Chicago is a huge city and most people search for local services and businesses by neighborhood. Google recognizes some Chicago neighborhoods as ‘belonging’ to the city and assumes that if you search for “wicker park restaurants”, you mean the Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago.
Some neightborhoods require a more refined search to produce a 10-pack. For instance “bucktown restaurants” gives you results for Bucktown, IL, not the Bucktown neighborhood in Chicago. A search for “lakeview restaurants” produces similarly noisy results. But, when you refine the search to “lakeview, chicago restaurants” you get much more relevant results.
If you’re running a neighborhood business, then your physical location will be very important for your Google maps result. If you’re trying to decide where to set up your business, take a look at Google Maps and search for “neighborhood, city” to find the centroid for your neighborhood.
For example, when you search for “wrigleyville, chicago”, Google locates the center of Wrigleyville just above Wrigley field. That seems obvious, but if you look at Yelp’s Wrigleyville results, you’ll see that the center according to Yelp would actually be a few blocks north of where Google places the center.
If you’re trying to target customers throughout Chicago and don’t want to be constrained by neighborhoods, then you should be looking for a location near the center of Chicago.
More than Physical Location
Of course moving your business is not an option for most of you. In that case, you should also look for natural ways to add neighborhood keywords to the copy on your site, make sure your business information is correct across the many local search sites, and get your customers to give you positive reviews on Yelp, Google, and other local sites.
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Having multiple locations listed doesn’t hurt either. Having a franchise view seems to please the Great Google.
If you have a unique business which doesn’t have much competition it might be smart to also optimize for the main city name so you don’t miss out on some on the other side of town that might be looking for you.
@Christian – I definitely agree, multiple locations within a city will help your business, as long as you’re not “location spamming.”
@Nick – I agree, I wouldn’t forgo your main city keyword for a neighborhood keyword. I would find a way to include both in your website.
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