What is the best approach: abbreviated citations or fully spelled out citations?
-
What is the BEST approach: abbreviated citations or fully spelled out citations?
For the purpose of ranking locally in google what is the best method of formatting citations? Would it be abbreviated or fully spelled out addresses.
Southwest v.s. SW v.s. Sw
Avenue v.s. AVE vs. Ave
-
So glad to be of help, Erik. Thanks for using Q&A!
Miriam
-
greast response. It makes sense they can understand the difference. Seems like a basic thing. Just want sure how picky they are regarding to consistency and format. Thank you all.
-
Hi Erik, Smart question, and it's one that I've actually discussed in the past with other Local SEOs. My belief is that Google has no problem understanding that Ave and Avenue are the same thing, so this is not the kind of consistency you really need to worry about as I do not feel it has any effect on rankings. What does have a big effect is inconsistencies like differences in business name (i.e. Joe's Plumbing vs. Joe's Plumbing & Heating) and failure to correctly list elements like suite addresses every time. Hope this helps! Miriam
-
That's a good idea. Ultimately, remember that Google buys data from the big 3 aggregators, InfoUSA, Localeze, and Axciom. These guys buy data from the Telco's like AT&T etc. Make sure you have a copy of your phone bill (if you aren't using VOIP) and match it to your Google Local+/Places address format.
-
I would also cross check it against the USPS format if you are starting out just to find a good consistent format that is right with the USPS.
-
For address suffixes, Google displays them as abbreviated (where Street=St, Place=Pl, Avenue=Av etc.) So it follows that that would be an optimal convention to use. Note however that it is more important that you ensure that your citation format is consistent across the web. This will have a far more significant impact on your local ranking.
Marc @ PoweredbySearch.
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
-
Latest Best Practices for Single Page Applications
What are the latest best practices for SPA (single page application) experiences? Google is obviously crawling Javascript now, but is there any data to support that they crawl it as effectively as they do static content? Considering Bing (and Yahoo) as well as social (FB, Pinterest, etc) - what is the best practice that will cater to the lowest-common denominator bots and work across the board? Is a prerender solution still the advised route? Escaped fragments with snapshots at the expanded URLs, with SEO-friendly URL rewrites?
Algorithm Updates | | edmundsseo2 -
How is best to use Permalinks for Wordpress /category/postname or /postname
Hello , I have a question Regarding the Permalink structure form Wordpress ,I am trying to figure out what would be the best structure of the blog post link ,for the moment I am using the structure example.com/postname and I changed the structure to example.com/category/postname ,redirected with 301 the old links to the new links and I thought about it and wanted to ask , I would really appreciate if you could tell me what is best form SEO point of view to do. Regards,
Algorithm Updates | | anitawapa0 -
Site´s Architecture - Categories . What´s the best in my case?
My Dear friends of MOZ, I´ve got you a case that has been driving me crazy for 2 weeks, Im doing an SEO audit for big brand that sells electronics. Since they sell all kind of electronics, and are very popular the site is quite big and has several categories. Now...Im working particularly in a kind of micro-site that sells two kind of products that are very similar but not the same. Lets say in this site they are selling super-light-weight-Laptops and tablets, so if you look the site its a Laptop/Tablet site. But the site is not under a laptop/tablet directory, some pages are under laptop and others in Tablet directory . For example : Home page URL: /light-laptops/home.asp ; Products general page page URL is light-pads/products.asp ; and each single product page is under laptops or pads according the type of product. From my point of view, they should create a new directory called /light-laptops-pads/ and single directories for products, and case studies, etc.. Since they want to show both products together when you click in products (off course they will be creating sub-directories for the two types of products). At the begining I thought they were really mistaken, but now that I see that all light-pad content is in one folder and light-laptops content is in another, and the site jumps from one category to the other I am a little bit confused. PLEASE HELP ME PD: I want to make clear that general categories like products, case studies , contact us, solutions pages are in some cases under /light-pad/ directory and in other cases under /light-laptops / directory PLEASE PARDON MY ENGLISH!
Algorithm Updates | | facupp10 -
Best approach to ranking locally
Hello, What are the best approaches to ranking locally. Ie a user in Dallas googles "mechanics" and local results return. I understand Google+ local pages to be an important factor for the location based listings on maps. What about about location specific pages on the site? Meaning if we have a page on the site talking about areas we serve in Dallas. Other suggestions?
Algorithm Updates | | CallRingTalk0 -
Best Place To Aggregate Customer Reviews?
There is a plethora of choice today for aggregating customer reviews. BBB wants to collect ratings from our customers; there a commercial options that put me in more control; yelp wants to rate me locally. Google... Given that I have some ability to steer customers toward my preferred review site, which one should I use? From an SEO perspective, have you noticed whether some these sites carry more weight or credibility than others? I realize it may depend on the type of business we are. In this case I represent a software company and their customers are USA/global, rather than local.
Algorithm Updates | | DarrenX0 -
Where do we know that citations are needed?
Hi, there, I 've read much about citations and that there are very good for local SEO. I also watched the webinar about them in SEOMOZ. My question is where does the information that citation are needed and help in Google ranking? Is there a proof from Google or just it is found by seo specialists? I've never heard about it just 1-2 years ago so I am interested where this information comes from?
Algorithm Updates | | vladokan0 -
What is the best way to organize a catergory for SEO purpsoes?
I work for a organic vitamin and supplement company and we are looking to rank for our categories by making more specific categories. For example we are going to try to add under the category "vitamin d" some smaller more relevant (longer-tail) categories like "spray vitamin d" and "vegan vitamin d" and try to rank instead for these searches and also searches containing words that we already have more authority from Google like "natural" or "organic". I know that putting the product pages a level deeper will only hurt us so I want to avoid that but I'm wondering if anyone has some advice on how to organize categories for longer tail keywords that we actually have a chance to rank for. Any help to figure this out would be greatly appreciated. Here is our page as it is currently, like I said we want to create sub categories that are effective for SEO, but also make searching and navigating the site easier. http://www.mynaturalmarket.com/Vitamin-D.html Thanks, ThatKwameGuy
Algorithm Updates | | ThatKwameGuy1