Local SEO can be confusing for those businesses that don’t have a physical store for customers to walk into.
Unlike businesses with a brick-and-mortar storefront, service-area businesses (or SABs) go out to meet with their customers, as opposed to their customers coming to see them. This often results in them servicing multiple cities, which can be problematic—the #1 ranking factor in local SEO is the physical address of the business. In addition, business owners are also usually concerned about privacy, as many of them use their home address and can’t utilize some of the features that Google offers small businesses (like Indoor Street View).
This guide will show you how you can maximize your presence on Google and reach more people in your local market.
1. Figure out which address you're going to use.
As a service-area business, you only have a couple options. Here are some best practices:
- If you have an office, use that for your business address everywhere online.
- If you have no office but you have a business partner(s), use the home address for the person who lives closest to the major area that you service.
- Use the address you registered with for your business everywhere. Think of the address you put on your bank business loan, the address you used for registering for your business telephone line/cell phone, the address you provided when you bought a business vehicle or equipment. These are the addresses that are going to populate online via data providers later in the future, and they'll give you a possible headache if they don’t match what you used as your address in Google My Business (GMB).
2. Decide if you need to hide your address or not.
Hiding your address means that Google will know where you are (for verification), but users will not see your address publicly on Google.
You should always hide your address if you're using your home address (unless customers actually show up there). If your customers do visit your home address, it needs to be blatantly obvious on your website. You should:
- List driving directions,
- Invite people to come visit, and
- Include photos of your home office.
You should hide your address if you have an office, but no one is actively staffing it during the day. If a person walked in at 2pm during a work day, would your door be locked with no one there? If so, hide your address.
If you have an office that is actually staffed, you should leave it unhidden.
Flash from the MapMaker Top Contributor team wrote up a great guide that shows you how to hide your address and the rules that Google has about this.
3. Decide if a public address is okay elsewhere online.
If you fall into the majority of SABs that need to hide their address, decide if you're okay publicly listing your address on other websites.
My advice is to always list your full address everywhere else online (other than Google My Business), including your website, Facebook page, Yellowpages listing, and so on. If you insist on not listing your home address anywhere, that’s okay, but know that you will run into some missed opportunities. There are still many local directories that require an address to be listed. Phil Rozek wrote a great summary of places you can list your business with a hidden address.
4. Think about how you should list the area you service.
In Google My Business, you can select which areas you service. You can do this by adding either zip codes or the names of the cities you service. It's good to note that what you select here will determine how your business radius and marker will show up on Google Maps. If you choose a ton of cities and zip codes, Google will attempt to find the center of them and put your marker there. The result isn’t always ideal.
Keep in mind that the service areas you select have no impact on your ranking there. It’s extremely unlikely that you will rank in the local pack outside the town your address is in.
5. Do a thorough check for duplicate listings on Google.
- The best option for a service-area business is to head to Google and type in this query (with the quotations). Replace the dummy phone number with your actual one:
“plus.google.com” “999-999-9999” “about” “review”
- Go to the end of the URL string in your browser (it starts with “google.com…”) and add &filter=0
- Record a list of all the listings you find (they will all start with “plus.google.com” and repeat those 2 steps for every phone number that might be associated with your business. Make sure you check your home phone & cell phone.
- Once you have your list of existing listings, make sure you deal with all the duplicates appropriately.
- If your duplicate listings had inconsistencies and used different phone numbers, websites, or addresses than the one you have provided to Google, make sure you search Google for other online references to that information and update it there, as well.
6. Do a local search on Google for a few keywords in the town your address is in and see who your competitors are.
Look for competitors that either have multiple listings (which is not allowed) or that are using keyword stuffing in their business name. Typically, more spam exists for service-area businesses than for businesses with storefronts. Locksmiths are known in the local SEO world as being the most-spammed business category.
Submit an edit for these listings through Google Maps to remove the keyword stuffing.
If the competitor is a service-area business with multiple listings, you can report the duplicates through Google Maps. As per the guidelines, a service-area business is not allowed to have multiple listings. The only exception would be if they had multiple offices where customers could actually show up.
7. Consider expanding your open hours.
Service-area businesses with hidden addresses have the advantage of listing the hours that they're available to answer the phone. Businesses with storefronts are supposed to list the actual hours that customers can show up at their front door and get service. If they have a 24-hour call center, they are still not allowed to list themselves that way unless they're someone like McDonald's, with a 24-hour drive-through.
Service-area businesses avoid this rule because they have no physical storefront, so their open hours are the equivalent of the hours that they answer the phone. With Google’s new hours display in the search results, having longer open hours could result in a lot more calls.
8. Come up with a really great content strategy for the areas you target outside of the city your address is in.
Generally, you will only rank in the local pack for the city that your address is in. If your home address isn't in the city that your primary book of business is in, this can be concerning. Other than setting up offices in different cities (real ones, not virtual ones), your best option is to target long-tail keywords & the organic section of Google using really great content.
Here are some tips for ways to generate good content:
- Create pages/articles about the different jobs you do. If you are a home remodeler in the Denver, CO area but do jobs in the entire metro area, you could create a page for different jobs you did in Parker, CO. On that page, you could put before & after pictures of the job, a description of the job, details about the neighborhood you did it in, a testimonial from the customer, and so on and so forth.
- Create how-to videos for your industry. If you’re a tree service business, you could create a video on how to prune a maple tree (think long-tail and get specific). Post the video on YouTube and use their transcription service to transcribe the entire thing as well. In the description, include the full name, address & phone number of your business along with a link back to your website.
- Use a service like Nearby Now to help automate this process.
- If you're a contractor, create a useful page on your site for each town with safety information, emergency contacts or places to get permits.
Technically, I could continue to add a hundred more items to this list—for now, I wanted to focus on the major starting points that will help a service-area business start out on the right track. If you have questions, please let me know in the comments!
I have had to do this a few times, I just wish google would stop messing about with Google for business places or what ever they are calling it this week!
Joy,
Great information - one of the most detailed writeups I've seen. I especially liked the mention of the ideas around generating great content.
As an agency we have come to rely on the benefits afforded to clients by using the Nearby Now tool. From a content automation process, it allows service area business clients to automatically capture a keyword rich copy of each job summary they perform and then send a review request invitation to verified customers. And with the API integration (for us the wordpress plugin) we can have all that content automatically publish into the appropriate service area city pages of their branded website in real time -- already preformatted using schema to showcase the geography, timestamp and review rating. Every SAB client we have is using this solution - for the ROI value they receive.
Just check out "atlanta electrician" and you'll see how powerful this can be.
Sincerely,
Bob Misita
Thank you for your post Joy. Excellent guide to local SEO.
I agree with you Alberto López, it´s a excellent guide to local SEO :)
Some great tools here for business owners and SEO's to know in terms of getting a local business ranked. One of the major areas that I try to stress to client is avoid any NAP (name, address, phone) inconsistencies if possible as they will make for a headache in your business being ranked in the right place.
Also wonderful on the looking for duplicate listings I try to either use an online tool like here at Moz or just manually look and see if there are any dup's prior to going down the citation rabbit hole, and find many business owners attempt to DIY there listings but then forget they did it and the accounts they used.
Number 8 is also a final and great strategy to find quality unique tactics outside of your area, and I mean ranking within your centroid can be easy with the right moves but letting people know who you are outside of that is where you can really start driving business you never knew you had. Utilizing Google Analytics for this is great, as I had a client based out of CA, but was selling a product nationally. We targeted major cities but then noticed there was a spike in KS so we created some content based for that area now we are pulling in revenue from that small analysis.
Great article and always appreciated keep up the good work.
Hello Joy,
This is really useful and handy info. I think the setup is lengthy but easy. Page maintenance is more important. There could be large difference for two different pages , one with physical location /without web presence and vice versa .
Well written Joy, thank you. For SERPs, local listing are important, since they do give signals to Google about citations and backlinking. Any real ecom business has to have physical or mailing address as part of business rules, Google shopping rules, etc. Mark Cutts have said several times business that don't show their actual contact information including address as well as Whois info, are usually spammy businesses and don't rank as well as business sharing their information publicly.
Awesome post Joy! Great to see the issues SABs face, covered in such great detail. I'll share this at the forum too. In fact will make it a sticky in our SAB section. (Has to be pretty good to be a sticky!) ;-)
Thanks Linda! I'm excited to be considered for a sticky ;)
Interesting to read about the importance of having physical address in the city being targeted and the unlikelihood of ranking in the snack pack for queries including another city. My site ranks 1st in the snack pack for most queries including SEO and my state (Surrey, UK) e.g. SEO companies Surrey but also ranks in the snack pack for many of the same queries for the neighbouring state (Berkshire, UK) e.g. SEO companies Berkshire. The only association that my business has with Berkshire (that I can think of, anyway) are (a) proximity - I'm just a mile or two from the Surrey/Berkshire border and (b) a page of content optimised for queries including SEO + Berkshire.
Not sure why I'm ranking so well in the neighbouring state but wonder if content is playing a bigger part and proximity matters almost as much as having the address actually in the city/state.
Hey Ewan,
Yes - distance/proximity is a huge factor. Especially when you have really large cities or areas. Google even mentions it as one of the main ranking factors (and they don't list many) - https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091?hl=en
Hi Joy,
I know proximity is a big factor. My point (which I didn't make very clear) was really that the Local SEO ranking factor considered to be the most important factor, according to the experts' survey for the last several years, which is having a physical address in the city/state of search is not actually necessary in order to rank top.
Excellent guide to local SEO. This is the most definitive I've read yet. Thanks!
This is great advice on an area of SEO which can be problematic - thanks a lot for sharing!
I say to you that insert your direction with a maps aplication in the website of your local shop is a great a idea, because a los of customers search nearly shops in maps.
Thanks Joy Hawkins,
Great artice, I'm trying do it for SimiCart.Com, my businees still dont' have local SEO.
I hope, i will complete it.
For perfect online business need all the above thing with complete detail.I agreed with above point for local SEO .Because location online business only based on trust ,right information and good services .and also mention few other detail like-
Toll Free Number-
Business Email Id-
About Services-
Business Review-
Good blog on Business website- ....Etc
Joy,
Once again you deliver and share your vast knowledge of all things local. I appreciate the tips.
It is a difficult but necessary process to ensure visibility of our business in Google. Highly recommended.
Thank you.
This is extremely useful! Thank you for sharing.
just commenting (as a German user) what TimCapper from UK commented already:
searching a business for its phone number only works like his sample site:plus.google.com +44 1536 269657 if the phone numer is written in the same layout as it appears on its G+ page.
This is for Germany and surely for the most countries always [country code] [regional code w/o "0"] [number]
Sample:
sites: plus.google.com +49 30 6572048 will work but sites: plus.google.com +49 306572048 doesn't
Great stuff Joy! Thanks for sharing!
Forgot to hit reply button :(
Generally, You'll rank in the city you're primarily TARGETING, regardless of your physical address -- IF that area is in your business name.
If that city is NOT the physical location of your business and not in your business name, you will typically only rank in the city you're physically located in.
~~~
And be careful how you report spammy listings to Google. There's been a bug with the local pack algorithm when Google changes a business name itself... You may just be setting the spammer up to own what ever keyword you got taken out of their business name.
Scott,
When you say "IF that area is in your business name" are you referring to a business just adding a city to their business title field or referring to a business that has actually has a DBA that includes the name of a city A in it but has an address in city B?
I am not sure I know what bug you are referring to but if you are able to provide more details that would be great. It sounds intriguing.
Unfortunately for the SAB SMB's, this gets abused by map spammers religiously. But similar tactic to Edward's Snow Den in the White House on Google Maps... or the slur against Obama. What ever keyword you've managed to stuff past verification tends to attach permanently to your map listing, legitimate or not -- But you have to get Google to "fix" the name field for you.
I can provide an example...https://screencast.com/t/qOiWcNqsebyF
And to answer your question, I was referring to legitimately in your name, DBA style. North Dallas Appliance Repair ranks in Dallas but is physically located in Richardson.
Thank the post Joy. It`s very useful.
Great SEO Post! Thanks for sharing!
Nice advice on local search. It does get problematic if you are working on non-US areas as so many programs are built for the US only but thats the way it goes.
Hi Joy!
Great article! I am looking forward to more great tips and advice from you in particular from the SAB perspective. Thanks for publishing!
I appreciate the local info. Especially #8. Always be creating content.
Hi Joy, Thanks for the great guide! For a service area business, is it a problem to use a virtual office as the address, if the address is hidden in GMB?
Thanks a lot for sharing! :D
Great article on business location, an dI looked forward to setting up my own with these tips.
Great article! As a locksmith with a SAB, I know very well how spammy the industry gets unfortunately. Good tips on reporting the spammers as well! Cheers!
I have my home address listed on google (and hidden). However, facebook does not support address hiding, and does not allow reviews for service area businesses, so I was forced to use a different address than my home address on facebook. Ditto with some other sites Does google penalize me for this in SERPS? What are my options?
You don't get penalized but it definitely won't help you as much as if your information was consistent. Having varied addresses on other sites isn't a good thing because it leads to confusion on Google's part in regards to what your real address is. You never want to confuse Google. My suggestion would honestly be to just list your home address on Facebook (unhidden). In my experience, customers aren't really going to "show up there" and if you're worried about privacy, your address is probably already visible if you look up your license on the secretary of state website.
This very great information for Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), In this way a website increase its traffic and Rank on Google or other Search Engine.
Joy, I can't understand how I missed this article when you published it, but it's of great value to me. Thank you very much and I'll see you on the forums!
Hi Joy,
I'm creating a bulk GMB account for 150+ clients in the HVAC category. I wonder if you've noticed any difference in visibility for a service area business that also selects the box labeled "I also serve customers at this location". Trying to determine the most effective setup for them.
Hey Brett,
Service Area businesses are not eligible for bulk verification at this time. You have to create them and verify them individually. You definitely should hide the address for an HVAC business unless they actually have a storefront/office. Most of the times these guys work out of their home.
Hey This is so helpful and Language is so easy as well. This is preety well described as you are expert in this i am into Home tuition Business and i am doing SEO My own for my website www.delhincrtutor.com if somebody can guide me how i can shoot my SEO in competative will be much appriciative.
Has anyone worked with listing an individual practitioner such as an insurance agent, or real estate agent? Professionals who may be part of a larger brand as part of a brokerage. I am assuming that the guidelines don't allow for an individual to list the address of their brokerage bc that is owned by someone else. So that being said, how do these individual practitioners get on the map? Thanks in advance.
@VMRImage-Miami - We work with about 1000 insurance agents and professionals are definitely allowed their own listings. Google even has an entire section around it in their guidelines: See "Individual practitioners" section here - https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en
Hello Joy,
Thank You for sharing,
our organisation is in multiple locations like different countries , so i have to create the business page as per the country or with in the single page i can show all my branches country wise.
Thank You
Thanks a really usful guide for me, especially the last point on developing a content strategy for the area. Its obvious with hind sight but it hadn't occurred to me before. Once question though, does structured data have any effect on local search results?
Yes it definitely does. Every business should have Schema markup on their website. This is the best guide on how to use it properly for a local business: https://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/62-the-json-ld-markup-guide-to-local-business-schema
Hi Joy, thanks for advice. I did have some schema markup on my page but I dont think its was 100% correct for the business. I've just gone through the guide you linked to and I'm happy now that I've got all the bases covered.
Hello Joy, thanks a lot for the information, quite a good points to remember!
I have few concerns regarding the local business listings
1. Should an e-commerce site or any site that sells products online submit their business to local business directories? Assuming that they sell their products in multiple locations?
2. In other scenarios, the business has a physical address and they sell online across the state, should they list their business in local business listing sites?
Hey Nelton-Raj,
I don't think e-commerce sites should bother submitting to local business directories because their audience isn't local so their location doesn't really matter. Local directories help with ranking in local search but they wouldn't do much for a big online store trying to rank nationally.
I would say for the second scenario to only list them if you think they'll benefit from ranking locally in their town.
Thank you for the answers, Joy, it was clearly understood, but will it have any impact on their online reputation because though they don't have a physical store where customers walk in and buy products, they are claiming and listing their business in local business listing sites.
If they still want to get listed in local directories though they are an e-commerce store, do you suggest any number on how many listings are good and safe? (any ideas)
If it is a startup e-commerce site, would do suggest to list them on local business listings sites?
Really appreciate your patience in clarifying my concerns :)
Hey Nelton-Raj,
Online stores might get reviews on sites like Yelp so it might be good to claim those profiles. If you wanted to list them on local business sites I would go with the top 50 list that Whitespark has: https://www.whitespark.ca/top-local-citation-source...
I just don't know if I'd spend a lot of effort on this since their local ranking won't contribute much to their ROI. I do see your point about reputation though.
Thank you for your insights Joy.
Thank you. Looking to open a local store - and needed some tips on how to get that all-important google visibility. I bookmarked the article and will look to these strategies. Thanks!
I liked the way your explain and show the 8 points of view about how to make local SEO and its benefits. It´s very good post, many of the tips I use with my clients and have helped me to improve their visits on the web.
Thank Joy.
Achieve ranking locally is becoming very difficult. This is extremely well article which will help to maximize presence on Google and reach more audience in the local market. I am completely agree with the author.
Thanks Joy,
your article comes just in time for me, what a lucky guy! i will put your tips on practice. +1
Thank you so much Joy for this nice comprehensive guide for local listing :-)
Google Maps listing are in my opinion the most time-consuming projects to take on. 99% of business owners seem to set this up wrong, and then most of the work done is finding and fixing mistakes! Thank you for the great article and 'cheat sheet' of items to pay attention to for SAB setup!
I'd like to see some local SEO posts for those of us with no physical location. We like to target local customers as well. Any tips...or has Google just written us off in their quest to have all small businesses jumping to their beck and call?
Greg,
Those types of businesses are not able to compete in the local/maps section so your options would either be organic or AdWords. What type of business fits into the scenario you are thinking of?
Service-type businesses that provide digital services. Editing, copywriting, SEO services, social media work...stuff like that. There's no reason to have a physical location with that type of business, other than eating up revenue or boosting your ego.
Hey Greg,
That type of business would fall into the service-area business umbrella. I know plenty of Local SEO companies that set themselves up as an SAB (Like Local SEO Guide in Pleasanton) using the home address of the business owner. For the company I work for (Imprezzio Marketing), we have a staffed office so we use that address.
That isn't necessarily true, Joy.
Scott,
Sorry, I'm not sure I'm following you. Why couldn't a marketing agency without a staffed office set themselves up as a SAB? I know I referenced Local SEO Guide (Andrew Shotland's company) and another one that comes to mind is Linda Buquet's company - Catalyst eMarketing (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Catalyst+eMarketing/) or Darren Shaw's company - Whitespark (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Whitespark)
https://blog.valetinteractive.com/2015/10/top-3-loc...
Thanks @Joy Hawkins!! Nice post.
Hey joy! Specially thanks for your guidance smart pointout.
Hi Joy, great article.
Im having issues checking the phone number. Company based in france but with mainly UK visits our listed phone numbers are France +33 (0)4 50 47 17 73
UK +44 (0)207 0434 874
this causes an issue as the configuration of spaces in the numbers is different in US, France and UK (see above) any ideas?
I have no experience dealing with businesses outside the US & Canada but I just sent this comment to 2 of the other Google My Business Top Contributors that are over in Europe and asked them to come over here and let you know.
wow thanks!!!
To find a business page : site:plus.google.com +44 1536 269657
Telephone number listed for any other business name ( my business is Online Ownership : 01536-269657 -“Online Ownership"
This is handy to see if your number is associated with any other business
To check citations :
site:yellowpages.com “Business Name”
site:yellowpages.com +44 1536 269657 intitle:”Business Name“
site:yelp.com/biz “Business Name”
site:citysearch.com intitle:”Business Name”
etc etc
In most cases, you can only create a Google map listing or GMB listing FROM an IP address within the country you're trying to set the listing up in... not from, in.
I have this problem trying to set up GMB listings for Mexico clients from Texas... Google won't let me create a Mexico listing from a US IP.
Sure, it's important to make sure that a local business can be found using local searches. However, it is still important to understand that content is the core of any marketing program, and this includes SEO. Besides having all the relevant information about your business on your site, you should also post excellent content to your blog, which will help your SEO program during the long term.
Great post. Can anyone suggest good free alternative (ideally wordpress plugin) of Nearbynow mentioned in point 9?
There is this option that uses Gravity Forms to create the content: https://www.tractleads4movers.com/turn-customers-to-bloggers/
Thanks Joy!
Joy Hawkins,
Great tips on “Getting on the Map for Service-Area Businesses”. But if we talk about duplicate listing we should focus on it and try to fix it with immense concentration.
I like the way you describe in your post to search it manually in Google, but I also suggest you to use online tools to get duplicate listing data. We can use Yext, Moz, Brightlocal etc. Once you find all the duplication listing, fix them without delay.
Hey Asim,
The reason why I prefer to do it manually via a Google search is because every tool I've used doesn't catch every single one. The Maps API (that most tools use) also doesn't report listings that are marked permanently closed and those can be serious ranking killers so it's really important to know about them :)