What options are there for local SEO when no physical location exists?

[SEOAspirant]

I work for a automobile transportation company that provides services in several different cities throughout the US. Our headquarters (and physical location) is in San Diego, California, however we have drivers stationed in several different cities throughout the nation.

The problem is, we don't have physical locations in those other cities - our drivers essentially work from home.

What local SEO options are available to us, if any, for those cities where we don't have an actual brick and mortar address? Listing the home address of our drivers is, for obvious reasons, not ideal.

Thanks for your help!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Rachel!

That was a pretty long reply, but if it helped, well worth the time. Best of luck in your efforts!

[Rachel_J]

Miriam,

I really appreciate the lengthy explanation! It helped me feel like you understand what I am trying to accomplish and I will use your words as a guide.

Thanks for all your time and expertise!

Rachel

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Rachel,

I know it can be tough, and scenarios like yours have grey areas.

Here is the straight and narrow on this:

• You build GMB listings for your two offices, but not for the truck drivers houses.

• Unless people are actually walking into those offices off the street during stated business hours, yours is a service area business and should be checking the boxes for this, rather than for serving customer at the physical location.

• You can set a service radius for each of the 2 locations, yes, but I advise going easy with this and not setting too large of one.

• You develop a landing page on your website for each of the cities you serve and, hopefully, earn some links to these pages as well as linking to them in a visible way internally

• You build all your other citations for the 2 locations, but not for the truck driver's houses.

• Be sure each physical office has its own unique local phone number so that they don't get mixed up

• Be sure to earn reviews for both locations

With the above path, you should be free of worry that you are violating any guidelines and can simply focus on building up your branding to be all it can be.

Now, here's the grey area and not so straight and narrow:

You could ostensibly argue that each of your truckers is, in fact, working from an office in his house and answering the phone "ABC Trucking" each time it rings. I can see that, and, I can also see the horse sense in wanting customers to know that a truck driver is right near them, if the service is one in which time is of the essence.

The problem is, what sometimes makes good horse sense doesn't always make good Google sense. We know for a fact that Google has the capability not only of looking at streetview-level images of any address, but that they also read signage on buildings. This is where the stress of worry may come into going with anything other than the straight and narrow.

Imagine you are Google. You receive a report from XYZ Trucking that ABC Plumbing is outranking them in 10 different cities, when all they really have there is a house. "It's not a real office!" XYZ plumbing complains. At this point, Google has the capability of checking up on this using their own tools, and if what they decide is that ABC's business with just 2 real offices is trying to make themselves look like they have 12 offices, it's unlikely that you are going to even have a chance to argue the horse-sense point of view. Rather, you could wake up one morning to find those 10 listings gone and the 2 for your legitimate offices falling in rankings. It's not an experience I'd wish on anybody!

Some business owners take risks. Google isn't the best at policing their own data sometimes, and people can get away with things for years, but in this case, you are the SEO on the job, and the stability of your client's visibility tops any hopes of temporary gains.

If this were my client, I'd explain all of the above to him and then explain how we are going with the straight-and-narrow, for the long-term health of his business and reputation.

Long answer - whew - but I find it helps to tell myself a story when weighting possible outcomes. Finally, regarding your question about putting the truckers' home addresses on the website, I'm not seeing a good reason for this as I'm guessing they don't want the public showing up at their homes, and there is a chance that the presence of all this non-physical-location NAP could get mixed up with the NAP for the 2 physical offices you'll be doing your best to build up.

Hope this helps, and I think you've asked some very important questions, here!

[Rachel_J]

To add to the question, there are two office locations which I will be creating GMB accounts for. Should I be creating service areas where we have trucks on Google My Business? In other words unchecking that i service customers at my store? Is this better than not having a location at all? Can I do this also if we contract out some of our work to subcontractors in that location?

[Rachel_J]

Hi Miriam,

Thanks, I really appreciate you taking the time to answer this question. One last thing, if the truck drivers officially answer phone calls from their house does that make a difference? Also, it would be less than 10 drivers.

Would you place the driver's home location on the website even if your not creating a GMB account for it?

I hope I'm not beating a dead horse, but this is pretty disappointing for me :).

Thanks again,

Rachel

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Rachel,

Glad you asked this! At this point, no, I would not give the same advice as 3 years ago. Though I saw the above advice working back then, it's not advice I would currently give.

I don't recommend creating a network of truck drivers' houses for the purpose of citation building. Home-based businesses are fine, for a single location, but a network like this could raise red flags. If you can't staff a physical office in a city, I do not advise building a Google My Business account for it. So, you'll need to stick with getting GMB on-board for whatever your staffed, physical location is and then working on content (rather than citations) for your service cities.

Times have changed

[Rachel_J]

Hi Miriam,

Does this response still hold true for almost 2016? I am doing local SEO for a business that is more service based, but their drivers have home offices. I am considering putting our truck drivers phone numbers and addresses as locations in the cities we have trucks. Also, can I use their regular local phone number instead of our 1800 number?

Is this strategy risky?

Thanks!

All the best,

Rachel

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Adam,

Good question. Unfortunately, a storage unit would not likely meet Google's guidelines for a physical location. Rather, what you'd need to do here is list whatever your headquarters are (your main location where you answer your phone, even if that's your house) and build just 1 Google+ Local page for that, being sure to set the business as a service area business so that the address is hidden. Then, instead of going for local pack rankings for your service locations, you'll need to go for organic ones via the city landing pages you build on your website for the various cities you serve.

[acfalla]

Hi Miriam,

I run a multi-city domestic cleaning company and am facing similar challenges.  Because we do all our work on-site at clients' houses we just use a storage unit in each city as our base of operations - much more cost effective this way.

We are able to receive mail at each of our locations (a service the storage locations offer) but do you think using these storage unit addresses as our physical locations in each city would get us into trouble with google?

best Adam

[KS__]

Thanks Miriam. Waiting eagerly.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi KS!

I'm responding on your other thread. Thanks for asking!

[KS__]

Great help Miriam.

Since it has been a couple of since you typed this answer, does it still hold true and 2015? I posted a similar query on http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-rank-for-a-location-country-without-having-a-physical-address-in-that-location-country#reply_297693. Will be great if you could help me out there.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi SEOAspirant,

The truth is, Google does not have published guidelines for businesses with models like yours. Because of this, you must view some of the following in the light of an experiment rather than an accepted practice.

Typically, for SABs (service area businesses) one is dealing with something like a plumbing company located in city A, but serving cities A, B, C and D. In such cases, the guidelines are clear. You create a single listing for the location, hide the address and choose a service radius or, in the new Google Places for Business Dashboard, select a couple of service cities. You never create additional listings for the service cities.

Your business model is more complex, however, as it appears that you have a location in San Diego but that your employees offer services nation-wide. I'm not very familiar with the auto transport industry, but I'm presuming this means your drivers deliver cars to dealerships or individuals all over the country, and have face-to-face transactions with the recipients. If so, I think there are 3 possible paths open to you.

Path 1:

This is in line with Stephanie's comment. In some cases, business models like yours will establish a representative in a target city and use the home address and phone number of that person. *Note that you must not use a toll free or re-directing phone number. The representative of your business in that city must be the one who answers the phone there, at the location. And, the number he/she uses must not be shared with any other business. For example if the driver shares his home with his wife who runs an accountancy firm out of their home, they cannot share the phone number.

The possible downside to this is that Google is quite capable of seeing that the address you've listed is a home. Google is fine with home based businesses, at this point, but it is not impossible that in the future they might decide that national businesses who have taken this path of using a home address to establish a location in multiple target cities are gaming the system. Tons of businesses currently operate this way and, from what I have seen, appear to be surviving in the system, but I would not rule out the concept that Google might decide they don't like this at some point.

Path 2:

This is in more line with Ian's comment, with some slight refinements. In this scenario, your national business realizes that you must invest in a small office in your main target cities and staff that office with someone who answers calls and takes orders from clients. This scenario is completely without a downside, because you are then like any other truly local business with a clearly accepted physical location in each of your target cities. You can proceed as any local business would, without fear of reproach.

What you should not do is attempt to get a virtual office, P.O. box or any similar faux location in your target cities. This is a shortcut attempted by many businesses with models similar to yours and it risks penalties and worse.

Path 3:

You decide you can't yet afford to accomplish the Path 2 plan. In that case, you could determine to set up a single listing for your single physical location and determine that this is the sum of your local efforts for now. Beyond establishing this, you determine to go after high organic visibility in your service cities via a combination of content development, linkbuilding and other traditional organic SEO practices. In this scenario, you are hoping to achieve high organic rankings for a wide number of cities, but are not going after LOCAL rankings due to a lack of legit physical locations. This is a completely risk-free path as well. In future, should you develop funding to open new offices in new cities, then you can begin to follow Path 2.

Long answer, I know, but your scenario is deserved of very careful consideration before you proceed. Hope this helps!

[DonnaDuncan]

Here's something else you will find helpful.

This blog post, published earlier today (4/22/13) by Phil Rosen at LocalVisibilitySystem, identifies all the well known local directories on which you can create a business listing without having to disclose your address. Places like Angie's List and the Bing business portal.

[itrogers]

Since people will not be able to visit the locations of your driver's addresses, I agree with you that you would not want to use that. Also, it will be a bad idea to setup home based service area businesses at your drivers' houses since they will essentially be able to control the listings you create. You will need to come up with some sort of space that is controlled and utilized by your business in those locations. It doesn't have to be a large space but it will have to be a unique address. Even though customers may never come to it, you'll still need to get it setup. Then, in Google places set the business up as a service area business with the appropriate areas that your drivers in that area can legitimately serve. Click the "hide address" box and you'll be good to go. You'll want to setup local phone numbers for each location as well.

Then you can create unique content around those other areas where you can do business directly on your website. Have localized content (services, reviews, phone number, etc) specific to each location. Set the URL for the places pages to those specific area locations on your website.

Edit: spelling and grammar

[jhinchcliffe]

Great question! I would love to hear answers as I have a similar situation.

My suggestion would be to sign up for Google Local (make sure to merge Google Places and Google Plus) and have each driver verify the location by having Google send confirmation to their home. You can opt to not show the address on the Local page. This will make it so your company shows up on Google Local and Google Maps for each location where each driver lives.

let me know if I need to explain that concept more.