Optimizing a location the business doesn't actually reside in
-
I am optimizing a site for a general contractor in a small market -- Chittenden County, Vermont -- and I'm struggling with how to label his local identity on-page. His registered place of business is in a town about 12 miles outside of Burlington, which is the largest city in the county and state. Nearly 80% of geo modified keywords go to Burlington, and most people consider Chittenden County to be "greater Burlington."
I am wondering whether it will help or hurt SEO to use "Burlington" in the titles, headers, etc, even though their actual location is a few miles away. They don't get customer visits -- business operations are located in a residence and all inquiries come in over the phone or email -- so I'm not worried so much about confusing visitors. Also, their official location will be available in the footer and contact page.
If I go with "Burlington," how will this impact search rankings and G+ Places when I start focusing on citations in various directories. Will this slight geo discrepancy cause problems with organic and local SEO?
I've been wrestling with this for a while. Your input is REALLY appreciated. Thanks, guys!
-
Thanks, Patrick! Best wishes for an excellent 2015 to you, too!
-
Great tips as well, Miriam! Enjoy seeing you chime in when it comes to localized SEO
Happy 2015! - Patrick
-
Great question and something I bet a lot of other SEO's deal with, but don't always know what to do, nor ask the appropriate people for their take. Kudos to you for looking out for your client's best interests.
That being said, I agree with Ryan. Hit on your Google tools and G+ page to mention those geo-specific keywords. Also, there is nothing wrong with working to optimize a business which resides/operates out of one location while focusing their marketing in another location.
Two examples of this...
- 1st, our company is located in Cary NC, a smaller, but fast growing town outside of Raleigh, which is the major metropolis around here. However, we target a lot of SEO and keyword research at Raleigh. We've got a great presence for lots of terms relating to Cary, so Raleigh was our next goal and some of the smaller towns around us. It is possible, when done correctly, even for a highly competitive service like "SEO" and "Web Design" and "WordPress" in any major city. Burlington for you, would be nothing less.
- 2nd, we're about to work with another small carpet cleaning business who operates outside of his home yet travels to about 25 mile radius to service customers. Yes, his address on his website and G+ pages and his listings will be in Wake Forest NC, but that doesn't mean we can't go after organic searches/results in Cary, Durham, Raleigh, and the like. He is actually pretty exited to potentially get traffic and customers from all over the area.
Take 1 well written and optimized blog article targeting a specific keyword and going for a smaller market, we'll say Youngsville NC with little to no competition for my client, we see we could gain him a few customers a month potentially when that blog article ranks.
Incorporate a blog and article writing into your campaign and I'm sure you'll see success for your client.
Hope Ryan's, Miriam's and my responses were good and helpful! - Patrick
-
Hi PTDodge!
You'll want to go with your city of location in the following places:
-
Your contact page and footer on your website
-
Website copy that speaks to your physical location
-
All of your citation building
You must be absolutely clear and correct on all of the above. I know it's a shame when you don't operate out of your major target city, but it's really important to tell it like it is - which is that you are physically located in a small town but serve in other towns, including a major city. Places you can mention your major city include:
-
A local landing page on the website, devoted to that city (see: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide)
-
Descriptions you write on some of your citations, "Voted Burlington's #1 Contractor' or what have you
-
Testimonials and project summaries from/for clients you've served in Burlington
-
A mention on the homepage that your service area includes Burlington
-
PPC campaigns
-
Blog posts
Unfortunately, none of this is likely to enable you to edge out competitors physically located in Burlington, but unless your company can get a physical location in this city, this is the reality of your situation. Telling it like it is will hamper you in some ways but is the right thing to do for your customers, representing the business honestly as it is.
Hope this helps!
-
-
Thanks, Ryan! Yeah, I'm not going crazy with geo references in the copy. I just don't want to miss out on searches for "general contractor burlington vt" when the difference is negligible. Good advice. Thanks again!
-
When you're localizing a business within Google's own tool, they allow for this kind of feature either by selecting area codes the business serves or by applying a radius in which business will make service calls. I'd do a mix and match of phrases like, "One of Burlington's most trusted..." "serving the greater Burlington area" "calls Chittenden county home". You don't need to go over board with it though. Other local search factors are going to play a larger role.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unlinking Google Local Listing from your GMB Account with other locations you have
I have listings that I need disconnected from my main Google My Business account. I can close, or remove which is similar as closing, but the goal is not to close the listings, just to remove the association to my google account, and im not transferring the listing as well. Anyone know how to accomplish this? Goal is to clean up old listings that are exist but I dont manage Thanks for all the help
Local Listings | | vmialik0 -
What to do with One physical location but serving multiple cities?
Hello everyone, I need help about this. My client sent me this "I have a question about doing local SEO for other locations for the same company.
Local Listings | | Beachflower
The Brisbane data recovery business is linked to Corporate data recovery and are physically based at the same address. Now we have other website for the same business, but named after other cities (eg sydneydatarecovery, melbournedatarecovery etc.). The business has only one physical address, which the one used for Brisbane and Corporate. How can we do Local SEo for the other location website with our Brisbane address.
We do have the Google location registered to a local address we have in each cities, but not display to the public." N.b I already build citation using the address for Brisbane Data Recovery business name. And I didn't know about this before. Please help me to fix this mess.0 -
4 shared locations - 1 phone number - legacy GMB - HELP!!!
I have a friend who is a dietician and has the following issue with his business He works in 4 different locations across town- Each location is shared with other practitioners. - he uses the same phone number for each location (free 0800 UK number)- he has legacy google places profiles for some locations with some reviews he'd like to keep and other locations he'd like to delete.He'd like to be present on page 1 of google for terms like dietician in "name of location he works in"I am clearly concerned about his NAP profile since he only has 1 phone number for all locations.The address of each location can clash with other practitioners working there who have already registered a GMB profile using the same addresses although there might be the possibility of using something like "suite x" to differentiate his business in the address.Can anybody advice on how they would approach this one please.Thanks
Local Listings | | coolhandluc0 -
Do You Know What's Triggering Your Local Packs?
Hey To All My Local Pals, Here 🙂 Recently, I watched a totally fascinating LocalU video in which Mike Blumenthal introduced a hypothesis that there may be a way to analyze what, specifically, is triggering a specific local pack. Now, Mike is stating that correlation is not causation in explaining this, but basically what he starts talking about at around 4:40 in the video is that what you are seeing rank well in the local packs may be demonstrably caused by what you see ranking organically beneath the pack, or may be caused by totally different signals. Mike says, _"If you're seeing the top 10 results are all IYP industry sites, and there's a pack showing, and the highest local site is 24 or something in organic, it's unlikely that that's what's triggering the pack. And so then you want to look at third-party triggers and see if that's what's actually triggering the pack." _ Obviously, all of us who do Local are familiar with the idea that a tremendous variety of elements contribute to pack rankings, but I am particularly intrigued by the idea of looking at the organic result beneath a pack and determining that there is little or no correlation between them, and this then driving one to look elsewhere for contributing factors. In a recent response to another thread here on Q&A, I discussed some common local pack ranking failure causes when organic rank is high. What I'd love to see is whether, if you look at some of your clients' desired packs, can you tell if organic signals are driving them, or can you see that it's not organic signals driving the pack, as Mike suggests. What, in those cases, does appear to be driving the packs? I'd be so interested in a discussion on this. What do you see? What do you think of Mike's suggestions?
Local Listings | | MiriamEllis9 -
Google My Business URL Choice
Hi guys, we have a national chain hardware store hardware store as a client. We built them a new website, and now they want us to do local SEO to help them rank better. We are debating for GMB whether to promote our new website URL or use the location page on the national hardware site. Most similar stores seem to promote the location page on the national site, but the client just spent money on having us build them a new website. What gives our client the best chance of ranking better?
Local Listings | | JohnWeb120 -
Deciding whether to list multiple locations
Hey Mozzers, thanks for your awesome help today. I have another related question to local listings. We're currently rebuilding our website and we have multiple physical locations across the UK. Is it beneficial SEO wise for us to display just one address on our contact page or should we list the 5 addresses that we have? I have also been checking out our local listings and it appears that we have inconsistent listings across the 13 sites that Moz local lists in the UK and then across various other directories. How important is it to get these cleaned up? Cheers in advance Leo
Local Listings | | Leo_Woodhead0 -
Multiple Domain optimization
Hello all, I'm a bit new to this, though I'd like to think I'm a fast learner when it comes to IT related stuff...as I've been doing it for long enough. Here's my question. I have a non-profit corporation that covers a small region referred to as "Upper Cape" which covers four towns (mashpee, sandwich, falmouth, bourne). I have a direct competitor in each town who has a domain that contains the name of the town. Being that I'd like to optimize across the four towns, I've decided to also purchase up 4 domain names that contain the towns. Rather than forward the domains to the upper cape domain, I've cloned instances of word press containing my data across 4 different sites that contain the towns.
Local Listings | | UpperCapeSpartans
As I got to thinking about this...I thought that it might actually hurt me...looking for insight and help as to how best to do this to optimize search (and be found) across these four towns.0 -
Targeting both Dutch countries .NL & .BE --> 2 ccTLD's using rel-alternate or just one TLD?
We want to target both Dutch countries .NL & .BE (Belgium & Netherlands).
Local Listings | | Brainlane
Should we go for the 2 ccTLD's using rel-alternate, or go for one TLD, .EU or similar? We currently have an SEO project going on where DNS.be & DNS.nl are equally important. Currently we are using the rel-alternate meta data. The .be website is doing fantastic, the .nl one seems stagnant and not really getting to target. For a similar project, we are now wondering whether we should go for the same approach, or just pick one TLD (.EU or similar). Note: we cannot create content that is regionally specific, since the content is just what it is and cannot be altered.0