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I have seen several search results in the past have buttons show up under the search results going to pages on the site. Of course now I can't find a concrete example, but they weren't just links, they were actual buttons. I know about the sitelink process (or lack thereof, really), but how does one get the buttons? Is it strictly a paid thing in Google?

Thank you so much Tawny! Perhaps they could at least incorporate Google's current method of grouping for the DFW Area.

Is there not a way to cluster a given number of areas under an additional category with some sort of if/then code?

For instance, if there were 26 cities total in the world (A-Z) and an additional location "Metro City" were added to the list manually. Then an if/then were added so that Cities A-F were not only given the attribute of City A, City B, ... but also given the attribute of Metro City.

Then, if a user chose Metro City as part of their monitoring, then Cities A through F would be monitored, but instead of giving separate results for each of those 6 cities, it would give one sum total for all those cities added together, under the category Metro City.

The reason I press the issue is because, while going to a granular level is extremely useful for certain areas and businesses, it is nearly useless for others. The DFW Metroplex is a prime example of this, as the vast majority of those 200+ cities are within a 30 minute drive of each other at their farthest point, because of the extensive highway system it has. Add to that, there are numerous corners that apply to multiple cities, because of the strange border lines, so you might literally have a 1000 square foot area that covers 3-4 separate cities, or one city that is bordered by 10 others, that one could drive through in 5 minutes at legal speed limit.

Likewise, I know it can be done, because Facebook and Google already allows for less granularity when choosing demographics based on location. See the following link on Google Trends that already allows for the Dallas / Fort Worth area.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US-TX-623&q=Stuff

At the very least, could Moz developers look into this as a future offering?

I would like to request that a "Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex" option be added to the keyword search areas. As it stands, each city must be individually chosen, which is not only very time consuming, but also acts as an insurmountable multiplier for the keywords used in our campaigns.

Most businesses in DFW serve the entire Metroplex, which consists of around 200 cities. Even the core largest number well over 50. Almost all of these cities are within about 50 miles of each other as well. Asking the majority of businesses to only focus their SEO monitoring efforts on a few cities in the Metroplex would be like asking a Hyper Wal-Mart to only monitor about 10% of their inventory at most, and more likely 1-5%.

Alternately, if you could instead have County choices for DFW, that would help a lot. The counties of DFW are:

Collin County
Dallas County
Denton County
Ellis County
Hood County
Hunt County
Johnson County
Kaufman County
Parker County
Rockwall County
Somervell County
Tarrant County
Wise County

The three in bold are typically the most important for businesses in the Metroplex, though each of the outlying counties listed contain dozens of cities as well, each with their own particular specialties, focuses, and demographics.