Questions About Citations, G My Business, and Local SEO for Service Area Business

[SBCutri]

This is a rather complicated question, so forgive me for posting in the wrong section.

I'm a co-owner of a soon-to-launch SAB coming with some questions about Google My Business, how exactly citations work, and how they should integrate with website content.

To give some essential background info, my home (and consequently, my physical business address) is located in a county right outside of a major city. I plan on serving a portion of this county first, and then expanding to the city once my business establishes itself fully in the first county. I'm wondering what the best solution is to ranking in all the 60+ towns in the county. My business is a house cleaning service, and local competition is quite high, even for some of the smaller towns with populations of 10-15k.

So here are my questions:

1) What is the best method for how to choose my service area in Google My Business? I've seen people recommending the service radius feature, but that extends into areas that I don't yet want to serve, so choosing to upload each town individually seems the best way to go, even if I have little control over where the pin is located. The county is rather large, with lots of medium-large-ish towns, and my business address is in a somewhat lower population town, so having the pin located a little closer to the true center of my service area seems like a better idea to me as far as marketing goes. I also like customers knowing exactly where I serve, as specific locations/zip codes are important to my backend scheduling system. My plan is to get an address/phone located in the large city once I expand there, and have that be its own service area in My Business, separate from the county I'm also serving, and likewise for all future locations. Is this a sensible strategy right now, both for short and long-term?

2) How do I handle the different service areas in my citation strategy? Let's say I have a My Business service area set for my county, on-site pages built for the lucrative towns with the NAP of that service area, and then separate service area/locations pages for the city. That's where my plan is at. Now I want to submit citations to SuperPages. Do I need to hide addresses, worry about having too many local listings with them (I see some national competitors with tons of service area listings), anything of that nature? Will the physical proximity of service areas conflict with each other at all?

3) Will the NAP in my locations pages gel well? Currently, since I'm serving a portion of the county, I'm going to go with the top 4-5 lucrative towns there and putting them in the title/H1/content of a main locations page. Once I expand, I'll have pages built for each service area, and perhaps a page for each small town, with the NAP of its My Business service area on each. The thought and idea of having hundreds or thousands of locations pages makes me gag, but it seems worth it SEO-wise. My competitors seem to not have a problem with it, and they're ranking well, so I figure that's a good sign.

I've jumped into SEO rather recently, and trying to deal with the bear that is local SEO has been uniquely challenging. I understand this isn't the place for a consultation, but any advice comes greatly appreciated!

Steve

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Hey Steve,

Welcome!

1) I wouldn't worry about your service area too much. I would just set it for where you serve now. There's not any indication that fooling with the service area affects your ranking significantly. There have been studies done on it with nothing conclusive, positive or negative. Just set it and don't sweat it.

As for expanding to the large city, will you shut down the existing location or just have two? If you just have two, I think you're good to go as you are. If you are shutting down your current location, you will have to switch all your citation information over to the new location which can be hassle and has been rumored to potentially cause some complication, and maybe even a drop in ranking. Personally, I have not experienced this. I've switched citation information twice for my clients flawlessly with zero drop in ranking. You just need to do it quickly.


2) SuperPages and other local search directories like it work based off of an address, among other things. Do you plan on having a separate address in every single service area? I think that would be a lot of work for little reward. I need a little more information here to diagnose properly.


3) I can't imagine what city you're in or close to that you need that many service pages for that many locations. I just don't know if the return on your time would be there and the user experience for your website could suffer with tons of pages saying, more or less the same thing, with multiple locations. We've done that before for clients but only for 1-2 locations.

Normally, if a location is worth doing SEO in, that means you have competitors already doing it. If that's the case, they're dedicating their entire website to that location while you're dedicating just 1 page. I'm not saying you can't outrank them but you're fighting an uphill battle, keep that in mind. Also, if you don't have any competition in that area, consider why. It may be because it's not worth it.

You have a lot to consider here. It may behoove you to hire a Local SEO to help you with your strategy.

But I do know with your well thought out questions, I'm sure you'll make it to the top. Especially if you have someone good guiding you along the way.

Ping back if you have anymore questions.

 

[SBCutri]

Hi Joshua,

Thank you so much for the great response. I will try to clear up any miscommunication - I didn't want to leave you all with too massive a wall-of-text.

1 - Alright, it looks like choosing the individual towns is the way to go, then. I do not plan on shutting down any service areas, only adding new ones.

2 - I do plan on using a separate address for each large city I'm in, but that's a ways away. It seems like a necessity for house cleaning services, especially after Pidgeon. Maybe that will dissipate in the future, but having a physical address seems great for SEO.

I'll have a service area for the county, but after that, I've decided that cities are the way to go for SEO in the future, and I would also be able to rank for towns outside the city. And I could cover the counties through AdWords.

3 - My situation is this. Huge competitors (Molly Maids, etc) and Yelp take the top spots in any given town that is not a large city, simply because those companies are so big, and a smattering of odd (honestly, shitty-looking) companies taking the spots after Molly Maids types and Yelp. I'm confident that in pretty much any location, I at least have a good chance of ranking up there with Molly Maids and so forth, if a couple spots behind them.

To clear up the number of service area pages question, I initially will only have one main page with the county locations only on that page, no linking out to a page for each small town. Then I am planning on having a page for each major city (Philly, NYC, those types) and linking out to that from a main locations page. I'll have to see how the current plan works out before I decide how to tackle non-major-city SEO in the future.

Thanks for the encouragement. I think it's more like an uphill war, and I'll have to pick and choose the small battles I believe I can win haha. However, I believe even small successes are profitable in the beginning, so it's worth the attempt.

I really don't have any follow up questions, but if you have anything to add, feel free! Thanks so much, Joshua.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Joshua,

Thank you so much for the great response. I will try to clear up any miscommunication - I didn't want to leave you all with too massive a wall-of-text.

1 - Alright, it looks like choosing the individual towns is the way to go, then. I do not plan on shutting down any service areas, only adding new ones.

2 - I do plan on using a separate address for each large city I'm in, but that's a ways away. It seems like a necessity for house cleaning services, especially after Pidgeon. Maybe that will dissipate in the future, but having a physical address seems great for SEO.

I'll have a service area for the county, but after that, I've decided that cities are the way to go for SEO in the future, and I would also be able to rank for towns outside the city. And I could cover the counties through AdWords.

Yes thanks for the great answers Joshua!

Sorry to say but you will typically only rank for the city you are located in and it's unlikely you can rank for a whole county. (Depends on competition.)

Additionally it's a violation for service area businesses to set up additional locations to try to rank in other areas. Google wants you to only set up one G+ Local page for your main location you actually work from.

So the only thing you can really do, is to try to rank in organic.