Local SEO for Service Area Businesses: Optimizing Your Reach

Enhancing online visibility and driving local traffic are two primary SEO issues that local-oriented companies face as obstacles to their financial success. For service area businesses, these bottlenecks are even more serious because of their nature and the specifics of their functioning.

The article explains what a service area business means, discloses the importance of SEO for a service-based business, provides valuable tips to build a local SEO content strategy for such enterprises, and outlines major challenges and opportunities related to local SEO for a service area business.

What Is a Service Area Business?

The two main characteristics of an organization that let it qualify as a service area business (SAB) are the absence of a brick-and-mortar storefront and the delivery of services at the customer’s location, either a residential home or a commercial establishment. Typically, they serve a certain area (hence the name) and don’t feature in business listings where physical locations with office hours are mandatory.

Service area business examples include plumbers, electricians, house and window cleaning workers, home repair companies, HVAC technicians, roofers, locksmiths, landscapers, garage door contractors, mobile pet groomers, pest control specialists, and others. Some of them may have a physical headquarters (being, in fact, hybrid businesses), but they still travel to their clients to provide their services. For both kinds of organizations, local SEO of their digital footprint is vital.

The Importance of Local SEO for SABs Made Plain

It is true that hybrid companies with a geographical address find service business area SEO somewhat simpler. However, SEO for service businesses with no physical location can become a challenging endeavor in building a strong online presence and local visibility of your organization. Why? There are two fundamental reasons.

First of all, until recently, citation sites didn’t include a company in their business listings unless it had a publishable address. Thus, SABs largely remained non-existent for search engines engaged in site ranking and responding to customer queries. Naturally, such a situation required unconventional local SEO efforts from SABs.

Fortunately, this “no address, no listings” approach has been undergoing a U-turn recently. For instance, Google Business Profile allows no-storefront enterprises to register there, and you can set the toggle of its “show business address to customers” option the way you want. However, many listing sites still adhere to old-school guidelines, so while planning your B2C or B2B local SEO strategies, you should bear this in mind.

Second, the absence of a physical address excludes SABs from the “near me” search and from appearing on 3-Pack results sought by 93% of consumers. And since local search is what 82% of mobile users prefer, your web visibility is in trouble.

Service area businesses can offset these negative factors by implementing effective local SEO steps.

Zooming in on Key Local SEO Strategies for SABs

Based on our experience in local SEO projects, we recommend the following practical measures that boost the online visibility of service area businesses.

Fill out Google Business Profile (GBP)

Without establishing a footprint on this platform, you can’t hope to hit it big. It has a dedicated “service business area” option, allowing you to select up to 20 areas to cover with your service. You should carefully define an area’s boundary (not more than a two-hour drive from where you operate) and choose your service category.

Since a SAB has no physical address to post, you should provide all other contact information (business name, phone number, website, social media links) as well as other job-related details (working hours, accessibility, payment options, supported languages, and the like) to help your potential customer receive a complete picture of your company.

Add images

People like photos. They not only build customer trust but also tell more about you and your business than lots of words. The pictures you upload should showcase your popular services, display the results of your projects, give behind-the-scenes glimpses of your workflows, and let customers meet your managers and employees. Make sure at least three appealing and eye-catching exterior photos and as many interior ones are uploaded to your GBP.

Leverage local on-page optimization

On your site, you should have landing pages streamlined for local search. To do that, you should fill meta titles, headings, and descriptions with local keywords and topics, embed a Google map of the service zone, and create area-specific content. The latter means including landmarks in the vicinity, discussing news and community initiatives in the area, posting local testimonials and case studies, giving details about local team members and clients, you name it.

It goes without saying that such content should be posted regularly, constantly updated, and replenished, not only on the site but also on social media, GPB, or email newsletters.

Engage with local communities

You should develop strong offline and online ties with local communities. The first is achieved through sponsoring local events, participating in community projects and forums, partnering with complementary enterprises, and cooperating with regional influencers. The second is the outcome of the first: By becoming an integral part of community life, you place locally relevant links to other resources and earn backlinks to your site, thus enhancing your local SEO.

Prompt for reviews

According to statistics, 75% of people looking for a local enterprise read reviews on their sites. To increase the efficiency of this source of attracting customers from your service area, you should prioritize feedback concerning local issues and from local clientele.

Gauge success via localized analytics

While using Google Analytics to assess your digital performance, you should monitor not only overall indices of landing pages, website traffic, user behavior, and conversions. Segment the results by region and utilize rank tracking tools to follow local metrics, understand your strengths, and, more importantly, find problem zones to take remedial actions.

Local SEO Challenges and Opportunities for SABs to Consider

Let’s summarize the good and the bad of local SEO for service area businesses.

To maximize fortes and handle local SEO challenges, you should hire a competent partner in this domain. Livepage’s seasoned experts can help develop a custom service area business SEO strategy tailored to suit its requirements and specifics to a tee. Drop us a line to elevate your local SEO efforts to a new level.

Conclusion

Service area businesses are companies and individuals (electricians, technicians, landscapers, cleaning specialists, etc.) that come to customers’ homes or commercial premises to deliver their services to clients across a certain area and don’t have a physical storefront from which they operate. The absence of a brick-and-mortar headquarters creates specific challenges for SEO efforts undertaken by SABs to make their online presence visible to the communities they serve.

Efficient local SEO strategies for SABs capable of bringing long-term success include creating and maintaining a Google Business Profile account, filling the company’s digital footprint with localized images and area-focused content, building online and offline rapport with local communities, placing and responding to clients’ reviews, and monitoring local digital performance metrics. Implementation of these steps should be delegated to vetted professionals in the field.