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 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.

Thanks for the further details, Agrier. The answer to this is not simple, but I'll do my best to be concise, and will number the following suggestions:

1. If the parent company needs to maintain its GMB profile, but is in agreement with the branch that they shouldn't be outranking the branch, have the parent de-optimize their listing. Remove photos, the business description, hours of operation and service menus. Don't have them use Google Posts, Q&A, SWIS or any other influential features. I'm not sure of the business model, but if they can accurately list themselves as an SAB instead of brick-and-mortar, that could help, too.

2. Next, go full bore on the branch listing. This means optimizing every single aspect of the GBP you can. Here is a complete guide to this: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-cheat-sheet-google-knowledge-panels

3. Underpin the branch listing with the strongest possible landing page on the website that you can. This means good content + good internal and inbound links to it.

4. Steps 1-3 are your best bets for overcoming the present ranking advantage the parent company has, as well as any filters that might be happening if the two businesses are closely located to one another.

5. Finally, remember that local rankings are not static. What customers in one part of this branch's town are seeing may be quite different from what customers on the other side of town see. For more on this, I recommend reading the following: https://moz.com/blog/find-local-competitors

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

Hi Agrier,

The question I asked you, above, was in hopes of understanding whether the parent company needs to rank for purposes of its own or is expendable. If you can let me know the answer to this, I'd be very glad to discuss further!

Hi Agrier,

Is it necessary for the parent company to come up at all in search? Is there any benefit to it ranking highly?

Hi Wagada,

I've seen this come up before at Google's forum: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Basics-for-Business-Owners/quot-Owner-quot-Q-amp-A-Responses-not-being-displayed/td-p/1675268

Read that one, and then I suggest you post a thread there on this topic and see if there is currently a known bug surrounding this.

My typical advice to business owners near the borders of a larger city they serve is to be honest about their physical location, but build relationships with/content surrounding the larger city.

Your case is different, in that you are half-in/half-out of both cities. The client's physical address is in Racine, as attested by the Google Business Profile, so this is how I would most strongly market and identify the business. Racine has more than 2x the population of Mount Pleasant, so it is definitely your bigger client pool. So, unless I'm missing something about your client's client base, I'm guessing the majority of your efforts on and off the website will be optimized for Racine.

Without a deeper dive into the client's scenario, I'm not sure what you should do about Mount Pleasant. It has a pretty good population of its own and it would be good to reach that audience. But, I'm wondering whether it would be better to leave that geotargeting to PPC rather than the website, if you're trying to make the biggest push for Racine. You only have one office you're working with, so I'm not a fan of optimizing the site for both without a creative plan to make it reasonable to do so.

So, I think the ball is in your agency's court to deeply review the scenario and decide on the best way forward for consolidating or dividing optimization. Good luck!

Arggh! Definitely a frustrating and unusual case. Literally one of the best illustrations I've ever seen of how being on the border of a big city can create such a hurdle to rankings. Sorry this worked out this way, but yes, your options are:

1. Create content surrounding Racine. I would suggest that the dentist find some opportunities to interact with/contribute to the Racine community that you can then create content surrounding. There has to be something more to write about than just a "our patients come to us from Racine" reason to write about Racine. That's not interesting. But, if the dentist sponsors Racine groups/teams/events, if he speaks at schools, belongs to business associations, contributes to online news, etc. all in Racine, this is something to showcase on the website to highlight his community involvement in that city. It will also be the best kind of way to get linktations (see: https://moz.com/blog/linked-unstructured-citations) to support organic rankings for implicit and explicit Racine-related searches.

2. Invest in social outreach hinging on the Racine community.

3. Invest in PPC targeting Racine

4. Invest in offline advertising targeting Racine.

5. Run campaigns at your practice that in some way reward customers who refer Racine neighbors to you.

6. Use all available GMB fields to mention Racine. This includes Google Posts, Q&A, description, photos, review responses, etc.

7. Bear in mind that while it's not likely for a business to rank outside it's city of location where there is a fair level of competition, it's also not absolutely impossible. Don't make any promises to the client about this, but on the back burner of your marketing plan, keep in mind that you are trying to see if any amount of organic signalling can overcome that border bias. I'd track everything closely. If you manage to surmount this issue, you'll have a fascinating case study on your hands.

Honestly, the scenario of having the parking lot in Racine and the dental office in Mount Pleasant is so odd, I'm half-tempted to recommend you find some clever and funny marketing angle in it, but that could just be the local SEO in me who finds this scenario weird and exasperating. Maybe a goofy idea, but I've seen such things take on a viral life of their own for other local businesses. Good luck!

Thanks for the screencast. This is a super frustrating case for your client, honestly. When I first looked at the map, it looked to me like they were clearly on the Racine side of the line, but after looking at your screencast, I agree - it's borderline.

Sadly, because of this, I don't think you have much of a case to make to Google if they are insistent that the business is technically in Mount Pleasant. It's especially unfortunate, because clearly, the business has a Racine postal address. Obviously, the postal authorities believe the business address in technically in Racine, but Google follows their own lead on this.

I will ask around among some GMB forum Gold Product experts to see if there is any hope of appeal on this. I think I've seen folks make slight moves to the map marker to change this sort of thing, but I don't want to tell you to do something that could end up being problematic. If I hear anything positive, I'll return to this thread.

Hello Again,

Looking at this again after reading the reply you received from Google. The trouble is, when I zoom in enough on the map, Google's borders disappear, so I was having to approximate location. To confirm, can you let me know if this image is correct:

https://imgur.com/NhaXUj3

Thanks!

Hi There!

This must be very frustrating, indeed. It's a really interesting case, actually. Looking up "racine" in Google and observing Google's red border on the map, I see your client as actually being just inside the city border of Racine. So, I think you actually have a case here for speaking to a Google rep about the incorrect designation showing up on your Google Business Profile. I would take a screenshot of the client's pin marker, and then a screenshot of the map search for Racine. It proves that the client is physically in Racine rather than in Mount Pleasant, so Google's designation is wrong.

Once you have your screenshots, this is what I would do:

Send a tweet to Google's Twitter support at https://twitter.com/GoogleMyBiz telling them you have an incorrect city designation showing up in their category summary and want to show them an image.

Be sure you are following them on Twitter as they will likely want to DM with you.

Once they get back to you (I find it takes 1-3 days typically) upload the screenshots you've taken and explain the problem and ask if they can help, as the map shows their text is wrong.

See what they can do.

Come back to me and tell me what happened.

Hope this helps!

Marie - how awesome of you to stop by! I am a fan

Did you notice that GrueBleen mentioned in their original post that there are no penalties showing in GSC? Clearly, the links are bad, but like you, I can't explain the SERP behavior for Austin-only users.

GrueBleen, you're getting weigh-ins here from some amazing experts, and as no one has been able to pinpoint the exact cause of the weird SERP behavior, I think you're at the point where hiring a consultant for a full audit is likely necessary. Many ranking problems are easy to solve, but what you've presented here is unusual. In the scope of a forum, we can't fully audit every aspect of a business (history, technical issues, usability, local, etc.). You need someone to do this to see if they can connect the dots between the Austin-only behavior and something the business is doing/failing to do.

GrueBleen,

Just spoke with one of our top organic SEO folks here at Moz (Dr. Pete) and he agreed it would be strange that an organic penalty would only affect users in Austin. So, while I agree that the link anchor text of your links is something you need to be looking at because it's believed that Google devalues (more than penalizes) such links, the mystery continues!

Tom Waddington's idea is also definitely worth looking at. Good idea reaching out to him, Joy!

I had noticed this as well, Joy, but somehow, it doesn't satisfy me that this would somehow exclude the client organically ONLY for Austin searchers. If that were the root of the problem, would it not be affecting organic rankings across the board? To me, the link anchor text seemed like a possible explanation until I asked myself that question.

I'll see if I can get one of our organic SEOs to weigh in on whether Google could exclude something only in a specific area.

Joy, I searched from the zip using Bright Local and was not seeing the client come up at all. So glad you stopped by

Hello There!

Using a rank checking tool set to the zip code of your business, I see you ranking #1 in the local pack and #9 organically for "real estate photographer Denver". Doing the same search from my location in California, I see you ranking #2 in the local pack and #7 organically. In other words, you've already achieved really excellent visibility.

I would question the path of making your homepage more optimized towards Denver, because I'm assuming Denver is only 1/50th of your customer base, if you offer a 50-state service. Right now, with your optimization exactly as it is, Google is still highly favoring your Denver location in the Denver-based-and-modified results. I would feel some concern that overdoing the homepage with Denver would be subtracting from your visibility in other parts of the country. At the same time, if you created a Denver-only page for the website and pointed your GMB listing to it, your local rankings would almost certainly drop as the new landing page wouldn't have the same DA as your homepage.

Your About and Contact pages can act as landing pages, of sorts, for your Denver location, but I still wouldn't advise pointing your local business listings at them. Nor does that seem at all necessary given that you're ranking #1 and #2 locally for this core term.

Rather, if what you're really hoping to do is get more business from Denver clients, I'd leave your website as-is and consider some of the following efforts:

1. Continue to hammer down on reviews. You're already blowing away your local pack competition in this regard, but I'd keep working on this. And keep up the work on Google posts. This is for your local ranking maintenance, of course.

2. For your organic goals, I'd work on links. Explore whatever Denver-based links and linktations you can get. This tutorial might be helpful: https://moz.com/blog/linked-unstructured-citations.

3. I would also work on social outreach within the Denver community, which actually corresponds with point #2.

Hope you'll get some more feedback from the community!

Thank you for the replies to my questions. I'm just going to start jotting things down here:

1. Your client is outside of the Austin city limits. The location is the quite a bit west of the city boundary, as perceived by Google: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Austin,+TX/@30.3172704,-97.91144,11z/data=!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x8644b599a0cc032f:0x5d9b464bd469d57a!2sAustin,+TX!3b1!8m2!3d30.267153!4d-97.7430608!3m4!1s0x8644b599a0cc032f:0x5d9b464bd469d57a!8m2!3d30.267153!4d-97.7430608

2. I mention this, because Google is fairly biased towards physical location, and a business outside of city borders is not one I'd typically expect to see ranking well locally, unless there was little competition. Organically, I might see them ranking however. So, I'm walking into this not really expecting your client to rank well locally, and I just want to mention that.

3. Using BrightLocal's rank checker tool and setting my zip to the zip code at Google's perceived center of Austin (78701) I am unable to find your client in the first 10 pages of the organic results for "austin plumbers". You mentioned you are seeing them on page 9 from another tool. I just can't find them at all.

4. Yet, when I search from my own location in California for this same term, your client is #1 in the local pack and #2 organically (just below Yelp). So, for non-Austin-based searchers,your client is doing extremely well. And, this comes as a bit of a surprise to me, given what I said above about them being beyond city limits. To have overcome this, the site must be doing something right to be so dominant!

5. So, now, the frustrating part of this. It has long been observed that Google handles proximity of the searcher quite differently when the searcher is near a business vs. in some other city or state. In other words, if, from my location in California, I look for a plumber in Austin, I'm not likely to see the exact same results as someone actually in Austin would see. Rank checking tools aren't great at approximating this. So, I want to ask you to ask your client to do something. Have them search from their office computer on Ranch Road for "austin plumbers" and tell you exactly where they see themselves both locally and organically. Please, if you can do this, come back and let me know what they say.

Clearly, the launch of the new site design is making you question whether something you did caused the ranking drop. But, I want to be sure that we aren't overlooking that Google somehow made a change that is coincidental to your redesign and has nothing to do with it. If your client's site was penalized, I wouldn't expect to see it ranking so excellently for my searches from California. And the GMB listing is not suspended or anything like that. So, let see if you can get your client to tell you what they see searching from their own office. I'll stay tuned.

Good morning!

So sorry to hear you've encountered some trouble. Can you answer some questions for me about your scenario, please?

1. Did your re-design of the website keep the exact same domain and URLs, or did you have to do any re-directs?

2. Am I right that your concern is that, when you search for things like "austin plumbers" while you are physically located in Dallas, you are seeing your client on the first page of the organic results, but when you search from a physical location in Austin, your client is coming up on the 9th page of the organic results? Is that right?

3. You mention local results, as well. What were your client's local pack rankings prior to the re-design and how, exactly, have they changed?

4. How long ago did you launch the re-design?