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