Significant organic traffic increase from outside of my service area

[CWG7575]

I run a local service based business. About 6 months ago, I updated my homepage title tag to incorporate the phrase "near me" (I performed other optimizations as well). Over the last few months, I've noticed increased traffic, calls and online bookings from different areas around the country. I was perplexed, I thought I may have mis-targeted my ppc campaign.

After some digging, I found out that my home page ranks #2 in the organic listings for a couple core service keywords with the "near me" phrase added. Of course, my bounce rate, from these visitors outside of my local area, is pretty high (65%). Also, the majority of these visitors are using mobile devices.

I see an opportunity here to possibly provide relevant information to the searchers, based on their geographic area. The problem is that, I can't risk modifying my website for the sake of this "out of area" traffic.

If I were to provide a page to a visitor based on their ip, could that be considered a black hat tactic? I don't want to do anything that will compromise my core business.

Any advice will be welcomed.

[katemorris]

From a not local perspective, redirecting based on IP is generally not the best idea. Early on at Distilled in Seattle, our I{ address was in Washington DC! IP Addresses are not reliable in the United States.

There is that problem, plus the fact that Google only crawls from California. Therefore, depending on how the redirect was set up, they might just see the San Jose area content.

Therefore, I am glad you decided against the redirect. I think your idea of letting people define where they are and find a new provider is perfect. The people in your area get the right content and others that happen on that page get to find a preferred vendor.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jim,

Yes, I think this is a serious consideration. But let's see what additional feedback you get.

[CWG7575]

I didn't think about the confusion from the customer or Google side, in terms of creating pages that focused on locations other than my own.

Thanks for passing this question on to your staff.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jim,

Well, from a Local SEO perspective, I wouldn't advise putting content on a local business website that reflects anything other than your own city or location and service area, due to confusion this could cause on the part of your customers and Google, but lead gen is not an area of expertise for me. I'm going to ask our staff for additional input on your question. It's a good one, for sure!

[CWG7575]

Yes Miriam. I was referring to lead generation. Being that I can't fulfill these service requests (as I'm not physically located in these areas). I am in the process of building a service provider network, which will allow me to continue to market these services, while the service providers do the fulfillment.

So, going back to the original question, I was thinking about options that would allow me to serve the localized page of their respective service provider when the customer seeks services. I figured an immediate redirect could have been construed as a door way page. So, now I will customize my home page to add a section that allows them to search for service availability in their area, which will then take them to that local page.

This is my thinking now.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jim,

Thank you for the excellent further details. I'm trying to envision your situation. You are an auto-related services company located in South Florida, and presumably, serving customers in that area. However, you mention:

"I had an opportunity to find a mutually beneficial way to provide these services."

Would this be along the lines of lead generation to businesses in other states that provide the same service you do but that are not part of your own company? Or, something totally different?

[CWG7575]

Rishi & Miriam thanks for the feedback.

Sorry about the vagueness of the question. I was pressed for time when I wrote this initially. To give you a better idea of what my situation is, our business is located in South Florida. We provide automotive related services. Our industry is pretty competitive, but the players in this industry don't really have a strong grasp on the varied aspects of digital marketing, outside of the customary G Plus Local pages.

We've been in business for quite some time and we have done all the on-site optimizations, citation building, locally focused pages, content creation, etc. About 6 months ago, I noticed we were getting more mobile traffic coming to our site and there was an increasing number of keywords that contained  "best" and "near me". So, I decided to add our particular service keywords along with "best" and "near me" to our title tag. Up to this point, 70% of our traffic was coming in via paid search & desktop traffic accounted for over 70% of traffic as well.

Over the last few months, I began to notice that we were receiving calls and online bookings from NJ, Ca, Tx, Philly and a few other places. I thought that I may have made a targeting mistake on my ppc campaign. After further investigation, I saw that all of this traffic was organic. At this point, 70ish% of our traffic was coming from organic and mobile accounted for over 70% as well. About a third of this traffic was coming from outside of our geographic service area.

When I realized this, I took to the serps and saw that no matter what location I searched from in the continental U.S. our website showed up in the number 2 organic spot for 2 of our core keywords with "near me" associated with it.

I believe this is because, our company has some "brand equity" and although this industry is competitive, it isn't from a digital marketing perspective. So, there is a great opportunity to get out ahead of these guys in these other regions.

So, long story made even longer, I realized that if I had potential customers seeking our services from areas where we weren't physically located - I had an opportunity to find a mutually beneficial way to provide these services. I was just thinking about the best way to go about it.

One thought was to redirect traffic that came to my site to a locally focused page, but I didn't want G to think I was setting up my homepage as a doorway. I also mulled the idea of a zip code overlay that would prompt the visitor to enter their info and would send them to a page focused on providing services in their local area.

But, overall (and the reason for the initial question) I wanted to know if redirecting a visitor based on their location would be cause me problems in the future. But, since the initial post, I've abandoned that idea for something more efficient.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jim,

You've done a good job phrasing the details of your question, but this is one of those situations in which it may actually not be possible to advise you well without assessing your unique website/industry/geography/scenario. Businesses that operate in a non-competitive niche or geography often do rank for other cities beyond their city of location, simply because Google doesn't have much data to go on. For example, if you're the only tow truck company servicing a 50 mile radius in rural Kansas, you might very well show up for a variety of mobile and desktop searches for users who aren't located in your city or who are adding these other city names to your query. If, however, you are an attorney in Los Angeles, you are in a completely different situation and the fight for any kind of ranking is a tough one.

Are you familiar with the concept of developing high quality local landing pages for the various cities in which you serve? This is a common, effective strategy for service area businesses of all kinds. You can delve into this topic here:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

The development of unique local landing pages for each service city is going to be a more common strategical move than simply altering the title tag of your home page to reflect a bunch of other cities. Not sure if your rankings can be explained by having added 'near me' to a single title tag, but again, it would be easy to give inaccurate advice to you without actually auditing the website and its competition. This might be one of those situations in which you'd be best off hiring a pro and using a non-disclosure agreement if you're concerned about privacy. Alternatively, you can share your website address and further details here to get more on-target feedback from the community.

[rishil]

If you switch the page then there is a slight risk, although you are doing it for the right reason. One of the better and safer ways of doing this is to serve an image or a small block of text that directs users to the better matched section, and only geo serving that content on the page, not the whole page.