Geographical coverage

[AVSFencingSupplies]

Hi there, I need some help how best to represent the geographical coverage of our businesses on our websites and in Google Local. We are a supplier of construction materials. We have a retail business and a trade business.  We have a HQ and several branches in locations across the UK.  Our delivery area expands from those locations. We also acquired some time ago a website that ranked highly for one of our products. In summary we have:retail website trade website niche product website (brand not related to company) The products are largely the same (some variations between sites) but of course the language used on the pages might be optimized for different search terms to attract different customers i.e. retail and trade.   The niche product website actually competes with the retail for ranking for those product pages and I believe should be removed and all traffic directed to the retail site (of course others argue about branding). 1.  How do we represent these businesses in Google? Everything under 1 company name? e.g.  Joe Bloggs Construction Supplies Or separate names? e.g.  Joe Bloggs Construction Supplies

Joe Bloggs Construction Trade Supplies

Joe Bloggs Niche Product Supplies 2.  The location As I understand, its poor form to tell Google we have 3 businesses at the same address.

e.g. Joe Bloggs Construction Supplies - London addressJoe Bloggs Construction Trade Supplies - London addressJoe Bloggs Niche Product Supplies - London address A suggestion is to modify the address to put 10A street, 10B street, etc to make them uniquely identifiable.  Is this the best practise?  What about telephone numbers? Also even though we have several branch locations, the website we'll want to direct them to will be the same.  Is this OK or do we need to direct them to the branch page within the website so the URLs are considered unique?  If this is the case, this would have an impact on CTR as the visitor would land on a contact page instead of a page leading to products. Also in the title field on the Google Local page, should we: State the company name e.g Joe Bloggs Construction SuppliesState the company name and business type e.g.  Joe Bloggs Construction Trade SuppliesState the company name, business type and location e.g.  Joe Bloggs Construction Trade Supplies - London 3.  Indexing & Coverage area Google Local provides a description box and categories that our business falls under. Should we follow the categories that are suggested by Google when we start typing in the category box or make our own based on our main product/category keywords? Say we identified a category "timber supplies" and mentioned this keyword within the description text as well; are the categories and keywords in the description text considered when listing the business in search or is it content found via the URL given in the Google Local profile? Would this then consider locations mentioned in the description to return our company in search results for the category + location mentioned in the text? Under delivery/coverage area, If I specify a county/state.  Would we then be considered in search results for terms that mention cities within that county/state? Currently, we do not appear for many local searches within our delivery coverage area even though specified in Google Local.  I would like to understand how to improve this.  We have a good domain authority and rank highly for broad search terms but not so much for local. 4.  Represent coverage for organic search website The last question is how we represent our coverage area on our website.  We cant possibly list all cities or counties we cover on each page, certainly not frequently enough for it to be considered by search engines. Is there some HTML header tag we can use? What is a search engines behaviour concerning a companies location and coverage? Would we need to create articles are pages focused around local search terms e.g. <category or="" product="">in <location>?</location></category> Thank you so much for any help you can give. Kind regards,

Antonio

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Antonio,

You have asked many questions here. I will try to cover as many as I can, within the scope of Q&A.

From a purely local perspective, Google is interested only in your brick-and-mortar locations. You may have 1 listing per location, and each one must use your legal business name or DBA, a unique (not-shared) business address and a unique local phone number. You cannot have 2 businesses at the same address, nor 2 businesses sharing a phone number. Any confusion here can result in penalties, so it's really important to be totally clear in how you list yourself, and be sure that your website and all citations of the business precisely match the way you have listed yourself locally in Google's local products.

I am concerned that if you go with the suite number approach you are mentioning, above, that the similarity in the 2 business names is going to bring up a red flag at Google. Google's guidelines state:

Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.

I believe that Google might find the approach you're considering to be a violation of this guideline.

If your business is Joe Bloggs, then that is one business, regardless of how many websites or specialties you may have.

Your Google listings can link to separate city landing pages rather than the homepage. That is fine. So your listing for your brick-and-mortar location in city A can link to the landing page on your website for city A, and so on and so forth with cities B, C, D, etc.

Regarding categories, it's fine to choose custom categories, but it's a good practice to make at least the first category one of Google's pre-set categories. I like to find at least 2-3 pre-set categories, but this isn't always possible. Just make sure that your custom categories follow the rule of is-not-does. So plumber, not plumbing; chimney sweep, not chimney sweeping.

Regarding a wide service radius, remember, local results revolve around your physical brick-and-mortar locations...not your service area. So, focus local attention on your physical locales. Everything else needs to approached from an organic standpoint, with a hope of getting organic rankings for these other cities and regions where you're not physically located.

To begin targeting these service regions where you're not physically located, consider the practice of creating fantastic, unique landing pages for various locales. Do not create thin or duplicate content. Start with your 5 most important targeted geographic spots and create big, creative content for them. Then, move onto the next 5. Just remember, your goal with these is organic - not local.

I hope I've answered the bulk of your questions helpfully!