that's the good news.

The bad (bad-ish?) news is that the client also gets tons of traffic from outside the service area. Not only that, people are calling them all the time who either live in a different state and don't realize that the company isn't local to them or are located out of state but are calling for free advice. On one hand, the client gets a kick out of it and thinks it's funny. On the other hand, it's annoying and they're having to train all their intake people to ask for callers' locations before they chat with them.

Some things we're doing to combat this problem:

1. The title tag on our home page specifies the metro area where we're active.

2. Our blog articles frequently include lines like, "Here in [name of our city], we usually take this approach."

3. There are references to our location all over the site.

4. We've got an actual location page with our address; for that matter, the address is listed in the footer on every page.

5. The listed phone number does not begin with 800; rather, it uses the local area code.

6. All of our local business listings, including our Google My Business listing, is up to date.

7. We recently published a "Cities We Serve" area of the site with highly customized/individualized local landing pages for 12 actual municipalities in our metro region. This will take some time to cook, but hopefully that will help. "Cities We Serve" is not a primary navigation item, but the local landing pages are situated as such: "About Us > Cities We Serve > [individual city page]"

**Anyway, here's my main question: **In light of all this, is there any other way to somehow shield my client from all this irrelevant traffic and protect them from time-wasting phone calls?

[kwoolf]

My first thought would be to have an IVR on your phone system with a "Press 1 if you're located in the XXX metro area, press 2 if you're located outside this area." Then if callers press 2, you have have an apologetic message that states your business qualifications.

If that's not possible for some reason, you could use redirects based on geolocation with services from Maxmind. Alternatively, paid accounts on Cloudflare allow geoip rules that could redirect visitors from outside your IP range to a "sorry" page.

My opinion on this is to modify your business processes to accommodate out-of-area customers.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Greenery,

Congratulations to you and your client on what must be a very successful marketing strategy! You've ended up with an embarrassment of riches, and that's not a bad thing, but it's certainly understandable that the client doesn't want to waste resources fielding queries from unqualified leads.

From the list of actions you've taken, I can see how thoughtful and thorough you've been in trying to limit unwanted calls. I can add just a few suggestions:

1. Put something in the sitewide masthead stating "Serving Cities A,B and C"

2. Include something similar in your calls-to-action in the main body of the pages. Something like "We'll come to you in A,B, and C. Call (XXX)XXX-XXXX today!"

Alternatively, you and the client might want to look at this scenario in another way. Consider:

1. Is the client getting enough interest from non-local clients to indicate that the should establish a second locale? Not it another state, perhaps, but in a neighboring region of the state? If there is tremendous demand for his service, could this indicate that it's time to consider expanding?

2. If expanding is out, is there an opportunity here for lead generation? What if your client formed a trusted partner network to send out-of-area customers to a trusted provider? Could this yield benefits that would justify the effort? Monetary benefits? Professional benefits? Social benefits?

I'm just saying, before you turn those ineligible customers away, you might want to look at this interesting situation from a creative angle to see if getting "too much of a good thing" could actually be parlayed into something positive for the business and consumers.