Most local SEO advice assumes one town, one council and one state. Albury Wodonga has a river through the middle of its market, and businesses on both sides sell to both sides. That changes a few of the standard moves.
01 The border problem
Your Google Business Profile has one address, so it sits in either NSW or Victoria. Google leans heavily on proximity for local results, which means a Wodonga customer searching on their phone is being served results weighted toward Wodonga, and an Albury address is at a disadvantage before anything else is considered.
You cannot fix that with the profile, and you should not try to fake a second location. What you can do is make sure the website carries the other side clearly: a genuine page about serving that town, written for people who live there, with the relevant landmarks, suburbs and service specifics. Organic results are not proximity-weighted the same way.
Listing a virtual office or a friend's address across the river to claim a second profile is against Google's guidelines and gets profiles suspended. Recovering a suspended profile is far more painful than never having had the second one. Serve the other side through content and a service area instead.
02 Google Business Profile
For a local business this outranks almost everything else you could spend the time on. Complete it properly and then keep it alive, because an abandoned profile decays.
- Primary category chosen precisely, then secondary categories for genuine services. The primary one carries the most weight.
- Service area set to the towns you actually serve, including across the border.
- Hours accurate, including public holidays. NSW and Victorian holidays differ, which catches people out here.
- Photos added regularly. Real ones of the premises, team and work.
- Services and products filled in with your actual terms.
- Questions seeded and answered. You can ask and answer your own.
03 NAP consistency
Name, address and phone, written identically everywhere. Google cross-references your details across directories, and inconsistency reads as uncertainty about whether these are the same business.
The usual culprits are an old suite number, a mobile in one place and a landline in another, and abbreviations that vary — St against Street, or the trading name against the registered one. Pick one exact format, then work through your website, Google profile, Facebook, LinkedIn, industry directories and any local listings until they match.
04 Location pages worth having
One page that lists twenty towns will rank for none of them. A page per location works, but only if each is genuinely about that place.
That means real content: what you do there, which suburbs, work you have done locally, and the specifics that only apply to that town. If you could swap the town name and the page still read correctly, it is a template and Google treats it as one. Two or three substantial location pages beat a dozen thin ones every time.
05 Schema
Structured data tells search engines plainly what your business is, where it is and what it offers, rather than leaving them to infer it.
- LocalBusiness or the closest subtype, with address, phone, hours and service area.
- BreadcrumbList on inner pages, so results show a path rather than a bare URL.
- Service entries where you offer distinct services.
- FAQPage where you have genuine questions and answers on the page.
Only mark up what is actually visible. Schema describing content a visitor cannot see is a guidelines problem, not a shortcut.
06 Reviews
Recency matters as much as volume. Forty reviews that stopped two years ago read worse than twelve that arrived steadily this year.
Ask every satisfied customer, at the moment the job is finished rather than a week later, and make it one tap. Reply to all of them, including the poor ones, because the reply is read by everyone who comes after. This is the easiest part of local SEO to automate: a request that fires when a job is marked complete removes the remembering.
07 What to measure
Rankings move around by device and by where the searcher is standing, so a single position number is close to meaningless locally. Watch these instead:
- Profile actions — calls, direction requests and website clicks from your Google profile.
- Search Console impressions for queries containing your town names.
- Enquiries, tracked back to source, which is the only number that pays wages.
We build this in from the start rather than bolting it on afterwards. See SEO, or the detail on Albury and Wodonga. For the longer technical version, read our SEO guide for Australian businesses.