How can they rank in multiple cities with no physical addresses in those countries?

[vivekrpatel]

Last week I was looking for some SEO agency in various countries and I found a few websites ranking in the different country without having a physical address.

Examples:

https://xyz.abc/seo-agency-sydney/
https://xyz.abc/seo-agency-san-diego/

https://xyz.abc/content-marketing-agency-new-york/
https://xyz.abc/content-marketing-agency-san-francisco/

How can they be seen in other cities if they don't have a physical address for these cities?

Could creating a separate page dedicated to that particular city and optimizing that particular page is good?

 

[djbaxter]

Are you talking about ranking in regular organic search? or local search?

 

[vivekrpatel]

I'm talking about regular organic search. Not really on the first page of Google, their ranking has been switched between the first two pages of SERP.

 

[James Watt]

You're talking about local landing pages, and they're a great strategy for expanding your reach out to locations you don't actually have an address in. Google seems to have gotten much better at figuring out which pages are locally relevant, and it's not as simple as going after a normal organic keyword. I've been helping a client that had a page ranking very well for 'keyword + city' but only 100 miles away from the city. Anyone actually in the city wouldn't see the page at all. It's doing much better now, we're working on improving it even more with locally relevant backlinks from appropriate sites in the city.

So to answer your question, those pages appear because Google's decided they're relevant to the search query. The business doesn't have to actually be in the city to be relevant, but you do have to do a little extra work these days to make sure your city landing page is seen by Google as actually being relevant to the city.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Just to add to what James said - it's common place to have location specific pages or service area type pages rank organically in cities that the business isn't located in.

What is not that common, and something you will more or less never see are Google Maps/GMB listings ranking for search terms not specific to the physical location that the business is in.

Organic/Local Organic Results = Possible to rank outside the city you are physically located in

3-Pack/Google Maps/Local Finder = Not possible to rank outside the city you are physically located in

 

[vivekrpatel]

Hi James and Colan,

I appreciate your feedback.

Can you share resource or guide to create a strategy for the landing page without having a physical address?

I came across this post: https://whitespark.ca/blog/rank-in-cities-with-no-physical-address/

Apart from this anything else that helps us in creating strong backlinks.

Thanks in advance.