By Bianca Frank, Creative Director · Bianca Frank Design, Anchorage
Originally published March 2025. Fully rewritten and updated October 2026.
Search “plumber” from a phone in Anchorage and the first thing Google shows isn’t a list of websites. It’s a map with three businesses pinned on it. Those three get most of the calls. Everyone below the map is competing for what’s left.
Local SEO is the work of getting into those three, and in Alaska it has a wrinkle the national guides skip: distance. A customer in Girdwood is forty miles from midtown; a search from Wasilla and a search from Eagle River return different maps; and a business that serves the whole Kenai from one office has to be found by people in towns it has no address in. Here’s how the map decides, and what you actually control.
In short:
- Google’s map results come down to three dials: relevance (do you do what they searched for), distance (how close you are to the searcher), and prominence (how well known and well reviewed you are).
- You control relevance almost entirely, prominence substantially, and distance only through how you describe your service area and whether you build real pages for other towns.
- Your Google Business Profile is the single most important local asset. Most Alaska businesses have one; few have it right.
- Location pages work when each one says something true and specific about that place. Copy-paste pages with the town name swapped get ignored or penalized.
- Reviews and real local mentions are the prominence dial. They compound; they can’t be bought.
Dial one: relevance
Relevance is whether Google believes you do the thing that was searched. It’s decided by the categories on your Google Business Profile, the words on your website, and whether the two agree.
Most of the fixes here are plain:
- Pick the right primary category on your Business Profile, and the right secondary ones. “Electrician” and “electrical supply store” are different maps. A psychiatric practice listed as “medical clinic” loses to one listed as “psychiatrist.”
- One page per service, named the way people search. A page titled “Short-term rental turnovers in Girdwood” is relevant to that search; a page titled “Services” is relevant to nothing in particular.
- Say what you do in words, not just pictures. Google reads text. A home page that’s all photos and a tagline has told Google almost nothing.
For a cleaning company in an Alaska resort community, relevance was the whole project. The business does eight different things, from routine house cleaning to short-term rental turnovers to pressure washing, for four different kinds of customer: homeowners, vacation rental owners, property managers and local businesses. The site was built so each service and each audience had its own clearly named section, with titles and metadata aimed at town-plus-service searches. A vacation rental owner searching for turnover cleaning in that town finds a page about exactly that, not a general cleaning page that mentions it in passing.
Dial two: distance
Distance is the one you can’t fake and the one that matters most in Alaska. Google ranks map results partly by how close the business is to the person searching, or to the place they named. A business in Spenard will usually beat an identical one in Eagle River for a search made in Spenard, and there’s nothing either can do about the geography.
What you can do:
- Set your service area honestly on your Business Profile. A service-area business (one that goes to the customer) can list the towns it covers instead of, or in addition to, an address. Listing the whole state when you really serve the Anchorage bowl doesn’t widen the map; it dilutes it.
- Name your real service area on the site in the words people use, including boroughs and neighborhoods, not just “Southcentral.”
- Build a page for a second town only if you actually serve it and can say something real about it. More on that below.
The honest limit: if you’re in Anchorage and someone in Soldotna searches “roofer near me,” you will not be on their map unless you have a presence there. That’s not a problem to be optimized around; it’s a business decision about where you work.
Dial three: prominence
Prominence is how well known Google thinks you are: review count and rating, how often your business is mentioned on other sites, how long you’ve been listed, and whether the information about you is consistent everywhere it appears. It’s the slowest dial to turn and the one competitors can’t easily copy.
- Reviews, steadily. Not a burst of twenty in one week (that looks bought), but a few every month, with real text, and a response to each one. Ask every customer at the natural moment: the invoice, the follow-up, the pickup.
- Consistent name, address and phone number on your site, your Business Profile, the chamber directory, the Yellow Pages listing nobody reads, and the fifteen other places your business is listed. Mismatches make Google unsure which listing is real.
- Real local mentions. A story in the Anchorage Daily News or the Frontiersman, a supplier’s “our dealers” page, a sponsorship on a league website, a client who lists you as their vendor. Each is a vote that you exist and matter here.
Your Google Business Profile, done properly
Almost every Alaska business has a profile. Here’s the difference between having one and using it:
- Categories set correctly, primary and secondary.
- Hours true for the season, with holiday and closure dates entered ahead.
- Service area set to where you actually go.
- Services and products listed by name, each with a sentence, so the profile is relevant to more searches.
- Photos of your actual place, people and work, added a few at a time through the year. Profiles with recent photos get more clicks.
- Posts every few weeks: an offer, a project, a seasonal note. They expire; the habit is what counts.
- Questions and answers seeded with the five things people call to ask, answered by you.
- Reviews responded to within a few days, especially the bad ones.
That’s an hour to set up and twenty minutes a month after. It outperforms most of what businesses pay for.
Location pages: when they help and when they hurt
If you serve several towns, a page for each one is the standard advice, and it’s correct only under one condition: each page says something true and specific about that place. Who you’ve worked with there, how far it is from your base, what’s different about serving it, which local organizations you belong to, photos from jobs there. A customer in Wasilla should read the Wasilla page and feel it was written for them.
What doesn’t work is one page copied five times with the town name swapped. Google’s systems recognize those as doorway pages and either ignore them or hold them against the site. We’ve seen Alaska businesses with pages for every community from Ketchikan to Utqiaġvik, each identical, none ranking anywhere.
We hold ourselves to this. Our own site has pages for Eagle River, Wasilla, Palmer, Fairbanks and Juneau, places we’ve worked and can say something about. There’s no Kenai page yet. One is in the works, and it’s taken longer than copying the Wasilla page would have, because a Kenai page has to be about the Kenai: the clients we’ve worked with there, the seasonal businesses, the distances. The rule is simple: build the page when you have the substance, not before.
Keep it local in the writing, too
One pattern we see constantly: an Alaska business buys SEO content from a national provider and ends up with pages that could be about any city. Google can tell, and so can a reader in Fairbanks who notices the page never mentions the cold. Write how you talk to customers. Mention the real places, the seasons, the organizations, the kinds of properties and problems you see here. Relevance is a dial you turn with specifics.
Frequently asked questions
How does Google decide which businesses show on the map? Three factors: relevance (your categories and content match the search), distance (how close you are to the searcher or the place named), and prominence (reviews, mentions, consistency, history). You control relevance fully, prominence over time, and distance only through your true service area and real location pages.
Do I need a separate page for each town I serve? Only if you actually serve it and can write something specific about it: clients there, local details, what’s different. Identical pages with the town name swapped are treated as doorway pages and don’t rank.
How many Google reviews do I need? More than your closest competitors in the map, arriving steadily. Rating matters, recency matters, and real text matters. A few a month with responses beats a burst of twenty followed by silence.
What’s the most important local SEO task? Getting the Google Business Profile right: correct categories, true hours and service area, listed services, real photos, regular posts and answered reviews. It’s an hour of setup and twenty minutes a month.
Can a business in Anchorage rank in Fairbanks? For map results, rarely, without a presence there. For regular search results, yes, if it has a real Fairbanks page and serves the area. Distance is the one dial you can’t optimize away.
Check your three dials
Search your own service from your phone, then from a friend’s phone across town, and see who’s on the map. If you’re not there, the reason is one of the three dials, and it’s usually relevance or the profile. If you’d like us to tell you which, our SEO work for Alaska businesses starts with exactly that check, and if you’re comparing proposals, start with what an SEO quote should include.
Bianca Frank is the founder and Creative Director of Bianca Frank Design, an Anchorage agency that has designed brands and websites for Alaska businesses since 2007. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design and leads a small in-house team covering branding, web design, SEO and content strategy, with recent work for clients including Nalaquq LLC, the Native Village of Barrow, Solstice Psychiatry and Alaska Geographic. BFD was named one of Anchorage’s best web designers by Three Best Rated (2025) and received UpCity’s Local Excellence and Best of Alaska awards (2022, 2023).
