Google Places - What is the best Service Areas Strategy?
-
I've found a lot of useful info on this topic in these forums, but still can't seem to find the answer to my specific question.
Client has one physical location and services many areas.
I have seen various comments that claim setting a service area actually has a negative effect on rankings and the login makes sense to me, so we don't want to do that.
Using the actual physical address, seems to be what google would prefer, but the address is actually on the outskirts of the city and would mean that competitors that have addresses closer to the city center would show up before us.
Our current places listing has the actual address, but the previous SEO put the larger city, with the smaller city zip on the on the website.
City Center: San Diego, 92101
Actual: Street Address, El Cajon, 92020
On website: San Diego, 92020
It this large City + Actual zip code strategy any good?
Which of these 3 strategies should we use to standardize all of our listings?
*we will not be considering a location or mailbox per service are to use multiple listings at this time
-
Hello VernonMack,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. I think the most important point to respond to in your post is this one. You write:
Using the actual physical address, seems to be what google would prefer, but the address is actually on the outskirts of the city and would mean that competitors that have addresses closer to the city center would show up before us.
It isn't so much a matter of Google's preference, but a matter of adhering to their guidelines which specifically state that you must use your real physical address. Unfortunately, this means that businesses likes yours on the borders of major cities do not have the strength to overpower the rankings of competitors actually located within the big cities. As you can imagine, this is a very common issue for all local businesses located just outside of metropolitan locations. Google will always view you as most relevant to the city in which you are located, so for your company, that will be El Cajon - not San Diego. I cannot recommend attempting to mash up the city and zip of the two different locales.
You can, of course, create content on your website about any work you do within San Diego, but should not expect this to take precedence over your actual physical location.
I truly sympathize with the wish to compete for the big search terms, but the usefulness of Google Places depends on accurate representation of data. For now, you are located in El Cajon and should correctly list yourself as such. If it becomes clear to you in future that you need to move locations into the city of San Diego, you will be doing what some other local business owners have done due to Google's handling of location. For some businesses, moving shop just isn't feasible, but for others, getting that inner city address is a must and a smart move.
Hope this helps, and good luck!
-
I can't say 100%, but it looks like El Cajon is still in San Diego County, which might mean it's close enough to still count. Again, you might want to get a second opinion, but I don't think it would be too much of a problem using your actual zip code with San Diego. For instance, where I am (Maryland) there are several small towns that people just incorporate into the bigger city while keeping their unique zip codes.
-
Thanks, Nick. do you have any additional insight into the strategy that combine the large city with the actual city zip code? The listings (NAP) are currently all over the place we will standardize them once we have chosen the best format.
-
This is a tricky one - you're more likely to come up for the smaller city if you're far from the city center, but it's not as likely to get as many searches.
I'd suggest using whatever address most commonly appears on the web. One thing Google really relies on is a consistent NAP - Name, Address and Phone Number. If your website says San Diego, and you have other local citations (directories, etc) that say San Diego, go with San Diego - that should help boost all your local rankings.
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
-
Page missing from Google index
Hi all, One of our most important pages seems to be missing from the Google index. A number of our collections pages (e.g., http://perfectlinens.com/collections/size-king) are thin, so we've included a canonical reference in all of them to the main collection page (http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all). However, I don't see the main collection page in any Google search result. When I search using "info:http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all", the page displayed is our homepage. Why is this happening? The main collection page has a rel=canonical reference to itself (auto-generated by Shopify so I can't control that). Thanks! WUKeBVB
Technical SEO | | leo920 -
My some pages are not showing cached in Google, WHY?
I have website http://www.vipcollisionlv.com/ and when i check the cache status with tags **site:http:vipcollisionlv.com, **some page has no cache status.. you can see this in image. How to resolve this issue. please help me.
Technical SEO | | 1akal0 -
Google is not respecting the meta title
We're experiencing a peculiar situation with Google not respecting our meta <title>.</p> <p>As you can see in the first image (search result), the title <a href="http://open.iebschool.com/profesores/startups/">for the page</a> is a part of the content. This is relatevely normal for the description, but we never heard of Google doing this before.</p> <p>In the code, the <title> and meta description are correctly implemented.</p> <blockquote style="background-color: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> <p><meta name="description" content="Profesores, tutores, autores y docentes 2.0 de Open IEBS. Conoce su Biografía, experiencia, reputación, conexiones sociales y las valoraciones de alumnos."/><br /><title>Conoce los profesores, tutores, autores y docentes de Open IEBS.</title> In a further research, we discovered that the title which is using is an in anwith the following code (cleaned and simplified for the question): <hgroup> Pilar Soro
Technical SEO | | ofuente
0 Seguidor
Para poder seguir al Profesor, debes de registrarte aquí. Profesora y experta en redes sociales. Formadora de docentes, [...]
</hgroup> Note: we're correcting the code since this is quite messy, but it's the one we have now The point is that google has considered that this particular is more important than the title itself. This would make sense if we were looking for that name, but the search was simply "site:domain.com". Two things for which this is even more strange are the following: while all the /profesor/%category%/ has the same code, this only happens in some search results and not in all of them; why is it appearing in some pages, but respecting my title in others? the previous code is not the only one in the page, there are about 10 others and some are placed before and some are placed after; so, why this one and not the first or the last? What is more strange is why this article in particular and not any other of the 10 on the page since some of them are placed before and some of them are placed after. Provided this situation, we would like to know: is this a common situation? Is it happening to more people? why is it happening? Is it somehow related to , <hgroup>and ? why that piece of code and not any other article? and why is it only happening in some pages? more important, can it be corrected or can we take advantage of it somehow? Thank you in advance. Any light you can shed on this will be well received! AJ2CUSe.png?1?8232 </hgroup>0 -
Dev Site Was Indexed By Google
Two of our dev sites(subdomains) were indexed by Google. They have since been made private once we found the problem. Should we take another step to remove the subdomain through robots.txt or just let it ride out? From what I understand, to remove the subdomain from Google we would verify the subdomain on GWT, then give the subdomain it's own robots.txt and disallow everything. Any advice is welcome, I just wanted to discuss this before making a decision.
Technical SEO | | ntsupply0 -
SEO url best practices
We're revamping our site architecture and making several services pages that are accessible from one overarching service page. An example would be as follows: Services Student Services Essay editing Essay revision Author Services Book editing Manuscript critique We'll also be putting breadcrumbs throughout the site for easy navigation, however, is it imperative that we build the URLs that deep? For example, could we simply have www.site.com/essay-editing rather than www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing? I prefer the simplicity of the former, but I feel the latter may be more "search robot friendly" and better for SEO. Any advice on this is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Kibin0 -
Help with google adsense
Hi i wonder if anyone can help me with google adsense. I am having trouble making money with google adsense. I have been altering my pages to try and get better results with google adsense but nothing works. my traffic at the moment is about 3000 visitors a day but this should be doubled to around 6000 a day within the next two months. here is the layout of a typical page and i would be grateful for any advice on how to alter it to make money with google adsense http://www.in2town.co.uk/showbiz-gossip/rihanna-news/rihanna-shocks-fans-over-her-sexy-body-claims
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Best Pracice to Obsolete a Blog
Hi, I have a blog that has thousands of URL, the blog is a part of my site. I would like to obsolete the blog, I think the best choices are 1. 404 Them: Problem is a large number of 404's. I know this is Ok, but makes me hesitant. 2. meta tag no follow no index. This would be great, but the question is they are already indexed. Thoughts? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Bucky0 -
Best cross linking strategy for micro sites?
Hi Guys. I created a micro site (A design showcase gallery) away from the main website to attract a lot of links in my space from competitors. It works so well it has become a valuable resource in my industry and I believe I will keep it running and adding content to it. Is the best SEO strategy for the main site simply to link from each page to the main site? Or should I be looking at something else? Thanks, Alan
Technical SEO | | spoiltchild0