Geo.placename and geo.region different from physical location

[dwallner]

Hello -

I am considering adding geotags to landing pages for services offered. The problem I have is that the physical location of the business, registered on Google places, is different from where these services are performed. The company is a lawn care provider that services several small cities and is based out of our residence. I plan on creating landing pages for each of these cities so I am hoping to use these tags to indicate to the world that this location is my desired audience.

Example, the business is in a town called New Market, MN population small so that is my location on Google places. 99.9% of the business we do is done in neighboring cities of Northfield, Lakeville and Eagan.

Is is it an acceptable practice to put geotags on landing pages for those cities or would this be considered dirty pool? On the eagan-lawn-care page place a geotag for Eagan and a different one on the Lakeville page?

Gracias!

Derrick

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Derrick,

Can you define, specifically, what you mean by geotags. Are you talking about Schema, rich snippets, geotagged images, something else? Please describe.

[dwallner]

Sorry, I am referring to schema.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Derrick,

Thank you for clarifying. While I don't think this would hurt you if you're just adding it to the city landing pages, I doubt that it would have much, if any, ability to influence your organic rankings in places where your business isn't physically located.  I would imagine that links would be a much more influential element in regards to your city landing pages than this markup would. Personally, I wouldn't implement this for my own clients because, after all, their content is stemming from their physical locale, just like their services are, but I'm not predicting that this would put you at risk for a penalty or anything, so if your want to experiment, go ahead. Maybe try adding it to one of your city landing pages and not another and see if you can discern that it has made any difference for better or worse?

Good luck!

[dwallner]

Thanks Miriam -

I wish there were clear cut guidelines for this so I didn't have to guinea pig it.

Derrick

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Derrick,

I hear you on that, but Google's total guidelines for Local businesses (http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528) are very cursory...some might say intentionally so. Google is not motivated to explain word for word how to achieve high rankings in their system, so while the basic mantra of creating content for users and not search engines is their public message, the truth of the matter is that a great deal of what Local SEOs and SEOs do is experimental and is very much about the bots and not people.

When something is found to work, the idea gets spread around and becomes an accepted best practice that aids ranking efforts, until Google changes their rules (think Penguin, Panda, and the never-ending changes of policy in Local). Schema and other types of markup are relatively new, so everyone is pretty much experimenting with this. What you would be doing would fall in line with that, if you choose to test your strategy idea. Who knows, you might discover something no one else has noticed! You're not alone in wishing the guidelines were totally clear about every scenario, but one might say that it's not in Google's best interests to operate that way, right?