One Business-Multiple Services
-
Hello Everyone,
I was looking for some strategies for doing SEO on a site that offers multiple services.
Here is the example:
There is one company with ONE physical address.
They perform the following services:
- Pest Control
- Mold Remediation
- Home Inspections
- Waterproofing
They also handle these services in several surronding cities.
They want to maintain one website for branding purposes.
Obviously I will create individual pages on their site for each service but was wondering how diffiuclut it will be to rank one website for these various services.
Thank you!
-
Hello Bill,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. The NAP is really the key, more so than the website. For the business to be able to treat each specialty as distinct, it would need to become 4 distinct companies, each with a unique legal business name, legit physical street address and local area code phone number. This scenario would enable the owner to have a unique Google Place Page for each of the businesses, instead of just one Place Page for all of his specialties (as well as having unique listings in all of the other local business indexes). As things currently are, he is permitted to have only the one listing per index.
This is the case for most businesses like that of your client and by building out his content on his website, you are doing pretty much what you can do for his organic campaign (plus linkbuilding, social media, video etc., of course).
The tough thing about clients like this one, is that they typically not only offer a menu of very varied services, but they also tend to serve in a number of surrounding cities. So an SEO/Local SEO campaign typically looks something like this:
1. Get the client listed in the major local indexes.
2. Campaign for reviews in a variety of sources.
3. Get citations for his Google Place Page
4. Build out a body of service-related content on the website.
5. Build out a body of geographic content on his website.
6. Build links every which way
7. Engage in additional forms of marketing that will be most effective at reaching the client's audience (email, video, social media, blogging, etc.)
Now, in entering into all of this work, the client must be informed up front that his chances of ranking above the fold of Google's results are mostly going to revolve around his services in his city of location, in that he may achieve grey pinned local results for these 'service + geo' terms. He may not be able to expect top rankings for all 4 services. In any service city where he isn't physically located, the client should be made to understand that he is most likely to have to rely solely on the organic rankings below the local results, as Google will be viewing his competitors with physical locations in those cities as most relevant.
Clients like these are more complicated than, for example, a dentist with an office in Denver. But, that being said, there are substantial benefits to engaging in the work. Even lower rankings for terms can lead to trickles of monthly traffic and if these convert to phone calls and bookings, it has all been worth it.
Good luck!
-
Yes but then its hard to get the quality links for each, you can do your local directories for each, but the quality links is a bit harder.
-
Thanks Alan. I can understand why they want to do this from a branding standpoint but it will be harder to rank for individual terms.
In most cases I would think multiple websites would be called for here. A website for each area of service.
-
It is hard to rank for multiple servies, but even harder for multi locations, but you seem to be doing the write thing, make a page for each target.
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
-
Multiple times same keyword or Lsi / synonym.
Hello, I have a page with multiple bike tours on tour and under my image as anchor text linking to the different destination I have written the region + bike tour. Is it ok to write bike tour that many times bike tours or would it be better to write variations of it such as "Bordeaux biking, Strasbourg to Colmar by bike for (Alsace bike tour) or doesn't it matter ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Multiple 301 Redirect Query
Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Multiple Results On First Page
Hi Guys, First question here, after splitting our content across 2 subdomains (~6 months ago) we've noticed google showing several of our pages on page 1. Would it be better to somehow consolidate to just one page (in the hopes that together it would push the rank higher or is it better left to google to work out on its own? I've attached an example of this happening with one of our targeted keywords. HwEARxd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattjamesaus0 -
Can multiple redirects from old URLs hurt SEO?
We have a client that had an existing site with existing rankings. We rebuilt the site using DNN 7 and created/tested 301 redirects from all the Original URLs to the new DNN URLs which are nasty and have /tabid/1234 and will not allow for dashes (-)'s We have found a DNN module that will make the DNN 7 URLs search friendly. However, that will cause us to 301 the current DNN urls to the new URLs so in fact the original will redirect to the DNN and the DNN will redirect to the rewritten SEO friendly URLs. What should we know here before proceeding?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tjkirgin0 -
Looking for re-assurance on this one: Sitemap approach for multi-subdomains
Hi All: Just looking for a bit of "yeah it'll be fine" reassurance on this before we go ahead and implement: We've got a main accommodation listing website under www.* and a separate travel content site using a completely different platform on blog.* (same domain - diffn't sub-domain). We pull in snippets of content from blog.* > www.* using a feed and we have cross-links going both ways, e.g. links to find accommodation in blog articles and links to blog articles from accommodation listings. Look-and-feel wise they're fully integrated. The blog.* site is a tab under the main nav. What i'd like to do is get Google (and others) to view this whole thing as one site - and attribute any SEO benefit of content on blog.* pages to the www.* domain. Make sense? So, done a bit of reading - and here's what i've come up with: Seperate sitemaps for each, both located in the root of www site www.example.com/sitemap-www www.example.com/sitemap-blog robots.txt in root of www site to have single sitemap entry: sitemap : www.example.com/sitemap-www robots.txt in root of blog site to have single sitemap entry: sitemap: www.example.com/sitemap-blog Submit both sitemaps to Webmaster tools. Does this sound reasonable? Any better approaches? Anything I'm missing? All input appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AABAB0 -
Changing Business Addresses
Anyone have a good local search "best practices" resource for advising a client who is changing business addresses (aside from cross your fingers). For example, order of updating local citations (website first, google places, others). Time frame for update to take effect? Other issues folks have faced in updating addresses? I regularly follow David Mihm, Mike Blumenthal, & Andrew Shotland, I was just curious what the Moz community might be able to add. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gyi0 -
Does Google Places reward unique icons for multi location businesses?
I work for a company that has over 100 physical locations. We are working to update our Google Place icon. My question is, do we get any seo benefit having a unique icon for each location, or no benefit and its better to focus on having a the best single icon possible. Note, we are going to add unique images in each place listing, this is specifically referring to the main icon shown on Google results.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NickConfer0 -
HTML5 and using multiple H1 tags
Hi All, Our dev team have just asked me a very interesting question........ Within the context of an HTML5 page, where it is supported and encouraged to use multiple H1 tags, will the use of multiple H1 tags be detrimental to SEO? or does Google fully understand how HTML5 works and therefore not penalise a website for using multiple H1 tags? I have an opinion on this that if it helps usability and user experience then it is likely that it will be good for SEO. It would be really good to hear views of people who have tried this or have decided against it! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q0