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Hi Echo,

You're in a very competitive space, so I would say I'd focus more on getting quality unstructured citations.  One or two from colleges and universities or government organizations could indeed tip the balance in your case.  Have you thought about giving free rides from O'Hare and Midway to incoming guest speakers at various seminars / colloquia @ Univ of Chicago, Northwestern, etc, just as an example?

Taking a quick look (assuming this is you) -- I'd suggest trying a couple things first, though:

1. set your service radius much tighter (something like 30 miles)

2. get more reviews on TripAdvisor, WeddingWire, AngiesList, and Yelp.  These seem to be the most prominent review portals in your space.

Hope that's helpful.

My guess is you'll see an improvement in rankings moving to a subfolder structure but a possible decrease in the # of results you get on page one (if the subdomains were ranking there previously).

That's correct.  Every unique clinic that can be reached at a direct-dial phone number should have its own page (or silo) on your website.  If they all have their own websites, the intermediate page is not necessary, assuming that you've thought about the SEO implications of splitting your link equity over multiple sites, rather than one singular, authoritative domain (which would be my recommendation).

Hi Andrew and Christopher,

Thanks for contributing to this thread.  I've just returned from vacation to Miriam's email in my inbox.  We're definitely looking to bring more local reporting features to our customers over the next few months & appreciate you voicing this request, as it helps us prioritize features internally.

Thanks again for being a part of our community!

Cvissi,

Couple things:
#1 If this is one client with 250 locations, then it's a best practice to create a places@client-domain.com email address and then use the Bulk Upload feature from within Google Places for Business.

#2 If it is actually 250 individual clients with 1 location each, you should create a unique account along the lines of places@client-domain.com for each one of those locations.

You should never use an agency email address to claim client locations.

Does that make sense?

It's going to be a lot of manual work at this point unless/until Google allows for SABs to be included in bulk upload.  I'm not so sure I'd even try to tackle GMB yet, but instead focus on aggregator submissions and primary vertically-relevant directories like Thumbtack, AngiesList, Yelp, YP.  Those should honestly get you pretty far in terms of rankings (although obviously you won't get the benefit of being able to choose a featured photo, etc.).

Hi Elyk,

You are correct that Google is interpreting "asphalt company" as having Local Intent (e.g., it thinks you are exceedingly likely to hire a locally-based company to repave your driveway), and thus geo-locating that search to your IP address.

So you'll see different rankings than a searcher in Portland, Oregon (like myself) or Chicago or New York.

The rankings in Moz Analytics are currently pulled from "outer space" so we don't localize those queries.  I'll get Jon White, the product manager of Moz Analytics, to jump in on this thread and provide a little more color around our plans to add local rankings to M.A., however.

Best,
David

Ron, this is exactly how I'd set up the site:

"I believe we should create a mini web site starting at the location page that has specific content and navigation related to each location.  That the content should focus on the specifics of that area and what would serve that clientele the best. We should add to each branch location based on the key words and competition in that area. "

I'd surface blog articles tagged with each location in their corresponding sections here, but wouldn't worry so much about the structure of the blog per se.

No, I'd strongly recommend a page (or set of pages) about the location that lives on your primary domain.  Non-physical locations can only rank organically, and you're much more likely to rank organically using the strength of a parent domain.

Google is unlikely to show schema markup for reviews on category pages.  Yelp does not get these snippets on their category pages like this one and yet invariably gets them on individual business profile pages.

As Greg said, as long as they are Noindexing the page or robots.txt 'ing it out of the crawl index, you should be just fine.

It's still more than a bit lame that they might be able to take credit for content and layout that you did, though.

Not entirely sure that's an accurate response.  There are plenty of SABs who have not claimed a Google My Business Page and yet are still in the Maps index -- and ranking QUITE well.  Here is just one example.

I would try submitting a few locations to each aggregator and see which one has the primary feed in these categories.  My guess would be Infogroup or Acxiom in this particular case.

I tend to agree with BeardoCo, in general it's not worth paying for an upgrade.  There are two notable exceptions:

#1 if the site in question is very heavily trafficked in your industry and provides real eyeballs as part of their premium listing package.  An example might be a TripAdvisor ad for a hotel or B&B -- especially one that's brand-new and hasn't had time to accumulate enough reviews to reach critical mass in TA's internal algorithm.

#2 Sometimes it may be worth paying for an enhanced listing on one of the major data aggregators like Localeze -- in order to include your URL and social information in the results that they syndicate to secondary and tertiary sites.  Additionally, paying for an Enhanced listing on the "back end" like this means that if there aren't any advertisers in your category on the sites that Localeze is syndicating to, your listing is likely to rank pretty well in the "organic" listings of that site.

Hey all,

Thanks for all the positive responses.

We designed Moz Local to be the best option out there to get your data consistent and present at the sites that have the biggest impact on your local search presence.  And to do so at a price point that would be affordable to everyone.

As Bryan noted, there are other products (including Yext) that have more features than ours does, and we'll certainly be expanding our feature set over time.  But if you are looking for an efficient, reliable, affordable location management product, I'm hoping that's us

Best,
David

In the US, Localeze, Infogroup, and Acxiom are the "big three" data providers.