Business location in small town - How to target meta title?

[OliverNeely]

So it's common practice to include the city/state in page titles and within the content. However let's say that a business is located in a small town, but serves customers in surrounding, larger towns.  You might say that it's not worth mentioning the small town because there would be few searchers in that area.

However, does Google take into account the distance a searcher is from the business location, in relation to the page title, as well as the Google my Business page? Obviously you can't go stuffing all of the surrounding towns into your homepage or main service pages. Is there any value in mentioning the small town, or is it fine to leave it out too?

What has been your experience?

[MikeRoberts]

In a situation like this, I would turn to your Google My Business page and make sure that the locations or distance that you serve is set properly in order to reach all of the surrounding towns that you do, in fact, serve. It doesn't necessarily hurt to include your small town name in the meta title. While that will help with more immediate local traffic, Google does change titles and descriptions in the SERPs for certain terms they feel the page is relevant for but do not feel your other info adequately expresses. Google will take into account the location of your business but if your GMB page shows that you service a nearby area, they won't just discount you because you're in nearby small town instead of Big Town. In cases like that, you may find that Google alters the page title in the SERPs to show the name of the bigger town or completely remove mention of any town. So just because your title and description don't perfectly reflect every single area you might work in, that doesn't mean you can't show up for those local searchers.

It can also be useful to make pages on your site specifically talking about the services available to those bigger surrounding towns. So even if your homepage is more targeted to Small Town, you can have an organic landing page devoted to Big Town A and Big Town B with all your info, service information, a blurb about the town and how your business interacts with that area, and a nice call to action and/or contact form for that town. Just make sure not to copy/paste to create tons of targeted pages like that. You want everything to be nice and unique so there are no duplication issues.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Fantastic answer Mike!

I would also add to look into services like Moz Local, Whitespark, or Yext, to get more relevant listings that help Google and other search engines verify your information and help you appear for searches related to your industry and service area.

Don't forget also that Moz has a great local SEO audit resource.

Hope this helps! Good luck!
Patrick

[KevnJr]

Oliver,

We serve the DC market with a commercial print shop in Waldorf, MD (15 miles outside DC) and I've focused all my SEO efforts on DC. We've had success with this strategy along with the convenience of lower manufacturing costs, as well as maintaining our Super-Fast expedited services model. We've done it and you may as well.

KJr

[BlueCorona]

Hi Oliver!

Mike's answer is spot on.

In reference to your question about Google taking the searcher's distance from the business into account I would like to provide some insight. Organic listing will not have as much to do with location to the search, but the results in the local pack do. Three important factors to keep in mind when trying to rank in the Local Pack:

• Relevance
• Distance
• Prominence

Relevance is impacted by the information in your profile relating to the searcher’s query. Ensure your profile is completely filled out with valid information, hours, photos, etc. Google will show results calculated by the user’s location in order to display business closest to them. Lastly, how prominent your business is within the industry is important. Prominence refers to offline factors (links, articles, directories), as well as positive reviews and SERP positions.

Hope this helps!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Oliver,

It might help to think of it this way. Whatever your town is (small or large) that is your local home base. This is the address you'll be using in all of your citation building, the footer and contact page of your website, and in at least some of your website content and optimization, all for the purposes of ranking locally.

For any other locations you serve, but where you lack a physical location, you'll be aiming at organic (not local pack) rankings. So, this will have nothing to do with your citations. It will all have to do with service city content you build on the website + additional outreach in the form of social and paid promotions.

So, even if your town is small, it's the anchor that proves you to be a local, physical business. It's what proves your eligibility to be included in Google My Business and other citation platforms. It's your best hope of local pack rankings.

Everything beyond your city of location is for organic outreach.

As for how Google will handle all this, given the user-as-centroid phenomenon, Google will customize local results for the searcher based on his physical location at the time of search. So, you do want to be sure you're making it clear that your physical location is at 'X' so that Google is convinced searchers near there are close to you.

Hope this helps, and might like this for further reading: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages