If you are a local business, it’s important to optimize your website for local search. One question that many local business owners have is how they should go about targeting more than one city or location. Even if your business is located in City A, you also want to attract searchers that may be searching using the surrounding cities or areas of City B, City C, and City D. It’s possible to target more than one location without being spammy.

If you’ve had a website up and running for at least a year and have access to analytics, the first step is to take a look at where people are primarily searching from that land on your website. Take a look at the top 3 location results. Do they make sense? If they are very close to where you are located, those locations would be good to target. If your business is located in a small city or town it’s likely that that city or town might not even appear in the top 3 location results. Because it is where you are actually physically located, it should still be included on the site within the content and in meta information.

For the homepage, you will want to target the number one location. In most cases, you will find that it is the largest or most populated city in your general area. However, you need to be truthful. Don’t say that you are located in that city if you aren’t. Instead, use phrases like “servicing City B”, “located near City B”, or “close to City B”. You never want to be deceptive. If you lead website visitors to believe that you live in one city, and then they search for the location and find that you are in another city it can be frustrating. Always target your actual physical location on the “About” or “Contact” pages.

It’s important to only choose up to 4 locations to target on the homepage and other internal pages of the website, and only one or two locations per page. Don’t use spammy tactics like including a list of 40 cities that you target on the homepage, or creating a different page of content for every city. You can target other cities or towns using other marketing methods including PPC advertising, but it’s important to keep your website and SEO more focused.