What (Local SEO) NAP to use when your country doesn't use Suite #s?
-
New Zealand does some good things, for example we grow hairy fruit called Kiwifruit, put other fruit into bottles and call it Sauvignon Blanc, but we can also be a bit, well...fruity.
My problem is that when we Kiwis list out NAPs we do it like this: ABC Company, Level 1, 123 Example St. Now the fruity bit is we don't have Suite #s, there is never: ABC Company, Suite #400 Level 1, 123 Example St. We just expect you to go up to level 1 and bl@ody well find the office thanks very much (yea there are signs).
It seems like a Local SEO shared office situation but it's the whole floor! I'm worried if I get an office in an office building then I will have my results merged with Extremely-Boring-Accountant and Angry-Lawyer who happen to be on the same level.
What's a Local SEO aware guy to do?
-
Thanks, will do
-
Hi Bruce,
Thanks for your patience. I did get a chance to speak with my colleague - Nyagoslav Zhekov of NGSMarketing.com, and he feels that Google will be sophisticated enough to handle this issue, especially given that this is par for the course in your country. Likely Google handles this the way they do shopping malls here in the U.S. Just be sure your business name and phone number are unique to you, and cross your fingers that no problems arise.
-
Thanks Miriam
-
If I log out of normal moz, and then click the login button at the bottom of this thread and login, then I am Q&A logged in. Weird.
-
Hi Bruce,
This is quite interesting, what you've described regarding New Zealand addresses. I'm going to ask a colleague who has done quite a bit of local work in NZ if he has any info about Google's ability to handle this. I will hop back in if he is kind enough to respond to me. One would presume that Google gets this about your country (love those little kiwi birds, btw) but I'll see what I can find out!
-
Yeah I thought Miriam Ellis was the subject matter expert and I've copied her advice below (there is no solution) from 13 months ago. I'm kinda hoping that there is updated advice and even perhaps a solution?
"It's important to understand that no matter how many citations you get, you are at risk of their 'power' being split between you and any other business sharing the address, and simply confusing the bots further. It might be helpful to visualize being a bot here. If you see 50 references around the web to Jane's Hair Salon, 23 for Jenny's Yoga and 72 for Bill's Martial arts all stating that they are located at 123 Main street, who do you believe? Therein lies the problem and it's not going to be a winning situation for any of the businesses mixed up in this. Google has never handled the concept of shared addresses well. Unfortunately, in the real world, people do share addresses, but Google's system is not designed to cope with that, so either one abstains from participation in Google's local products, or finds a way to comply with them." - Miriam Ellis Oct 13 http://moz.com/community/q/local-seo-how-to-handle-multiple-business-at-same-address
-
Thanks Moosa. We use PO Box numbers.
-
Thanks for your quick response Federico. The issue is New Zealand does not use Suite #s at all.
-
My apologies for not responding to the responses earlier, I got caught in some sort of odd logged out bug for just the Q&A section
-
I'm going through the same issue with a client with 2 offices - both are shared.
I'm taking heed of the advice given at http://moz.com/community/q/local-seo-how-to-handle-multiple-business-at-same-address and http://moz.com/community/q/multiple-businesses-at-the-same-address-avoiding-google-places-trouble
-
When you don’t have it, you don’t have it… just use it with what you have and this won’t really be a problem for Google I guess…
But if you get some letter to your address how do you get it without the suite no.? #just wondering!!
-
Doesn't the building provide you with a suite number? (ask there)
They usually do for correspondence delivery. Try to see if you can get one, but if you can't then you should use what you have, without the suite # as there's none.
There are several businesses that run in a same "office" with just separate "areas" and use the same address, that shouldn't be a problem. In fact, the lack of a suite number isn't your problem, but the building's.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Google+ Local ranking for company with no website
Hi,
Image & Video Optimization | | Ant71
Im about to start helping a small business who has a facebook account but no website. Has anyone got any experience of getting a business ranking locally without a website? Just wandering if NAP details from a facebook / Google+ account helps with local citation building? Or whether a basic website is required? Antony0 -
What is the best way to optimise the website of a service area business websites for local search?
Service area businesses are a little caught in the middle when it comes to local optimisation and can really struggle to So what approaches would your recommend for optimising a service area business: Assuming the following, perhaps obvious, goals: Make sure your site visitors can clearly understand if their location is covered by your service areas Compete for search traffic for service + location searches (including those with an implided location). One common tactic that I see being used is to generate humongous lists of locations, maybe in a footer. Obviously the more areas you want to include the less relevant (and more spammy looking) your targetting looks. And of course, with loads of locations, you're not going to be able to get them all into your titles (even if you wanted to!) Maybe if you've got locations that are more inportant to you you might create specific landing pages for these location? If you've got the kind of business where the locations you target are determined by the locations you can reasonably get to during a working day it's really tough to find a realistic way to target specific location on your site. I'd be really interested to hear how you approach these kinds of sites.
Image & Video Optimization | | DougRoberts0 -
CDN image links passing SEO benefit?
We used a CDN to host all of the images on our site, and the paths are such:
Image & Video Optimization | | PixelKicks
http://cdn.onedirection.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/harry-styles-tongue5.jpg Frequently we get a lot of other websites using our images, which we're fine with, but I would like to know if we get any SEO value from these image links? Interestingly they do appear in the "Just Discovered" section of OSE. Cheers, Chris.0 -
What are you most concerned about or interested in for Local Search?
Hi All, I'm speaking to a local SEO meetup at the end of this month. If you were attending (hypothetically), what would you be most interested in hearing about for local search? The audience is a mix of SEO professionals, web developers, internet marketers, and business owners. I suspect that there will be a number of people who understand the foundations of SEO, though not all of them will be practiced at implementing it. I believe the number of people who get really indepth with Local is quite small. At the moment, I'm thinking about covering things such as: The local search universe in general--which data sources are doing what these days, where it's heading. Google Local+ recent changes Migration to Local+, data cleanup, merging (or not merging!), and other Local+ nuances Current ranking factors, and where I think they're going. I'd love to hear, and greatly appreciate, any ideas you might have. Cheers, Bede
Image & Video Optimization | | BedeFahey0 -
Does displaying a mobile number for business hurt local SEO?
Perhaps a silly question but could someone please clarify if displaying a mobile number in the main site or Google places etc would hurt local SEO? Is having a regional landline/fixed telephone number a ranking factor? EDIT: This is for a UK site, does anyone have experience of this is UK please?
Image & Video Optimization | | Clicksjim0 -
New site, SEO well considered, no traffic :/ What next?
Hi There! We've built whatphone.com.au with SEO at the top of the list but things are not going as expected. Yes, there's still a lot of work to do, but I was hoping to get some guidance on what to do next to make sure we keep the right focus. This is what we've done to date: Added lots of unique and relevant content, particularly to our blog (and will continue to do so on a weekly basis) Ensured internal linking is strong Optimised each product page around product name (and relevant internal links pointing to it) Ensured the code is clean (ok, we are not a 100% but in a good place) URL structure, metadata, page titles, file names and alt tags following best practice Named the company and registered our domain around one of main keywords we are currently targeting "what phone" What we're working on: Link building Site speed Social signals Rich media (videos, more images) Not a bad effort right? No love from an organic traffic perspective 😕 Ok, the site / domain is no older than 2 months old, it's a very competitive industry, and no inbound links yet, but come on! Questions: Are there any benefits of engaging external providers to help with link building? I'm talking about outsourcing from elancer or similar.. Or is this playing with fire? Have we missed something obvious here? Any help will be greatly appreciated! PS: we currently have some issues with our pricing tables, but will fixed as soon as possible..
Image & Video Optimization | | whatphone0 -
Target inside pages for specific country
Hi! How are you? I'm having the following problem: I have a client that has a big multilingual website, in spanish, portugese and english. The server is in Brazil, but he wants to migrate it to USA. I think that this will affect my SERPs in Brazil, and Brazil is the most important country where we need to be first in SERPs. I'd like to, somehow, tell Google that http://website.com/pt is for Brazil and http://website.com/es is for Argentina, so I can avoid the problem that I'll have when the migration is completed and I lose my brazilian IP. Do you have any tips on what should I do? Thanks! Best wishes, Ariel
Image & Video Optimization | | arielbortz0 -
Google local question - over optimization?
I run a law firm with multiple practice areas (bankruptcy, probate, estate planning, personal injury). I have a google places page with those categories listed. I recently spoke with an seo company (that cold called me...) that told me that it was "black hat" to try to optimize a local campaign for more than one of those practice areas. That doesn't seem right to me. Any thoughts?
Image & Video Optimization | | richardslaw0