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Great suggestions, Jeff. This particular client, for once, already has a great deal of reviews, but I have a few other guys in mind that could really use some good PR.

Thanks, again, for the great recommendations! I think we'll take door number one. All other avenues seem too messy and I think it's just going to be a matter of getting the business owner to admit it's time to breakup with the sales site. I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm taking on a client who has two websites, one for auto sales side and the other for auto repair. We're taking on the auto repair site. They both share the same business name, address and phone number. Do you foresee any NAP errors if we direct all the directories to the auto repair site?

@Miriam

First off, thanks for your careful analysis, and to answer your questions

1. The Car People have the same name at both locations. PAC Auto (closed) was the previous shop at the Dickerson location.

2. We do the off-site stuff and our competitor does the on-site SEO (don't ask), so creating landing pages means a little push-back. So by "getting the site" I mean that if they won't take our recommendation to add landing pages (not to mention additional issues with NAP in html markup) then we'll push for a sale.

Otherwise we'll talk about a new number and start building again from the ground up.

Too bad about my goof on modifying PAC Auto's citations. Guess I'll go back and close those now.

Tough indeed. Time to call in the dream team.

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@ZDAdmin

Great feedback--thanks! On your suggestion I think we're going to push for their website.

Are you suggesting closing the existing Google+ page for Dickerson and verifying a new page, or was I just not clear about having already opened one? And for conversations sake would you have done something differently to start? For example, having them change their phone number?

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We have a client in Nashville who opened his first location on Spring St., then later bought out PAC Auto to open a second location on Dickerson St. Lately, we noticed that the Dickerson location wasn't ranking. I found that the previous business owner at Pac Auto had already built up a good web presence and that sigh our client was using their old number.

Basic NAP violation, ok, got it. But what to do next?

I decided to update PACs citations with The Car People's business name and website. Where I was unable to edit or where listings were already claimed, I just reported PAC auto as closed.

But yesterday I noticed not only was the Dickerson location still not ranking, but the Spring street location had indeed dropped several places too! (edit: I'm referring to local search results here as we don't own the site)

What kind of beast have I stirred?!

What kind of signals am I sending to Google that are devaluing the Spring st. location? Will things get worse before they get better? What can I do to make some progress on one without hurting the other?

Is it worth trying to get the previous business owners logins (not likey)? Talk to The Car People about getting a new number (not impossible)? Is it worth trying to get the site in order to build separate landing pages for each location?

Thanks in advance!

We do local SEO over here and so our keywords are always followed by a city name, like so: "auto repair+Springfield". If there's ever any confusion within SERPS which "Springfield" the searcher is looking for we can depend on Google to pull query location to assume it's the nearest to them (it does, and is usually correct). And furthermore, if the office ever needs to check for rankings by hand (we're not in Springfield), we just set the query location to "Springfield" and our results match their. However, MOZ doesn't set a query location. Which makes sense, I suppose, because their crawlers are up in the Bay. What I'm saying is that oftentimes there's a discrepancy between how MOZ tells me they rank, and how I see them ranking, the business owner sees them ranking, and how the customer finds them ranking. As such, we can't send them reports through MOZ Has anyone else had this problem and found a solution? Should the keyword be followed by a zip code instead of a city name? This seems like it would solve the location query problem but it may not provide the same results as service+city name.

Great suggestions, Jeff. This particular client, for once, already has a great deal of reviews, but I have a few other guys in mind that could really use some good PR.