How to rank B2B service companies on Google, location-based SEO tactic.
This article is not an introduction to SEO; I want to give some practical advice from my own experience and mistakes, doing research, applying my findings, and getting results.
Consumer behavior over the years.Â
On my personal searches over the years, I gradually learned that Google would show me things that are near me, this is very useful when you are looking for a restaurant or similar, so after learning this behavior, many of my searches are directly on Google Maps. I believe this is now a “normal” consumer behavior, at least in a demographic similar to mine (millennials). But if a person is not looking for something near them, if they need it in a certain location is logical to search for where they need it.
When a person is looking for something related to their work they might want to search it based on the location that they need the service. For example, a property manager that is located in Miami and has properties all over the states could search for “Air conditioning maintenance in Edmon, Oklahoma”.
Here is a graph from Google Trends showing the term near me, this is now a normal pattern for searching, not even 10 years old (it is incredible how fast we are going).
The difference between local SEO and location-based SEO.
One of the main bits of advice that you will find if you search for “how to rank your business” or “how to do SEO for your business” or similar queries, is that you have to have your Google business profile up to date and with the right information. This is where my first mistake came in, the service company that I did this for has multiple branch locations, so I did one profile per location, this would have been ok of for a local business (one that wants to attract customers to their physical location) but not in the case of services business that delivers their services to the customer’s location. Here you can see how they are presented differently on Google.
A local business:
Notice that it has the address for the store. In this type of business, they want people to go to the store and pick up their pizza or they want the people to know that they are not too far away.
In contrast here is a service business:
Notice that it has the company's "service area" and not the address, this is because their customers need the service performed on-site, so there is no need to show the company's address.
How to benefit from location-based search for your SEO strategy.
The tactic works by creating multiple pages of locations on your target market geographic areas, in this example of a popular commercial cleaning company, you can see how they created multiple pages for different localities. This is just one example of the many that I found on B2B service industry websites.
The URL is customized for each location, this is good for SEO and for the user because they are sure that the page they are on, has what they need, in this case, a service performed in a specific area.
The URL is optimized with keywords.
The issue with duplicate content:
For my targeted area I created around 150 pages, I didn't want to write 150 completely different pages my main fear at the time with this issue was that my site was going to get penalized if I created too many duplicated pages. This Google "penalty" might be a myth, but to me, it made sense that Google doesn't want to serve the exact same content where only the headlines change between pages, it might seem "spammy" and therefore not a good user experience.
The way that I handled this was by creating multiple sections for my webpage, I created 5 distinct versions for each of these sections, and I introduced the location keyword on some of them.
Headline.
Description.
Meta Description.
Intro Paragraph.
For this specific project, I needed to use WIX's CMS which lets you import CSV files, my approach was to create a "scramble" of this content, so each page would have a mix of these sections between them. Here is a simple node script that inserts keywords where needed and outputs a CSV file.