Local search optimization for national product?

[responselink]

Hi all,

My company sells a direct-to-consumer product nationwide. We have competitors that sell  through local distributors. Therefore, many customers think that this is a product that must be bought locally.

Because so many people search for this product locally, we want to be able to rank for local searches. But, because we sell nationwide, we don't have localized content.

We have a competitor that created a page for each state which lists every zip code and city name in the state, but that seems pretty labor intensive (and not all that effective). Any ideas on how to address this problem would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[flowsimple]

I've faced a similar issue before. His company served clients nationally, but many people searched for his services locally, typing "xxxxx california" or wherever they were located. We did several things, and depending on your budget you may consider some or all of these:

1. PPC campaigns targeted to local/regional keyword searches. Ad copy that gave highest conversions used words like "nationwide" or "largest provider"
2. Consistently wrote and published blog posts and articles on the difference between local and national provider and why the national provider had advantages
3. Wrote and published articles targeting regional or state keywords with the highest searches, and explained how the national company knew that area better than any local provider.
4. Leased and employed some exact match keyword domain for 302 redirects. And also bought and developed some exact match keyword domains as lead generation sites.

Of all of the above, PPC will give you instant results. And depending on your product and the CPL you want to target, it can be very successful.

[division1]

Creating separate websites is time consuming but as per our experience it was worth it. We had the client who wanted to open two new locations in two other cities.

1. We tried to add other city location to the contact page and for every location listing in google maps added same URL for our main website. Result was the website instantly lost the ranking for first and main city it went from 6 to 20. It took a lot of time to recover.

2. The we decided to buy separate domain for each of the locations and from main page just linked to other city pages. The link was from same industry (which is great) and it didn't hurt main website because we don't have there any information with addresses in other cities. Of course had to put new urls to google maps. Both new websites did grow quite quickly. Yes it was time consuming.

Of course it is up-to you to decide, just thought that it would be good to share our story.

[responselink]

Thanks, Pashmina, this is really great feedback! I'm definitely going to do the first two ASAP, and investigate the others. Thanks again!

[responselink]

Thanks so much for sharing your experience. I'm definitely going to investigate local domains for our largest geographic areas.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! I'm going through older questions in the Q&A system, and wondering if you could give us an update on how you tackled this problem, and any lessons you can share with us. Thanks so much!