Philadelphia SEO for a dense city that searches by neighborhood.

Philadelphia is compact by big-city standards: about 134 square miles of land, by the Census count, holding 1.58 million people. In a city that dense, Google's local results, which weigh relevance, distance and prominence, can shift from one neighborhood to the next. Customers search that way too. They want the plumber in Fishtown or the dentist near Rittenhouse, and a site that never mentions where it works gives Google nothing to match.

The fix is a page for each neighborhood or district you genuinely serve, each with something true of the place: the housing you see there, the jobs you do, how fast you arrive. Old-house search terms are a particular opening in a city whose median home dates to 1949. Few competitors write about party walls, knob-and-tube wiring or cast-iron stacks, and the customers searching for those words are usually ready to hire.

Philadelphia's calendar adds predictable spikes. The Flower Show fills the convention center in March, the Penn Relays arrive in late April, the Broad Street Run closes its namesake in early May, and marathon weekend brings more than 40,000 runners in November. Restaurants, hotels and shops near those events should publish weeks ahead. For how the profile and site share the work, see our Playbook on Business Profile versus website SEO. SEO starts at $575 a month and scales with complexity.