Business in one location, be found in others?
-
Hi all,
A bit of an interesting one but I am sure you can all help.
My client has a business in a town called location A. Surrounding town A there are several other towns - My client wants to make sure they also appear in SERPs for these surrounding areas, even though their business is not physically located there. E.g.
Product town A
Product town B
Product town C
Or even just being physically searching from one of those locations and typing the product name, they want to be on that first page.For example if you live in town B which is 20 miles away, my clients still wants to appear right at the top of the SERPs as they are competing against other businesses for that area. They also want to appear for town C, D, and E, all of which are surrounding town A.
How can I make this happen? Would I need to create multiple landing pages and focus the SEO on each individual location? I'm just worried Google would see duplicate content but with varied location keywords. I don't have any room left in the page title to add every location.
They do legitimately serve these areas, if you are looking for their product there are a few competitors around but this is in their 'territory' so to speak.
Any help big or small would be great.
Thanks!
-
Hi Harry,
Agree with Ryan here that your client is in an excellent position to rank organically (if not locally) for additional cities, given the non-existence of competitors in his 30 mile radius. However, you have 2 major challenges to address and overcome.
- A car dealership is a brick-and-mortar business without any obvious relationship to any city beyond its own. This is not a service area business that goes to towns B, C and D to repair plumbing or trim trees. So challenge #1 is to sit down with the client and do an honest assessment of whether the two of you can discover a legitimate connection to cities B, C and D. Just off the top of my head, this might include:
-
Sponsorship of events, sports teams or other things in cities B, C and D
-
Rotating regional specials, as in, bring us a piece of mail with your address in City B and receive a 5% discount on X at our dealership
-
Participation in industry-related happenings in these other cities. For example, blog coverage of an antique car show, an auto race, a vintage car club, teaching at a driver's training school or teaching road safety to students.
-
Blog coverage of industry-related news or laws pertaining to cars, traffic, safety, etc. that is applicable to each of the specific cities
-
Endorsements of or tie-ins to businesses in the other cities. For example, partner with an auto garage in City B to provide some kind or special for doing business with both companies.
These are the types of things you need to brainstorm. If no relationship to the other cities exists, then the customer can't move forward. He must either mine his business model to discover these relationships or begin to build them so that he can prove he is a relevant result for these other cities.
- Challenge #2 hinges on the quality of what you and the client develop together. You mention that you are already working on city landing pages. The client should aim for just 1 page per target city on the website and make it as interesting, useful and strong as possible. Do not create thin or duplicative pages. This is not a good marketing strategy for any business, under any circumstances. Once you have got the basic page in place featuring the 'relationship' content, consider developing an on-site blog to continue on with this work, producing new writing on an on-going basis about contests, events, specials etc. You don't have to do tons of this, because of the lack of competition. Even a single blog post a month for each of the target cities will likely get you pretty far in what you're hoping to achieve, because of the client's fortunate lack of competitors. In all efforts, stress quality to the client and this should be a viable strategy.
Hope this helps!
-
One idea around content would be to create a portion of the City B, C, D pages as a test drive map and description. That way you're talking about the different neighborhoods, landmarksm and such as you describe the route. Make it legitimate though. Plan out a route that actually tests the different characteristics of the vehicle. Something like that would be useful to user, regardless.
As mentioned earlier, you can probably expand to a lot of the places via service area based on the service portion of the dealership.
Those things combined with being the only brand of dealership in the area should help influence "brand dealership city X" as pointing to you as the nearest resource.
-
Thank you both for your answers.
My client is indeed a car dealership and in some cases is the only dealer offering that brand in 30 miles or so, so I can see why they want to appeal to near-by towns as well as just the town they are in.
I have explained about the limitations with Google and physical locations, but they are still keen to show up in 'car dealer location A' SERP when they are actually physically located in location C.
We've made a few location-based pages targeting those locations which do seem to work, but we're starting to have 10 or more pages that are fairly similar so I'm getting worried about duplicate content.
What would best practice of appealing to the non-physical location based towns be? We couldn't possibly list them all through out the site as there are so many, it would be like saying 'we sell new cars in location A, location B, location C, location D etc...'
Thanks!
-
Hi Harry,
The first thing here is to explain to the client Google's bias toward physical location. In most cases, your client will be outranked in the local results by any competitor who has a physical location where your client has none. With that understanding, please, find your business model in this article and read the suggestions. I believe you'll find them to be helpful, but if you still have questions after reading, definitely come back with them!
-
Hi Harry. To rank for those other cities you'll want content around them as well, but is the product area specific? Maybe if it's a car dealership or larger purchase you could do a few things like add service area to their local listing based on where they'll do pick up and drop off for repairs; or if an appliance type of business, installation based service areas. If you're a bit more specific with your example people here could come up with more precise ideas.
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
-
How do Nation wide business win Local?
For example, this site https://www.kvetinyhned.cz for selling flowers is ahead of the sales of local stores that have a site but aimed only at sales in a certain area of the store
Local Website Optimization | | Martin11Martin0 -
Business has multiple locations, but want to rank for commutable cities, geographies
Hello, The business I am working for has multiple locations, but the service they provide is one that you would commute for. At present, they have 20 or so pages with yucky geographical keyword stuffed content (think "New York computer services" and they are based out of a suburb (maybe 40 miles away). For some ridiculous reason, some of these pages are ranking for exact match search terms? We are in the process of revamping the whole site-taking approx five sites and integrating into one mega site. I want to first, figure out the best strategy for ranking for the region that each is in and serve, without being spammy like the previous SEO. I want to eliminate the spammy pages without losing the rank and link juice. What is the most appropriate and above-board strategy? These are my thoughts. Should I: 1. Keep the pages, but tweak them enough to make the content quality? If I do, should they be geo pages? Should they be "locations served", statistics of the area, etc? 2. Group the pages according to region (one page per region) that are location-oriented and tweaked to still include the terms they were ranking for (without the spammy look and stuffing), along with a map, etc? And then, I have to figure out how to redirect so not to lose the value we have now for some of them. The company deals with treatment for addiction, so in recommending and tips-remember that our audience will commute by car, and eventually (hopefully) by plane. 😉 Thank you so so much for any and all help you can provide! Sorry for such a long description!
Local Website Optimization | | lfrazer1231 -
Can I have multiple GeoShape Schema for one page on one domain?
Hi Mozers, I'm working on some Schema for a client of mine, but whilst doing the research on GeoShapes with my developer, we came across a potential issue with this particular mark-up. My client is B2C business, operating in numerous places across the UK. I want to use the Circle property from GeoShape to draw out multiple circles across the UK, but am I able to do this? From looking at some other websites, most seem to just have one GeoShape. Can I have multiple on the same page and same domain? Thanks! Virginia
Local Website Optimization | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Looking to create a "best practice" doc on location pages. Anyone know of a useful resource?
I'm working for a few regional brands and would like to create a best practice doc for the structure of a location page. Has anyone seen anything recent regarding a structure for local, regional and national pages? Thanks all, Kevin
Local Website Optimization | | Kevin.Bekker1 -
Multi Location SEO Page Structure
I am trying to optimize my website for multiple locations. I have setup a landing page for each location. Now I want to optimize services we offer at those locations such as floor scrubber rentals. I'm confused on the best approach for this for ranking locally. I offer the same equipment for rent at each location. So... should I have a link on the location landing page that takes you to an individual floor scrubber rental page for each location optimized for that locations city or should I have just one floor scrubber rental page and would I optimize it for both cities or just optimize it for floor scrubber rentals in general? I have many different categories like this that are offered @ both locations. If I do individual pages all the products and rates will be duplicate but I could change the areas we deliver to and description to be more geared towards that city.
Local Website Optimization | | CougarChemMike0 -
Google my business - Image sizes
I have scoured the web in order to find a guide that would give me the ideal dimensions for images to populate google my business page... in vain. Google itself is very vague about it as indicated below Format: JPG, PNG, TIFF, BMP Size: Between 10 KB and 5 MB Minimum resolution: 250px tall, 250px wide Does anyone know of a guide with optimum recommendation for each photo (profile, Cover photo, business specific photos...) or alternatively can recommend the exact size needed. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | coolhandluc0 -
How to approach SEO for a national umbrella site that has multiple chapters in different locations that are different URLS
We are currently working with a client who has one national site - let's call it CompanyName.net, and multiple, independent chapter sites listed under different URLs that are structured, for example, as CompanyNamechicago.org, and sometimes specific to neighborhoods, as in CompanyNamechicago.org/lakeview.org. The national site is .net, while all others are .orgs. These are not subdomains or subfolders, as far as we can tell. You can use a search function on the .net site to find a location near you and click to that specific local site. They are looking for help optimizing and increasing traffic to certain landing pages on the .net site...but similar landing pages also exist on a local level, which appear to be competing with the national site. (Example: there is a landing page on the national .net umbrella site for a "dog safety" campaign they are doing, but also that campaign has led to a landing page created independently on the local CompanyNameChicago.org website, which seems to get higher ranking due to a user looking for this info while located in Chicago. We are wondering if our hands are tied here since they appear to be competing for traffic with all their localized sites, or if there are best practices to handle a situation like this. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | timfrick0 -
Local Business Schema Markup on every page?
Hello, I have two questions..if someone could shed some light on the topic, I would be so very grateful! 1. I am still making my way through how schema is employed, and as I can tell, it is much more specific (and therefore relevant) in its details than using the data highlighter tool. Is this true? 2. Most of my clients' sites have a footer with the local business info included on every page of their site (address and phone). This said, I have been using the structured data markup helper to add local business schema to home page, and then including the footer markup in the footer file so that every page benefits from the local business markup. Is this incorrect to use it for every page? Also, I noticed that by just using the footer markup for the rest of the pages in the site, I am missing data that was included when I manually went through the index page (i.e. image, url, name of business). Could someone tell me if it is advisable and worth it to manually markup every page for the local business schema or if that should just be used for certain pages such as location, contact us, and/or index? Any tips or help would be greatly appreciated!!! Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | lfrazer0