Localized SEO for Restricted Niches

[bbarber57]

Sorry for the hypothetical, it's a sticky subject!

Suppose I work for a company that offers Online Widget Counseling.  Due to the fragile nature of Widgets, this service is only legal in one state and must be administered by a registered and regulated Widget Counseling company.  Widget counseling is only available online so there is no competition from bricks and mortar stores.

Unfortunately the SERPs are dominated by unscrupulous black market outfits offering Widget Counseling illegally.

If we were to use intensive and strong local signals, could we expect the SERPs to favor our pages for searches "in or about" the state in which we are registered?

Thanks for your help

-SEO Newbie

[crackingmedia]

Hi Benjamin

It's rather a question full of riddles, but as far as I see it the search engine only cares about providing the most relevant pages for the search.

Just because the widget counselling service is only available online doesn't really matter to the search engine. If someone searches for "widget counselling boston" and there's a website run by a company showing that they are based in Boston, then it's more than likely that company's web pages will rank highly. Unless of course, there are many other widget counselling companies in Boston!

I'm not sure that answers your question, but I hope it helps.

Peter

[Digital-Diameter]

I'm going to take a stab in the relative dark and say this:

1. Building local links and citations should help as it would with any site.

2. It is unlikely that Google will assist you further than that. They appear to penalize broadly illegal sites, but they do not appear to get into the details beyond that. If you feel businesses are illegally offering a service, it seems like that would be more of a legal / regulatory issue than an SEO issue per-say.