Listing a business in more than one town.

[Silkstream]

Hi everyone,

My name is Hayley and this is my first post here. I found the forum whilst desperately searching for some help with a local/places dilema i am facing. Ive tried all the social media communities i belong to in search for an answer so I really hope someone on the forums is able to help me.

First of all, i am in the UK, so please bare this in mind if offering any advice.

My dilema is this;

I have a business that serves the whole of the UK. For arguments sake, lets say i am a florist (im not a florist). I have a bricks and mortar HQ in my home town for which i have set up a local listing and it is ranking in all the right places.

The problem is that we deliver flowers to houses nationwide, we go right to their door, but we dont have a bricks and mortar shop in every town.

Is it possible in any way whatsoever to gain a lsiting in local search for every town we serve, without a local NAP?

Anybody else faced this problem or have any idea of the best way to approach this?

I have asked this question in a multitude of places and cant seem to get a proper answer.

Thanks.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Silkstream,

Welcome and thanks for posting a great question!

You can only have a Google Places listing for locations where your business physically exists.

See Quality Guidelines - Businesses that operate in a service area, as opposed to a single location, should not create a listing for every city they service. Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

If you deliver nationwide, then you'd need go do some serious SEO (organic) in order to rank in cities other than where your business is physically located in. You could set a wide service area, but a local listing would probably on show up well in the city your business is actually in.

 

[Silkstream]

Hi Colan,

Thanks alot for such a quick reply. And thanks for linking to the page that details service areas. I tried to do this originally (i believe you have to submit the changes to Google upon adding these areas), but the changes were never accepted. Could there be any reason for this that you are aware of? We cover most of the UK so maybe i added too many towns at once?

EsR,

We have the organic seo covered. Ranking in top position for most (keyword + town) searches. But we want to get this local listing thing correct in order to gain more visibility.

Thanks again, Hayley.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Hayley

Everything these guys have said is right on the money. Here's just a quick, down-and-dirty sketch of how you might go about covering the entire UK through a combination of Google+Local, organic, and PPC:



Obviously, it's great if you're able to reach farther-away areas and get organic results there with your city-specific landing pages. But my rough sketch doesn't assume that's the case here.

And of course, I just picked a random spot in the map for your business (no idea where in the UK you're located!).

 

[Silkstream]

Thanks Phil!

As i mentioned above, we have managed to do a pretty good job with search visibility by doing just that, creating town-specific landing pages for both organic and PPC. Its all going great, traffic and conversions are up. Local listings are the last piece of the puzzle for us. I guess setting up a service area is the only way for us to do this for now.

Ohh and we are based in Essex.
"shuuuut uuuuup"

 

[Phil Rozek]

I guess setting up a service area is the only way for us to do this for now.

Sounds like a good plan, although the "service area" specified in the Google Places dashboard won't really influence where you rank in the local results. It's just kind of a N.B. to Google.