Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Stacy, Your question is smart! It's good you're working to understand this, and I'll do my best to explain how this works on a local level. I'm going to break this into 4 parts. Because your business is located in Akron, your Google local pack rankings will be confined to appearing for searchers who are either searching from a device in Akron, or, including the term 'Akron' in their search ... like 'magicians akron'. You are unlikely to achieve local pack rankings for any other city than Akron, because of Google's bias toward physical location. In order for you to achieve local pack rankings in Cleveland, you would need to have a physical location there. Because of the above, your ability to be visible for Cleveland is going to be confined to organic results rather than local ones. For starters, you will need a Cleveland page on your website. You don't have a physical location there, of course, but you can strive to create the BEST page in your industry/geography. You'll want to make this page totally amazing, with fantastic content, and link to it from the top level menu of your website. What would be natural here would be for you to thoroughly showcase some of your gigs you've done in Cleveland. Write them up, show photos, videos, testimonials from customers, FAQs, talk about Cleveland, your work there, etc. Be sure you're implementing best SEO practices in the text and tags of the page. In addition to your menu linking to this Cleveland page, link to it from other pages within the site and then begin the work of earning inbound links from third party sites. The better the page is and the more links it has earned, the better your chances of this page showing up in the organic results for Cleveland-based-or-related searches. Once you have built this best-in-industry/geography page, consider blogging to continue to grow your 'Cleveland-ness'. I'm not very familiar with your industry, so you'll likely have better ideas than I would regarding what to blog about, but I'd think further showcasing of your events, posts about magic, posts about magic shops, magic tricks, magic venues in Cleveland would be a start. Promote the posts socially. Each one is a chance for a potential customer to end up on your site, saying, "Hey, I want to hire this magician!" The third thing you have to consider is competition. If local pack rankings in Akron, and your best efforts to rank organically for Cleveland are not getting you the visibility and gigs you need, if may be that the competitiveness of the searches you are going for is just too tough for a new business to surmount and you will need to rely on PPC. You may only need to pay for clicks temporarily, until you've achieved local/organic visibility, or, it may need to be a permanent part of your marketing strategy. Finally, be aware that Google is currentyl going through the greatest upheaval in Local in recent memory, converting formerly free local pack rankings to pay-to-play home service ads (see: http://searchengineland.com/google-home-services-ads-plumbers-locksmiths-san-francisco-beta-226469). In the next few years, you may be _required to pay for placement. _This could be bad, if your budget is slim. Or, for a business like yours, it could be good if Google will allow you to pay enough to appear for searches in a neighboring city where you're not physically located. Not sure if that will work that way, but it might. So, stay tuned in on these developments. Hope this helps!