Florence · Muscle Shoals · Sheffield · Tuscumbia
One business, four city names: Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield and Tuscumbia
JM Marketing builds, hosts and maintains websites for businesses across the Shoals in northwest Alabama: Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield and Tuscumbia. Jeff McDaniel has clients in the Shoals and works there regularly, and he sets each site up to be found under every city name its customers search.
What JM Marketing does
JM Marketing builds, hosts and maintains websites for Shoals businesses, and sets up the on-site SEO so a business in one city can be found in all four without claiming an address it does not have.
Pages that say plainly which Shoals cities the business serves, in sentences rather than lists.
Run on JM Marketing’s own servers, backed up before anything changes.
WordPress and plugin updates every month, plus the small changes a business needs along the way.
Titles, headings and structured data naming Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield and Tuscumbia where they apply.
The local picture
The Shoals is four cities with about 148,800 people across the area, as of the 2020 census. Florence is in Lauderdale County. Muscle Shoals, Sheffield and Tuscumbia are in Colbert County. Plenty of businesses here serve the whole area, but their customers search by the name of their own city, or by “the Shoals”.
Most small-business websites pick one city name and lose the other three. A Sheffield firm that serves the whole area has to be findable by somebody searching Florence, somebody searching Muscle Shoals, somebody searching Tuscumbia and somebody searching the Shoals. A site built around the Sheffield address alone is in the running for one of those searches and missing from the rest.
The fix is on the website itself, and it is not a list of town names in the footer. It means saying in plain sentences which cities the business serves, giving each one a section with something true to say about it, using the names people search in titles and headings, and listing every city served in the site’s structured data, while the street address stays the real one.
Each of the four Shoals cities has its own search, and its own reasons a business there needs to be found under more than one name.
Florence is the largest of the four Shoals cities, with about 40,200 people, and northwest Alabama’s primary economic hub. The University of North Alabama, Alabama’s oldest state-certified university, is there, and the Port of Florence on Pickwick Lake serves local industry. Web design in Florence is the most competitive of the four, so it has its own page: website design in Florence, AL.
Muscle Shoals, in Colbert County, has a name known nationally for its long association with the recording industry. That fame brings visitors, and it also crowds the search results for anybody looking for an ordinary local service. The Tennessee Valley Authority has a long presence in the area. Muscle Shoals has its own page too: website design in Muscle Shoals, AL.
Sheffield is a Colbert County city of about 9,000 people, and a Sheffield business is the clearest case of the four-names problem: its customers live across the whole Shoals, but a site that only says “Sheffield” is found only by people who search that one name. Web design for a Sheffield business is handled here, on the Shoals page, with Florence, Muscle Shoals and Tuscumbia named beside Sheffield wherever the business really serves them. The area’s manufacturing history runs to iron founding, lumber and cotton and wool mills, and the Tennessee Southern Railroad and the Port of Florence serve local industry today.
Tuscumbia is the third Colbert County city, beside Muscle Shoals and Sheffield. A Tuscumbia business has the same split as its neighbors: some customers search “Tuscumbia”, some search “the Shoals” and some search for a bigger neighboring city. A Tuscumbia website that names the town in its title and headings, says which neighboring cities it serves, and lists them in its structured data can be found by all of them without pretending to be anywhere it isn’t.
Visitors come to the area too. The W. C. Handy Music Festival and the Alabama Renaissance Faire both draw people from outside the Shoals, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which created Pickwick Lake, has been part of the area for a long time.
The full version of this is in One Business, Four City Names: Getting Found Across the Shoals.
Clients in the area
Jeff McDaniel has clients across the Shoals and works there regularly. One of them is already named on this site.
Florence, AL · Radio station
Sports talk radio. Website, live streaming and the podcast archive, all hosted on JM Marketing’s own servers. Visit the site.
Talk to Jeff
Call or text Jeff McDaniel about your business in Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield or Tuscumbia, and he will tell you how your current site does across all four city names.
or email jm@jeffmcdanielmarketing.com
Jeff McDaniel · JM Marketing · Malvern, Arkansas
Serving Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield and Tuscumbia, Alabama
Areas we serve
Each area JM Marketing serves has its own page, and all of them are listed together on the Areas We Serve page.
Mississippi: Tupelo · Booneville · Corinth
Tennessee: Savannah and Hardin County
Alabama: Florence · Muscle Shoals
Arkansas: Hot Springs · Malvern · Benton · Bryant
