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I have a question for the local SEO crowd: when it comes to creating keyword tracking lists, what are your best practices in reference to tracking from a set location?

Do you typically create national keyword lists that include the location operator in each term or are you better creating a list of locally-tracked keywords around a business' location and dropping the location operator from the keyword? Or some combination of the two?

To clarify, if I had an example business of a realtor in Chatham, MA, would I want to track

-"realtor in chatham ma" (national)
-"realtor in chatham ma" (with the location set to Chatham, MA)
-"realtor" (with the location set to Chatham, MA)

Or some combination of all of the above?

Right now, I track waaaay too many keyword variants on my local campaigns! Hoping there's a better way from some more-seasoned Moz users.

Thanks in advance!

Hi Miriam, thanks for the thorough answer, that really helps to clear things up! Those are all great options to build some organic buzz in neighboring towns.

I manage a site for a medical practice that has two locations. We already have a location page for each office location and we have the NAP for both locations in the footer of every page.

I'm considering making a change to the structure of the site to help it rank better for individual services at each of the two locations, which I think will help pages rank in their specific locales by having the city name in the URL. However, I'm concerned about diluting the domain authority that gets passed to the pages by moving them deeper in the site's structure.

For instance, the services URLs are currently structured like this:

www.domain.com/services/teeth-whitening (where the service is offered in each of the two locations)

Would it make sense to move to a structure more like

www.domain.com/city1name/teeth-whitening

www.domain.com/city2name/teeth-whitening

Does anyone have insight from dealing with multi-location brands on the best way to go about this?

I'm working with a medical practice that has 6 doctors in a single office location. We already have GMB pages for the practice as a whole as well as each practitioner.

Should multi-practitioner businesses like medical practices build citations for each practitioner as well? For instance, should each doctor have a listing on YellowPages, Localeze, etc?

I have a client who runs a dental office on the outskirts of Racine, WI. His address specifically shows up as being in Racine, however, his GMB profile has always showed with the category of "Dentist in Mount Pleasant, WI" displaying below the photos. (Mount Pleasant is the next town over and his office straddles the line between the two towns in Google's overlay map of the town.)

Obviously this is frustrating and I'm concerned that his location is hurting his ability to rank in the larger, more populous town of Racine. Have any other SEOs ever encountered this? And if so, how have you approached the issue? Location pages? Mentions of the location more often on the pages?

tsLvH2B

Hi Miriam, thanks so much for your advice on this. I really thought we had this one, but Google disagrees! I tweeted support and got the following answer:

"Thanks for reaching out. Upon further investigation, we found that the listing is located in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin on Maps here: http://spr.ly/6015EwZYV  Since, the information is not incorrect, we'll be unable to update it. However, this does support the listings organic ranking. To learn more about local ranking and tips check out the link here: http://spr.ly/6016EwZYn  Thank you for your patience and understanding. "

It turns out that the map of Racine may omit this SINGLE plot of land. The business address comes up as Racine, the business owner probably even pays taxes in Racine, but according to Google, he's solidly outside of town. I personally feel like this is debatable based on the map, but Google is at least consistent-- other businesses in the building come back with the same city designation. It's especially a shame because the dentist practicing literally next door comes up as a "dentist in Racine" in his city designation. We've always had trouble ranking the client in Racine, even against competitors with lower DA, and I suspect this city designation could be part of the reason why.

I've attached a few screenshots you may find helpful and if you should want to write a blog post or case study about this, I'm sure Dr. Gould would thank you : )

roFTx5E

Hi Miriam, it's honestly hard to tell. In addition to the city boundaries disappearing on zoom, the map pin has an animation that makes it slowly descend onto the map. It's literally on the line.

Check out the attached screencast I made to help us slow down and stop the Maps animation. At first, I have the boundaries of Mount Pleasant, WI displayed. Then I search for Dr. Gould's location. Based on where the pin falls, it looks to be on the Racine side of the fence but when you pull up the Satellite view and compare the placement of the building to Greenleaf Road (looks to me like the city limit comes through halfway between Greenleaf and Sunset/Byrd) it's possible that the limit line runs through the backyard. A tough call!

Thanks for your help!

Justin

Screen%20Recording%202019-04-02%20at%209.51.20%20AM.mov?dl=0

PS: I'd recommend opening the screencast outside of DropBox, the quality on the website is awful but when I run it in Quicktime it appears just fine.