If you operate a service area business (SAB), you’ve likely encountered challenges with local SEO. Unlike typical brick-and-mortar businesses, SABs often struggle to find comprehensive SEO services that have the know-how to secure local search visibility. Rocks Digital is different. We have years of experience helping businesses without physical locations reach their target local audiences. So what are the essential techniques we use to help companies stand out in local search?
Top SEO Techniques for Service Area Businesses
SABs differ from many local businesses in that they don’t have a physical location for customers to visit. Such SABs will either come to the customer’s location (in the case of plumbers, gardeners, cleaners, pest control and so on) or operate exclusively online. The latter encompasses consultants, virtual tutors, writing services, etc. While the SEO approach for businesses with and without locations certainly shares similarities, service area businesses absolutely require a modified focus.
Optimize the Website for Your Main Geographic Area
Incorporate local keywords and content into your website to highlight the areas your businesses cover. If you’re short of ideas, our ways to find SEO-focused content for your website could help. The strategic use of local keywords in tags and content can optimize the site for the specific locations you hope to attract clients from.
Optimize and Maintain a Google Business Profile
From the categories to Google Posts, a Google Business Profile (GBP) has numerous ways to optimize the listing. The ability to add up to 20 service areas, including city names, ZIP codes and more is an essential feature for SABs. The boundaries for the overall area should remain within a two-hour drive of your company base.
Create a Bing Places Listing
A Bing Places for Business listing offers many features similar to a GBP. You can even sync with a GBP to maintain consistent data across each platform. Bing lets a business put up offers, which can be focused on different cities.
Build City Pages
City pages are effectively individual landing pages that are highly optimized for a local city. To increase the possibility of ranking for city-based searches, make sure to create unique content for each individual city page, and feature the location name and main services as keywords. At Rocks Digital, we create city pages for our business. Here is an example of one of those pages.
Get Customer Reviews
Reviews are crucial for local SEO, and particularly important for an SAB. It’s important to get reviews from customers in the cities you target. If customers include a primary keyword and their location in the review, it can boost search visibility significantly. Also, remember to respond to both positive and negative reviews.
Track Your Rankings
Tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics will help you monitor rankings so you can prioritize pages that deliver locally relevant, converting traffic.
Because SEMRUSH will let you see how your business ranks for different cities, employing it can also be helpful.
Submit to Local Business Directories
Local citations from platforms that don’t require an address contribute significantly to local SEO for SABs. Focus on high-quality directories with category options and the ability to add a keyword-rich description. Using a listing management platform that allows you to also add cities is always a plus.
Use Paid Ads
Google Ads help a business appear at the top of search results for specific services in a particular area. And when you’re competing with businesses with physical locations in Google Maps, this can be quite valuable.
Create Location-Relevant Content
Plan to weave locally-relevant references into blog posts, case studies, Google Posts and other places where it makes sense. With the help of content writing services for local SEO, you can target the right keywords while also delivering engaging content for local audiences.
Get Expert Assistance With Local SEO for Service Area Businesses
If you operate a service area business and need to increase search visibility, Rocks Digital can help. We offer expert SEO services to improve rankings and secure more customers. For assistance, call (214) 989-7549 or request a website evaluation today.
