Rand’s recent SEOmoz post offered some great tips to improve multi-city local results using SEO. I have been thinking about local results in Google also, and in my opinion, SEO techniques coupled with Google Place’s display of brick and mortal local results have gotten much too focused on physical location, and I believe I have a creative way to change up the playing field.

As most of you know, Google Places favors brick and mortar, but this doesn’t necessarily benefit the companies OR the people searching. There are many industries where Google Places does not offer an adequate or accurate way of listing their business, such as service and consulting companies, but why should these companies be penalized because they don’t have a physical location?

Why can’t Google Webmaster (or possibly Places?) allow webmasters to add a meta tag or setup a verification process to confirm a companies' location - not by PHYSICAL address - but by areas served? 

Now, I know that Google’s advanced search offers a hidden option at the bottom of the page to select “region”, but this is a very broad category, and many people do not know it is there.

Unfortunately, Google cannot simply go grab a person’s IP address to serve up the most relevant location-specific results. Google does look at IP, but the truth is, IP address isn’t the most accurate measure of a person’s search location. What IP address does offer is a general location, even if its not the exact city. So, if my logic is sound, when a person goes to Google.com, Google’s technology could detect their general location and serve up a drop down list of cities specific to the state in which the IP address is location. If the user did not select anything in the drop down, more general results can be displayed. But if the user couples their search phrase with a specific city from the drop down list, then sites will show Places listings, followed by meta-tag Webmaster-verified listings. Those listings will still have the additional rank factors as they did before, PageRank, content, etc, but less weight will be placed on the city search phrases, because that is a less relevant key phrase now that location is managed in this manner. 

If this was accomplished, Google could add a “Location” drop down field next to the search box in Google.

Here’s what it would look like to Google visitors:

More Relevant Local Results

Companies would benefit from being able to share their areas served with Google directly, and Google would benefit by having an improved verification process in place for locations served. Google could verify areas served in various ways. Their current brick and mortar verification process leaves a lot of room for abuse, so I would be excited to see a more accurate way of verifying business areas served that are not physical locations. I don’t have the ultimate answer for the verification piece, but a phone number or perhaps a relevant content crawl of the site would work. Something to verify the location would be better than nothing to prevent excess spam or black hat techniques. When companies are allowed to directly tell Google about their area’s served, they can place their meta tags on the RELEVANT pages to which local information and content is placed on their website. Can this be abused? Of course. But so is every other meta tag and optimization technique for SERPs.

In my experience, city location is the single most frequently used coupling phrase in long tail key phrase searches. People would no longer need to type in the location they are coupling their search phrase with - they would be able to get to the results they want faster, Google’s ultimate goal. Local results would focus more on relevance and less on the city-specific key phrase. Optimizers could quit spending so much time optimizing title tags and page titles for location phrases, and spend time ensuring their content is relevant for the products and services offered.

Who Already Does This Well? Consider Craigslist.

The place that you start your search in craigslist is by location, everything is filtered from there. This has proved very useful for this highly popular tool. Why can’t this be incorporated into Google and other search engines tools? 

To Conclude: 

1. I feel that Google Places unfairly favors brick and mortar businesses
2. General searchers should be able to custom target their location without effecting their key phrases
3. Optimizers should spend less time on location-specific techniques and more time on relevant content

What do you think - is it possible and would the impact be to dramatic for current optimization techniques?