Making the Most of Your Location
When a customer is looking for the service you provide and they go online to search, they may find that you are the nearest option that fits the parameters of the words they use in the search. They will also see other provider options that are farther away. That is good for your business; some customers like to do business with sources that are close to home. That is not so good for your business if you are one of the businesses located farther away.
If you are in the home services industry and you provide landscaping, roofing, electrical work, pest control, or any other on-location home service, you go to the customer; they don’t come to you. You need to be at the top of searches for your entire service area, not just for the homes in your immediate neighborhood. You should not expect to have much success in convincing Google that you have locations in each community in your service area, and you will have big trouble with Google if you don’t show your address on your website.
One thing you can do that will make a difference is to list all of the communities in your service area on your site and make it clear that you serve all of them. Much better than just listing them is to provide a link for each of them to a page that discusses the services you provide and makes the case for how your business provides valued services to the homeowners in each community. A word of caution: don’t even think about writing good neighbor copy for one location and then changing a headline and another word or two to make it unique to each community. Google will see through that quickly and possibly penalize you. Aim for 50% or more of new content for each community location and don’t forget to mention the name of the location multiple times in the copy.
This expansive handling of location is much more than a gimmick to convince Google that your business should come to the top of a search in your entire service area. Taking the time to acknowledge and address the residents of all of the locations in your service area is good neighbor marketing. To push the concept to the next level, include links to reviews by homeowners sorted by the communities where they live. Finding a five-star review by someone from the homeowner’s own neighborhood is a powerful recommendation much like word-of-mouth marketing.
If you are in a large city surrounded by dozens of suburbs, providing custom location copy for each community could seem like a daunting task. Firestorm LeadGen can help with setting up a location enhancement initiative and other website modifications to make your website more search friendly. Location enhancement is just one of many site changes falling under the general title of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Talk to Firestorm LeadGen about a full SEO review and possible overhaul. Improvements to your site for SEO purposes tend to be lasting improvements that pay off quickly and boost your search results month after month, year after year.