Out of City but in "A" spot

[Chris Alphen]

Hi Folks

I've not seen this before so wanted to show it.

Does this mean there is hope of penetrating a pack from another town?


electrician Randolph,ma - Google Search

The electrician in the A spot is in another city (nearby)
the next 6 are in the searched city - electrician Randolph, MA

What do you think?

 

[Linda Buquet]

That's more an issue of small town with not a lot of competition.

I see 4 from Randolph then another from Holbrook on page 1.

If all on page 1 and page 2 of Places search were from the main city and only the A spot was from another city that would be significant. But you see other cities on page 2 and it's just kinda of a mixed bag. That tells me Google is not finding enough strong listings in that town so is pulling from others nearby.

But the other thing that's significant is that A spot listing is not even optimized for Randolph. It's optimized for Boston. Even domain has Boston in it. So wonder if it's backlinks that are doing it.

The OTHER thing that's significant is the A spot is the only one that has address hidden. So great example of how listings with hidden address can still rank. In this case even if not in the same city!

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Yes it is possible to be outside of the targeted city and rank for it (as you've seen here). Notice the bubble instead of a pin marker. That business has set a service area (which they should do if they see customers at their location) and hid their location. The service area is most likely targeting the "Randolph, MA" and 20 miles around the city.

Holbrook is just outside of the city so if they have solid onsite SEO, it wouldn't surprise me that they could rank well. It's kind of interesting because on their site they put "Boston area" in the NAP instead of an actual city... Could that be helping them rank in other cities?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Interesting! I wonder if hiding the address actually contributed to the great ranking in this city??

 

[Chris Alphen]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I've surely seen penetration into the pack by well optimized nearby co's but never in the A spot when the host city has more than a few listings. Obviously my goal is to penetrate out of city packs for my clients and in the case of electricians most are just not paying attention.

after posting the thread I found an electrician in Winthrop whose own out of city listing trumps his own in city listing A spot and B. Super optimization can't be claimed for this since he's a mess.

Google

 

[David Deering]

I'm not really seeing anything great about Innovation Electrical in terms of SEO. Although they have stuffed their tags with keywords. They don't have an excessive amount of citations and backlinks are pretty much non-existent. Looks like they have some reviews, though. The homepage is pretty keyword dense, too. Looking at their competition, it doesn't look like they do much SEO either. So this looks like a case of nobody really doing the right things, so the site doing the most wins, even if they aren't located in that particular city.

 

[mborgelt]

So my first thought is...yes in the business where you are serving people AT THERE LOCATION google will start to reward those companies that have that set properly. The reason I think this is because they are spending a lot of time (& money) getting this information correct so why wouldnt it be somewhat a ranking item in certain industries. You can see the MJ Electrical doesnt even have a website and they are showing up so the competition is also low here (Linda's point).

 

[Keenan Glass]

Randolph - Holbrook - it all looks like the same area to me. When the cities are all packed in there together, the actual city locale isn't as relevant.

 

[mborgelt]

Yes...and the area codes are the same (not that its a huge indicator) but just another signal.