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Hi! Looking for some link building advice. For some background, I work for a company that has over 100 locations across the US. So we are deeply involved with local SEO. We also do a ton of evergreen/ national SEO as well and the spectrums are widely different for the most part. We also have a very successful blog in our industry. It really is an SEO’s dream. I do not even need to worry about a link strategy for this because it just naturally snatches them up. I’m trying to find some unique ways to utilize the blog to boost pages on my main root domain, more specifically, at the local level. It is really hard, besides the standard methods for local link building, to get outside sources to link to our local office pages. These pages are our bread and butter, and the pages we need to be as successful as possible. In every market we are in, we are at a disadvantage because we have one page to establish our local footprint and rank, compared to domains that have their entire site pointed at that local area we are trying to rank in. I’ve tried linking to local office pages from successful blog posts to attempt to pass link juice to the local pages, but I haven’t seen much in terms of moving the needle doing this. Are there any crafty ideas on how I can shuffle some internal linking around to capitalize on the blog’s authority to make my local pages rank higher in their markets? Thank you! -Ben

Hi all, I am wondering if anyone out there has cracked the enigma of figuring out how to accurately find local rankings for multi-location businesses. I do understand that "accuracy" should be used loosely given the numerous factors that come into play for local such as distance from searcher and business location being located directly in the city of the search. So I definitely get that nothing will be entirely accurate but the programs I have used and the incognito browser approach just seems so far off. Moz tells me something different than the Google Adword Preview Tool which is different than SEMRush which is different than serps.com and so on. I have done the appending to search strings with near=city as well. I unfortunately do not trust any of them at this point. I would LOVE if my company flew me out to every single city we are in so I could do local searches but that is probably not going to happen 🙂 Any thoughts or recommendations for how I can get the most accurate local rank, even if it is an incredibly manual process? Is there an easy way for me to change my location anymore since Google stripped that option away awhile back? That was the ONLY time I felt I was getting somewhat accurate results. Thanks! -Ben

Hey all, Wanted to run something by you. I am getting pressed to use tracking phone numbers for all of our GMB pages for over 100 locations across the country. Has anyone done this for their own listings or for their clients? Because I will have to do it for GMB, this means I will be sending these same phone numbers out to the other major directories and data sources around the web. The phone numbers do contain the local area code for each city and do directly connect our customers to their specific location without any kind of redirecting. How is Google looking at this? I have read before it is a no-no but have also read it is not a big deal. Any thoughts would be much appreciated! -Ben

Hey everyone, So I'm noticing lately that Google is showing ads via AdWords for my locations in the local pack. I am fine with that, but unfortunately it is now driving me a little bit insane wondering how much Google really cares about NAP, distance from centroid and or user, links to domain, completed business profile and so on. They will pull an ad into the top of the local pack for my location, yet, my actual organic business listing in some cases will not even show up until I hit the second page of business results. I get that it's Adwords, it's pay-to-play, but from most accounts, the differences in ranking for traditional listings results compared to business results on both desktop and mobile are pretty different. For example, by doing my traditional SEO best practices, I can rank high in traditional listing results even when my business does not show in the local listings. I have done this time and time again. I am able to accept that since we have 100 locations in the US and our lists were an absolute mess before I got here, that some of our NAP across multiple directories and listing sites are not exactly up to snuff which I have been working on. So I guess the thing is, if my location in Google's eyes is not good enough to be shown organically for the user even at the bottom of page of one of business results, why is it good enough to show an ad for my business location for that query as the absolute first result? Again, I know its Ad Words which basically allows you to cut in line like that special pass you can buy at a roller coaster park, but still. Isn't their goal to provide the best possible experience for their user? If they feel something is worth holding back my organic listing from the user, why is it fine with them to show the user that same location with the top possible local pack spot in an ad? I guess this is more of a rant than anything but I wanted to know if anyone else is dealing with this or anyone has any info they have found that could help shed light on this? It kind of just kicked everything I thought about trust, authority, links in order to rank in the local pack organically out the window. Thanks! -Ben

Hello everyone! I manage SEO for a pretty large brand that has close to 100 office locations nationwide. In the last year we have completely revamped our Yelp pages. This has been a great secondary source of traffic and conversions for us because of the type of industry we are in. The problem is, it can be exponentially better if we were more visible. We have done almost everything we can to make our pages as good if not better than almost any competitor regardless of geographic location. We even have the enhanced profiles (extortion) that remove competitors ads from appearing on our listings. Here is what we have done in the last year to each listing: Uploaded tons of photos Increased reviews Added proper categories Fine-tuned all of our CTAs Added in a unique and optimized business description ( Available with enhanced profiles) Set the proper service area range on their map Increased our review response rate ( both negative and positive) to 100% Still, even after months and months have gone by we struggle to rank on the first page for our service category. Doing manual searches often turn up competitors, who do not even have their listing claimed, have no photos, little reviews will rank higher than us. Even though we have an account rep because of our business size, bringing this issue up to them is about as useful as talking to a blanket. They push CPC so hard that its the last thing they are willing to help with. It has gotten to the point where I am honestly starting to believe in a self-curated conspiracy theory that they purposely hold larger brands back in organic to sell CPC harder. Obviously certain brands that hold the branding clout like a "Best Buy" would be hard to get away with. But still, we do all the right things and we are getting very minimal results compared to where we should be. Has anyone else had issues with Yelp or have any ideas on some steps we could take to appease their particular algorithm? Thanks! -Ben