Strategy for a business that has many service locations, but no real storefront?
-
I've struggled for a few years now trying to find the right solution. Say a client (home services contractor) has only one "location" - only one physical address from which they manage operations. This is not a retail store, not an office where customers would go. Technicians are dispatched to a 50 mile radius to provide service. This 50 mile radius includes a large metro area and many small cities.
Let's take Austin, TX for example. Let's say Contractor ABC has it's office/warehouse in a smaller city just north, Round Rock, and the office's zip code is 78664. But they provide service to all of Austin and some surrounding cities such as Cedar Park, Pflugerville, Lakeway, Buda, etc.
Their competitor, Contractor XYZ, services the exact same areas, but they have the benefit of having a physical address in the heart of downtown Austin, zip 78701.
How does Contractor ABC effectively compete for rankings in Austin as well as the rest of the service area? More specifically, what is the best practice for handling NAP in this scenario?
Most recently our strategy has been to enter the actual physical address where required (not trying to pull one over on google and trusting that google makes the correlation to the metro area) and where we can, we just put the metro (Austin, TX for example). This is also for display purposes so that a potential customer in Austin or Buda doesn't think, "Oh, this company is in RoundRock, this is not for me."
I have multiple clients in this scenario and would like to have more clarity in this strategy before signing them up for MozLocal - P.S. any feedback on the current usefulness of that platform is also welcome!
-
You're welcome, Vernon. I completely relate to what you're saying. Google entered Local with a brick-and-mortar mindset, which has left SABs a bit on the periphery all these years. I know it can be tough. Good luck in the work ahead!
-
Thank you, Miriam! I wish your answer was a bit different, but it is what it is. I appreciate your thoroughness. We'll proceed as suggested and cross our fingers that Google will one day provide a way for SABs to be more competitive in local search...
-
Hi Vernon!
Good questions! There are 2 really important facts to understand regarding marketing service area businesses (SABs):
-
Google is highly biased toward physical location and sees each business as most relevant to its physical location. Unfortunately, this puts SABs in kind of a weird position because, in the real world, they are equally relevant to every city they travel to in order to serve customers ... but Google doesn't see it this way. When we want to be visible in Google's local and organic results, we must perforce play by Google's rules. (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en)
-
Representing your location data accurately is a must. Do not ever attempt to be appear to be physically located any place that you aren't. Per Google's rules, you should only build 1 Google+ Local page per physical location and whatever town that office is located in will be the one for which you have the best hope of ranking in the local pack results. With few exceptions, for any city you serve but for which you lack a physical address, your best hopes will be to gain organic, rather than local, rankings. Unless you are in a rural area or a very niche profession, you are unlikely to rank in the local packs for any city in which you lack a physical location. This is the reality for all SABs.
So, the local search marketing strategy for SABs generally looks like this:
-
Create a unique landing page on your website for each of the major cities you serve. Make these pages of the highest possible quality you can. The goal here is to hope for some organic visibility for these pages. You can read all about city landing pages here: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
-
Create a Google+ Local page for each city in which you have a legitimate physical office. Be sure your Google+ Local pages are in complete compliance with the Google guidelines linked to above. The goal here is to gain local pack visibility for your physical location cities.
-
If the combination of efforts in steps 1 and 2 fail to get you good visibility for any city that's really important to you, the only alternative is to pay for advertising via Google's Adwords program, creating a campaign that helps your ad to show up for chosen cities.
Regarding Moz Local, our service will help push out your physical location data to our partner network, helping you get your data consistent on the 5 major local business data aggregators and 2 other important sites. We draw from and validate against the data we find on your Google+ Local pages and Facebook Place listings. Having consistent citations is a major component of achieving high local rankings, but this will all fall under the same heading as Google's guidelines: local rankings for physical locations only.
Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions about this!
-
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
-
Local Ranking with No Physical Address in New Service Area - How to Rank?
OK, SO, I am a wedding company in Maui, Hawaii and have an established business on one island with a physical address. http://simplemauiwedding.net We have started a new team in Oahu, Hawaii http://simpleoahuwedding.com and we provide service there and have a full team in place. How can I rank for Local Search on that Island with no physical address? I would love to hear some proven strategies. Thank you 🙂
Local Listings | | photoseo10 -
SEO - Should individual doctors at facility claim a Google My Business profile?
My client is a physician facility with several doctors practicing at the facility. When doing a Google search for some of their practices such as "family practice" one of the doctor's profiles will display in the Google Local pack - however it is not linked to the facility website where their profile exists. As of right now, we are using YEXT and other tools to claim Google Business Profiles for each practice, not the individual doctors. If there are unclaimed accounts for individual doctors, they are alerting Google that it’s a duplicate and should be taken down. Is this the right process to follow for SEO best practices or should we be claiming both the business and individual doctor profiles? The reason they are not claiming individual doctor profiles is to cut down on duplicate reviews as part of the Reputation Management Program. Advice much appreciated!
Local Listings | | chrisvogel0 -
Local SEO business name issue due to aggregator
So I work for a college and we have multiple locations. My tactic has been always to keep the name the same for all of them (no city name), and then change the address and phone number for each. But there is 1000s of college listings websites out there that aggregate college and school data from the same source: the US government. Now the way that they have most, if not all, multi-location colleges listed is: "college name-city name". I can see the value in that, but I guess I'm just wondering what to do since it obviously can't be changed. Should I revert all of our listings as "college name-city name" to match the 1000s of listings that have it that way? I've been under the impression that I should leave the city/town name out of the name, but I'm just wondering what you think best practices would be? Thanks
Local Listings | | TomBinga1125
Tom0 -
Creating a new Google local business page vs. adding additional locations to an existing Google business page?
We are a service company that both travels to customer locations and serves customers at our business location. The split is about 80/20 (travel vs. serve customers on location). We just opened up a new office in a city about 1 hour away from our main location. The question is, should we create a new business page and account on Google local or should we add the new location to our existing google local account? The new location has a separate website, phone number, email etc. My inclination is to create a new local business account/page on Google. Has anyone experimented with both solutions and tested which option creates more powerful local signals for ranking?
Local Listings | | Vspeed0 -
Best practice for local SEO when two offices handle different services?
Our agency has three main services - SEO, PPC and web design. We're in the process of setting up a new office in a different city where our PPC team will be based, while SEO and web will stay in the original office. How do we handle local SEO/Google My Business listings in this situation? Geo-targeted service pages and two separate GMB listings?
Local Listings | | CustardOnlineMarketing0 -
Should I omit the street address for a delivery based business?
I have a client who has a small ready mix concrete delivery business. A couple months ago the client payed another agency to add their business to google places/business—whatever their calling it these days, and to bing places. So instead of the agency submitting the full address, and the full NAP, they just submitted the Name, City, State, and phone (left off the street address). I guess their rational was that by doing it this way, my client would show up for a more broad region instead of a small specific region for local search. It's been about 2-3 months now since the agency completed the work and I noticed that my client just started showing up on the maps today. When my client first hired me, I advised them to let me submit their full NAP, with the street address to Moz Local, and add the NAP micro-data to the footer of their website, with the hopes that google would start paying attention to their location and begin indexing and ranking their website. But after seeing their website begin to show up on the maps, I'm wondering if that's the right decision. So my question is: Should I submit the _full NAP—_with street address—to moz local, or should I submit the NAP without the street address? And depending on which of those I should do, how should I proceed with the google+ business page and the bing for places page?
Local Listings | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Google Services for our Multiple Entities with Multiple Locations
I need to know what is the better practice for us. We have long had one Google account for our four businesses. It was easy to manage GA, Adwords, WMT and until recently - Places. My places account is not transferred to the new My Business Locations, but I am having trouble with a few items and I am wondering if it would be better to have each of our business take on their own unique Google accounts. If I did that, would I be able to transfer GA and other ownership or would I lose all my existing data? Should I just wait to see what my listings are when i get transferred and then worry?
Local Listings | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Site links mutually exclusive with Google+ Business?
Hey all! I've been looking at the search results for our company name (Angelsmith). Looking at our listing, our search result has title, authorship, ties in with Google+, reviews, link to map, plus the big sidebar Google+ Business result with map, logo, directions, hours, etc. Our site is well-indexed, we're using a sitemap, etc. but I notice we do not have any sitelinks under our result. And come to think of it, I can't remember seeing any search results that have authorship and Google+ listings on it AS WELL AS a nice set of sitelinks underneath. So I'm wondering: are Google+ Business and sitelinks mutually exclusive? How about authorship and sitelinks? Do we have any control over which get displayed on search results? Thanks in advance, --eric
Local Listings | | EricOliver0