Can I use PO boxes as an actual business Address?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hi mozzers,

A potential future client(electrician) covers 40+ locations in one region(local SEO) but only has 1 address. He wants to rank for at least 5 to 7 main locations which he has PO boxes for.

Can I use these as addresses on his website or will it be seen as violating the google guideline? If it is no good what should I do?

Thanks

[AngelDigital]

So you probably already read that so far as adding the business to Google local is concerned, PO boxes are violation of Google local quality guidelines - if you read through them, they are looking for places that receive customers and they specifically state that post office boxes aren't considered physical locations. So if you add them as a listing to Google local, they get deleted, sometimes .. pretty often (there are still some listings with PO boxes but I wouldn't bother trying). And you want your website address/phone etc to match your local listing for good local SEO. So although you could add the various PO boxes to the website, I don't think it will help for local, there's probably no real point them being on there unless they have some legitimate business use and I wouldn't recommend it.

I've mused recently (in a blog post) that using virtual offices combined with local area code numbers (e.g. forwarded to the main sales number) might work for boosting local, but only if the business centre allows use of the address rather than the PO box address. If you had the virtual office address but didn't have local matching numbers, I think that'd be a potential negative for local.  I think there's an element of risk here as virtual offices aren't too difficult to spot and let's face it, it is still against the quality guidelines and trying to manipulate results etc. I'd kind of be interested to know if it'd work but I wouldn't try it for a client myself!

Things the client can do instead -

• Use his one business address, phone etc, same on local listing as on website, and then,

• Specify in his Google local listing which areas he covers. Rather than stating the whole of the UK, I'd recommend adding those specific areas he wants to rank for.

• Create pages for those areas around what people search for e.g. going for the organic results 'electrician services in lincoln' etc as Google does still feature these around the local listings.

• Add location specific content for that area - eg. case studies, testimonials for companies / customers in that area with plenty of refs to the location.

Hope that helps.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Taysir,

Both P.O. boxes and virtual offices are forbidden by the Google Places Quality Guidelines (see: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en)

Unless your client is an area of very low competition or in a very rural area, then he should not expect to rank in the local pack of results for anything but his city of location. It's important to set his expectation about this, so that he understand that this is simply how Google works. Let him know that the use of P.O. boxes or virtual offices will only harm his trustworthiness in the eyes of Google at the same time as confusing his customers.

So, he can go for local rankings for his city of location, and then go after as much organic visibility as he can for his other location-less service cities by developing content that reflects his work in these places. I think you will find some good inspiration for this in this article:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landings Pages

All SABs struggle with this situation, but it is totally possible to earn good core local visibility for the location city and additional organic visibility for the service cities with the right strategy. Good luck with the work ahead!

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Thank you guys for those useful tips