Local SEO (Location Question)

I've been reading up on local SEO in my free time lately as I'm not really that much into it, so my question is pretty noob.

I'm under the impression that having your business within the city you're trying to rank for is fairly affluent in your local rankings, but is it possible to rank for local keywords outside the city?

For example, lets say I want to rank for the keyword "best plumber flushing" or something, but my business is located in a different city.

Basically, what I'm asking is, how difficult would it be to rank for local keywords outside your business' city?

I think there are some missing details here.
1) If it's a different city, is that city in a different state? Can you try to rank it for the country or state and not globally?
2) How many keywords are you trying to rank? any of those keywords are relevant to the place you are trying to rank in?
3) If you are offering services in that city you are trying to rank in, even if your business is not physically there and the keyword competition is low, you can rank. Or at least, this is what I think.

Maybe I'm wrong. Good luck.

It is difficult or nearly impossible if there's a lot of competition, that is if you're talking about maps rankings. If Google is lacking businesses to put in the 7 box they will start pulling from nearby areas.

But for organic, anything is possible.

Andrew Scherer said:

It is difficult or nearly impossible if there's a lot of competition, that is if you're talking about maps rankings. If Google is lacking businesses to put in the 7 box they will start pulling from nearby areas.

But for organic, anything is possible.

Click to expand...

Thanks, this kind of cleared it up a bit

I'll send you a PM later by the way, I'm curious about your citation service . I hear good things about it, and I think it would help out a lot. I'm drafting really basic marketing plan for a potential client at the moment, but I'm not 100% about the local SEO aspect of it.

PandaDomo said:

Thanks, this kind of cleared it up a bit

I'll send you a PM later by the way, I'm curious about your citation service . I hear good things about it, and I think it would help out a lot. I'm drafting really basic marketing plan for a potential client at the moment, but I'm not 100% about the local SEO aspect of it.

Click to expand...

OK thanks - hit me up if you need any help..

Also my skype is andrewdscherer

You can rank in every single county and town in a given state just by populating a site with hundreds of geo-targeted pages.

Then all you do is silo the site like: locations>county>town

My top competitor right now ranks for roughly 450 different municipalities in our state. Towns, townships, cities, boroughs, counties, etc.

So I copied his overall strategy by filling out my site with tons of geotargeted content. And 1 "unique" thing I notice this guy did was he did geo-targeted anchor text for EVERY location in our state. So if you look at his backlinks you see anchortext like

xxxservice xxxtown xxxstate
xxxservice xxxtown1 xxxstate
xxxservice xxxtown2 xxxstate
xxxservice xxxtown3 xxxstate

Over and over and over he's got hundreds of backlinks with anchor text like this that point directly to his homepage.

And he doesn't have 1 backlink on any of his geo-targeted pages.

But if you type in virtually any town in our state, his site pops right up #1.

The guy must have found one of the best SEOs in the world cause his site outranks franchises and is nearly impossible to outrank. I outranked him at one point for 9 months till my link suppliers network got wiped out and my site dropped off page 1. But no we're slowly trying to outrank this fucker again.

Here's another weird thing I've noticed about sites like this. I'm talking about local sites that have pages for every single region in their state. True local authority sites.

These types of local authority sites don't just rank locally..... they rank NATIONALLY.

Like one of my main sites. Even though my goal was to dominate our entire state and rank locally (we don't do any work out of state).... our site now ranks NATIONALLY on the bottom of page 1. Google is crazy like this. These aren't our keywords but just imagine you were trying to rank for, "home improvement new york" or "home improvement nyc". Then people were searching those keywords and finding you in the local pack in New York. But ORGANICALLY your site still ranks on page 2 for those keywords. HOWEVER, in California, Florida or other states, if people just type in the more competitive phrase "home improvement" they see your site on page 1 and call.

It's not bad SEO on our part it's just Google being a complete fucking mess. WHY would you rank a business organically on page 2 for the term "home improvement nyc", but THEN you rank them #8 on page 1 for the far more competitive term "home improvement"? It's like Google is literally telling us, "you're good enough to rank in the local pack and you're good enough to rank >>>NATIONALLY.... but you're NOT good enough to rank organically for your own fuckin state". LOL.

/end rant

I don't target different city, I only target the local country... !

If you have different offices in different cities of a same business then this is easier to rank in different cities via local listening.