Local SEO Best Practices for 2,000+ 'location' service area business

[JohnGroves]

Hi Moz Community!

We operate a business where we have a network of 2,000+ technicians around the country who help people repair their mobile phones. These techs do the fixing at the customer's location, making them service area businesses. Even after scouring all of the go-to places on local SEO, I'm struggling to find best practices for this type of situation - the fact that our techs are operating in service areas presents a number of challenges. The biggest one, it seems, is that inevitably service areas are going to overlap. When I talked to a Google rep on this he said this "might" cause our locations to get de-listed and we'd just have to test and find out. Other challenges include the fact that we cannot bulk upload the service areas of our techs, and we cannot bulk verify - meaning there is a ton of work to do at our scale.

Any suggestions on where to go to find resources on this specific topic, or an example of someone doing this well we can model?

Thanks everyone!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

**...this "might" cause our locations to get de-listed **

As I started reading, that was my exact thought.

Overlaps are going to happen from time to time with some listings, but you would have to try and keep it as clean as humanly possible, and where you think an overlap might happen, you could consider removing it to avoid issues. Losing one listing by your own hand, is better than losing the lot to Google.

I haven't had to deal with something quite as large as this in the past, but there are similarities with other clients that spring to mind.

Someone else might pop along with additional ideas or examples for you.

-Andy

[JohnGroves]

Thanks Andy, that makes sense. The Google rep I spoke with seemed to think we'd be ok to 'test out' what happened if two service areas overlapped, and that if they got de-listed it would not affect our other locations. However, given the fact he couldn't tell me for sure what would happen seems to mean there would be some risk to that. Any experience with this?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I do have experience of this, but not on that scale. I would certainly be proceeding with caution and like the Google rep, I think that there could be an element of risk, mainly down to the fact that there will be so few working examples of this to compare it with.

Is there any way you could roll out test groups to see how well they work? If you start with a smaller evaluation group, there is less at stake if something goes awry.

-Andy

[David-Mihm]

It's going to be a lot of manual work at this point unless/until Google allows for SABs to be included in bulk upload.  I'm not so sure I'd even try to tackle GMB yet, but instead focus on aggregator submissions and primary vertically-relevant directories like Thumbtack, AngiesList, Yelp, YP.  Those should honestly get you pretty far in terms of rankings (although obviously you won't get the benefit of being able to choose a featured photo, etc.).

[JohnGroves]

Thanks David! At your recommendation I talked to Infogroup, Acxiom and Neustar. The information I got from Infogroup (which they said came directly from Google) was that a listing with them, or any aggregator, wouldn't get us a listing on Google Maps - SABs needed to be directly on GMB to be listed.

Given our budget will only allow for one aggregator for now, is there one of the three aggregators that would make sense to do first?

Thanks again.

[David-Mihm]

Not entirely sure that's an accurate response.  There are plenty of SABs who have not claimed a Google My Business Page and yet are still in the Maps index -- and ranking QUITE well.  Here is just one example.

I would try submitting a few locations to each aggregator and see which one has the primary feed in these categories.  My guess would be Infogroup or Acxiom in this particular case.

[JohnGroves]

Great idea, thanks again David.