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Question on US national ecomm business showing up in local searches
I have a e-commerce business which has a target market across the continental United States. No brick and mortar store, I fulfill orders as a side business from stock I keep at home.
My focus right now is to build organic traffic to my site. I do blogging and get traffic but was curious if I should pursue an idea or not.
Essentially I have 6 core products. I have distinct content geared for top cities across the United States(mostly by population so NYC, LA, Houston etc).
I see attainable traffic in my niche(dating activities), ie date ideas near whatever city which I was hoping to product my products to as an option.
Because I am not physically in those cities, would this be something Google would potentially frown on? Or is this something thats not even worth the effort?
Thanks!
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1 Reply
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If you set up Google business profile listings or do anything like add location pages to your site then you’ll kill your rankings for at a national level.
I’ve tested this over and over again.
I even had a “national” client, who sells tickets to events in every state, set up a gbp listing, as he is near Chicago. Once he set that up, he no longer was ranking for national phases “nationally”. For example, he was ranking for “Taylor swift tickets” if you were in Florida or if you searched from California. But once the gbp listing was added, he only ranked for “Taylor swift tickets” if you were in the Chicago area, where his gbp listing said he was. He literally killed his rankings overnight. We removed the gnp listing and rankings came back.
There is a really big “local” component to rankings. Let’s say there is a realtor in Dallas. If you search for “realtors”, Google will show you realtors in Dallas if you’re searching from Dallas. Makes sense.
If you were to introduce a “local” component to your business and your site then Google will see those locations and rank you accordingly. You won’t rank nationally.
So you need to decide if you want to go the local route or not. There are benefits to it, as there may be less competition in certain cities and locations, so id you add those cities then it kay be easier to rank. But keep in mind that that might be a lot less traffic to your site than ranking nationally.
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If you are targeting 6 main markets, what is preventing you from serving those over 6 different domains, each targeted at a single market? This is really for my own curiosity as I have recently been through a similar exercise myself.
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