Local business with online nationwide services in a post-corona world

[koji]

Hello everyone,

A question that is banging my head for the last weeks.

I've got a local business quite well positioned in Google local search but since the pandemic broke out, we started doing online services and went quite well and we have been acquiring customers from other regions. Now that the post-corona era is coming, I'm confused about how to proceed:
- Shall we keep it as we are now? I mean a local business with online services, wouldn't we be penalized for nationwide searches for our online services?
. Should we split our business onto two different products/brands and therefore websites to cater to the two distinct markets and maximize the optimization for each of them?

Many thanks for your help.

 

[Rich Owings]

Do you meet with or serve local customers in person? If so, I see no reason to not keep a local listing.

 

[koji]

Good morning Rich, thanks for your reply.

My dilemma is that if Google has classified my company as a local business, most probably when someone from another region searches for a service like ours but online, Google won't rank us for that search, will it?

 

[Rich Owings]

I haven't seen evidence of that happening. For example, there are plenty of businesses that have GMB listings for their corporate headquarters, but still rank well for national or international searches.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

My dilemma is that if Google has classified my company as a local business, most probably when someone from another region searches for a service like ours but online, Google won't rank us for that search, will it?

The organic algorithm may present more localized results either because it knows the searchers location or when the location is explicitly written in the search query, however it won't penalize a page that is relevant if the website is owned by a business 'somewhere else'.

 

[dgrunited]

Good morning Rich, thanks for your reply.

My dilemma is that if Google has classified my company as a local business, most probably when someone from another region searches for a service like ours but online, Google won't rank us for that search, will it?

Just edit your schema (in your website) from LocalBusiness to Organisation (or something else as per schema.org) Don't forget to edit the areaServed & geoRadius too.