My question is location. My seo troubles seem to be location. Depending where I am, my google rank changes based on general keywords. My seo performs well on location specific searches, but not broader terms. How do reach other nearby cities with general keywords? Do I need to create pages for each city? Specify region? Thanks for your thoughts! DG

Michaela Fowler: Specific rankings for highly searched phrases are elusive for many reasons and Google is continually changing them. It takes a lot of time, effort and leverage to get consistent rankings. Yet its just as important, or more important, to realize that cumulatively, more people search based on more refined phrases these days, than they do for a single, shorter phrase. So its not easy to fully understand the dynamic involved, or how to win within a given niche. If you dont have a physical brick-and-mortar type presence in each location, the only way to truly win with geo-specific visibility where someone is not using that geographic moderator in their search phrase, is to build enough content, supplemented with strong internal links and inbound links, specific to each geographic area you want to gain visibility in. That content needs to be natural though. Just making up nonsense content, or repetitive content that only swaps out location words, is not sustainable. What reason do you want to be found in those locations? Has work been performed by the company in those locations? If so, thats a potential gold mine for valid content to be created. Are there clients or customers in those locations who can provide unique reviews for the work done in those locations? Thats also valid, very helpful content. Do you have data specific to the industry the site is in, where that data is specific to various locations you want ranking for? If so, that data, when written about uniquely, with high entertainment or educational focus, is also valid as more content opportunities.Except you need, at all costs, to avoid spam-like content organization or structure. So you shouldnt, for example, have one page for each location, where each page shares the same keyword phrases but only has the location as different. That gets stupid, fast, on scale. Instead, one way to go is a Locations Served section of the site, and where each location served gets one or more pages devoted to it, where the content types I list above, are placed on that page or on those pages for that location. This is as much an art form as it is science. All that you do needs to make sense to human visitors, not cause them to think its junk or repetitive and insulting to their intelligence. That new content needs to be evaluated by them as being helpful.

Vivienne Cummings: Watch how your business is defined in Google My Business. Service Area businesses may be subject to a smaller ‘centroid’ or area of relevance. Fortunately, those profile entires are editable.