Questions about On-site Location Content for Service Area Businesses

[PTHerrington]

Hello all,

I've got a couple tough questions about how to go about creating locations pages for my business, and I'm wondering if you can give me some much needed direction.

I'm about to launch a professional house cleaning business which will serve Philadelphia and a couple surrounding counties. I plan on aggressively expanding to other large cities, and while I plan on building a Philly locations page, I'm unsure of how to rank organically for all the individual towns/municipalities in the surrounding counties in the middle without having a physical business location there.

Should I even hope to rank for these smaller towns? Would a page where the county is in the h1 tag, and say the top 10 largest towns in that county listed underneath in h2 tags help me reach searchers in those top 10 largest towns? How about paying ~$100 for a physical street address in each county and submitting that NAP to local directories of the larger towns, as well as getting a Google My Business page and using the service radius option?

Is there some other strategy that I'm missing?

I'm just at a loss for how to compete without AdWords for the people searching in the smaller towns when my competition is businesses with NAP/citations and their main page dedicated solely to that smaller town. Google seems to have made it even harder with Pigeon coming out recently. I serve those areas just as readily as my competition, yet the customer will predominantly see them SOLELY due to the fact that most of my competition are incapable of serving or choose not to serve wide areas. I understand that these businesses are dedicating a lot of resources to those small towns, but it does seem a sad fact that it doesn't mean they're any higher quality of a company than mine, yet they get a leg up.

ANY advice or direction would be greatly appreciated, and would come with a huge internet bear hug.

[Patrick_G]

Hello PTHerrington,

You certainly have your work cut out for you, that's for sure.

If I were you, here's what I'd do:

• Analyze where my competitors are weak when it comes to online local marketing, and exploit those areas especially. It sounds like the main advantage they have are offices in those towns, which you can't duplicate. I personally wouldn't bother with the PO Box option. I doubt it will help a whole lot with your end game from actually netting more customers.
• I'd start with a good Google AdWords budget while you're trying to build rank organically. Over time hopefully you'll have to spend less and less on AdWords, but out of the gate you'll need it to get traction over organic competitors. Ideally you'd have really good landing pages that drive them to a page for that town, or county if towns are not feasible. (Of course, if you worked hard on a handful of pages for individual towns for organic, those could double for PPC nicely.)
• People generally don't search as much for services on a county level. So I'd argue you should focus on a few small, key town pages, and try to fill them with as much local content as possible and try to educate your consumer a bit, beyond what your competitors are doing. Over time those pages could get rankings, but doing the H1 county thing with H2 town names I don't think will deliver.

Here's an example of a woman who created good local content and from it grew not only a pet sitting business for herself, but a thriving franchise business other pet sitters have replicated in their cities. I'd assume her area was dominated by larger kennels etc., and she appears to be a one-person operation. http://www.copyblogger.com/bella-vasta-case-study/

• Be sure obviously to check out Moz Local, and listen to Greg Gifford's webinar on local SEO. He helps local car dealerships, and that webinar is packed with good, practical ideas you can execute on.

In summary, I'd argue don't try to cover everything. Just pick a few towns and test out what works, and then slowly expand out with additional pages. You can always mention other cities you operate in. But don't try and bit off your entire coverage area with regional pages.

Most companies do little more in local SEO than register a Google Places page and have a physical address. So if you try to create a little more value and optimize heavily for those towns, over time I bet you'd see some good results.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi PT:)

You might also like to check out this blog post on local landing pages:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Hope this will be helpful!