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Hi Thomas, As you are running a design/SEO business, then Google does not consider your business model as truly local to anywhere and will only show organic results for queries like 'web design nyc'. So, everyone competing for phrases like this must do so organically. Your efforts will likely need to include on-going content development, link building and, perhaps, an additional outreach via Social Media, video marketing, etc. Content development will most certainly stand at the core of your strategy, so finding something of interest and value to write about that will be relevant to your desired NJ audience is the task at hand. For web design firms, a natural choice would be beautiful writeups of projects you've completed for NJ businesses. You might also begin doing features of NJ-based businesses with awesome websites, or websites that could be improved, or websites that help the people of NJ is some special way. You can display some of your expertise by critiquing what works. Basically, you're going to have to brainstorm some great ideas that would make for excellent content and then keep brainstorming and writing so that you can begin to build authority around search terms that relate to New Jersey. But, again, the end goal here will be organic rankings rather than local ones, simply because Google stopped displaying web design and SEO firms for common local queries some years ago. Your creativity is your best asset towards achievement of your goals. Lots of work ahead! Good luck!

Google doesn't guarantee that the author picture will show up and whether or not the picture shows up varies, depending on the searcher's search term. Writing more under a particular byline seems to help.