How to Rank Beyond Your Location 

Local business owners who invest in SEO usually ask this question: how can I rank beyond my location? It’s one of the most common questions we receive from clients and businesses alike who want to reach a wider audience. It’s common among businesses with multiple branches or locations around the country or abroad.

So should you make a listing for every location? Should you create individual websites for every place? Nope. Here’s what you can do:

Boost the geo-signals of your website

Geo-tagging videos, images, and other content to specific areas you want to rank at is a good start. This will let Google know that your website is somehow related to that location, thus crawling your pages to appear on SERPs on that specific area.

Also, it will help to add testimonials or case studies on the specific area that you want to rank on aside from your physical location.

It will also be great if you can secure reviews on various sites mentioning the location you want to rank in.

Use Google+ Local

You should also consider utilizing Google+ Local. It’s an efficient way to get your business seen on the location where you plan to rank better.

In this platform, you can create a listing using a functioning phone number. For multiple business branches, you’d need a unique phone number for each one you plan to list.

Take note that you should meet the Google listing guidelines for your business to be indexed. Once you got this set, expect better visibility on other locations.

Come up with location-specific pages

For businesses with multiple branches or virtual locations, creating individual pages for each one will actually help a lot. Each one should have a unique URL as well as a category organized per state or area.

Don’t forget to add these pages on your sitemap to make sure that it will be indexed appropriately. Aside from that, pack these pages with geo-related content. You can leverage this on the title tags, page names, description area, outbound links, and more.

Just use a single domain name

As much as we said that you’re supposed to make an individual page for each location you want to rank it, that doesn’t mean you’re creating a website for each. Standalone domains for each location would only make things confusing and disorganized.

What you need to do is to create subdomains under your single domain. That way, Google will associate these pages to your main website. Also, the ranking of your single domain will trickle down to the subdomains.

Perform a comprehensive SEO audit

If you already have these pages and tags in place, a comprehensive SEO audit will help identify the weak points. This will inform you where you’re lacking and what areas you need to focus on.

From there, you may need to create a geo-targeted list of keywords to work on later. This is to boost the geo-signals on your pages while keeping it relevant to your main domain’s content.