Local SEO Best Practices for 2,000+ 'location' service area business
-
Hi Moz Community!
We operate a business where we have a network of 2,000+ technicians around the country who help people repair their mobile phones. These techs do the fixing at the customer's location, making them service area businesses. Even after scouring all of the go-to places on local SEO, I'm struggling to find best practices for this type of situation - the fact that our techs are operating in service areas presents a number of challenges. The biggest one, it seems, is that inevitably service areas are going to overlap. When I talked to a Google rep on this he said this "might" cause our locations to get de-listed and we'd just have to test and find out. Other challenges include the fact that we cannot bulk upload the service areas of our techs, and we cannot bulk verify - meaning there is a ton of work to do at our scale.
Any suggestions on where to go to find resources on this specific topic, or an example of someone doing this well we can model?
Thanks everyone!
-
Great idea, thanks again David.
-
Not entirely sure that's an accurate response. There are plenty of SABs who have not claimed a Google My Business Page and yet are still in the Maps index -- and ranking QUITE well. Here is just one example.
I would try submitting a few locations to each aggregator and see which one has the primary feed in these categories. My guess would be Infogroup or Acxiom in this particular case.
-
Thanks David! At your recommendation I talked to Infogroup, Acxiom and Neustar. The information I got from Infogroup (which they said came directly from Google) was that a listing with them, or any aggregator, wouldn't get us a listing on Google Maps - SABs needed to be directly on GMB to be listed.
Given our budget will only allow for one aggregator for now, is there one of the three aggregators that would make sense to do first?
Thanks again.
-
It's going to be a lot of manual work at this point unless/until Google allows for SABs to be included in bulk upload. I'm not so sure I'd even try to tackle GMB yet, but instead focus on aggregator submissions and primary vertically-relevant directories like Thumbtack, AngiesList, Yelp, YP. Those should honestly get you pretty far in terms of rankings (although obviously you won't get the benefit of being able to choose a featured photo, etc.).
-
I do have experience of this, but not on that scale. I would certainly be proceeding with caution and like the Google rep, I think that there could be an element of risk, mainly down to the fact that there will be so few working examples of this to compare it with.
Is there any way you could roll out test groups to see how well they work? If you start with a smaller evaluation group, there is less at stake if something goes awry.
-Andy
-
Thanks Andy, that makes sense. The Google rep I spoke with seemed to think we'd be ok to 'test out' what happened if two service areas overlapped, and that if they got de-listed it would not affect our other locations. However, given the fact he couldn't tell me for sure what would happen seems to mean there would be some risk to that. Any experience with this?
-
**...this "might" cause our locations to get de-listed **
As I started reading, that was my exact thought.
Overlaps are going to happen from time to time with some listings, but you would have to try and keep it as clean as humanly possible, and where you think an overlap might happen, you could consider removing it to avoid issues. Losing one listing by your own hand, is better than losing the lot to Google.
I haven't had to deal with something quite as large as this in the past, but there are similarities with other clients that spring to mind.
Someone else might pop along with additional ideas or examples for you.
-Andy
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
-
Rankings preferring English URL above local URL
We've recently had a redesign for our website and it has influenced our rankings a little bit. However, what I mainly noticed is that for some keywords in MOZ the English URL is looked at in terms of ranking, instead of the local URL. It used to be just the local URL ranking, even for keywords that are more English oriented, and I'm wondering if that might be hurting our rankings. And more importantly, why it's happening. An example of a page where it's happening is: https://www.bluebillywig.com/online-video-platform/
Local SEO | | Billywig0 -
2 Websites Targeting Similar Keywords
One of my clients is set on setting up another website targeting some of the keywords/services on the main site. One of the services they offer gets traffic from natural search and also Adwords but doesn't convert well for this service. For other services (which are often utilized at the same time by the customers) the site converts well. My client feels that... "people are not converting on the main site because they click on the page and realise that we are a wider company. From this they probably work out that we don’t actually produce Green Widgets and we just buy them in. Therefore we will be more expensive than a company who does manufacture Green Widgets (although there are only a few in the country who actually make them)." The new site "...will have more of a manufacturer and specialist feel. There will be a small mention of other services. People visiting will think we are specialists and that we make them, whereas at the moment they may feel that they are just being cross sold a product. We have also noticed that we are not being found earlier enough and we are contacted to do other work only to find that another company is providing the Green Widgets." I did something similar back in the day, but here we ran a local website and a national website covering the same products. We tried hard not to duplicate the keywords we targeted minimising this as much as possible. I don't think we cared much about the local site as the national one went crazy busy. In essence, my client wants to do the following: Main Site...
Local SEO | | GrouchyKids
Blue Widgets Bristol
Red Widgets Bristol
Green Widgets Bristol (This would be retained) New Site...
The new site would focus on Green Widgets In time the new site would include content for...
Green Widgets
Green Widgets Bristol (As per the main site)
Green Widgets Cardiff It would also make mention of Blue Widgets and Red Widgets as possible addons. The new site would be at the same address but have its own companies house registration, emails and phone numbers. My feeling is that we should take an above-board, risk-free approach and remove the Green Widgets service from the main site to ensure it doesn't upset Google. In other words go out of our way to minimise targeting of similar/same keywords across the 2 sites. My client strongly disagrees showing evidence of others using similar tactics (we have had the EMD debate as well). I am also concerned about Google Places and how this might be viewed here. Opinions please, also any idea of what if any action Google would take if we push forwards?0 -
International Versus Local Backlinks?
I'm running a dentist's website and I've been wondering if there is any additional benefit to achieving local backlinks from other medical sites versus larger international ones? For example, if I had a blog article that I wanted another site to link to, would you choose the local medical website within the same city or the international one that has more viewers?
Local SEO | | Undergrnd0 -
What's the best approach to deleting a location page ?
We have several locations that moved to be under a parent location. Should I do a 404 redirect or a 301 redirect to parent page where they can find information about the location they are searching for.
Local SEO | | lina_digital0 -
Which domain extension would benefit my SEO the most? Old vs New .com or .shoes
Having a keyword in a top domain extension like .com could benefit your SEO. Well I think it was like that.
Local SEO | | KnowHowww
So if you would sell cars and you had cars.com it could benefit. But is there something to say about the new extensions like .shoes.
Do they have the same impact or are they just not old enough? A domain like cars.com is probably registered since the beginning of the Internet so it carries more weight. I'm curious to hear your opinion on the matter. Thank you in advance,
kind regards, Eelco0 -
Handling redirects when 2 companies merge
I am working with 2 local businesses that are joining forces to create 1, new business. Both individually hold consistent position 1 and 2 in Google for the majority of their chosen terms. However, the merger will see a new brand name and therefore a fresh out of the box domain. I have suggested setting up a partition on the hosting for both old URLS. All that will be hosted there would be .htaccess files with 301s to the like-for-like pages on the brand new domain / website. This will obviously also aid UX. However, is this overkill? I personally think not... but would a domain level 301 redirect work just as well from preserving / passing on any authority to the new URL.
Local SEO | | AbsoluteDesign1 -
What is the best SEO tool for tracking local rankings
Hi Can anyone recommend what they think the best tool is to track local rankings. I want to manage several small businesses' visibility and I am not sure which one is the best. I have been told that "Bright local" and "SEO PowerSuite" are the best in the business. Is that true? or is there something better out there Thanks
Local SEO | | coolhandluc0 -
Best approach for international multi country SEO
Hi all We're working with a client that is in the travel industry and they already have a relatively new site (setup in September 2014) which is on a .com domain We've completed a digital strategy for them and have identified 12 key markets within Europe, North America, South America and the Asia Pacific region. We have suggested an approach of setting up individual local websites for these countries and for countries in the same region sharing a common language (like USA & Canada) we're thinking to use a subdomain on the existing .com (eg. amaricas.clientdomain.com) Does this sound like a solid approach? thanks
Local SEO | | seobackbone0