How do you handle local SEO when a business has had multiple names?
-
Hi,
Here is a quite simple question... that comes from a real life example.
When a local business, with one phone number and one business location, has been promoting itself with up to 4 different names over the years. How do you handle local SEO?
Do you try to update all pages (and directories) on the Web to the new name? Do you keep the existing records as they are and find some ways to show Google - and people - that those are all the same business?
Thanks,
Adrien O'Leary
-
Hi Adrien,
There are no two ways about this, in my opinion: consistency is all. Telling Google that a single phone number relates to 4 different business names will almost certainly kill the business' chance of earning good rankings because merged and duplicate pages will sap all the strength of the profile. Tell the client that they need to pick a single name and go with it and that citation cleanup will be critical to you getting them in the clear with Google.
In your further discussion with Matt, you ask:
Yet I wanted to discuss some avenues to give a business all chances to indicate to the engines - and to people - that some business names used in the past belong to them.
The only way I would recommend doing this would be on the website, in non-indexable text (such as image text). If you put it in markup, Google will index it, thus confusing their ability to understand and trust the NAP of the business.
So, if it's essential to have Bob's Plumbing (formerly known as Bob's Kitchen Repair and Bob The Bathroom Guy) explained someplace, put it somewhere on the website in non-indexable text, but not any place else and not in any format that can be crawled.
That would be my best advice.
Funny thing about Google....in the real world, businesses do have situations like the one your client has, but Google's system is not designed to handle this type of complexity. They want 1 name, 1 address and 1 phone number. Anything else is too convoluted for them.
-
Matt, I appreciate the feedback and I'll keep you posted if we were to experiment with the options I've mentioned here... and I'm pretty sure that we will end up doing it the "right" way... even if the client is afraid to be penalized for updating her listings (with old names that were keyword rich) to her new brand name that doesn't contain any keyword. Time will tell!
-
I'm not sure how "Branchof" schema will work on a business in the same location - never actually tried that. I understand why you would want to and there are things to look at, but I think ultimately, there are two solutions: the best and the possible. We know what the "best" is - I guess to me, anything else is not going to be the best answer, which makes it a band aid on a problem that will still need to be solved later.
If you do branchof and brand schema, I'd love to know how that works out. It's an interesting idea for businesses in the same location but I think the problem will be them not actually being a "branch" will work against you. Instead of having 3 "branchof" coming into the main domain, you'll have one - from the same location. I'm not sure how sophisticated Google's schema reading will be for a "trick" like that but yeah, definitely interested.
-
Matt, I appreciate your answer... and I do agree with it 100%. Yet I wanted to discuss some avenues to give a business all chances to indicate to the engines - and to people - that some business names used in the past belong to them. An idea was to specify the old names as additional fields on Google Places. A different one was to use the branchOf or the brand attributes with microformats from schema.org - on the business site - to present old names as brands or subsidiaries. I'm curious. What would be your take on those points?
-
We've seen that the most important thing in Local is consistency. That said, I'd take the longer but more profitable road. Update everything - do searches on the old name, searches on the phone number, searches on the biz address, etc. just to find everything you can possibly change. I'm sure there are ways around it but realistically, doing the work will be the best in the end.
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
-
Embedding videos for SEO
What is the best practice for having videos on a website in terms of increasing SEO? Embedding YouTube videos is probably the easiest solution, but does that help with SEO? The other options would be to use a third party or build one. What have other people found to be the best option? Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | STP_SEO0 -
How do you manage phone verification when claiming listings on behalf of clients (local and remote)?
As the top competitive difference maker, Quality/Authority of Structured Citations is pretty important. That being said, I spend a good deal of time manually running around to different citation websites and jumping through their hoops to get my clients' websites listed properly. I've been using getlisted.org to check my sites, and a lot of the citation sources out there require phone verification. Now I was wondering how you professionally manage the phone verification step for your own clients. I've found it a bit difficult getting my clients to reliably get the PIN numbers for me. I've even had problems with clients checking the mail for the post cards that get sent! At this point in time, I try to schedule a time (not during business hours preferably) to go into the location and answer the phone to get everything verified in one shot. For remote clients however, I just have to hope that they are on board with answering their phones and getting the PIN numbers back to me. Lastly, how do you manage to reduce the amount of sales calls that your client receives from these listing sites? I currently register accounts under a separate email address, for example, webmaster@domain.com. This cuts down on the email marketing spam, and it obviously helps me stay in control of the listings. How do you handle the phone calls though? Especially from some of the more aggressive companies like Yelp? Personally I've just been 'briefing' my clients on how to respond to these sales calls, and I've educated them on the importance of these listings so they aren't too annoyed with the assault of sales reps calling their business constantly. Are there any magic words that my clients can use with these sales reps to make them stop calling? Sorry for the long post, if you've made it this far thank you for reading!
Image & Video Optimization | | IronSummitMedia0 -
Local: Checking to make sure this NAP is good before launching campaign
Hello, I'm launching a local campaign. Here's my NAP, I want to make sure that it looks good and that there aren't any new developments in local SEO that will effect my campagin. Here's the address we'll use: 913 S Latah St #H, Boise, ID 83705 where H means suite H Any suggestions before we launch this campaign? Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Image SEO in 2013
3.26.13 Everything I can find on image SEO is relatively dated and some that I do don't explain exactly what should be done. 1. When designing a site it is easier to simply integrate best practices from the get go. So what are the best practices? Alt tags - these are to explain the photo for handicapped individuals but you can naturally weave in a good keyword. Image titles - do these matter? URL of the jpg - should we put in a good keyword here? What about schema? What about Meta tags for the page the pic loads on? What about pinning to Pinterest and what is properly pulled over? What about other social channels and sharing? What am I missing? Who out there has the ultimate guide for optimizing images in 2013? Thank you!
Image & Video Optimization | | Hospitality-SEO1 -
Google+ Local Assistance (Listings being reviewed)
Hey guys, My client is having issues with his Google+ pages and I'm wondering if someone can shine some light on the issue for me... Basically the client has two businesses, both using the same residential address. The page was ranking well until a week ago, when it disappeared from search results and was listed in the dashboard as "Under Review." I've heard horror stories about this -- examples of Google taking months to review pages and make a decision, and I'm wondering if if might be better to just delete the under review pages and start over (hiding the address on the new listing to comply). Edward
Image & Video Optimization | | edwardrj0 -
Google+ Local Page Wrong Categories
The "new" Google+ Local page for one of my clients is not showing the correct Business Categories. Seems like it reverted to an old Category before we revised. I looked in my Google Places dashboard and the correct Categories are there. They do not have a Google+ Profile yet. Any suggestions? They also seem to have disappeared for those categories we used to rank in the top three in Google Places results.
Image & Video Optimization | | Reportcard0 -
How far away does your Google Local Listing Show up - and how to improve.
How does google decide if a listing from one city shows up in another? When I do a search for a lawyer in my city my competition from another town shows up - but I don't show up when I search their town. Only 3 listings show up for both searches - so it's not necessarily a rank thing. Any ideas on improving the distance your listings show up for? Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | musillawfirm0 -
Maximising Local Search
Hi, I work for a weather company. I have recently begun to define a keyword strategy to target specific keyphrase segments with the objective to maximise webpage visibility and increase CTR. One growing keyphrase segment is "location weather" based searches (e.g. "London Weather", "Manchester Weather"). I am keen to understand how I can maximise our presence for location weather searches within the SERPs. This seems to be a common trends seeing as Google announced that over 20% of all searches contain a relevance to locality. I have been trying to understand if there is a way to maximise our location based weather pages, perhaps using the Google Local search tactic and if there are any recommendations you could suggest? ISSUE: In order to maximise your presence through local search you need a fixed address, something our site does not offer, however it does offer bespoke landing pages for a specific weather forecast based on locality (city, town etc) Essentially, are there any recommendations you can provide a website that offers specific location based pages (without a fixed address) to maximise our location weather based search rankings within the SERPs? Many thanks Simon
Image & Video Optimization | | simonsw1