#add another to my list of unrealistic transition goals

[bobby-the-queer-artist]

I think peak gender euphoria for me would be to look like morten harket because I mean. LOOK AT HIM. WHEN IS IT MY TURN.

i look like this in my heart

[normal-thoughts-official]

i'm not trans but i want to write trans magnus, what are ig the dos and don'ts? (only if you dont mind <3)

i don't mind! happy to reply to those. altho i'll be real, there's a lot of stuff, so it's a bit hard, which is why i'd say that my first tip is to have a sensitivity reader (even better if it's multiple). i even offer to do that, more trans magnus content is what i want! so i'd tell you to consider that

i'm going to make a list, but i ask you that first of all, you try to understand the reasons why i'm saying what i'm saying (i'm trying to outline them as clearly as possible) instead of just taking it as a checklist of what you're supposed to write or not. the most important thing is that you understand why certain things are/can be harmful, and approach them accordingly. there is rarely ever going to be a rule like "EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU DO THIS THAT'S TRANSPHOBIC". it depends a lot on the story and how you do it

(sidenote: of course there are things that ARE always transphobic, like using men in dresses as the butt of a joke. but that's not the case for most things, and I hope this kind of very obviously transphobic trope is already understood to not be a good thing doiajdsoija)

other than that, i think the first things that come to mind are the following (i'll try to have more do's than don't's cuz i feel like giving you a path to follow is more helpful than paths NOT to):

DO research about transphobic tropes in media and make sure you understand why they are harmful. that's a great way to avoid the most glaringly obvious Bad Takes™

DO try to understand your character's identity as much as you can. are they a trans man/woman? are they nonbinary? if they are nonbinary, what do they identify with? you don't have to have a fully fleshed out identity, but at least know whether they lean more towards neutral, fluid, multiple gendered, outside of the gender binary, etc. if you want a culturally specific gender, KNOW WHICH ONE. have details. and do your research on that. i don't recommend doing that if you don't know exactly what you're talking about

DO try to incorporate the character being trans into your understanding of their backstory. did they have help from their community? what was that like? how did that influence other parts of their story? when did they realize and when did they come out? being trans is going to have an impact on a person's story, so the more you know about that, the more you can build a character that feels real, not a cis person with "trans" slapped on their forehead

however, DON'T have their entire backstory and life be about them being trans. that's not how it works with anyone. you want to understand how being trans intersects with their life, not reduce everything about them to being trans. your goal here should be to incorporate the aspects that are related to that person being trans and the ones that are not into one thing that feels cohesive, because that how it works

DO wait until it's pertinent to mention the fact that your character is trans. it's kind of *sigh* when the fic starts like "Magnus Bane (who is trans) was buying groceries". that feels like what i just mentioned in the last don't: everything revolves around him being trans. you don't want that. if it only comes up halfway through the fic, then it only comes up halfway through the fic. i actually think that's kinda rad because it really normalizes a character being trans, but it all depends on what the rest of the story is like

DO approach their transness like any other element in the story. if it's a light-hearted story, you don't have to approach their transness from an angsty perspective. that doesn't even necessarily mean u can't approach transphobia as a topic, but it's just weird when the whole fic is happy and upbeat and then suddenly there's an on-screen transphobic microaggression and the person is very sad, and then back to upbeat. if you really want to broach this topic on your light-hearted fic, you can do it in ways such as "*flops down on the couch* god, i'm exhausted. some asshat tried to pick up a fight with me today" you know? again, i'm not saying "don't talk about X or Y subject", you just don't want the tone to be completely different from the rest of your story. it feels not only like his transness is out of place (which alienates the reader) but also like just... bad writing, i guess you don't have to take that as an absolute rule, just... as with anything else you're writing, make sure that it fits the story you're telling. if it's gonna have a different tone when u mention something, know why and how you want to do it

DON'T feel obligated to approach every aspect of their identity/backstory/everything they face as a trans person. it's good that you, the author, know it, so you can even know what is or isn't important to mention. but you don't have to give the reader a whole exposé on his transness. approach what's relevant

DO include them making jokes, puns about being trans, having other trans friends, etc. it just feels more real and we do all that all the time. it's just unrealistic for a trans person to hear the word "transparent" and not crack a joke (with people they feel safe with, of course)

when you do mention them being trans, please DON'T treat it like a big deal. when the whole narrative stops so you can mention that a character is trans, it just feels like their transness is a spectacle for a cis reader. similarly, if the reader can tell that their reaction is supposed to be like "*gasp!*" it just feels like trans people aren't supposed to be seen as normal. i'm talking specifically about how the narrative treats it here, not necessarily what happens in the story. you could have a scene where the character comes out, for example, and then of course this is going to be a big deal for them. but there's that, and then there is "magnus bane put on his binder. that's right, hE IS TRANS!". a trope i wouldn't call harmful but that i particularly hate and turns me immediatelly off any story, particularly, is the thing where the character is like "I put on my binder, getting ready for school. I am trans, and anyone who has a problem with it can fight me". no one thinks about how they are trans every time they do anything that's related to their transition. that'd be exhausting. you don't brush your teeth and are like "that's right. MY TEETH NEED CLEANING! i want to avoid caries, because i am human and that might happen"

DO try to think of every element of how they express their transness in relation to that character. you don't have to outline the reasons in the story (that'd be exhausting) but don't just go "well, magnus is trans, therefore he wears a binder and a packer, wants surgery, and [list of Transmasculine Traits™]". WOULD magnus want a binder? WOULD he want a packer? remember that those things are all choices, not a checklist that determine whether or not you're trans. each trans person is an individual, and thus each trans person's relationship with their transness and how they express it is different. so treat your character as such

DON'T make him being trans something that is only used for sad things!!!!!! again, i'm not saying "you can't approach transphobia", but if him being trans only comes up when it's to bring Bad Things His Way, it just feels like being trans = bad for you. know what i mean? try to mention it in neutral or positive ways more than you do in negative ways. a few things that i think are positive: you get to choose your own name, you get to rethink every bit of how you want to express yourself instead of just following a script, you get a lot of friends who Get It, you have the jokes about all the guys named Skylar, the flag is cute, transitioning feels so good! every new thing is a discovery. coming out as trans and transitioning is very liberating, it feels like you are so much more real. sex feels a lot less like a scripted ordeal when you have a completely different relationship with your body, i feel like trans ppl naturally communicate a lot more about sex and explore a lot more of different ways to touch their bodies even when they don't necessarily have genital dysphoria. the puns and jokes are also a nice bonus. the slang is so fucking funny. you learn a lot about your body and hormones and the such just from having friends who hormonize and looked up every detail. as for neutral things, just being like "magnus put on his binder" is a neutral thing. it's just a part of his life! when you only remember that a character is trans because they are going through violence, it just makes people scared of being trans

and i guess those are the most important pointers? just, don't make trans identity a whump thing and remember that not every trans person is the same, build that character just like you do any other. if anyone wants to add more stuff, feel free to! i have a tendency to forget to mention or explain certain things (like "don't make trans ppl the butt of a joke") because to me they are obvious and i forget that they aren't obvious outside of trans circles. i have very few cis friends (that's something that makes a difference too) so ya know. diajsda

another tip i think can be helpful is, if you're uncertain whether or not something sounds natural, try to imagine that instead of talking about a trans character, you're talking about a person who wants to be a mechanic. when you're building a character who wants to be a mechanic, that can be part of a super angsty backstory about how they lost their parents in a car crash due to a car malfuction... or not. it can have relevance to a certain point of the story, or not. it can fit naturally into this part, or it can feel like you just really want the reader to know that the person wants to be a mechanic. it can be integral to the plot, or it can be just another thing about that character. you know? that sounds kinda lame, but i think it's a good way to try to think about what you're writing without all the pre-conceptions and pressure not to Fuck Up Your Representation. idk, something to try out and consider whether or not works for you

if you have any questions, let me know! and ask other trans ppl about their perspectives too, i'm just one person. if you want a sensitivity reader, i'd really be super happy to help :) just DM me, or whatever you feel more comfortable with

[tarot28]

MANIFESTATION, GOALS, INTENTIONS AND GRATITUDE AND MOREEEEEE

This is my guide to how I do my daily self work to bring some joy and happiness and better things closer to me.  Everything I do listed below is written down in the same place - a generic leftover half used spiral notebook next to my bed.  

I have a little anxiety and uncertainty and a little moop (a word for when you’ve got sad mood that’s kinda blah but it doesn’t have as quite of a severe connotation as depression does imo) when it comes thinking about the future.  To get super real for a second here, it can be so so bleak sometime to look ahead and look at where I am now and where I could be like if only if only.  Coming out of an unhealthy and toxic relationship and being on the mend from that also has me looking for ways of actively reviving my worth and my joy and I’m glad to report that what I’ve outline below has helped me personally and by sharing, I hope I can help others :) :)

Also just as a note: I use the Universe instead of God, Goddess, Spirit, etc bc that’s my preference.  Mentally sub that for whatever works for you <3

Contents: sorry this is a hella long post but here’s the break down - Manifestation (what I used to do) - Goals (what I do/how I altered manifestation to make it work for me) - Intentions (goals are long term, but here’s the daily) - Gratitude (how it puts things into perspective) - Meditation (an on and off again relationship/the one that always gets away) - How the fuck do I fit all this into my daily routine ?

Manifestation: So when I first started this routine I used kinda generic manifestation and threw literally everything I wanted at the Universe like here this is what I want and it’s your problem now.  That’s the idea I got from the very minimal reading I did on manifestation and law of attraction type shtuff.  I reallllllly hesitate to call what I currently do manifestation but it’s like a cousin and is closer to setting goals.  I’m not going to go into manifestation further but the “manifestation work” I do is like everything written here collectively.

Goals: This is the branching out I did for manifestation.  It’s more accessible language too.  A goal is something I want and it’s something attainable.  Transitioning from manifestation to goals was kinda necessary to me because when I was doing manifestation was me throwing every tiny little want and need at the Universe.  Goals was that but with filters and then elaboration.  I went from asking for like 8 or 10 things that would change often to asking for 3 consistently.

Here’s a working example.  One of my old “manifestation” items was “a sense of confidence in my body.”  Let’s pull this apart a bit.  This isn’t a bad thing to ask for at all; it’s definitely something that can happen.  But like does the Universe really need to bestow that onto me or is that something I could do on my own.  It’s too specific and exclusive as well.  The perception of my own physical health comes from my personal relationship with myself, mentally and emotionally.  My body confidence won’t change unless I work at how I talk to myself or unless I start to praise my own appearance.  

I use a different, but related version of this older item currently in my goal statements that aims to “improve the relationship I have with myself for myself through positive self talk, self care, and recognizing the joy that comes through exploring my relationship with myself.”  This is longer, but it’s bigger picture.  It encompasses mental, physical, and emotional health.  It also emphasizes my part in it, which was the biggest issue I had with what I was calling “manifestation.”  I think it’s ok to ask for things, but personally asking and waiting passively for something to drop into your lap just on the merits of asking for it felt unrealistic.  I think my biggest personal distinction between goals and manifestation was introducing accountability, thus empowering myself to make the changes in my life that I wanted to see.

Intentions In addition to writing my goal statements, I write my intentions.  The goals are more specific to the season or a couple month to a year long period, whereas the intentions are a couple of ways I want my day to go.  Again, this is kinda me empowering myself to take action and decide how my day will unfold.  It’s just a couple of brief statements about things I want to happen, but less of a tangible to do list and more like what’s the vibe today boysss

So for example on a to do list I had this week: chem for mon, wed, fri, bio lecture notes from thursday, final revisions on whatever weekly essay it was lmao rip, and then a couple emails.  This was a to do list from Monday and I have work and class and meetings and bathroom break and have to take care of the dogs and make food and eat the food and drink water and maybe squeeze in a workout from 9am to 3:30pm on top of the to do list, which is usually just classwork.  My intention for the day was to “be productive enough to prepare for tomorrow.”  This is a way to say do the bare minimum and feel better about it.  Another intention I had was to “recognize and when I need a break and give myself the rest time I need to be productive.”  Another way of justifying slacking off occaisionally but giving it an elevated purpose through the wording.  It also makes me feel like shameful about not getting everything I planned to do in one day because I carried out my intentions.

Gratitude! This is my absolute favorite part of my routine!  It brings everything home for me and I can really draw attention to all the mundane disguised positivity in my life that might go unnoticed or underappreciated otherwise.  This one is so simple.  I start by writing “I’m grateful:” and then just list whatever comes to mind easily.  

If it’s hard at first, make sure you’re not overthinking.  When I introduced this into my routine I would almost talk myself out of the stupid things, but I think that’s where a lot of my small, daily joy comes from.  Yesterday was cold and rainy and that’s my favorite weather so I wrote “rainy and cold” on my list and I think I put sweatpants on their too.  Don’t overthink it and don’t force it and just start doing it.

Here’s some research for the benefits if you don’t want to listen to me, please listen to the science, more of the science and a little more.  If these links don’t work- sorry but they’re random articles I found from google scholar after searching gratitude journaling.  SO much evidence out there 

Meditation This is my long lost love.  I feel like I never have the time and I’m fighting to put her back into my routine.  It makes me feel great and settles me into my body.  More posts to come if when I get back at it.  If anyone has techniques or guided mediation recommendations omg let me know.  I use a couple podcasts, one is purely guided mediations because they’re like 5 or 10 mins each and I’m short on time a lot.  The other is called nothing much happens and it’s just like bedtime stories about mundane routines and not strict mediation, but I love them.

My daily routine and how I make this work for me and don’t give up: My first rule is that if I’m not in the mood, I simply do NOT.  Like days where shit sucks is different from days where you feel like you’re breaking down and it physically hurts to think about the future or your goals because everything is so hard.  I get that and I treat myself like an adult and know that not doing it one day won’t be an issue as long as I make sure I do it the next day.

In the morning, I think about my schedule.  What is today and what is the best way to approach what I have going on?  What is the best way to direct my energy?  This is intention time :) And then this is where I’m trying to add meditation back in but I really suck at morning time management and I’m trying to use the time to work out before my day gets started.  We’ll see lol I’ll prob add it in at the end of my day to help me get to sleep feeling a little more settled and comfy in my own body and mind.

I try to keep my intentions in mind during the day.  Sometimes it happens, sometimes not.  It’s ok because I did them and I thought about it at least one time during the day for it’s own special, dedicated amount of time.

After I’m completely done for the day, I go what the fuck am I doing on this planet, how can I improve my existence, what do I see happening for myself? Under my intentions, I write my big three goalssss.  Something for my own healthy, something for my career and academics, and something to kinda talk about my meant to be, forever home of person that I’m trying to attract.  Self-career-social kinda triangle of goals.

Under my goals, I zoom in on everything that went great.  The last thing I write down for the day is gratitude so that even if I get a little stressed about not following my intentions too well or not making a lot of progress towards my big picture goals, I can look at today and go I had a great cup of hot chocolate and binged AHS though and I don’t regret it because it made me so happy that I wrote it down.

The end thanks for reading this incredibly long post.  I love these long posts where I can just go on about what I do :) I really hope this helps someone who doesn’t vibe with what they’re seeing in their skimming over of law of attraction and manifestation stuff.  Fuck that and do you.  Sending so much love to y’all <3 L :)

[michaelandy101-blog]

How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

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How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you’re marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you’re marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you’re marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you’re marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they’re shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

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How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[drummcarpentry]

How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[lakelandseo]

How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

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How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[bfxenon]

How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[nutrifami]

How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

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How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

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[kjt-lawyers]

How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[noithatotoaz]

How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.

Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.

Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.

Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.

Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Image Credit: Nacho

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.

It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.

Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.

Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.

Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.

Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

Image credit: Charles Rodstram

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!