Getting Found in the Town Next Door

Why you appear in one town

Local results weigh three things: how relevant you are to the search, how prominent your business is generally, and how close you are to the person searching.

The third is the one small businesses run into. Somebody searching from a town twenty minutes away is being shown businesses near them, and you are not near them.

This is not a flaw. It is the results being useful to somebody who wants a local supplier.

Which means the goal is not to defeat proximity. It is to be relevant enough elsewhere that you are worth showing despite it.

What does not work

Worth clearing away first, because these are widely attempted.

Setting a huge service area. Tells the platform where you will travel, not where you are. It does not move your listing.

Adding town names to your business name. Against the guidelines, and it gets corrected.

Fake addresses. A mailbox or a relative's house used as a second location. This is the one that produces suspended listings, and suspension is difficult to reverse.

Thin location pages. Twenty pages identical except for the town name. That approach worked years ago and now attracts the opposite of what it was meant to.

The last is the most common because it feels like content rather than a trick.

What does work, slowly

Relevance built honestly, which takes longer and lasts.

A real page per town, written about the work you actually do there.

Jobs described with local detail, the kind of housing stock, the conditions, the specific problems that area has.

Reviews from customers in those towns, which frequently mention the place by name.

Mentions from local sources, a community group, a supplier, a sponsorship.

None of that is quick, and all of it is durable in a way that settings are not.

What a real location page contains

1. Work you have actually done there, described specifically.
2. Photographs from that area, which are yours and unique.
3. Something only somebody who works there would know, such as the common building type or a recurring local problem.
4. Practical detail, how long you take to get there, whether there is a call-out difference.
5. A review or two from that town.
6. Contact details, the same ones as everywhere else.

The third is the test. If a page could be about any town by swapping the name, it is one of the thin pages rather than a real one.

Which also means you cannot have twenty of them. You can have four good ones, and four good ones outperform twenty thin ones.

A worked example

An appliance repair business based in one town and serving three others.

They had four location pages, created from a template, differing only in the town name and a stock photograph. None ranked for anything.

They rewrote two of them properly. One town had a lot of older apartment buildings with a particular type of laundry installation, and the page said so, described the specific problem those units have, and showed three photographs of that work.

The other covered a newer suburb with different appliances and a different set of common faults.

Both began ranking within a few months, and the enquiries arriving through them were better qualified, because the page had already answered whether this business understood their situation.

The two pages they did not rewrite continued to do nothing, which was the useful control.

The honest limits

Some proportion so the effort is aimed correctly.

You are unlikely to appear in the map results for a town you have no presence in, no matter how good the page. Those three positions are heavily influenced by distance.

What you can win is the ordinary results below the map, which is where somebody who did not find what they wanted in the map goes next.

That is a genuine source of work and it is a different target from the map pack. Aiming at the wrong one produces disappointment.

How long any of this takes

Worth setting expectations, because the timescale is the reason people abandon it.

A new page needs to be found, assessed and given a position, and for a small site with modest authority that is months rather than weeks.

Reviews accumulate at whatever rate you ask for them. A local mention arrives when somebody has a reason to mention you.

Which means judging this after six weeks tells you nothing. Six months is a fair first look, and a year is when you know.

That is uncomfortable against the appeal of a setting you can change this afternoon, which is precisely why the settings get tried first and the durable work gets postponed. The settings take ten minutes and do nothing; the pages take months and last.

When a second location is legitimate

Because sometimes it is the right answer.

A real premises, with somebody there during stated hours, a separate phone line, and genuine operation from that address, can have its own listing.

That is a substantial commitment rather than a marketing tactic, and the test is whether a customer could turn up and be served.

Renting a desk in a shared office to claim a second listing is the version that gets suspended, and the suspension usually affects the original listing too, which is a high price for a shortcut.

Where to start

With the town that would produce the most work, rather than all of them.

Write one genuinely good page for it. Ask two customers from that town for reviews. Look for one local source that might mention you.

Then wait a few months and see whether it moved before repeating for the next town.

Doing one properly teaches you whether it works for your trade, which is worth more than doing four badly at once.

It also keeps the writing honest. Four pages written in one sitting will resemble each other; four written a quarter apart, each after doing more work in that area, will not.

The service area setting that people reach for first is covered in service area or storefront.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.