Questions about On-site Location Content for Service Area Businesses
-
Hello all,
I've got a couple tough questions about how to go about creating locations pages for my business, and I'm wondering if you can give me some much needed direction.
I'm about to launch a professional house cleaning business which will serve Philadelphia and a couple surrounding counties. I plan on aggressively expanding to other large cities, and while I plan on building a Philly locations page, I'm unsure of how to rank organically for all the individual towns/municipalities in the surrounding counties in the middle without having a physical business location there.
Should I even hope to rank for these smaller towns? Would a page where the county is in the h1 tag, and say the top 10 largest towns in that county listed underneath in h2 tags help me reach searchers in those top 10 largest towns? How about paying ~$100 for a physical street address in each county and submitting that NAP to local directories of the larger towns, as well as getting a Google My Business page and using the service radius option?
Is there some other strategy that I'm missing?
I'm just at a loss for how to compete without AdWords for the people searching in the smaller towns when my competition is businesses with NAP/citations and their main page dedicated solely to that smaller town. Google seems to have made it even harder with Pigeon coming out recently. I serve those areas just as readily as my competition, yet the customer will predominantly see them SOLELY due to the fact that most of my competition are incapable of serving or choose not to serve wide areas. I understand that these businesses are dedicating a lot of resources to those small towns, but it does seem a sad fact that it doesn't mean they're any higher quality of a company than mine, yet they get a leg up.
ANY advice or direction would be greatly appreciated, and would come with a huge internet bear hug.
-
Hi PT:)
You might also like to check out this blog post on local landing pages:
http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
Hope this will be helpful!
-
Hello PTHerrington,
You certainly have your work cut out for you, that's for sure.
If I were you, here's what I'd do:
- Analyze where my competitors are weak when it comes to online local marketing, and exploit those areas especially. It sounds like the main advantage they have are offices in those towns, which you can't duplicate. I personally wouldn't bother with the PO Box option. I doubt it will help a whole lot with your end game from actually netting more customers.
- I'd start with a good Google AdWords budget while you're trying to build rank organically. Over time hopefully you'll have to spend less and less on AdWords, but out of the gate you'll need it to get traction over organic competitors. Ideally you'd have really good landing pages that drive them to a page for that town, or county if towns are not feasible. (Of course, if you worked hard on a handful of pages for individual towns for organic, those could double for PPC nicely.)
- People generally don't search as much for services on a county level. So I'd argue you should focus on a few small, key town pages, and try to fill them with as much local content as possible and try to educate your consumer a bit, beyond what your competitors are doing. Over time those pages could get rankings, but doing the H1 county thing with H2 town names I don't think will deliver.
Here's an example of a woman who created good local content and from it grew not only a pet sitting business for herself, but a thriving franchise business other pet sitters have replicated in their cities. I'd assume her area was dominated by larger kennels etc., and she appears to be a one-person operation. http://www.copyblogger.com/bella-vasta-case-study/
- Be sure obviously to check out Moz Local, and listen to Greg Gifford's webinar on local SEO. He helps local car dealerships, and that webinar is packed with good, practical ideas you can execute on.
In summary, I'd argue don't try to cover everything. Just pick a few towns and test out what works, and then slowly expand out with additional pages. You can always mention other cities you operate in. But don't try and bit off your entire coverage area with regional pages.
Most companies do little more in local SEO than register a Google Places page and have a physical address. So if you try to create a little more value and optimize heavily for those towns, over time I bet you'd see some good results.
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
-
Google Suspended My business listing
hi there, Google has Suspended By Google Business Listing Google has suspended your page due to quality issues. there is No spam Things in My Business, i have Requested Google, But It has not made active Since 10 Days, Is there any way to make My listing Publish on Google please Guide me to which steps Need take Thnx
Local Listings | | innovative.rohit0 -
Facebook Locations - Good or Bad for Local Rankings?
Our company has multiple (3) offices, including our headquarters, and each has its own Facebook page. Other than the primary company page, the other two locations have only been claimed and do not have posts, reviews, check-ins, etc. Now, Facebook recently granted us access to Facebook Locations, which, if I understand correctly, would remove 2-out-of-3 office pages and add a "Locations" tab to our primary company page where people can see the other offices. _See Starbucks Example: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Starbucks/locations/?ref=page_internal _ I've read mixed reviews regarding using the Locations feature, but nothing definitively answers whether or not this would negatively affect local rankings. Does anyone have firsthand experience going from individual business pages to a single parent business page with Locations? Is there any trustworthy documentation out there about this?
Local Listings | | MPlata1 -
New Google My Business - No more Google+?
I created and verified a new Google My Business page for a client and found that there won't be any more Google+ created automatically. I spoke to Google Support and they confirmed this is the case because apparently, the two Google products confuse people. Now, if we want a G+ page created for our client, we have to go and 'Apply' for one here - https://plus.google.com/create We're not sure how to go moving forward with new clients. Has anyone tried to apply for a G+ account successfully using the above link? If we create a new Gmail account, don't we get a G+ account anyway (or is that not the case as well)?
Local Listings | | nhhernandez0 -
Local SEO Tasks When Closing One Branch of Multilocation Business
I would appreciate the opinions of my fellow SEOs on this one. I haven’t seen any other threads on this exact subject and others that touch on it are somewhat older so I am hoping this also proves to be a good resource for others going forward. I have an existing client that I did local SEO for about a year ago. They are a propane service provider and they had multiple locations. So we did local SEO for the company primarily by updating NAPs and creating more individual content for each of the branches such as specific landing page for each branch on their website and individual listings in citations for each branch. Now they have sold one of the branches to a competitor and they need to remove all listings for it. I am trying to develop a comprehensive list of actions to take and I would appreciate any feedback on the best way to go about accomplishing this task. Here is what I have so far: Remove all mention of sold branch on client website, including specific landing page Delete any branch-specific social media accounts Some specific areas I have questions about are: What do I do with Google My Business listings for the sold branch? Do I try to delete/unregister/close them? Or should I just leave them be with an updated link to our website homepage? Should I even bother contacting the main NAP listing sites to remove the old listing or just leave it to fall off on its own? Thank you again for all your help!
Local Listings | | Ayres-SEO0 -
How to tell Google My Business what area is local to my company?
Hello Mozers I've been stumped by the changes in the interface with Google My Business. I used to be able to set up the area for which I wanted a business to cover. Now I can't find anyway to tell Google. The company I work for is in St Albans and our main workload is London. It would be helpful if I could actually control what Google Local sees as Local for my company, i.e. to encompass central London which is only 19 miles away. Can someone give me an idiots guide has to how to tell Google the area I'd like our local listing to cover? Thanks
Local Listings | | Catherine_Selectaglaze0 -
Getting your business name on a Google Map?
How do you get your business name to appear on Google Maps? See attachment. What's the process to get this to happen? I have a Google Local listing, but that doesn't seem to be enough. ZzFnwBj
Local Listings | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Good service for loactions for google maps
Hi guys, I have one client from the locksmith niche. His service is in almost all the us but he dos not have fiscal location. Because that all the locksmith niche are consider a bit gray, so we noticed that Google not all the time accept the address (Virtual offices). Do you know good service that can give me good solution for this ? something that will give me good reliable address... Thanks
Local Listings | | EdmondHong870 -
Does anybody have any data on what percentage of people actually click on a Google Places / Google+ listing VS call the business direct from the SERPs?
I've had a few SMB clients who have experienced drops in website traffic once their Google Places listing has gone live. It's hard for the average SMB to understand that this may not be a bad thing because they actually may be received more leads direct from the local SERPs. So while I can try to explain this to my clients, it'd be nice to have some broad data on how searchers interact with Google local listings. I'd love to learn what percentage of people call direct from the SERPs instead of clicking through to the business' website link. Obviously, the percentages would vary across different verticals, different devices & depending on whether the search query was branded or non-branded. I'm after some rough average data, so if anyone could point me in the right direction, that'd be great! 🙂
Local Listings | | Dave_Eddy0