Hi Again, AWC

Thanks for coming back with such complete information. I've re-set this thread as an on-going discussion, so hopefully that will stick and the topic can keep going. I agree, you should get 2nd and 3rd opinions on this, and I'm going to ask one of our traditional SEOs to step in as well with an opinion from that viewpoint of expertise.

My opinion is this: by putting local information on your product pages site-wide, you are sending a very pointed signal to Google that you deem your data to be most relevant to Oklahoma residents. If you're including the city as well as the state in all tags and text, you are sending a further signal that you consider your data to be most relevant to your own community within the state. Now, whether Google abides by the signals you have sent or not is where the grey area lies.

You are selling items out of state, as you say, but you've got them all, in a sense, labeled, as Oklahoma products. A truly national site wouldn't really take that approach with its SEO. And yet, there was real sense in your approach to start out small to get business locally because that cut your competition for product keywords down considerably. What you did makes perfect sense to me.

Now, with your question as to whether so boldly labeling everything on your site with state or city/state labels is going to be a detriment to you attempting to rank beyond state borders for the product, I honestly don't know. My gut feeling can be summed up in my observation that a national SEO campaign would not include those geo terms. That being said, Local and traditional SEO do not cross one another out. If going national is now your focus, you could trim back the heavy usage of city-related terms, and stick to spelling out your city in your footer site wide, on your contact page, about us page, home page and maybe a few other pages that talk about the ability for customers to do business with you in person. And, of course, you can list the local business in Google Places, Bing Local and all of the other relevant local business indexes.

State-related terms (Oklahoma) are not local, so that needs to be treated more as you would traditional SEO. You need to determine whether potentially losing some dominance for phrases that include the 'oklahoma' in them will be worth making the site look more truly national, in terms of its SEO. I haven't done any keyword research, but I'm doubting a ton of people are searching for 'barn kits oklahoma' or similar terms. My feeling is that they would either be trying to find one locally (in which case they would include the city name in their query) or that they would be comparison shopping on-line.

Bottom line: I think the decision rests with you as to whether your main SEO thrust needs to be truly local (city+state), statewide (in which case you'd keep optimizing everything with the state name) or truly national, in which case, you don't really want geographic modifiers all over the tags and text. You know your customer base and can look at your books to see what percentage of your business is coming from where (local vs. state vs. national). In situations like these, that is the best metric I can provide to help someone discern where their main efforts need to be placed.

Let's see what our traditional SEOs have to say! Sit tight.

I'm just jumping back in here after reading your remark: "This store has been here 20 years." So, it appears you have a physical location at which you are vending products directly to people, but that you also have an e-commerce portion of your website for national/international sales. Is this a correct description of your business model, AWC?

Hello AWCthreads,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and want to applaud the good response Nicholas has given you.

You have explained that your venture is an e-commerce site. Does this mean that the business is virtual (no person-to-person contact either at your office or at the homes/businesses of clients?). This is a critical point of information, because having a real physical location in your city/state puts you in a very different category than if you conduct all business virtually.

If you are doing business virtually, then, yes, I would say that heavily optimizing your website for your city/state is sending a strong signal to the bots that you hope to be viewed as especially relevant for 'blue widgets city state' as opposed to just  'blue widgets'. Is there a good reason for you to want to appear as most relevant locally? Does the thing you sell apply most to local people or is it a product used nationally? My question is a little vague because I lack information about what the product actually is.

Now, if the business is NOT virtual, and you have taken steps to optimize your website for it's local geographic terms, and have also gotten the business profiled in Google Places and other local business indexes, then Google is naturally going to view the business as most relevant for local searches. It is possible to run local and national SEO campaigns simultaneously, but different strategies will depend on the business model.

So, I would like to close with my question for you regarding whether there was some reason you heavily optimized your site for a local audience. What is the reason for/thinking behind this. Clarification on this point would be really help!

Miriam

Good advice again from Chas!

I think, given your situation, that the URLs you are using with the branch numbers are probably about as good as you can manage. Yes, it would be stronger for SEO if they could more keywords in them instead of just a branch number, but on a project this large, compromises sometimes have to be made.

One other item to mention - you have listed 'geosynthetic' locations. This is not a term I'm familiar with, but just in case you are talking about virtual offices, it's important to know that Google does not accept these. No P.O. boxes, no virtual offices. Each location you list in Places must have a unique local area code phone number and unique dedicated physical street address.

Hope this helps, and best of luck with the bulk upload!

Miriam

Hello Ferguson!

I agree with Chas on this that it's a little harder to answer without knowing the exact content. Most typically, I write URLs for city landing pages something like this:

whatever.com/city-state-service

For example, let's say the business is a mobile notary public in Berkeley, California. The URL might look like:

joenotary.com/berkeley-ca-mobile-notary

This would be for a business, and the landing pages might be for the different cities in which the business serves. Your situation is a little more complex with a single business with multiple locations in the same city and zip. Is your site a directory website? Or are you simply dealing with a single franchise's website? Perhaps you can give us a little more information.

At any rate, it sounds to me as if the only distinct items about the businesses would be their street addresses. How long are they? Would using them make them hugely long? What I'm describing would be something like this:

directory.com/joe-notary-123-centre-st

directory.com/joe-notary-39-brown-ave

a longer version would be:

directory.com/joe-notary-123-centre-st-boston-ma

It's not horribly long...but some businesses have really long street addresses with suite numbers and the like, so you'll have to judge whether an approach like this would start to look spammy.

Would this work for you? Has your question been answered? If not, please feel free to provide further details.

Miriam

Hello Brian!

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question, which is an excellent one. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to give you a helpful answer.

The situation you describe is common enough for Google to actually have spoken up about it within one of the most recent updates of their guidelines (see: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528). The guidelines state:

Some businesses may be located within a mall or a container store, which is a store that contains another business. If your business is within a container store or mall, and you'd like to include this information in your listing, specify the container store in parentheses in the business name field. For example, Starbucks (inside Safeway).

This is meant to resolve situations like the ones you are describing of businesses being located within container stores, but the details you have provided throw a monkey wrench into the works. You are saying that your potential client has no physical address whatsoever at which to receive mail? Are you 100% sure he is correct about this? He doesn't have a suite number of anything like that within the mall? I would double check on this with him.

If it turns out that he gave you the correct answer the first time around, then yes, there is going to be a significant problem here. The business, if new to Google Places, is very likely to be given the postcard-only verification option. If he can't receive mail, he's out of the game. In order to qualify for inclusion in Places, every business must have a legal business name, local area code phone number and physical street address. Without any one of those 3 items, the business doesn't qualify.

Again, I would return to this franchise owner and make sure he is positive that he has no address. Having one is is only hope of inclusion.

Best of luck!

Miriam

Greetings VernonMack, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. Your question is a good one and, happily, the answer here is simple. You need to use whatever your legal business name is. If your DBA uses ampersand, then consistently use this to describe your business on your website, local listings and elsewhere. If it uses and, then use that. Be consistent and you will be fine.

You are very kind, Robert (any your t-shirt sounds cool! hahah) I did think those articles were awesome, but they aren't very well-known. And, BTW, my cup of tea is...a cup of tea, organic with a little maple syrup, please!

Hi Robert-o,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm sorry I didn't respond to this earlier - your post somehow escaped my notice. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum.

Robert has been giving you some helpful advice. I recommend that you read this 2 part article series on attempting to get a Google Places Label for your business;

http://www.iexposure.com/2011/06/16/how-to-get-a-google-places-label

http://www.iexposure.com/2011/07/26/how-to-get-a-google-places-label-part-2-update

This is the best writeup that I know of on this interesting subject, and while following the steps outlined will not guarantee you a Places Label, at least you can give it a try! Good luck!

Miriam

Hello Bill,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. The NAP is really the key, more so than the website. For the business to be able to treat each specialty as distinct, it would need to become 4 distinct companies, each with a unique legal business name, legit physical street address and local area code phone number. This scenario would enable the owner to have a unique Google Place Page for each of the businesses, instead of just one Place Page for all of his specialties (as well as having unique listings in all of the other local business indexes). As things currently are, he is permitted to have only the one listing per index.

This is the case for most businesses like that of your client and by building out his content on his website, you are doing pretty much what you can do for his organic campaign (plus linkbuilding, social media, video etc., of course).

The tough thing about clients like this one, is that they typically not only offer a menu of very varied services, but they also tend to serve in a number of surrounding cities. So an SEO/Local SEO campaign typically looks something like this:

1. Get the client listed in the major local indexes.

2. Campaign for reviews in a variety of sources.

3. Get citations for his Google Place Page

4. Build out a body of service-related content on the website.

5. Build out a body of geographic content on his website.

6. Build links every which way

7. Engage in additional forms of marketing that will be most effective at reaching the client's audience (email, video, social media, blogging, etc.)

Now, in entering into all of this work, the client must be informed up front that his chances of ranking above the fold of Google's results are mostly going to revolve around his services in his city of location, in that he may achieve grey pinned local results for these 'service + geo' terms. He may not be able to expect top rankings for all 4 services. In any service city where he isn't physically located, the client should be made to understand that he is most likely to have to rely solely on the organic rankings below the local results, as Google will be viewing his competitors with physical locations in those cities as most relevant.

Clients like these are more complicated than, for example, a dentist with an office in Denver. But, that being said, there are substantial benefits to engaging in the work. Even lower rankings for terms can lead to trickles of monthly traffic and if these convert to phone calls and bookings, it has all been worth it.

Good luck!