National vs Local listings

Hi GD Community!

We’re using GD (for the first time) to create a B2B directory of UK businesses from a specific market sector. Some of these business supply services to their local area, and others are able to serve the whole country. The issue we’re having is this:

There doesn’t seem to be a way to have listings which cover a whole region/country – distance seems to override everything else when searching. If a ‘national’ business is based in a far-out rural location like the north of Scotland, they are never going to come up in search results, even though their services are available all over the country.

We’ve tried using custom fields with the Advanced Search add-on to add ‘national’ or ‘local’ options to listings, and that does work in the sense that the listing is then marked as one or the other, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to actually implement that idea in the search results. Searching for ‘national’ results is still dependant on distance from the search location. The national/local custom field can be added as a search filter, but there’s no way to get it to behave as ‘national’ – we want businesses which serve the whole country to come up in every search that they match for, regardless of distance, and alongside true local businesses – so as if they are distance 0.0 miles from the searched location, if that makes sense.

We’ve also tried the Featured listing option, but that too seems to be ruled ultimately by distance, and Featured listings will only appear if within the local search area.

We also tried to see if it was possible to make a listing have a location which covers an entire area, but it seems you *have* to set an exact location, you can’t have an area.

We’re using the up-to-date version of GD Core, plus Advanced Search, Ajax Duplicate Alerts, Claim Manager, Custom Google Maps, Custom Post Types, Location Manager, Marker Cluster, Payment Manager, and Re-Captcha.

Are mixed local and national results possible with the out-of-the-box Core and add-ons, or will some custom development be required? Any ideas for workarounds appreciated!