Citations, SEO and a skeptical client
-
What do you say to a client who recently purchased an online business and says 'I don't really care if the phone number or address on a directory is old or incorrect'?I've tried to explain the value from an SEO point of view, but he's not really buying it.Anyone encountered this skepticism before and if so, how did you handle it?
-
Intriguing title to this question! You hooked me.
Important question: if your client has an online-only business, why does he have citations? Structured citations are normally restricted to local businesses that make in-person contact with consumers. Does your client interact face-to-face with his customers? If so, failure to correct citations is about the worst mistake he could be making in terms of reputation, rankings and revenue.
But, if your client's business model is virtual, he shouldn't really be creating local business listings and ought to get rid of them - especially any Google My Business listings as they would actually be a violation of Google's guidelines. However, if he has accrued non-structured mentions of his business (for example, social mentions, newspaper articles, blog posts, etc.) and they contain misinformation, the risk of neglecting this is that he is losing customers. If I'm correct in understanding that your client's business is virtual, I'd advise him to:
-
Get rid of all local business listings on the major local business data platforms
-
Make the effort to correct unstructured citations, unless he can afford to lose customers.
I'd give it the 'old college try' to make the client understand his profits are at being put at stake due to misinformation being published about his company and outline a sensible plan for addressing the issue (based on whether his business is truly local or virtual). Then, if the client wouldn't hear this, I'd let him go. In fact, I wouldn't serve a client who felt that bad data about his company could be neglected. I'd be foiled at every turn in trying to market his business and see progress. His attitude would be setting us both up for failure. Hope this helps, and good luck!
-
-
David nails it here. Most business owners understand they need SEO, but don't know how it actually works. They are often told, you need thousands of back links, and then the company promises them these links. You need to emphasize quality and remind them it takes time.
As far as convincing the client they need to update their information, I would emphasize how the search engines draw connections between different sites and if the information is wrong it may look at the business as inactive. I'm sure you've mentioned that you don't want customers calling the wrong number, but they probably responded with "no one gets the phone number from this site". However, if they are searching for the branded name of the business a business directories information may pop up and show the wrong info. Don't miss out on easy conversions. I would try and provide some information or articles showing why they need to follow your advice.
Hope this helps.
Chris
-
All clients are skeptical when it comes to SEO. Because they get bombarded daily with emails from India promising first place on Google. Basically you have to A show them a client you did SEO for and have them Google it for themselves or you have to do one keyword for them for free to convince them of the value.
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
-
Is it more beneficial to use Yext rather than doing the citations manually?
Our company wanted to experiment on whether it truly is more beneficial to use Yext for citations rather than to do them ourselves. The thought process here, is that when we manually do the citations, some of our listings would increase in quality. The problem we have been running into, is that Yext has exclusive deals with nearly half of the sources we were previously listed under. Is there a way around this, or is Yext truly worth the cost?
Local Listings | | rburnett1 -
Dental Practice Acquisition SEO
Hi Mozzers! I have an interesting online marketing challenge I would love to hear the community's thoughts and advice! My clients (a dental practice consisting of 3 dentists) are taking over (buying) the practice of another dentist across the hall (same address except for suite #), who is retiring (we'll refer to him as "retiree" from here out for simplicity). The retiree's dental practice has close to zero online presence. He has citations across the web (google listing, yelp, healthgrades, etc), but no website. My question is: How would you go about consolidating the web presence for my clients? We want to get the traffic for existing and potentially new patients searching for the retiree. The retiree isn't retiring right away. His presence for the next several months will be vital to my clients' success as he will introduce new patients to my clients and pass the torch, so to speak. Would you create a landing page for the retiree on my clients' website & claim/add my clients' NAPW on all of the citations? That seems to be the best & simplest idea I've come up with so far, but I would LOVE to hear if anyone has any creative thoughts or ideas. THANKS!
Local Listings | | Derrald0 -
Unique Local Citation Descriptions?
Hello! As SEO’s we have always understood that it’s best practice to craft a number of unique descriptions when submitting to local directories, rather than using one generic description across all directories. However, if we look at this logically; An average business owner (even if Google didn't exist) wouldn't bother to vary descriptions. They would have a generic brand template and simply submit the same description to each directory. What do you think? Is having unique descriptions a MUST for Local Business Citations, or is it ok to use one generic one? I look forward to hearing your thoughts, Lee.
Local Listings | | Webpresence0 -
Ranking opportunity if we omit county in citations
I am looking to rank highly in local search for Birkenhead but have not currently filled in the county on Google + so Moz local is not picking the county up. I am wondering whether I should continue and keep the county off there as there is a potential problem: on our website we are listed as being based in the Wirral and we are also based in a county called Merseyside so have two different possible citations. We are ranking well for the term Wirral and do not want to effect this. I am thinking of building citations without Wirral or Merseyside and was wondering if anyone can advise? The address that I have in the citation would be - business name, building number, Birkenhead then Wirral or Merseyside and post code. I am currently using business name, building number, Birkenhead and post code and we want to rank highly for Birkenhead. Could anyone advise me here? The Wirral is a peninsular as can be seen on Wilipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Borough_of_Wirral
Local Listings | | SEM_at_Lees0 -
Local SEO: Special charakters in brand name?
Hey guys, we run a local gym in Germany located in Nuremberg called: "STUDIO N°1 - natürlich fit". Our domain is: www.studio-no1.de We are currently working on a new website since our current Website isn't really SEO optimized. Until then I would like to start optimizing some off-page attributes. As far as I know one of the main points in Local SEO is that your firm is registered at important directories. In our case we are already registred in most of the important german directories. The problem is that our oficicial company name has a special charakter included. This means that in some cases we have "N°1" and in some others "No1! Our Google Business name for example has "N°1", facbook not (no special charakter allowed). Germanys most important site for listings: Gelbeseiten, doesn't even allow special charakters in brand names.... On which name should I focus to get all the business listings to have identical NAP informations? Does it even matter? Schould I focus on "STUDIO No1 - natürlich fit" or "STUDIO N°1 - natürlich fit"? I hope you could understand my problem. Big Thanks Jonas
Local Listings | | Jo_Da0 -
SEO without a budget and Cheating Competitors
I have law clients in the atlanta ga area. I have worked with one client http://bestdefensega.com for the past 4 months trying to get him to the top. We blog 3 times a week, have manually built citations and legal directory profiles. My client doesn't have a large budget to purchase profiles on some of the larger legal directories like findlaw, lexus nexus etc.. With that said,
Local Listings | | underdogmike
Using Open Site Explorer I have discovered that his competition all have multiple business websites pointed back to their main websites.. So each law office has several really generic websites in addition to their main site. Other's appear to be receiving links from some type of link farm and really generic directory sites.
The domains of these guy's are older and more established. Where as, my client has a new practice and a new domain. How do I compete in the local market without a budget for the premium legal directories? So after 4 months my client appears in the local pack search results for only select keywords. Criminal defense attorney woodstock ga. His competition appears in the results for all variations, where my client only shows for this one term. How do I get me client in the local pack for all variations of Criminal Defense in my area? According to Moz, my site has a couple spam score issues and the explanations are not clear enough for me to make some types of changes.
**How do I make these changes to reduce the spam score? My site has more back links than Moz is reporting why?** All of the other sites that I manage perform well and my clients are realizing their ROI with relative ease. But criminal defense is a different beaat and it is starting to frustrate me. RAR! Thanks in advance!0 -
Local Citation with multiple offices
We have 5 different offices and each has its own google+ page and yell page. At first they were ranking poorly and the wrong offices were coming up for searches in that town so we change the name to :
Local Listings | | EJmoz
BusinessName (Location1)
BusinessName (Location2) Etc. those listing all starting to rank top for searches in Location1 and Location2. We have now been told that it is bad for our overall SEO to have the business name appearing differently in different listings and this led me to look at Moz Local. My question is should I remove the (Location1) from the Google+ business listing so that all our offices have the same name (but obviously different addresses) even though it appears to have a negative impact on rankings? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks0 -
Local SEO Benefit
Hi Our company is looking to increase our local SEO footprint and wondering what is the industry average for traffic increase to quantify investment. Can’t really find anything online. I understand this can be very subjective in relation to market size, competition, localization, etc but just trying to get a sense of opportunity if we cross our t’s and dot our i’s, what's the potential? Context: We’re a national brick and mortar with eComm. We’ve already done a lot of leg work in optimizing our NAP but very little citation building/claiming. Please provide resources for stats Thanks for any input. Cheers
Local Listings | | WMCA0