Use of City Name in Page Title and H1

[Matt Chauhan]

In the case of service area-based businesses, will it be a good strategy to use a different nearby target city in the page titles and H1 than the city that used to create the GBP profile? For example, if the GBP was created using an address in Brenham, Texas, can we use College Station, Texas, in the page titles and H1 if they are already ranking in Brenham?

I know for Brick and Mortar businesses, the city name should match with what is shown in GBP. Just want to confirm for Service Area based businesses.

 

[Matt Chauhan]

Bumping up this thread to get quick answers as its a little urgent and high priority.

 

[Conor Treacy]

It's going to be one of those things that you'll need to test and see what happens. I've not tried to target a city outside of the location of the business page itself when it comes to the link from GBP. What we do is set the landing page from GBP to be the city page that the business is in, and then build up other pages and cross link from the page - with city/town in the H1 of the new page created.

Changing an H1 on the landing page from a GBP I wouldn't think would have a massive effect on the rankings, but it will have an effect on the person that's landing on the page. If my business is in Houston, and when someone clicks on the business they land on a page that says "serving Aldine" (about 5 miles north of city center), I will have confused the user arriving from Houston and possibly lost the sale as I'm not actually targeting Houston.

In your case, we're not talking 5 miles, we're talking 40 miles - that's a long way to travel for a service business.

Heck even for us, if it says Omaha, NE vs Council Bluffs, IA (which is literally across the river, it has a HUGE affect on the mindset of the visiting customer - and worse in the eyes of Google as they're different states!