So I am not trying to please Google, I am trying to please visitors first, yet I have to be found to please the visitors.
So my site is a local Colorado construction website. We build horse barns, pole barns and riding arenas.
We service the entire state of Colorado, but that’s it.
I have Google + local and Business listings. I have tried to enter NAT in as many citation directories for my region.
But here is my problems:
So I see some of my sites competition going for general keywords. They service the whole USA, so there title tags say like - pole barns, hors barns, metal buildings | Brand Name
This works I guess because they are #1.
I understand that there are MANY factors that go into search results. They have 1000’s of backlinks, and such. Maybe a local listing cannot beat a nationwide listing because they have such a strong following.
So my question is:
When you are a brick and mortar company serving a state region, do you add that state name to title tags? Meta Descriptions? Or does Google know where you live when you search, so it does not matter?
As far as I understand it, for local search, Google uses the information you provide in your Places for Business listing to determine your location. (A local Guest House owner complained to me that she wasn’t showing up in local search results, although she’d set up a Places listing. When I looked more closely, she was showing up in search results for the nearest postal town, but not for the village in which she is based. And that turned out to be simply because, although she had (obviously) given the full postal address when registering, Google had just used the postal town and post code in its listing. Editing her details to show her full address resulted in her appearing for searches in both the postal town and the village.)
As far as general search results go, I would say that yes, it’s worth adding your state to both your meta description and your page title - for the benefit of potential visitors, as you so rightly say. Few things annoy me more than searching for local services and being offered a company based at the other end of the country. If it’s clear from the search results that the company is based locally, then I’ll visit that site in preference to others which might have been listed above it. Other folk will work differently, but as far as I can see, you have nothing to lose and maybe a bit to gain by adding in the state you serve.
I just know how valuable the title tag real estate is, so I did not know if I would be wasting space by adding say my keywords and then Colorado, instead of maybe my brand, Like keyword keyword keyword | Colorado or add in Colorado and lose a secondary keyword to promote where I live. Like Colorado Barn Builders, Garage Contractors | My Brand