How to rank in a city you're not based in

This question comes in two versions. A business based in one town wants customers in a city nearby, or in one further away where it has no office at all. Or a business in one corner of a city wants to be found across the rest of it. The answers overlap, and they depend on which kind of result you mean: the map pack, the ordinary web results or an AI assistant's answer. This post takes each in turn, then sets out what not to do. The wider subject is in the guide to local SEO.

Google bases local results mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and defines distance as how far each business is from the customer who is searching. If the customer does not share where they are, Google uses what it knows about their location.¹ Bing Places puts it more bluntly: distance from the user's location will determine whether a listing appears in a search.² Neither search engine publishes weights. I have gone through all three factors in how the map pack is put together.

The point that matters here is that a profile sits at one address, and hiding the address does not move it. Google asks for an address it can find in order to verify a business, and says only a service-area business should choose not to show it.³ A service area can list up to 20 cities, postcodes or other areas, and its boundaries should stay within about two hours' driving time of where the business is based. Google says setting one helps people find the profile. It says nothing about the setting changing where the profile ranks.⁴ The service area post covers that setting in detail.

Google's local ranking help does not explain how a city typed into the search changes the distance calculation. My working assumption is that a search for “[service] in [city]” is answered mostly from businesses in or close to that city, and that a profile based 30 miles away shows up only where there is little competition nearer in. That is my judgement and Google has published nothing either way, but I would not plan a campaign on the opposite assumption.

The same logic applies inside a city. Distance is measured from each person searching, so a business that ranks well around its own street can be missing a few miles away, and in a large city the far side behaves like another town. The best independent measurement of location effects I know is old but still useful. Kliman-Silver and colleagues collected 30 days of Google results for 240 queries from locations at three scales, from voting districts about a mile apart in one Ohio county up to different US states. Queries for local establishments were far more personalised than other queries, the differences grew with distance, and only 18 to 27% of the differences came from the Maps results. The rest were in the ordinary results.⁵ The data is from the US in 2015, so I read it as evidence of how the mechanism works. Today's numbers will differ.

So the work for a whole city is the same work as for a neighbouring one. Measure visibility on a grid across the area you want, because one rank check from the office only tells you about the office. Then build prominence, which Google describes as how well known a business is, including how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has.¹ In my experience a better-known business holds its position further from its address than a weaker one at the same spot. I compare the tools that run grid checks in the best local SEO tools in 2026.

The address rules decide what is possible here, so they are worth reading closely. A business that rents a mailing address but does not operate from it, which Google calls a virtual office, is not eligible for a Business Profile at that address, and P.O. boxes or mailboxes at remote locations are not acceptable. An office in a co-working space only counts if it has clear signage, receives customers during business hours and is staffed by the business's own people during those hours.⁶ Bing Places has the same rule: a mailing address the business does not operate from cannot be used, and listings that break its guidelines can be suspended.⁷

Verification is designed to find the gap. On a live video call, Google asks the owner to show outside signs, nearby businesses or a street sign that confirm the location, the products, equipment or branded materials used to serve customers, and proof of running the business, such as access to staff-only areas or keys to the premises.⁸ A mailbox at a parcel shop can show none of that.

Three setups are allowed, and they are the honest routes into a city's map results:

• A service area that includes the city, if you really travel there and it sits within about two hours' drive of your base.⁴ It makes you eligible to appear there. It does not make you close.
• A second base with its own staff. Google allows a service business with different locations, each with separate service areas and separate staff, one profile per location.⁶ A desk that someone visits once a month does not meet that test.
• An office or shop in the city, with permanent signage of the business name at the address and staff during the hours you publish.⁶ It then needs its own location page, built the way I describe in location pages that are not doorway pages.

The ordinary web results are where a business without premises can compete on fairer terms, because a page about a city can be relevant to a search about that city wherever its author sits. Bing says plainly that website SEO plays an important role in local ranking.² Location still personalises these results, as the study above found, but in my judgement the page itself carries far more of the weight here than it does in the map.

One good page for the city is usually right. When you have no address there, these are the things that make it worth reading:

• Work you have done there: the areas or streets, where the customer agrees, photos, and what each job involved.
• How you serve the city: who travels, from where, how long it takes, and any call-out charge or minimum job size for that distance.
• Reviews from customers in the city, quoted with their permission.
• Anything about the city that changes the job, such as parking and access, local planning rules or the kind of buildings you usually work on there.
• A plain statement that you are based elsewhere. Customers will learn it on the first call, and saying so up front avoids an awkward start.

The line is drawn in Google's spam policies. Doorway abuse includes having pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, and creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than to a clearly defined hierarchy. Keyword stuffing includes blocks of text that list the cities and regions a page is trying to rank for.⁹ Bing lists publishing the same or substantially similar content across multiple URLs among the practices that reduce ranking eligibility and grounding visibility across Bing and Copilot.¹⁰ Twenty city pages that differ only in the town name, and a footer listing every town in the county, both fall inside those descriptions. My test is simple: if you could not write the page without the template, do not publish it.

Assistants handle location differently from the map. ChatGPT may use an approximate location based on the IP address, which OpenAI describes as country, state or city, and device location sharing is off by default. When it searches, it rewrites the question for its search providers. OpenAI's own example turns “What are some good restaurants near me?”, asked from the San Francisco area, into the search query “top restaurants San Francisco”. It may also share location with third-party providers of local information, such as nearby business listings.¹¹ For a business outside the city that is useful. A “near me” question can become a city-level search, and the pages that rank for the service and the city, including lists and guides to the best options there, are what the assistant is likely to read. I have set out the rest of that process in how an assistant decides which businesses to name.

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode may run several related searches across subtopics to build an answer, and Google says the same SEO fundamentals apply to them as to the rest of Search, including keeping Business Profile information up to date.¹² There is no separate method for AI answers about a city. The page, the profile where you have one, and what other sites say about you are what gets read.

What other sites say may count for most. Ahrefs compared site and brand factors for 75,000 brands with how often each appeared in AI Overviews, and found branded web mentions had the strongest correlation, 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. The brands were larger sites, with a Domain Rating above 40, the method was a Spearman correlation, local businesses were not studied, and the authors say plainly that correlation is not causation.¹³ Bing's description of popularity for local listings points the same way: the more a business is mentioned across the web, the more likely it is to appear in results.² For a business with no premises in a city, being named by that city's press, guides and organisations is the nearest thing it has to being nearby.

Mentions and links in a city come from doing things there. These are the ones I would look for first:

• Coverage on the city's local news sites and in its magazines, for a job, an opinion or data you can share about the city.
• Membership of the city's chamber of commerce, business improvement district or trade associations, where membership comes with a listing.
• Sponsorship of a club, event or charity in the city.
• Talks, workshops or stands at events held there.
• Suppliers, partners and customers in the city who would link to work you did together.

Paid arrangements need care. Google treats exchanging money, goods or services for links that pass ranking credit as link spam, and says sponsorship and advertising links are fine when they carry rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored".⁹ Bing counts link buying among the schemes that reduce visibility.¹⁰ A sponsorship is still worth doing with the link marked, because the mention, and the people in the city who see it, are what you are paying for.

Reviews from customers in the city do two jobs. They count towards prominence on Google, where more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking,¹ and they are the evidence a reader in that city looks for before calling a firm from outside it. Neither Google nor Bing says a reviewer's location affects ranking, so I would not chase reviews by postcode. Ask every customer, wherever they are, and reviews from the target city will build up with the work. How to ask without breaking the rules is covered in review incentives and review gating.

Manufacturing those reviews is a different matter. A fake review is one that claims to be, but is not, based on a genuine experience, and UK law bans both submitting and commissioning one.¹⁴ Under undertakings Google gave the CMA, announced in January 2025, businesses that boost their ratings with fake reviews get a warning on their Google profile and have their review function switched off, and repeat offenders have all their reviews deleted for six months or more.¹⁵

Putting it together, this is what I would expect for a business with no premises in the city. It is practitioner judgement matched to the sources in this post. I know of no study that measures it.

If you need to be visible in a city this month, pay for it. Google Ads can show ads in the locations you choose, including areas within a country and a radius around a location,¹⁶ and Microsoft Advertising can target people in, searching for or viewing pages about selected cities and postcodes.¹⁷ The ad still must not claim you are local. In 2019 the ASA ruled against a paid Google search ad for “Local 24 hour emergency locksmiths” that appeared when people searched for an emergency locksmith in Edinburgh. The ASA had seen no evidence that the company had offices there, and its registered address was in Oldham.¹⁸

Every one of these shortcuts is covered by a platform rule, a regulator or both.

• A virtual office or mailbox on the profile. It is ineligible on Google and on Bing,⁶⁷ and Google reserves the right to suspend profiles that break its guidelines.⁶ It is also a long-standing form of local spam. Researchers at UC San Diego and Google studied more than a hundred thousand Google Maps listings that appeared between June 2014 and September 2015 and were later suspended for abuse. At least 40.3% were on-call services such as locksmiths, plumbers and electricians, the people behind those listings mainly used post office boxes at UPS stores to receive verification postcards, and the median listing lasted 8.6 days from creation to suspension.¹⁹ The study is old, but it shows how familiar this pattern is to the people checking listings.
• The city in the business name. Google's rules say the name must not include location information, and adding unnecessary information can get a profile suspended. The name has to be the one used consistently on your storefront, website and stationery,⁶ so renaming a business to get a city into it is a full rebrand. Bing does not accept descriptors such as “best” or “cheap” in a name unless they are legally part of it.⁷
• A fake local address on the website. In July 2024 the ASA ruled against four locksmith websites that each gave a local address and phone number, two of them with shopfront photos. The addresses were residential homes or unrelated businesses, the sites shared the same text and duplicate testimonials, and the ASA found that they gave the misleading impression of local traders.²⁰ UK consumer law also prohibits commercial practices that give false or misleading information about a trader and are likely to change a customer's decision.²¹²²
• City pages that differ only by the name. They match Google's description of doorway abuse.⁹ The location pages post shows how to find them on an existing site and what to do with each one.
• Reviews from people who were never customers. Writing them, or paying someone else to, is banned in the UK.¹⁴

A fictional electrician works from home in Slough with two vans. Most of the enquiries the business would like more of come from Ealing and Hounslow, where it has done a handful of jobs but rarely appears in the map.

The business will still be strongest around Slough. The plan makes it findable in Ealing and Hounslow in the results it can win there, while the profile keeps doing the work close to home.