Not appear in the local search results for searches in the city?

Problem

This case study is about a local cab company in a fairly competitive market. With a population of 200,000, about 60 million tourists in the metropolitan area, and two international airports within a 30-mile radius.

The client came to me with a pretty good organic ranking for location-based searches. However, the website did not appear in the local search results for searches in the city. That’s a problem for a cab company that operates primarily in one city.

Solution

After analyzing the site, its current organic positions and local pack positions (outside the city radius), I decided on the following approach.

1. Work on site
2. guides for the site in the city
3. guides for airports
4. Change the NAP

1. On-site work
   The site was working organically quite well, but some fine-tuning was needed.

• number in
• City on the site / services.
• Restructuring of the top navigation line so that the services are at the very beginning, especially when viewed on mobile.
• Structured data on the service area with geoMidpoint in the city centre and geoRadius, which corresponds to the radius of the Google Business Listing.

2. guides for the site in the city

As mentioned earlier, I wanted this company to rank organically for all sorts of searches in the city. Things like train station cabs, cab ranks, parking, wheelchair accessible parking, restaurant parking, hotel parking, literally anyone traveling to the city by car, bus or train could organically find a cab in the area. they did not show up in local search results for these searches within the city. Content and guides included written content, we created downloadable Google maps (the guide to cab stands has been viewed 170,000 times), and we used video content from dashcams in cabs with tips on shortcuts around the city.

3. guides for airports.

Although not located in the city, there are two international airports nearby and with 60 million tourists a year, airport transfers are very profitable. The airport transfer sites needed just a little more relevant airport content to push them into the local top spot, which this time did not depend on the fact that they were in the city itself. Also, users usually book in advance and have time to get quotes and shop around, so it’s not as time-consuming as a normal cab call.

Guides for these sites include (for both airport locations): main guide to the airport, maps to all terminal parking (drop-off / pick-up), short and long term parking, and detailed information for users wishing to arrive by train.
We also included companies that offer long-term parking at the airport and emailed them or tagged them on social media when they were live on site. Never miss an opportunity to share or link.

4. Change the NAP

This was a very special situation because we wanted to change all the address information. This business, although 2.5 miles from the city center, is located at the southern end of the city and about 50 yards from the border where a new district begins.

So I corrected the PIN marker to the back of the building, moving the location to a parallel road that does not go into the next county (for US readers: state). Playing with the PIN marker is only possible with a service area business and still within the guidelines, since it was on the back of the building anyway, so on a different street.

The part I wanted to remove from the address was the Area: Street Address, Suburb, & City, because that street in that area was at the end of that district and the beginning of a new district (state).

Fortunately, this company had not fallen into the trap of creating hundreds of miserable directory links, but had used only the major aggregators, so within a few days all addresses reflected the address change without the suburb.

We then put all of these changes into a blog on the website, along with posts on G+. After making these changes, the company showed up in the Local Pack for almost all major searches within the city itself.