Getting country wide rankings is a tough ask for a single website.  Google understands in many cases people are looking for a local provider of services and will favor a small local provider over a National Provider who services all areas.

How to combat this?  Several ways.

1. Build a single website but add lots of local content or –
2. Choose your areas and build a website for each area and SEO each one

In many cases, plan b. is the best plan.  Of course, it’s not without some challenges.  Google’s duplicate content filter has never been more active.  You can’t simply clone your site and launch it in different cities.  You need new content for each site, and not just a little bit of a rewrite – it’s got to be totally fresh and unique with a general local flavor.

We have a new client who we expect will in the next 12 months dominate the Australian marketplace for a variety of accounting and SMSF Auditing services and have already started rolling out the sites to achieve it, they are:-

Accounting Gold Coast Hinterland
SMSF Auditing Gold Coast
SMSF Auditing Brisbane

Within 3 months, we expect these three sites to be in the top 5 for their target searches, and then will be rolling out similar sites across the country.  Sure – it would eb possible to build a single site, target all areas and eventually get rankings locally but we can achieve far more, faster, with a site per location strategy.

Do note, strategy is not really workable for a product based website.  With product based sites, we recommend a single site, with lots of local content.  Two example of sites we have managed that have achieved local rankings using this strategy are

Yoga Tops
Girls Dresses

Update – Both the Gold Coast and Brisbane sites are already top10 ranked within 3 weeks of launch.  Kachow.