Local area coverage

[Jimboroberts]

Hi Moz people...

I have a little one that i can't quite get my head into the best way of achieving the clients goals.

My client has a local business but also travels. His area coverage is around 50 miles from his base. He also has a few skills, all under the main discipline. When users search for his skills set, they would search for a specific skill against where they live ie. "skill1 in city A"

What is the best way concentrate on these locations, and make sure his is targeting them? I know int he old days dynamic pages where created for each location (now black hat?), but I don't think this is now the best way forward? Any help, tips or just 'look at this' would really help me out.

[rhutchings]

Set your radius on your local to a wider area when possible, but Google is really making this type of situation difficult because technically he doesn't have a "physical presence" in all of these places.  I would say that you go ahead and create content around these seperate locations, but make sure the content is unique and good.  Don't simply copy the same content and swap out "city1" with  "City2" and call it good.  Google has specifically targeted those type of things and something they do not want in search results.  But having great content and information for each of those locations is an excellent idea.

1. One idea would be to house all of that content under a "service areas" type of page on the site.  Then you list each area/town/city that he provides service in, with deeper links and content to each of those areas with unique content.  Then you make sure to utilize breadcrumbs in the navigation with really good url structure i.e. www.service.com/plumbing/city1 and you could start to have the specialty skills as the topical/category high level pages, and then service areas within each specialty nested underneath.  (hope that makes sense).

Just some ideas that have worked on my end with local.  For sure check out he GetListed stuff and utilize those services as much as possible.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jimbo,

Ryan has highlighted some good ideas for you. I will add:

1. Yes, it's still forbidden to created Google Places/+Local page for service areas where the business has no physical location. Google's local product hinges on physical location.

2. I would create two sets of pages on the website. One set will contain a page for each of his major services. The other set will contain a city landing page for each of his main service cities. I wrote a pretty well-cited article some months back on the topic of city landing pages that I feel may be of some help to you: The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

3. Then, once you've established the two sets of static pages on the client's site, I would consider following up with any or all of the following:

• Linkbuilding

• Blogging to showcase his projects in different towns

• Social media with a local focus

• Video marketing with a local focus

Provided the playing field isn't too tough, a path like the one I've described will enable most clients to gain quite a bit of visibility.