Multiple My Business pages affecting local SEO?
-
Hey Moz!
We have a situation with a dentist firm with multiple doctors at the same address. They have two locations for their dental offices, and each of the dentists operate at both offices.
The issue: Each doctor insists on having their own by business page for each location and i'm afraid this is hurting their local SEO. We've been tracking keywords by week and we've seen some big fluctuations in ratings and i'm looking into why this is happening. The office in location 1 has it's own Google My Business page and the three dentists have their own my business page set up at the exact same address. The office in location 2 has it's own Google My Business page as well and the three dentists have their own my business page there also.
This leads the two addresses of the main offices having multiple My Business pages at the same address competing against eachother since they are all are registered with similar names and specialties. Could this be hurting our local SEO? Thanks!
-Z
-
No problem
I was going to go into a long explanation of how he needs to differentiate the listings from one another, but you saved me the trouble lol.
-
Thanks, David
-
I just wanted to say this was a great response. Gets my vote on where to start.
-
Hi Z!
If done properly, practitioner listings should not typically have a detrimental effect on the business' local pack rankings. Google's guidelines allow for their creation, and, up until about a week or so ago, these are the provisos I would make to ensure that you're managing this scenario correctly:
-
Be sure you've got a unique phone number for each dentist at which they are directly contactable, and that this number is being used for them across the board (on the websites, citations, social profiles, etc.)
-
Be sure you've got a unique landing page on each of the websites for each dentist, featuring their complete Name, Address, Phone number and other details. Be sure their citations link to the associated website landing page, rather than the homepage.
-
Be sure you are strictly adhering to Google's naming conventions, as specified in the guidelines: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en It's incredible how many listings don't adhere to these, and Google spells it out in black-and-white how multi-practitioners should name their listings.
So far, so good, but then Google made a strange move about a week ago that I've covered in detail here. Recommend you read the whole thread, as it may be highly pertinent to your dental client. Basically, in a nutshell, Google appears to be filtering out businesses located at the same location that share the same category. So, in our example in that thread, a Moz member who owns a fishing charter company is being filtered out of the results because other fishing charters (same category) are located at the same address.
Your scenario particularly interests me because it rings bells of a practice I believe I recall Linda Buquet advocating some years back of practitioner listings (dentists, lawyers, etc.) not sharing the same categories. It has been a few years since I've heard Linda address this, and I'd love to know her thoughts on this given this recent Google change.
I think you have a very interesting opportunity here to do some experimentation with the filter if either of your client's practices and associated practitioners were previously all ranking highly.. Here's how I'd do that:
-
Do a Google search for whatever the category + city is that pertains to the dental practice (this might be something like 'Dentist San Diego'). See if the filter is being applied so that only the business or only one of the practitioners is coming up for that term in the local finder view you get to when you click on the 'more' link at the bottom of the local 3-pack. As described in the other discussion I've linked to, zoom in to see if the missing business or missing practitioners show up.
-
Then, what I'd experiment with is whether changing the category for one of the practitioners (changing it from Dentist to something like Pediatric Dentist) affects the results. You'd want to give it a few day and check back. See if changing that category then allows the practitioner to show up at the non-zoomed level when it was previously being filtered out.
In sum, practitioner listings have not been a problem historically when managed correctly, but with the recent filtering rolling out (which may be temporary or permanent), some new questions have just arisen. These issues could possibly be resolved by changing categories, where possible, but experimentation is needed to see how doing so might impact results.
I would love to hear back from you if you do embark on such an experiment, and your question has also made me wonder what Linda Buquet (an expert in Dental Local SEO) might say about shared categories for practitioner listings in 2016. Great topic!
-
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
-
Impact of .us vs .com on SEO rankings?
Our website is hosted on www.discovered.us. I have 2 questions: 1: we have had regular feedback a .us domain is negative in SEO and in conversion (customers don't like it). We are thinking of changing domain to: www.dscvrd.com.
Local Website Optimization | | Discovered
Any insights on the impact on our rankings (if any) if we do this? 2: we are focusing our SEO global / USA first but conversions in UK are better. We currently do not have multi-language SEO setup. What would the impact be of implementing www.discovered.co.uk on SEO in UK? Thanks! Gijsbert0 -
Using geolocation for dynamic content - what's the best practice for SEO?
Hello We sell a product globally but I want to use different keywords to describe the product based on location. For this example let’s say in USA the product is a "bathrobe" and in Canada it’s a "housecoat" (same product, just different name). What this means… I want to show "bathrobe" content in USA (lots of global searches) and "housecoat" in Canada (less searches). I know I can show the content using a geolocation plugin (also found a caching plugin which will get around the issue of people seeing cached versions), using JavaScript or html5. I want a solution which enables someone in Canada searching for "bathrobe" to be able to find our site through Google search though too. I want to rank for "bathrobe" in BOTH USA and Canada. I have read articles which say Google can read the dynamic content in JavaScript, as well as the geolocation plugin. However the plugins suggest Google crawls the content based on location too. I don’t know about JavaScript. Another option is having two separate pages (one for “bathrobe” and one for “housecoat”) and using geolocation for the main menu (if they find the other page i.e. bathrobe page through a Canadian search, they will still see it though). This may have an SEO impact splitting the traffic though. Any suggestions or recommendations on what to do?? What do other websites do? I’m a bit stuck. Thank you so much! Laura Ps. I don’t think we have enough traffic to add subdomains or subdirectories.
Local Website Optimization | | LauraFalls0 -
Google my business - Image sizes
I have scoured the web in order to find a guide that would give me the ideal dimensions for images to populate google my business page... in vain. Google itself is very vague about it as indicated below Format: JPG, PNG, TIFF, BMP Size: Between 10 KB and 5 MB Minimum resolution: 250px tall, 250px wide Does anyone know of a guide with optimum recommendation for each photo (profile, Cover photo, business specific photos...) or alternatively can recommend the exact size needed. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | coolhandluc0 -
Disproportionate Links to Home Page
I'm a professional magician and mentalist who travels nationally for corporate events, social functions, and trade shows. Unfortunately, the landing pages are all for different venues and locations, but the product stays the same. How do you recommend optimizing for somebody whose product is essentially themselves? The pages have similar content, videos, etc., so I don't want to be dinged for duplicate content.
Local Website Optimization | | KevinViner0 -
Page Title for a Local Shop
Hello everyone 🙂 I would like to have your opinion on one thing: I am working on a local shop selling pottery and other things. So I was thinking, would it make sense to title the page something like: “Pottery Object, San Francisco, Awesome Pottery” which means “keyword, location, company name”? Or is there a better way to optimize the title of the page for a local shop? Thank you very (very) much 🙂
Local Website Optimization | | Franco19780 -
Should digital marketing agencies treat SEO differently when it comes to homepage content?
When I review competitor digital agency sites, they seem to have very little homepage content. But how would this be beneficial in gaining a higher SERP rank?
Local Website Optimization | | randomagency1 -
Local site went from dominating first page - bad plugin caused duplicate content issues - now to 2nd page for all!
I had a bad plugin create duplicate content issues on my Wordpress CMS - www.pmaaustin.com I got it fixed, but now every keyword has been stuck on page 2 for search terms for 4 months now, where I was 49 out of 52 keywords on page one. It's a small local niche with mostly easier to rank keywords. Am I missing something? p.s. Also has a notice on the Dashboard that says: "404 Redirected: There are 889 captured 404 URLs that need to be processed." Could that be a problem? Thanks, Steve
Local Website Optimization | | OhYeahSteve0 -
What is the best type map for local SEO?
Hi mozzers, Can someone tell me which type of map is best when embedding it into your service pages? or any map is good enough? Why? Thanks guys!
Local Website Optimization | | Ideas-Money-Art0