Whether you’re a plumber, a landscaper, or a local restaurant, optimizing your website for local search is crucial. In today’s Tech News Tuesday episode, we’re talking about some powerful SEO tips that can help both service area businesses and brick-and-mortar businesses increase local visibility and drive more traffic.
While most local SEO strategies are similar, some of the SEO strategies for service area businesses are different from brick-and-mortar establishments. Here’s how to tailor your approach and maximize results.
Service Area SEO
Service area businesses are businesses like landscapers, mobile mechanics, and cleaning services that serve customers within a specific geographic area, but don’t have a physical storefront for customers to visit. If this is you, your website needs to focus on your service areas. Depending on how large your service area is, you may want to create dedicated pages for each city you serve, providing relevant local information that resonates with people searching for your services.
Service area businesses want to focus on the specific areas they cater to.
Things like a clear service area page structure are important for these types of businesses. You should have pages for each city or neighborhood you serve, with all the relevant details like business hours, contact info, third-party reviews, and even featured articles that make your page stand out. For example, if you’re offering landscaping in Collegeville, you want that page to be highly specific to Collegeville—using keywords like “landscaping services in Collegeville” and providing information that speaks directly to the local customer.
You should have pages for each city or neighborhood you serve, with all the relevant details like business hours, contact info, third-party reviews, and even featured articles.
Warning: Don’t just duplicate the same content on all of these pages as Google may penalize you for duplicate content and not index all of the pages.
Brick and Mortar SEO
For businesses like retail stores or restaurants, the focus is on driving foot traffic to your physical location. For these businesses, creating unique pages for each location is a key strategy. Each page should highlight the location’s NAP information — name, address, and phone number — along with hours, product offerings, photos, and customer reviews.
Think of it as your virtual storefront. Help customers feel familiar with your space before they visit.
Even if you only have one location, it’s still a good idea to have a dedicated page for that location. Think of it as your virtual storefront. You can add details like photos of your shop, staff bios, and anything else that helps customers feel familiar with your space before they visit.
Just like with service area businesses, you want to think about your store’s radius. Customers might not want to drive more than a certain distance to visit your business. But if you optimize for nearby areas, like “women’s boutique near Philadelphia,” you can expand your reach to customers who are just a short drive away.
Schema Markup
For both service-area and brick and mortar businesses, if you want Google to really understand your business and where it’s located, schema markup is a must. It’s like telling Google exactly what you do and where you do it, in a way that’s easy for them to read. And the cool part? There are schema generators online and you can even use ChatGPT to help generate that schema markup and get it right every time.
Schema mark up tells Google exactly what you do and where you do it.
Google Business Profile
Let’s not forget one of the most important aspects for both service area and brick-and-mortar businesses: your Google Business Profile. Whether you’re a service area business or a local store, your Google Business Profile is a huge part of local SEO. Make sure you have all the key info filled out—your category, business hours, photos, and of course, customer reviews.
One of the most important aspects for both service area and brick-and-mortar businesses is your Google Business Profile.
The more active you are on your Google profile, the more likely it is that your business will show up in local searches and even in the coveted map “three-pack.”
The bottom line is this: whether you’re a service-area business or a brick-and-mortar store, local SEO is all about connecting with your community. Tailoring your website, content, and Google listing to your specific location ensures that when potential customers are searching, you’re the business they find.
Do you prefer to listen in? Here’s our podcast:
Links in this episode: Top SEO tips for location-specific websites
