Local SEO, located just outside major city
-
I have never had a local website, but I have a friend who owns a company that would be strictly local so it made wonder:
If a company is located just outside a major metropolitan area, is it possible for this company to compete with companies that are located within the actual city.
Here's an example. A construction company located in Plano, Texas wants to rank for Dallas Construction Companies. Plano is 15 mins from downtown Dallas. Does this company have much of a chance ranking on the map for Dallas Construction companies when they have a business address of Plano, Texas?
-
Hi Kade,
Good question and one that comes up frequently, because so many businesses are just outside the borders of major cities. The simple answer is - Google considers a business as being most relevant to its city of location. So, if you're in Plano, Google views you as a good answer for searches containing the word 'Plano' or for searches from Plano-based devices. Google does not consider you as primarily relevant to Dallas.
Some businesses have actually taken the rather drastic step of relocating just to get into those big cities, or have even moved within their city of location to get closer to the city centroid and improve their chances of rankings. Chris Silver Smith recently published a very good piece on this potentials and pitfalls of this approach:
http://searchengineland.com/relocation-relocation-relocation-a-new-local-ranking-tactic-135325
So, where does that leave a company like the one your friend owns? If you can't outrank Dallas businesses in the blended-local pack is their anything you can do?
The one path many businesses explore taking is to create city landing pages on their websites for their service radius cities. For example, if your friend does a lot of construction work in Dallas, he could have a page on his website showcasing his work there. And, he could back this up with an ongoing stream of blog posts highlighting his work in Dallas.
Will this enable him to outrank Dallas-based competitors? It's unlikely, and pretty much out of the question when it comes to his blended local rankings, but he may be able to get some secondary organic rankings for Dallas-related searches, driving some targeted traffic and leads.
I would discuss this idea with him, once he understands how Google views his business as being relevant to Plano because of locale. This isn't a dead-end situation, by any means, but it's definitely a challenging one, and calls for much creativity and effort.
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
-
Hypothetical SEO Question
I am running a website for a law firm. It has been running for many, many years and has plenty of backlinks and authority. I then create a standalone website for a specific type of case that the law firm is handling. On that website, I have a page that copies some of the attorney bio text from the main website. How much of a negative impact will this standalone website have on the main website as far as duplicate content issues are concerned? Please explain your answer in detail. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goldbergweismancairo0 -
Page Speed Factors For SEO
Hey Guys, I have developed a page and optimised it. I have got a dilemma, I have 2 variants of the optimised page I could use. The page is responsive and uses bootstrap from an external CDN. The 2 variants: External CDN - This is adding an an extra request and is delivering the entire framework (not ideal for mobile) I've looked in the node/grunt.js route (+unCSS) to remove redundant CSS, which led me to my next variant. Inline CSS. After doing some grunt.js work I shaved out the redundant code from the framework then added it inline. I will also point out that all assets are optimised, all CSS/JS/HTML is minifed. In terms for score the 1st variant is less than the second, but I believe that most users of the internet already have bootstrap cached due to it being so common. The ultimate question comes down to ranking, I'm not entirely sure where I draw the line between development and SEO (I will also ask in Stack Overflow). Which one would rank better? all other factors being equal.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AkashMakwana0 -
Seo black hat tricks
I have a competitor in the local area. He registered a new domain name. www.orangecountypatentlawfirm.com. It was created back in 11/10 and updated a few months ago on 11/13. My domain is ocpatentlawyer.com. I put my domain and his domain in the open site explorer. The peculiar thing is that my competitors website mirrors identically to my domain. (see attached image) my competitors website rose through the SERP very fast. I never saw it coming. Anyways, I wanted to know if he was using some type of black hat seo trick to hi jack my domain authority to get his own website to rank higher? Plus, if so, does it hurt my ranking? compare.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjd710 -
International SEO
Hi all, The company that I work for is planning to target some french (and some other foreign) keywords. The thing is, in our industry, you can't just hire someone to translate the content/pages. The pages have to be translated by an accredited translator. Here's the thing, it costs a LOT of money just to translate a few thousand words. So, the CEO decided to translate a few of our 'core' pages and SEO them to see if it brings results. My questions are, would it be possible from a technical point of view to simply translate a few pages? Would that cause a problem for the search engine crawlers? Would those pages be 'seen' as duplicates? Thanks in advance guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardDennis0 -
Negative SEO + Disavow
My site is very new (~1 years old), but due to good PR we have gotten some decent links and are already ranking for a key term. This may be why someone decided to start a negative SEO attack on us. We've had less than 200 linking domains up until 2 weeks ago, but since then we have been getting 100+ new domains /day with anchor texts that are either targeted to that key term or are from porn websites. I've gone through the links to get ready and submit a disavow... but should I do it? My rankings/site traffic has not been affected yet. Reasons for my hesitations: 1. Google always warns against using the disavow, and says "you shouldn't have to use it if you are a normal website." (sensing 'guilty-until-proven') 2. Some say Google is only trying to get the data to see if there are any patterns within the linking sites. I don't want the site owners to get hurt, since the villain is someone else using xrumer to put spammy comments on their site. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ALLee0 -
Joomla Plugins for SEO
Any input on which Joomla plugins could help us to facilitate the SEO on a client's site? Wordpress has some simple all-in-ones but we're not as familiar with Joomla and it doesn't look like that's the case. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MackenzieFogelson0 -
Indirect SEO boost from links
I have 2 ecommerce sites, each with a blog. I am increasing my linkbuilding efforts, but I don't want to build too many links directly to my 2 sites over a short period of time. I have decided that I will add a certain number of links to sites/pages that are already linking to my main sites (for example, a blog post on my blog, guest post on another blog, article submission, etc.). How much of a benefit can I expect in terms of rankings? Has anyone tested this out or experimented with something like this? What are the pros and cons? I appreciate thoughtful comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Is DOCTYPE important for SEO?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0