Use Local SEO to Claim Your Service Area
admin | Sep 5, 2012
Recently, I was tasked with finding the best prices on Porta-Potties. Don’t ask. Since I don’t rent a portable toilet every day, I didn’t have a vendor in mind or have anyone on speed dial. Naturally, I turned to Google, searching for “porta potty rental Manheim, PA” hoping to find a quick solution. What I found was interesting and disturbing. Larger out-of-the-area companies were dominating local, organic search. The only presence that any local company had was through paid search. #fail
Companies with large SEO budgets are aggressively building websites with pages for your town. In this case, I found websites with a page for “porta potty rental in Manheim, PA” along with other pages for other towns. But here’s the thing, the information on them was useless to me. Now, as motivated as I was to be done with this search for a porta potty in Manheim, you would think a page written specifically about porta potties would be at least mildly interesting. Wrong. These pages were written for the sole purpose of getting indexed on Google. I’m sure that an SEO company is touting how much traffic the site is now drawing, and I added one more click to their bragging rights. The problem is, since the content is blatantly useless, I’m not going to convert (call and hire them). What I will do is continue searching for a real company with information written for humans (not search engines) that convinces me to call or email.
But the real eye-opener is that the local companies in my area have allowed their equivalent of “big box” competitors to invade their service area by failing to do good local optimization. When I eventually found some local porta potty companies, I saw a sad void of best practices for local optimization. It was obvious that these businesses (or an SEO company they hired) were attempting to implement some location based SEO tactics, but weren’t on top of local optimization. For example, I found my town on an area porta potty company website (when I eventually found the website), but the phone number in the footer was an 800 number, not their local number.
Local businesses need to take advantage of their actual location, which is not something most SEO companies focus on or that most DIY Internet marketers have the knowledge or expertise to do. Search engines readily give locally optimized businesses a free ride to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), and that’s without a huge SEO budget. It may be the best ROI a local company, or a large business with specific service/retail locations, with a marketing budget can achieve today. Localized businesses need to claim their territories, or be prepared for the digital equivalent of a big box store moving in and stealing valuable leads.