What is the best way for a local business site to come up in the SERPs for a town that they are not located in?
-
At our agency, we work with many local small business owners who often want to come up in multiple towns that are near to their business where they do not have a physical address. We explain to them again and again that with the recent changes that Google in particular has made to their algorithms, it is very difficult to come up in the new "blended" organic and Places results in a town that you don't have a physical address in. However, many of these towns are within 2 or 3 miles of the physical location and well within driving distance for potential new clients. Google, in it's infinite wisdom doesn't seem to account for areas of the country, such as New Jersey, where these limitations can seriously affect a business' bottom line.
What we would like to know is what are other SEOs doing to help their clients come up in neighboring towns that is both organic and white hat?
-
I don't do local myself, so I haven't tried this, but I have seen the suggestion of getting testimonials from customers and including the customer's cities next to their names in the testimonial.
-
As you mention, it is very tough (if not impossible) to come up in Google Places for a neighboring town. I know this for a fact because I am currently working on SEO for a small business here in Texas with about 10 neighboring cities. The best I have been able to do is get them in top 10 SERP's organic results for neighboring towns. And Top Google Place and Organic results for their actual town listed in address when searched.
I have had some success by placing neighboring cities in title text and in page content while keeping content flow as natural as possible. This did work for a few of the company's neighboring cities in organic results.
-
Let's say you have a landscaping company who does work in several small towns. You could make a separate webpage for each town and fill it with amazing photos of the work that they have done (with permission from the featured property owners) in each of the geographic localities.
This would serve not only as a page that might rank in the search engines but it would also be a great way of building credibility in that community. If website visitors see that the company has done landscaping for the library, medical plaza, and some of the best homes then they will have greater confidence in hiring them. So you get two benefits from these pages.
Important - be sure that you put the addresses on the site for all of these properties.
These pages will have substantive content and tons of BIG juicy photos with extensive captions that describe the plants the mulch - everything about the job. These types of pages might rank better than Joe Schmoe landscaper who has a skimpy webpage with yada, yada, yada Belmont landscaping.... yada yada yada landscaping in Belmont.
Make this site a gallery of work that shows that your company is active and doing all types of work for everyone who is anybody everywhere in the whole freekin' county.
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
-
Latest from ... feature SERPs
Hello Mozers, this is probably (as per) a naive question, but, is the 'Latest from ***.com' element in SERPs an extract of Google News? I've added an example of what appears for 'Moz' in SERPs. MYn7Kh2
Algorithm Updates | | SEO_Selectaglaze1 -
Site:www Issue - Homepage of the website is not showing in Google
Hello everyone, When I have manually search site:www.blinds4uk.co.uk in google.co.uk to know about webpages status, home page of the website is not showing in google search engine result pages. Please let me know, what is the reason behind this? because website crawling and indexing is good. Many Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Kuldeep-Sharma0 -
Staging site - Treated as duplicate?
Last week (exactly 8 days ago to be precise) my developer created a staging/test site to test some new features. The staging site duplicated the entire existing site on the same server. To explain this better -My site address is - www.mysite.com The path of the new staging site was www.mysite/staging I realized this only today and have immediately restricted robot text and put a no index no follow on the entire duplicate server folder but I am sure that Google would have indexed the duplicate content by now? So far I do not see any significant drop in traffic but should I be worried? and what if anything can I do at this stage?
Algorithm Updates | | rajatsharma0 -
Does adding lots of new content on a site at one time actually hurt you?
When speaking with a client today, he made the comment that he didn't want all of the new content we'd been working to be added to the site all at once for fear that he would get penalized for flooding the site with new content. I don't have any strong data to confirm or refute the claim, is there any truth to it?
Algorithm Updates | | JordanRussell0 -
Changes in Google "Site:" Search Algorithm Over Time?
I was wondering if anyone has noticed changes in how Google returns 'site:' searches over the past few years or months. I remember being able to do a search such as "site:example.com" and Google would return a list of webpages where the order may have shown the higher page rank pages (due to link building, etc) first and/or parent category pages higher up in the list of the first page (if relevant) first (as they could have higher PR naturally, anyways). It seems that these days I can hardly find quality / target pages that have higher page rank on the first page of Google's site: search results. Is this just me... or has Google perhaps purposely scrambled the SERPS somewhat for site: searches to not give away their page ranking secrets?
Algorithm Updates | | OrionGroup1 -
Meta description and its influence on the SERPS
Hi Hi, on the On-Page Ranking Card I read: "The meta description, while it does not influence rankings in the results, can still be valuable to employ to improve the click-through-rate of searchers from the results page and to provide context to those visitors about the page's topic/focus." And Google confirms that it doesn't influence the results. On the infografic on this page (text is in german), the say, it has a little relevance for the serps and that is what I experience, too. http://t3n.de/news/diese-faktoren-beeinflussen-365580/ What is you experience with meta description and serps? André
Algorithm Updates | | waynestock0 -
My site traffic has dropped
My site http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk has always got around 500 visitors a day but for some reason the past couple of days this has dropped to around 50 visitors a day. can anyone please help me to understand what has happened and has anyone else come across this where their traffic has gone down hill by so much many thanks
Algorithm Updates | | ClaireH-1848860