How to be found in Sion and Sierre when your address is elsewhere

“Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”
— Waldo Tobler, 1970

My studio is registered in St-Luc, in the Val d'Anniviers, above Sierre. When someone types “web agency Sion” or “seo sierre”, Google first shows a map with three businesses, chosen largely for how close they are to the town in the query. My address isn't one of them, and no amount of optimisation will change that. In fact, I'm seriously thinking about moving closer to Sion, the economic heart of the canton. Google, for its part, will wait and see the new address.

That local block comes before the classic results, and it's often where the client makes their choice. In mid-October my Google listing showed three reviews, while the businesses on the map had between 14 and 216. Distance and reputation were both working against me at once.

Distance can't be fixed from your website. You can move, and I'm considering it, but you can't move to every town where you have clients. What you can build everywhere is relevance: proof, page after page, that you really work for clients in Sion and Sierre. And the place where most small businesses waste that proof is their blog articles.

Why your articles say nothing about where you work

When I reread my eleven published articles with this question in mind, the finding was stark. Sion appeared in none of them, Sierre in just one, and Valais mostly in passing. No article linked to my city pages, even though those are precisely the pages that need to rank for “web agency Sion”.

A generic article competes against the whole web

An article on indexing or on what a website costs speaks to the whole French-speaking world, and that's exactly its problem. It competes with thousands of pages saying the same thing, and it tells Google nothing about where you operate. To a search engine, a good article with no local anchor proves expertise, not presence.

My Sierre page paid the price. Its queries put it around position 28 on average, while my homepage captured “seo sierre” in its place: nothing else on the site confirmed that Sierre was a real place of work.

Repeating the town changes nothing

The opposite reflex is no better. Slipping “website creation Valais” into every paragraph creates no relationship a search engine can verify, and repeating a keyword tells a model nothing when it's looking for facts. You need something other than a town's name: a fact that only someone who works on the ground can write.

1. Anchor every article in a local fact you can prove

Before writing, ask yourself one question: which client, which town, which local constraint sits behind this topic? A building site in Monthey, a bilingual clientele, a tourist season that dictates a project's calendar. If the answer exists, it goes into the article. If it doesn't, the article stays general, and that's perfectly fine.

Cite one verifiable fact, not ten mentions

A local fact is a sentence a competitor couldn't write in your place: the name of a client who agrees to be cited, the place where a meeting is held, the specific problem of a business in your region. Answer engines cross-check this kind of fact against the rest of the web, and that cross-check is what lets them cite you when the question contains a town's name.

That's what I did with my own articles. Rather than adding town names, I looked, for each one, for a real story behind the topic. Nine articles received one, with clients I can name, and the others stayed as they were. Going forward, I'm aiming for one article in three anchored in Valais, no more.

2. Link the article to the page of the town it tells

A city page on its own carries little weight. The menu links to it in the same way as to every other page, which says nothing about its value. A link from an article that tells a real project in that town, however, gives it exactly what it lacks: context.

Place a single link with a natural anchor

The rule I've set myself is strict:

• one link per article to a city page;
• only where the town is named for a real fact;
• an anchor that reads naturally, like “businesses in Sion”, never a “web agency Sion” copied from a keyword tool;
• a link that lives in the body of the argument, not in a list at the bottom of the page.

My Sierre page now shows several articles drawn from projects run on the ground. The link in fact works in both directions: each city page automatically lists the articles that concern it, thanks to the markup in the next step, and nobody has to keep that list up to date by hand.

3. Declare the places in each article's markup

The text says where you work, and the markup confirms it in a format machines read without having to interpret. Schema.org provides a property for this, spatialCoverage, which states the places a piece of content deals with, alongside the subject it teaches.

Declare the place as data, not as a keyword

Each place is declared with its name and a link to its Wikipedia page, which removes any ambiguity: Sion the Valais town, not another one. Here, simplified, is what the markup of one of my articles contains today:

"spatialCoverage": [
  { "@type": "Place", "name": "Valais", "sameAs": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valais" },
  { "@type": "Place", "name": "Sion", "sameAs": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sion,_Switzerland" }
]

Keep one simple discipline: a place is declared only if the article talks about it with a real fact. Declaring Sion on an article that says nothing about it amounts to repeating the keyword in another form, and the signal loses its value. Let's be honest about its reach too: it's one more hint, not a lever that will lift a page on its own.

On a site whose CMS is well structured, it's just one more field to fill in at publication. It's the kind of detail you settle once in web development , then fill in within seconds for every new article.

Distance is endured, relevance is built through content

None of these three steps will move your address. On the map, proximity will keep weighing heavily, and a competitor based in the centre of Sion will remain better placed than you for Sion. Moving closer, as I'm considering, remains the most direct lever on the map, and it's a business decision, not an optimisation. What the three steps change is everything else: the classic results, the AI-generated answers, and the trust of a prospect who reads your articles before writing to you.

What content will never replace

For the map itself, the lever isn't on your website. It's your Google reviews, the accuracy of your business listing and the local sources that talk about you. An article doesn't replace a satisfied client writing “website and SEO, Sierre” in their review.

That's the order I follow for my own studio and for my clients, and the core of a local SEO strategy that holds over time: facts before keywords, links that tell a story, markup that confirms the text. Relevance is built slowly, but it doesn't depend on your postcode.

Ready to turn your articles into proof of local presence?

You won't always choose where your address is, and even a move only brings you closer to one town. What you do choose is what your pages say, and a single well-placed local fact says more than ten mentions of the canton. It's patient work, and it starts with the next true story you have to tell.

👉 Want your articles to finally prove where you work? Contact me