Multiple Businesses at the Same Address
-
Hello everyone! Fairly new member here with a quick local question.
A friend is starting a new business and sharing a showroom with another local business until they close up shop in a couple of months, at which point he will take over the showroom entirely.
My question: in the meantime, what would be the best way to have two businesses at the same address? The best I can come up with to avoid the pages being merged or who knows what else would be to list one of the businesses in a non-existent suite, for example 123 S Someplace Ave, Suite 100.
Is this strategy likely to cause any problems for either business? Ideally I would like to have both businesses appear in the listings until the first one closes, at which point I will just delete the page entirely.
-
You're very welcome! I'm glad the link was helpful.
-
Hey Miriam, thanks for chiming in.
I had noticed that a lot has changed since the last time I create a g+ page, so thanks for the link with all of the updated guidelines. I will definitely be back if (when) I get lost again.
-
Hi Rbmac,
Nice answer from Donna, and I just want to add a little note here that Google has just done one of the largest overhauls to their Guidelines For Representing Your Business On Google (including changing the name, haha) that I've seen in quite some time:
https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en
The whole format of the page has been overhauled as have several key elements of the guidelines that any local business owner just getting started should read up on. Following the guidelines at the outset can save many troubles down the road.
-
I agree rbmac. Seems logical.
-
Thanks for the info Donna.
To clear a couple of things up: yes they are separate legal entities, they will each have a unique phone number and unique website. However their business categories are basically the same which is what had me concerned about the two businesses merging.
After some further discussion with this friend, it sounds like their business would actually be better classified with a service area rather than a physical address, but they want the showroom to remain on the map. So it seems like the best course of action would be to (like you say above) allow the showroom to remain under the old company name until they close up, and build up the new company as a service area business until such time as they can fully claim the address.
Thanks again for your help.
-
The rules for Google local listings are fuzzy and the results can be somewhat unpredictable. Seems clear that the two businesses are separate legal entities. It's not clear, at least not to me, whether they'll share a common phone number, website or whether their clients or business categories overlap.
You could go the route of establishing a separate suite for each of the two businesses, but you're still at risk that the data associated with the two listings will get merged. That's not quick or easy to undo.
If I were you, I'd wait a few months until the other business closes shop and then stake a claim to the address on Google local.
This question has been asked in the past. Miriam Ellis usually chimes in and she knows Local SEO inside and out. Here's the answer she gave to how to handle multiple businesses at the same address a few years ago. It's still relevant.
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
-
How has the MOZ community used the new query data from Google My Business?
Our team has been diving into the wealth of knowledge that the Google My Business query functionality has created for us. In an effort to start the conversation on best practices, we're interested to hear how the MOZ community has used this data. Excited to hear how the community is using the data!
Local Listings | | ReunionMarketing1 -
Google My Business pages for New Construction Communities
I have a number of builders of new homes as clients. Typically, they build out a whole neighborhood at once and give the neighborhood a fancy name. We were planning to create Google My Business pages for these communities but then ran into some potential challenges. As new communities, they are sometimes not on Google's radar yet Some of them have model homes where you might take a tour with a realtor that serves the community exclusively but many don't. So here come the questions... Is there a way to make Google speed up its process of recognizing new addresses? I have to choose an address to associate with the GMB page, probably the address of model home. Is this going to create annoying problems for a buyer who someday buys that model home? Since some communities don't have a model home, I could arbitrarily assign an address of one of the neighborhood homes to the GMB page, but this leads to the same question about creating a GMB page that will exist after the builder has sold all the houses in the community. Will it be weird to have the GMB referring to someone's private residence down the road? My assumption is that claiming a GMB page would help with local ranking if someone searches for something like "new homes" in addition to providing easy driving directions to someone who has done a bit of research and Googles the name of the new home community while out driving and searching for homes. These seem to be the main benefits, but are the challenges associated with questions 1-3 even worth the trouble of trying to claim listings for these communities?
Local Listings | | TheKatzMeow0 -
Multiple google places listing
can i submit few map listings in different address from my same user and on the same IP etc
Local Listings | | SEOLocal920 -
Local SEO business name issue due to aggregator
So I work for a college and we have multiple locations. My tactic has been always to keep the name the same for all of them (no city name), and then change the address and phone number for each. But there is 1000s of college listings websites out there that aggregate college and school data from the same source: the US government. Now the way that they have most, if not all, multi-location colleges listed is: "college name-city name". I can see the value in that, but I guess I'm just wondering what to do since it obviously can't be changed. Should I revert all of our listings as "college name-city name" to match the 1000s of listings that have it that way? I've been under the impression that I should leave the city/town name out of the name, but I'm just wondering what you think best practices would be? Thanks
Local Listings | | TomBinga1125
Tom0 -
SEO strategy local service area business
Hello, I run a service area business that rents and delivers moving boxes in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our service area spans 75 cities and many millions of people, and several major metropolitan areas, including San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, but there are also numerous smaller cities that collectively represent a large number of monthly searches. I would like to rank well for the higher level search terms, like “moving boxes” and “moving supplies”, but also city-specific searches like “Moving Boxes San Francisco.” What’s unclear to me is the best strategy for organically ranking on the specific cities in our service area. As I see it, it seems there are several approaches. Is the best approach to either to: A.) Create clean “universal” web pages for pricing, products and landing pages and use blogs to build up content keywords for each of the cities B.) Create 10-15 city-specific web pages with the hope they'll each rank well (e.g. Moving San Jose, Moving in Cupertino) C.) Other? Thanks for your comments.
Local Listings | | bruteboxmoving0 -
2 businesses same phone number
I was wondering how I should approach a scenario where I am optimizing two different companies websites that have the same phone number but different addresses. This sounds like a weird scenario, however it is out of my control. Is treating them as two separate companies fine, or do I have to take special precautions when submitting business directories and what not? Thanks for everyone's help! As a side note, is their a way to use Moz Local with both companies, right now it is getting confused as to what business belongs to what listing.
Local Listings | | brfieger0 -
Issues with Claiming a G+ Business Page
We are working with a client and their marketing consultant who set up a Local Listing service to help local citations, Yahoo, Google+, etc, etc... We have their G+ business page and it is verified, however, as we are new to helping them out, we don't have access to the page to make edits. Here's the catch, neither does the client, or the consultant or the listing company/people. Question: How can we go about claiming this as "our" page in order to help the client out, get it edited/optimized and then keep record of it so this doesn't happen again? PS - Typically, there is an option for a business page to "Is this your page?" or "Manage this page?" at the bottom, but I don't see one of those buttons. Any help or advice would be appreciated. Patrick
Local Listings | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Does anybody have any data on what percentage of people actually click on a Google Places / Google+ listing VS call the business direct from the SERPs?
I've had a few SMB clients who have experienced drops in website traffic once their Google Places listing has gone live. It's hard for the average SMB to understand that this may not be a bad thing because they actually may be received more leads direct from the local SERPs. So while I can try to explain this to my clients, it'd be nice to have some broad data on how searchers interact with Google local listings. I'd love to learn what percentage of people call direct from the SERPs instead of clicking through to the business' website link. Obviously, the percentages would vary across different verticals, different devices & depending on whether the search query was branded or non-branded. I'm after some rough average data, so if anyone could point me in the right direction, that'd be great! 🙂
Local Listings | | Dave_Eddy0