Hi Luke!

Excellent additional details. This definitely should pass muster as two distinct businesses. And I do advise using the distinct addresses for each business as they genuinely do each have their own address. You want customers (and bots) to associate the right address with the right business. So you'll have a unique name, address, phone number and categories for these 2 businesses and should be a-okay!

Hi Nichole,

Wow - sounds like you're getting it right in a lot of areas. That's fantastic, and so good that the landing pages you've created for the 2 physical locations include video, etc. Regarding the possible project of creating a new set of landing pages for your non-location cities, here's what I think: to cover 3 states, you'd have to build thousands of these to cover every possible town and city. Given the vast resources it would take to make this many pages unique, I would suggest a more refined approach. Perhaps something like this -

• Identify 3-5 most important location-less cities in each of the 3 states.

• Over the next year, task staff with doing photo or video documentary of beautiful projects in each of the target cities.

• Write text descriptions of each documented project.

• Secure good testimonials from the associated homeowners

• Create one other unique section of the page for each target city showcasing information that is not on any of the other pages. The sky is the limit with this. You might do cleaning tips for certain types of flooring, explain sustainable flooring choices, showcase made in the USA products, interview the business owner or staff members, offer a city-specific special, etc.

At the end of the year, you will have added 9-15 extremely strong pages to the top-level menu of your website that you can then hopefully build up internal linking to as well as hopefully earning some inbound links, too. Whether you expand beyond this to further cities should be determined on the success of this initial project, but at any rate, I don't believe this approach could hurt you, but it could certainly help you.

Hope this helps!

Hi Jes,

You can approach this in the manner you've specified with a page for each city/service combo, but what I find is the challenge there is coming up with really valuable content in this scenario. My preference is to go with:

• A page for every city

• A page for every service

In other words, let you your service pages be about the services, because they are the same services regardless of where they are rendered. If you've only got 2 locations, you can of course mention those 2 cities on the service pages, but the main keywords on them should relate to the service. Then, have separate pages for each of your cities. Link to everything from the top level menu.

That being said, if you've got awesome writers and large resources, you could go with the approach you've specified to cover every possible keyword-city combo, but my advice would only be to go this way if you have the budget/available talent to make each of these pages amazing instead of so-so. What you definitely don't want is a big set of thin or duplicate pages that have been created solely to cover the combos rather than to educate and help the user.

Hope this helps!

Hi Anton,

If yours is a local business serving local customers in person, then, yes, a P.O. box will severely limit your local search marketing. Because P.O. boxes are not considered legitimate physical addresses, you'll be unable to build a full set of citations for the business, and that will likely hamper your local search ranking efforts.

Definitely better to use an actual address! Hope this helps.

Hi Roger!

Thank you for bringing your question to the community.  You can have both - links in a menu and internal links from your homepage and other pages of your website. There is not reason not to have both if the links in your content make sense.

One thing I would warn against after taking a quick look at your website: beware of duplicate content and over-optimization. You are styling these pages as "locations", but they are, in fact, areas  where  you offer your services. In order to make sense of creating landing pages for these locales, you should be using these pages to showcase events you've done in each locale. Right now, just at a glance, the pages look very similar to one another, rather than unique, and this could be a quality concern. Also, the language of your subheadings is not very natural. Check both these headings and the text of the pages for uniqueness and naturalness. If how you write isn't how you speak, Google could view the quality of the content as low.

Hope this helps.

You're welcome!

I think it's really important to keep in mind that, while you have one end goal of having these pages rank well in Google's results, the guiding force for creating them should be to convert human visitors into customers.

Service Area Business like yours (or like house painters, visiting home help, etc.) don't have branches that serve as the purpose for creating landing pages. Obviously, when a brick-and-mortar business has multiple locations (like a restaurant franchise) it makes total sense to create a unique page for each branch so that the customer can see the info they need about each branch. But when the business has an SAB model like yours, you want to be very careful that any landing pages you create have the purpose of serving people, rather than simply serving search engines.

This means making any locale-oriented landing page very specific to the locale it represents. For a business like yours, showcasing the parties you've done in X county would be a natural way to do this, along with testimonials/reviews from clients in that area. Any other approach risks watering down the quality of your website. You're lucky to have a fun industry that should easily lend itself to great, unique content!

Hi Ryan,

Complex scenario, but the good news is - you don't have to reinvent the wheel on this. Look at a website like https://www.rotorooter.com/ to see how they are managing the fact that they've got 600 locations in North America. If your company is expanding nation-wide, you need some type of interface (a zip code search, map, etc.) to get clients from the homepage to their correct section of the website. I see no reason to use subdomains. They typically just complicate things. You can create a landing page for each location (or a section of several landing pages if you absolutely must), but the goal is to take the client directly from the homepage to the page that tells them everything they need to know about the location nearest them.

If you go this route, I would advise:

1. Ensuring you have a sitemap that links to all of the landing pages, just to ensure full crawling

2. Avoid duplicate content on these pages as much as possible. Make them unique and useful. This article should help: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

3. Be sure you're building out a full set of local business listings/citations for each location and that the company has a strategy in place for managing reviews on them.

That should get you off to a good start!

Hi VELV,

Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. Local SEO is largely based on the physical location of the business, not its menu of services. As you describe it, you have a single company at a single location, with a varied menu of services. This might be comparable to an HVAC company which both installs air conditioners and repairs hot water heaters. It's a single company, doing multiple things. The HVAC company, and your business model of a single business with a varied menu, at a single location, is eligible for just one Google My Business listing, and if you choose to move ahead with the model you've described, your business will be "optimizable" in all the various ways one would typically market a single local business.

The alternative to this would be to legally register your single companies as two distinct businesses, with unique tax IDs, unique phone numbers, business names, and completely distinct Google My Business categories. Envisioning your printing company as completely separate from your website design company is an option, but it has potential problems.

The first problem would be that co-located businesses can sometimes be filtered out of Google's high level mapped search results, particularly if they are in a shared category. This is why I'm emphasizing that you would need no crossover between categories. Even with distinct categories, there is some chance you might experience some filtering. More concerning, though, would be the possibility that Google might decide that your two businesses are actually one business attempting to appear like two, in which case they might suppress or remove one of your listings. Your best defense against that would be going to all the necessary lengths to legally register the second business, and keeping its phone number, website URL, and other assets separate, and not linking between the two businesses in any way.

It's a choice you need to make about how you want to envision and present your enterprise. The easiest route will be as a single business with a menu of services. You can select categories for both services on the GMB listing, and build out great content for both on your website. But if you want to move ahead as the owner of two separate businesses, you'll be best served by taking the necessary steps to register and run the two brands, perhaps with the eventual goal of a separate physical location for each business. In that case, the concern about co-location and filtering goes away!

Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions. Good luck to you!

Hey Gal!

That's a good explanation, thanks. I honestly would not suggest trying to block people from other areas from accessing your website. For all you know, they could be doing research for a family member who lives in your area. Now, I'm no traffic wizard, so I'm actually going to ask a team member to add to this discussion, but from a purely Local SEO perspective, I'd suggest that you:

1. Be sure you've really stressed on the page the geography of the service being offered. That means titles, tags, text, internal links, etc.

2. Be happy your page is strong enough to rank beyond its service area. If it's getting a lot of out-of-state traffic despite doing all you can in point #1, perhaps there's some way for you to monetize that page, whether with ads or as a lead source of some kind.

Let's hope we can get you some more feedback on this.

You're welcome. If you want to go with the separate website and phone number for the online printing business, and you do not attempt to create a Google listing or other local listings for it, then no, I would not be concerned about local search engine results filtering. That would only happen if you tried to submit a listing for both businesses.

The only thing to look out for would be if someone (Google or a member of the public) accidentally created a listing for the online printing business. I wouldn't be too worried about it, but if you are ever having ranking issues for the real-world website design business, remember that we had this conversation about filtering and be sure no listing has accidentally ended up in Google's local index for the printing business.

I do think getting a P.O. box is a good idea for the print business, if you need to accept mail, because then you won't have to put the street address of the design business on the print business' website. Just to mention ... Google does not accept P.O. boxes as legit addresses for creating a local business listing, but if you have no intention of locally marketing the print business, this point is rather moot.

Hope this helps!

Yes, unfortunately, what the agency is suggesting is like a recipe from a duplicate content cookbook. They are trying to offer a shortcut to doing the actual work that should be involved in publishing hundreds of websites.

Has the business ever considered consolidating everything into a single brand with a single site? That way, they could have 1 page for each city and 1 page for each service, redirecting all the old sites to the new one, and never having to worry again about creating content for hundreds of microsites.

Hi Shay,

Locksmiths like yourself are up against a harder field then many other types of businesses. This is because the locksmith category has historically been one of the hardest hit by spam. This means that it is especially difficult for honest businesses to move up in the local search engine results because there is just so much spam there.

That being said, the strategy for you is similar to that of any other local business, namely:

1. Publishing the highest quality possible website with excellent text content

2. Having a verified Google+ Local page for the business that is free of violations

3. Building citations for the business on as many relevant local business directories as possible

4. Earning reviews on a variety of profiles

5. Traditional SEO metrics, such as the acquisition of high quality links

6. Participation in Social Media, if possible

Google's Local algorithm is made up of hundreds of different factors. The recent Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 does the best possible job of identifying which factors are deemed to be of most importance. I recommend that you study this survey and begin to identify areas in which you can improve. Discovering where you have already done things right and where you have room to grow is what will help you create a marketing strategy.

All this being said, you will have to be extra patient because of the situation I've described above (spam in the locksmith vertical). Sometimes, the spam is so deep that even the best efforts can result in only very small gains for the business and this is certainly frustrating. It may be that legitimate locksmiths will have to brainstorm ideas beyond the typical Local Search Marketing strategy to get their names in front of consumers. Some type of social, video or offline outreach may be necessary in addition to the above kinds of work.

That's a good question, Andrew. It's true that it's no longer a best practice to build out a set of pages featuring slightly different permutations of a keyword  (car repair, auto repair, repairing cars, fixing cars, etc.). That approach is now quite dated. Honestly, it never made any sense beyond the fact that when Google wasn't quite so sophisticated, you could trick your way into some additional rankings with this type of redundant content.

The development of location landing pages is different. These are of fundamental use to consumers, and the ideal is to create each city's landing page in a way that is uniquely helpful to a specific audience. So, for example, your store in Detroit is now having a special on winter clothing right now, because it's still snowing there. Meanwhile, your store in Palm Beach is already stocking swim trunks. For a large, multi-location Enterprise, location landing pages can feature highly differentiated content, including highlights of regional-appropriate inventory and specials, as well as unique NAP, driving directions, reviews from local customers, and so much more.

The key to avoiding the trap of simply publishing a large quantity of near-duplicate pages is to put in the effort to research the communities involved and customize these location pages to best fit local needs.

Hi Shay,

Content creation is always a major creative challenge. Writers and marketers all have different ways of brainstorming good ideas. If you are doing the writing, your task will be to research your industry and geography and see if there is something you can create that doesn't already exist or hasn't already been done well. Your industry might be thought of as a 'boring' industry because it doesn't automatically lend itself to exciting content. This means you have to work a little harder to discover what you can created that will generate notice. We had an excellent article here last year about this. I recommend you read this:

http://moz.com/blog/the-guide-to-developing-a-content-strategy-for-boring-industries

If you do not feel you can accomplish the job of content development and writing on your own, I recommend you hire help. Here on Moz, you'll find our recommended companies list that can help you connect with a pro. See: http://moz.com/community/recommended

Regarding your Google+ Local listing, I'm not sure if you're asking me if there is something you should add to it. Your listing should be fully filled out in all fields and should adhere to the Google Places Quality Guidelines.

Citations are mentions anyplace on the web of your business name, address and phone number (NAP). These can include listings on directories like Yelp, Yahoo! Local and SuperPages, and they can also include things like third party blog posts or social media mentions. It sounds like you've already built a listing on Yelp. There are lots more places you can build citations, too. If this is a new concept for you, I recommend you go to GetListed.org and use their free tool to help you start building important citations. Once you have built the basic citations via GetListed.org, you can decide to continue building other citations with the help of a paid tool like Whitespark's Citation Finder Tool (see: https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/).

Regarding your point #5, it is not a recommended best practice to acquire links by posting in forums. In fact, this would typically be seen as a spammy practice and should be avoided. I recommend you read chapter 7 of our Beginners' Guide to SEO. Chapter 7 will teach you about good methods for earning links: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Hope this helps!