Map-pack results for multiple locations in the same city

[djreich]

We just started working with a local business with several offices across Virginia. All of their locations have G+ local pages, and all rank pretty well in map-pack results for their respective cities....except for one location.

Two of their offices happen to be in the same city. One ranks well in the local pack, and the other one is totally buried. This is the only location that doesn't rank in the map-pack for its target local queries.

This company still has a TON of work to do to clean-up their citations and improve their G+ local pages across all the locations, but I'm wondering if there are any best practices for handling two locations within the same city...we obviously want both offices to rank in the map-pack, and don't want to do anything that might hurt the one that is currently ranking well.

I'm confident that generally cleaning up their profile across the board, and adding new citations for all locations would be beneficial, but would appreciate any suggestions or best practices for getting both locations in this one city to perform well.

Thanks!

[LindaBuquet]

Incredibly smart answer Miriam. I'm going to steal this line: "In general, inclusion of more than one result in a single pack for the same brand is the result of tremendous dominance or lack of competition."

Miriam covered it all, I'll just say that things are somewhat different post-Pigeon. In the past it was very difficult to get more than one listing in the pack. But now with Pigeon I've seen packs where ALL 7 were for the same business. Example: one medical practice and 6 Drs at the same practice. That never used to happen before. And it's not really fair if there are 30 other businesses in that city that one locks everyone else out.

But Pigeon has not settled in yet and it appears they are still testing and training it. So I would not count on that continuing and I've only seen it happen in some smaller less competitive markets.

So all you can really do is follow Miriam's advice and continue working on all the best practice stuff you can. Consumers searching via phone that are located closer to location B will more likely see that one.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Djreich!

Good topic! In general, inclusion of more than one result in a single pack for the same brand is the result of tremendous dominance or lack of competition. You don't mention the industry your client is in, so I can't really guess at their competition, but rule of thumb would be that if your pack is a 7-pack and you've got 7 or more competitors in that city offering the same service, getting Google to grant a single business more than 1 spot is going to be uphill work on desktop devices. You may have a bit of an easier time on mobile, depending on the proximity of the two businesses to the customer performing the search. If it's only a 3-pack (more common since Pigeon), getting more than one spot in it is going to be a real long shot, unless you are the only game in town. And remember, what you see is not necessarily what this company's customers see, on desktop or mobile devices.

It's good that you are going get the citations clean and consistent for the second location. That's vital! From a content perspective, each of the 2 locations should have its own, strong page on the website, linked to from a top level menu, including Schema-encoded NAP and good text content about the respective locations. If the company has a blog, continuing to build out content for each location would be smart, too. Working on social for both locations would be a good idea, and don't ignore video marketing as a way to get a very visual result for a second location, even if you can't make it into the pack. Review acquisition, particularly of Google-based reviews, could help. I would also think that doing a competitive analysis of who is coming up in the pack would be very important, enabling you to see if there are any weak competitors in there who might be bumped down by specific positive actions on your client's part.

I wish I had a tried-and-true formula for you on this, but the variables of pack size, user location, authority of the brand and level of competition make it pretty impossible to predict whether getting 2 spots in one pack is a reasonable goal or pie-in-the-sky. You will be doing a complete analysis of all of this, and may find weak spots or the competition may just be too stiff to reasonably be overmastered, in which case, diversifying keywords goals for the 2 businesses and/or going after organic rather than local visibility may be a better strategy.