Future address change and local search

[c2g]

I have a client who targets a particular city, and up until now has had his physical location in the suburbs of that city. This April 1, his office will have the city address he has been targeting.

I have spent a lot of time over the past year claiming ownership of all local directory listings and consolidating addresses as he has moved several times in the past 5 years. Looking at this as an opportunity to get the official USPS address he will be using and use the exact same address for everything. So many different variations out there right now for him.

Wondering if it would be ok to start promoting the new address before the April 1 move and also when to start with the directory listings. Also, have held off on purchasing the yahoo directory link because of the suburban address but reconsidering this as of April 1 as well.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi C2G,

While each directory has its own rules, Google is quite clear about their stance on this, in the Google Places Quality Guidelines:

Businesses that are under construction or that have not yet opened to the public are not eligible for a listing on Google Places

So, at the very least, until your client has moved, you cannot update his Google+ Local page. I will add to this that, because you should never publish anything but the current NAP (name, address, phone) of a business on a website or its citations (for fear of clouding the record and harming current rankings) you probably should not do advance work on this of any kind.

Instead, this would be a good time to be sure you've created a spreadsheet of all of the client's current citations, so that as soon as the move is official, you're working off an organized document doing his citation editing. And, if it's in your job description to do so, the coming months would also be a good time to come up with the content you'll be publishing once the move happens. This could include both editing of current content, including on-page SEO, and the development of new content announcing the move.

So, in my opinion, the next 3 months will be a good time for organizing and planning, but the actual 'doing' should wait until the move actually happens. Hope this helps!

[customerparadigm.com]

I think it might be a good idea to have a "coming soon... location at xyz address, starting April 1, 2014".

My worry about publishing the new address live:

• Any of the systems that do an address verification via snail mail might flag the directory listing, if the address comes back as non-valid.  This might do a lot more harm than good in the short term.
• I'd worry about customers trying to visit the new location based on the directory listings, and then not being able to see the location, and then flagging it as out-of-business.

That's my $0.02.  I think you might have trouble if you promote it as a "valid" address prior to being able to occupy it.

I hope this helps!
-- Jeff