target

…is this:

You can’t define what “local” is, in terms of where you rank.

In other words, you can’t pick exactly which cities you’ll rank in.

You might know that there are two types of “local search”: (1) the Google+ Local, AKA Google Places (and Bing Places and Apple Maps and Yahoo) results, and (2) the organic results for local businesses. I want to say a few things about the first type of results – Google+ Local.

Googlers have stated that the “local” algorithm looks at 3 overarching factors when determining where to rank your business, what terms to rank it for, and how highly to rank it relative to other businesses: relevance, prominence, and distance.

The first two you can control: My understanding has always been that your “relevance” depends on things like which business categories you’ve chosen for your Google listing and your citations, and how much info your site has on your specific services, and that your “prominence” depends on your citations, reviews, and (in some cases) links.

But the “distance”…that’s something you only control when you’re deciding where to rent office space, where to build your HQ, or – if you work out of a residential address – where you want to live. Once you’ve planted your stake in the ground, Google decides which tent it’ll be attached to.

You can’t fool Google as to what city you’re in. For instance, don’t put your “target” city in the address field on your Google listing if that’s not the city you’re technically located in. (You can tell that this doesn’t fool Google, because if you go to your Google+ Local listing and click the map on the right, you’ll probably see that Google has you at the correct address anyway.)

Sure, in some cases you can (but should not) use a fake location to rank in a city where you want to rank, and because Google has been toothless about enforcing its rules lately. But the teeth will grow back, at which point the fake address won’t seem like such a smart move.

What if you’re in a small town or suburb (or exurb) and want to be visible in the big city? Unless you’re in a niche market and there aren’t many businesses like yours nearby, then it’s probably not going to happen. As the density of local competitors increases, the amount of “map” you’re visible in decreases. The more businesses Google has to pick from, the pickier it can be about which ones to show and under which conditions.

If you’re a dentist in New York City, you’re probably doing real well if you rank on the first page of Google+ Local results in your ZIP code. If you’re a dentist in the middle of Montana, you’re probably visible in a number of towns. That’s why, in most cases, being in a small town isn’t such a bad thing – even if you wanted to be visible in the big town.

If there’s a city where you want to be visible attract local customers, there’s always a solution – but you may not like the solution. A situation I’m asked about frequently goes something like this:

Phil, I paint houses and I work out of my home address, which is 25 miles from the “rich town” with all the big houses I want to paint. What should I do?

My answer to a question like that is: don’t bank on being visible on the “local map,” unless maybe you’re one of half a dozen house-painters between you and the “rich town.” If you absolutely must be visible in the Google+ Local results in the “rich town,” move your business there. Oh, and you’ll still hard to put in the work on your site, citations, reviews, and so forth. (See? I knew you wouldn’t like the solution.)

But let’s say you’re not moving your business, and you realize that you can’t pick how much of the local map you’re visible in. How do you play your hand?

My advice is: make sure Google understands your “distance” – that is, exactly where your business is located. You may not like the maximum amount of local turf Google gives you, but at least make sure they have enough information to give you some turf. Therefore:

Have your business name, address, and phone number on every page of your site. (Make sure it’s text you can copy and paste; it can’t be a photo, for instance.)

Put your city somewhere in your title tag(s).

Nail the citations.

Embed a clickable, interactive Google Map on your site, where appropriate. (Embed the map that you see on the right-hand side of your Google listing.)

Beyond that, to the extent you need to fill in the gaps, I suggest at least dipping your toes into AdWords and working on your local-organic rankings (read this post and this one).

In the long run, it doesn’t matter much exactly where you set up shop. If you take advantage of the many things you can control, you’ll get more customers.

Are you creating pages on your site that target specific cities where you want to rank well in the organic search results for local businesses?

If so, you’d be crazy not to spend a little time making those pages unique – that is, clearly and substantially different from each other.

I’m going to show you a bunch of ways to make your “city pages” unique. As opposed to having a page for “city1 + keyword,” another page for “city2 + keyword,” etc.

Differentiating your pages will help you avoid (1) possibly being penalized by Google and (2) annoying and repelling your potential customers.

(If you want, you can skip right to my suggestions for how to make your pages unique. But maybe first you need to get up-to-speed – in which case just read on.)

I’m going to assume three things about your business:

(1) You’re trying to rank for a “boring” service;

(2) You only have one physical location (but also a service area that may encompass many cities/towns), and that

(3) You haven’t been able to think of much to say about the various towns in your service area (other than that you serve customers there).

If any of the above isn’t the case with you, great. So much the easier for you to make your pages unique. But I’m working under the assumption that yours is a head-scratcher case, where you just aren’t sure how to make anything but cloned pages.

My suggestions are also applicable if you have multiple physical locations and aren’t sure how you can differentiate your pages (or sites) from each other.

Why you might need city pages

Why might you want to go after organic rankings when you can get visible in the classic local search results? (AKA Google+Local and Bing Places.)

Because sometimes there are towns in which you just can’t rank in the local search results.

Let’s say you’re a contractor located in a little town that’s 15 miles from three bigger cities. Maybe you rank well in the Google+Local results within 5 miles of your office, but you haven’t been able to rank in the local results in the bigger cities because you’re just a little too far from where the action is.

What do you do?

You create pages on your site that target each of those cities you want to rank in. Your aim is to snag some rankings in the organic results – the ones for local businesses.

Why you need unique city pages

It’s pretty easy to get organic rankings in nearby cities, right? Just whip together a page, clone it for as many cities as you want to rank in, swap out the city names on each page, and watch those rankings roll in – right?

Maybe you’ve seen clone pages work for your local nemesis. That schmuck has 25 pages on his site that are nearly identical, with only the city names differing from page to page, and he outranks you.

So why shouldn’t you create a bunch of near-identical “city pages”? Why not build your very own clone army? For at least four reasons:

1. There’s a good chance it won’t work. After all, you only see the cases where Google doesn’t penalize businesses for putting out a bunch of garbage pages.

2. Even if it works now, it’s not going to work forever. Google is slowly but surely getting more teeth with which to penalize sites that are long on “optimization” but short on helpful info.

3. Even if you get the rankings you want, who says your pages will bring you phone calls? (For that matter, who says your competitors are making money off their clone pages?) Your customers aren’t stupid. They can tell when you’re just paying lip service to their city.

4. It’s lame.

The good news is it can be quick and easy to make your city pages different from each other – in a way that’s Google-friendly in the long-term and customer-friendly always.

16 ways to make your pages unique

Here are all the ways I know of that you can make your city pages unique from each other. Some of these (probably the first 6) will be obvious to you, whereas you may not have thought of others.

On-page elements

1. Title tags.

2. Description tags.

3. Page names. Don’t have these run too long. A name with more than 4-5 words may look fishy to Google.

4. H1s, H2s, etc.

5. Internal links. For example, you could link to a blog post you wrote about a job you did in your “target” city.

6. Outbound links. You could link to the town’s website, to the site of a charity you support in the town, or to a blog post that someone else wrote that’s relevant to the town and to your services.

Content

7. Write a simple case-study on a job you did in your target city. (All the credit goes to Matt McGee for this idea.)

8. Write about what you like about working in your target city, or what you like about its residents.

9. Write a blurb about any employees of yours from your target city. Better yet, have them do it. Just something that shows at least a small (but real) connection to that city.

10. Write about any local laws or regulations that your potential customers might want to know about. (Hat tip to Marcus Sheridan of The Sales Lion for this technique.)

11. Photos. If you don’t have pictures of jobs you did in your target city, maybe have a picture of a local landmark. Reflect the “local” subject matter in the names of the photos, and maybe in the alt tags and title attributes.

12. Videos. Each city page can have a different video. Assuming you’re the one who created the videos, you can include in your YouTube descriptions a link to your city page, and you can geotag the video.

13. Testimonials. Mention the city of the customers who wrote them. Depending on what your business is and how close you are with your customers, you might also be able to weave in relevant photos (e.g. “Fred’s front yard” or “Before-and-after of Sara’s smile”).

14. Rich snippets. You can mark up customers’ testimonials with Schema or hReview, so as to get those nice review stars to show up in the search results.

15. Offers or giveaways that are tailored toward the residents of your target city. Depending on how you approach it, this might also help you to track leads / conversions.

16. Make some Google “My Maps.” See if you can make a few custom maps that potential customers might find handy.