One physical location but we serve 7 counties

[avimoz]

I am a new business and I have one physical location but we serve 7 counties in CA how should I plan to list it?

[Hansen-Buildings]

What do you mean exactly by 'plan to list it'? Biggest thing is to not mislead where you are located or where you can serve. If you want to make it clear on any site or profile list your physical location and say something like 'Serving the counties of 1,2,3...'.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Shay,

Good question! I'll do my best to provide a thorough answer here, because the topic is somewhat complex. I'll number my points for easier reading.

1. If your business has a single physical location but serves clients in multiple locations (like a plumber, a mobile notary public or a carpet cleaning business) your business would be classified as an SAB (a service area business). Special rules and opportunities apply to SABs.

2. It is of primary importance to understand how Google views local search. In Google's eyes, any business is a most relevant result for its city of location. So, a barber shop in Chicago is a most relevant result for people search for 'barber shop chicago' or searching for 'barber shop' from a Chicago-based device. This also applies to SABs. So, even if a plumber located in San Francisco also serves clients Oakland, Mill Valley and Berkeley, Google still sees him as a most relevant to San-Francisco related or based searches because that is where he has his physical location.

3. What this means is that SABs can typically only pursue Local rankings for their city of location and and must pursue Organic rankings for all of their other service cities.

4. This means that you will only be creating one local business listing at each local business index (like Google Places for Business, Yahoo Local, Bing Places for Business, Yelp, etc.). This listing will revolve around your core business NAP (name, address, phone number) You will NOT be creating local listings for your service cities. Please especially familiarize yourself with the Google Places Quality Guidelines so that you do not risk penalties for accidental guideline violations: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

5. You will be working toward high Local rankings for your city of location via a variety of methods, including having a very strong, locally-optimized website, getting listed in various indexes, getting cited by other types of publications such as local blogs and websites and earning a diverse, slow but steady variety of reviews , among other things.

6. For your other service cities, you will be employing traditional SEO methods in hopes of gaining visibility for these other places you serve. This will typically included the development of city landing pages on your website (see: <cite>www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403</cite>‎) and earning links from influential places.

7. I'll close with a common SAB question. SAB owners often ask if there is any chance at all of them being included in the local results for their service cities. The answer to this is, it can happen, but it's uncommon. If a business happens to be in an area of very low competition (like the only carpet cleaning company in a large rural area) then it does sometimes happen that they will show up in the local results for more than just their city of location, but this tends to be the exception rather than the rule.

With the right approach and lots of hard work, SABs can see tons of benefits from promoting themselves on the web. There are extra hurdles to jump, but it can be done. Hope this helps!