Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Local SEO address question - adding a suite number for shared address for office building
-
Hi, I have a client that has an address that is shared for a few different businesses in the holistic health field. My client is a chiropractor. There is an eye doctor, massage therapist and acupuncturist aslo sharing the same address. It's a subburban setting with two buildings all sharing one address.
In the interest of preventing any merged listings down the road, I recently added un unofficial suite number to his website and Google places business listing. I also did this for all of his online directory listings, and for Bing and Yahoo as well.
Did I do the right thing here?
It seems to be having a positive impact on his local SEO as far as I can tell. Or at least there has not been any negative impact in the last 6 months
Your thoughts?
-
Great. I'm glad my answer helped. Good luck!
Miriam
-
Thank you for your answer, it's exactly what I was expecting your to say. I'll take the advice.
-
Thanks Miriam, I don't really know what's involved in making this "legal." He'll get the mail there with or without the suite # so I don't foresee a problem with postcard re-verification. So I guess he's good to go. If he wants to get it "legal" I can recommend that. Thanks for confirming what I already thought
-
Hi MozMan2,
Nice to see you here today! Okay...so you went about this 50% right, in my opinion. What's missing is getting the client an actual registered suite number at which he receives mail.
Initially, this is important in the even that Google (and others local business indexes) give you a postcard-only option for verification of the listing. Sounds like you're past that point, but remember, the need to re-verify does sometimes reoccur if you have to make certain changes to a Place Page.
For the long haul, the issue is one of differentiation. The inherent danger in different businesses sharing an identical address is that Google will conflate the listings, merging them into a mess of mixed addresses, phone numbers, reviews and descriptions.
Ideally, what the chiropractor should do is convince each of the professionals in his building to get their own suite number to prevent this from happening to any or all of them.
If he can't get them to see the light about this, then he should at least protect himself by getting his own suite number. Depending on where he lives, he may need to go to the post office or some other local authority to get this thing legalized so that he's got a separate mail box to which the mailman delivers his mail at his suite address in the building.
So, again, your overall approach is correct, but the suite number should be legit to keep this on the level. And you should make sure the suite number is consistent across all mentions of his business on the web.
Hope this helps!
Miriam
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moving Images to Subdomain: SEO Impacts
For sever work- load enhancements we are planning to move our images to a sub-domain. so the files would be located at something like images.domain.com Rather than domain.com/images/ We are a large Ecommerce site so we have a lot of images. These will be self hosted so we are not using a CDN. I'm hoping someone has done the same and if there were any steps they had wished they had taken before making the move/ if they noticed any traffic impacts things like that.
Image & Video Optimization | | RMATVMC0 -
Can I use PO boxes as an actual business Address?
Hi mozzers, A potential future client(electrician) covers 40+ locations in one region(local SEO) but only has 1 address. He wants to rank for at least 5 to 7 main locations which he has PO boxes for. Can I use these as addresses on his website or will it be seen as violating the google guideline? If it is no good what should I do? Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Vimeo Pro, video SEO and rich snippets
Hi All, we are producing product demonstration videos. One major aim with these videos is to help our rankings for these specific product pages and associated keywords... and to get rich snippets displayed on Google results pages against our listing. We have used schema.org markup in the product pages body code along with / next to the embed vimeo video code on the product page in order to hopefully get us rich snippet listing... we used schema.org markup as this seems to be the main current markup for rich snippets we have hosted the video via Vimeo Pro so that it is served quickly and not affected by speed of our hosting server or any possible bandwidth issues on our hosting server and ensure sthat the traffic comes to our site pages rather then Youtube or similar Vimeo Privacy settings for the video have been set so that we have not allowed it to be embed anywhere except for our own domain and the video is not displayed on Vimeo.com to ensure that the video is not duplicated anywhere else... so that this is unique content on our own site for maximum value for our domain We have used the "old code" from Vimeo Pro for embedding the video on our product page rather than the current iframe code as from what i understand Google cant follow very well and doesn't necessarily trust content displayed in iframes. Video and schema.org markup code used is on product page is: <div itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">video</a>" itemscope itemtype="<a class="attribute-value">http://schema.org/VideoObject</a>"> <p ><strong>Watch our <span itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">name</a>">Click 7 Lite Duo demonstrationspan>:strong>p> <meta itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">thumbnailURL</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/img/products/nextbase-click-7-lite-duo-thumb.jpg</a>" /> <meta itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">duration</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">T2M23S</a>" /> <span itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>">A product demonstration showing what's included in the box when you buy a Click 7 Lite Duospan>...:<br /> <p align="<a class="attribute-value">center</a>"> p> <p align="<a class="attribute-value">center</a>"><object width="<a class="attribute-value">500</a>" height="<a class="attribute-value">281</a>"><param name="<a class="attribute-value">allowfullscreen</a>" value="<a class="attribute-value">true</a>" /><param name="<a class="attribute-value">allowscriptaccess</a>" value="<a class="attribute-value">always</a>" /><param name="<a class="attribute-value">movie</a>" value="<a class="attribute-value">http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=67392721&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0</a>" /><embed src="[http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=67392721&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0](view-source:http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=67392721&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0)" type="<a class="attribute-value">application/x-shockwave-flash</a>" allowfullscreen="<a class="attribute-value">true</a>" allowscriptaccess="<a class="attribute-value">always</a>" width="<a class="attribute-value">500</a>" height="<a class="attribute-value">281</a>">embed>object> p> div> Page this code is used on: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/proddet.jsp?id=2016&cat=1 Could anyone confirm whether the above seems to be what we need to do / should be doing to get the most value from these videos for helping our web site rank better with Google / search engine results pages as well as getting rich snippets displayed? Lastly does the above code seem correct and include all the necessaries for rich snippets? Thanks for any pointers.
Image & Video Optimization | | jasef0 -
Google categories for local limousine service
I manage the Google places page for a SAB (local limousine company). The question is, should I add "taxi" and "airport shuttle service" as categories? I have listed only "limousine" and "car service' for now and I want to play it safe although those 2 are related to limo service. Sometimes people refer to limo service as "taxi service" or they are inquiring about prices for shuttle service to the airport and they end up booking the service quite often. Does Google look to our website to find these words in the content? Google Analytics show lots of people are finding us through those two keywords as well although you cannot find the word “taxi" on our website. The interesting thing is that when searching for "taxi + my zip code" the company shows up 4th on maps results and when searching for "shuttle service + my zip code”, the company shows up 2nd on local results and also 2nd in organic results. Is this enough to make me add these 2 categories? Second question is about the area served, does it make a difference (in rankings) if I choose “Distance from one location"over"List of areas served"? What happens is the red pin would be in a different location. If I choose "Distance from one location" the pin would be right in the center of the city (which I think it shouldn't matter anymore that much since the proximity to the centroid is not a ranking factor anymore). If “list of area” served is selected, (the city name will be chosen) then the pin would be about 5 miles West of the city center. Any thoughts will be appreciated. Thank you!
Image & Video Optimization | | echo10 -
Yext vs Localeze vs UBL for Local SEO
Which of these services is the best? Does anyone have experience with all three?
Image & Video Optimization | | nicole.healthline2 -
Google Places - Shared Office Space
Howdy, A client of mine has a shared office space, where several other businesses share the exact same address, including the same suite number. I realize that this is likely one of the biggest issues holding them back in local/blended search results in their market, which is a very competitive one. (They do have a completely unique local phone number.) They have tons of citations -- way more citations than anyone else at the same address -- so they are definitely the most visible. They are ranking pretty well -- top of page two in organic results (overall top 10 organic if you exclude the places results) and top of page 3 in places results for some select local search terms. But obviously top of page one as a blended result is where we want to be. They have a lot of great content, a lot of quality links and citations. Out of all the competitors ranking ahead of them, a few do indeed deserve to be there, but most do not -- i.e. they have lower DA, PA, worse links, fewer links, no content / shit content compared to my client, and some even have incomplete Google profiles. I really think this could be the sole issue holding my client back from appearing in blended results on page one. What should we do? If I convince them to change their address, we'll have to update thousands of citations, many of which we don't have access to. In reality, we would be able to update some, but not all citations. This also could cause a short term rankings decline, and/or Google Places limbo for who knows how long! Is it possible to overcome this problem if they keep the same address? In a less competitive market I would think it's quite possible, but I'm not so sure in this case. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!
Image & Video Optimization | | djreich
David0 -
SEO benefits of linking logo to homepage?
Hello All, It will be helpful if anyone can list the benefits of linking the company logo (on every page of the website) to the home page, and how important it is in terms of internal linking / SEO factors. Thank you.
Image & Video Optimization | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
Is there an easy way to see how competitive a local search term is?
Is there a quick and easy way to see how competitive local search terms are? I am looking at helping my clients show up on the local search results. Some times all I have to do is claim a listing and they move right to the top. Sometimes I claim a listing and nothing happens so I get links and I get reviews and it takes awhile. I want to be able to put an accurate price point on the service I am offering. I have looked at the search volume and it hasn't been the best indicator because some industries are more competitve than others. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
Image & Video Optimization | | jimmyseo0
