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Matt Cutts: Well, the entire page of web rankings is there that out of town people can compete on so the idea of the local universal results is to show local businesses. So in some sense there’s not really a way where if you’re out of town you can sort of show up within our guidelines and show up as a local business.

Now if you are a mobile business, so for example maybe you’re a plumber and you get into your pickup truck and you drive around in a particular area then in Google Places you can specify a service area, which is roughly 50 miles around where you’re based. But that’s only if you actually have some base of operations there. You can’t be based in Topeka and claim that you have a service area of Wyoming if you have no physical presence there.

And I think that that’s a good idea. You do want to have local businesses show up and I know that the team has been really paying a lot of attention to trying to improve Maps quality, make it more robust, check on the authenticity of businesses, and that will only continue.

So if you’re an out of town company and you’re looking for a way to show up locally and you don’t really have any presence there, there’s not really a way to do that. But if you are a mobile business then you can use that 50 mile sort of service area around where you’re based within Google Places so that’s one option to know about.