Q: I want to come up in Google Maps for other towns around the one I service. Adding these towns to my business’s About on Google+ hasn’t helped much. However, my competitors show up for these towns even thought they have not mentioned the other towns anywhere on their Google+ page. How can I do the same for my business?
A: There are certain factors which determine if a business can show up for a local search. Here are a few of them:
- If your business has a local address in the town in which the search occurs, it will show up in the Google+ local listings. So try to optimize the business listing with the same local address on the Google+ Local listing as on your website.
- Businesses with more reviews tend to do better, especially if your business has been reviewed by people who live in the town you want to optimize for.
- If a business has links from websites referencing not just their “home town” but also nearby towns they will perform better.
- You can create separate landing pages for each town to get shown on adjacent town searches.
For non-competitive searches, Google has very little data to differentiate between businesses and the listings are very random. For competitive searches there is less of this randomness.
It is recommended to work on the bigger factors like the local listing of your business, local optimization of the listing and the website and the business reviews of the listing. You can use AdWords for the nearby towns. Build targeted campaigns for these towns. If the competition is very low, using AdWords can be useful.
