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Hi Peter,
Like Pashmina, I'm wondering if what you are seeing relates to the Venice update. Did you catch Mike Ramsey's YouMoz post on this?
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update
Some changes have definitely happened.
Miriam
Hi Rohit,
First step for you will be to read (and memorize!) the Guidelines for Representing your business on Google: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en
If you are hoping to serve local business clients, so many of your actions will be governed by those guidelines, so read them until you know them by heart.
For your particular question:
If you client has 4 physical offices, and each of those serves customers face-to-face, has its own address and own phone number, you can build a Google My Business listing for each office.
If, however, your client has just 1 physical office, but it traveling to 4 different locations to offer services, then the business only qualifies for 1 Google My Business listing - not 4 of them.
Hope this helps!
Hi MrSem,
Awesome topic, and coincidentally, something I've been thinking about quite recently. Local Search Ranking Factors 2017 continues to cite hiding your address as a negative factor: it's #18 of the negative ranking factors section of the survey. There was a time in which it was extremely evident that hiding the address was dinging businesses (I'm thinking back to about 2010). Since then, I've personally felt that Google dialed this factor back, but the fact that some of my colleagues are still seeing enough negative impact from this for it to make it into the LSRF survey makes me suppose they are seeing things more frequently than I am. I can't assign an exact degree of negativity to this factor. In fact, it might vary from pack-to-pack, depending on the strength of the players.
Now, here's another twist to this. Hidden addresses are quickly become a really severe liability in a whole new way. When Google's Home Service Ads come to town, claimed listings for SABs who are complying with Google's hide-address guidelines appear to be gone from the local packs/local finders. Joy Hawkins has some examples of this here: https://whitespark.ca/blog/is-google-going-to-remove-3packs/ and I plan to write more on this topic soon. If you or your clients are being impacted by this artefact of the HSA program, I recommend watching Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling discussing this here: http://localu.org/blog/changing-landscape-for-service-area-businesses-sabs/
So, at this point, yes, I've got to declare hiding the address to be a behavior that can negatively impact service area businesses in a variety of ways, and it's quite difficult that compliance with Google's guidelines could appear to "punish" these business models, but that's about where we're at right now.
Hope my reply, and some of the resources I've linked to, help. And I hope our community will chime in with their opinions. I truly believe this topic deserves much discussion!
Hi Alex,
Thanks for sharing your client's identity. My honest opinion on this is that you need to find a top notch Local SEO in the UK to work with, because a full assessment of this is going to be necessary, and I can't really provide that in the scope of Q&A (plus, I'm most familiar with North American Local SEO). But, here's a few things I've noticed:
The website really needs some help!
It lacks traditional Local 'hooks', so far as I can see. What are these?
There is no NAP in the footer. All 3 addresses should be in the footer, preferably coded in hCard or Schema.
I know you've got the 3 city landing pages, but you should have a traditional Contact Us page, as well. My opinion is that the bots look for this, and you should have all 3 NAPs again, coded in hCard or Schema.
The content on this site is so thin. Only a few words on the homepage, a few on the Roker location page and zero on the 2 other location pages. This truly deserves work.
From a traditional SEO and UX viewpoint, the navigation on the site needs quite a bit of work. It is not good that any time I get onto a page, I have to hit the back button to return to the menu that's on the homepage.
Also puzzled that of the 11 items in that menu on the homepage, only 3 are links? More evidence that a copywriter needs to be engaged or the owner needs to get writing so that the site has good, unique, rich content for every service.
Regarding your question - no, having 3 locations should not have any effect on your rankings, provided you are taking the proper steps to distinguish them from one another. Right now, with the lack of NAP and content, you're not making ideal efforts to do so.
This is just a start, typed up from taking a brief look at the client's site. A full investigation of the client's site, plus citations and other factors is definitely advisable. And, you might also like to check out 51 Blocks' competitive analysis tool for Local Search, though I am not 100% positive it works for the UK yet. It's brand new and I'm not sure in Michael Borgelt (the creator) had included the UK yet. Check it out:
http://www.51blocks.com/online-marketing-tools/free-local-analysis/
Hope my straightforward response on the issues I am seeing at first glance will actually give you and your client hope. There are far more efforts that can be made here, giving you a possibility of moving up in the rankings if you can assess all areas of possible improvement, implement new work and see if it's enough to nudge you up in the rankings. Good luck!!!
Hey DaveyTree,
Some nice responses here from Cesare! I'm enjoying reading the discussion you two are having.
I agree with Cesare that it sounds like you're going above and beyond many companies in regards to your Yelp efforts, and yep, I've encountered other business owners expressing frustrations similar to yours. While it sounds like you've gained very advanced knowledge of Yelp in your efforts to promote your business, take a minute to watch this video from 2016:
http://localu.org/blog/guest-video-top-10-yelp-tips-small-business-2016/
It taught me some things I didn't know about Yelp when I first watched it, and maybe you'll get some new ideas, too.
Hi Bill,
Despite the fact that Google began rolling this out two years ago, there has been so little writing or research done on it. I read Local SEO news on a daily basis, and have yet to encounter any of the top Local SEOs saying that they implemented this for a client and saw X impact on the rankings. I actually just spoke with Darren Shaw who has a client who did this and he did not feel it impacted rankings, but as I say, people just haven't really published studies on this (not that I've seen, anyway).
Thinking this over, the one way I could hypothesize that this might have some small impact on rankings could be user behavior. This is a big 'if'. If participation were, for example, to cause users to stay on the + page longer, and if Google chose to view this as a signal that the page was more trusted or more active or some other positive attribute like that (I'm not saying they do, mind you), then perhaps that could slightly influence rank, but I wouldn't bank on it. And because you can't tell that a business has participated in this program until you're actually on their page, CTR can't be part of picture. So, no ranking factor there.
I think this app needs to be viewed more from a conversion standpoint than a ranking one. To my mind there are 2 things to consider here.
Client motive...whether the client's business has a strong visual component that could make a virtual walk-through persuasive to the user. For example, a beautiful restaurant can show off it's gorgeous setting, but a car garage might not have that same desire/need.
Google motive...see the final point on this page http://maps.google.ca/help/maps/businessphotos/faq.html#q2
Google has always loved neat technology, so there is a 'coolness' factor, of course, but this program is a way to increase participation in Adwords Express, so Google has a very good reason to want business owners to participate.
I hope these are some good thoughts to consider, Bill, but as I've said, this whole issue has been so little documented, that I just don't have an authoritative answer beyond suggesting that this more about conversions than rankings, from what I can see.
Hey Mike,
I have been looking into your excellent question a bit for the last two days, and while there are good tutorials out there about implementing Facebook Locations (like this one: https://sweetiq.com/blog/how-to-claim-facebook-locations/), what I'm not finding is trustworthy documentation of downsides, and I have one concern about this.
One of my colleagues and I noticed that Facebook's API is not seeming to return the locations of businesses using Facebook Locations, unless you add a city name to your query. This seems a bit odd and I don't know what to make of it, and don't have the resources of time at the moment to explore whether this behavior of Facebook's API could have further-reaching effects on search. For example, does this mean that apps/directories that pull from this API aren't going to return your multi-locations in their results? How does this impact Google results? Etc., etc.
I think you've raised a question that deserves a full study, and I'm sorry not to be able to surface one for you. I think you may have surfaced something that's in uncharted waters, and I'd love to see an enterprising Local SEO explore this topic further. In the meantime, you might consider posting in Facebook's help community to see if you can get any anecdotal replies from businesses who are implementing Facebook Locations, to see if they've noted any peculiar or negative impacts of going that route instead of going with individually building out pages one-at-a-time.
Hi Joel,
Hopefully, the stuff we discussed via PM and your other thread about your company will have helped you to understand some of the reasons you are being ranked on Page 2. Beyond that, one of the best places to learn about this subject is David Mihm's annual Local Search Ranking Report. This report surveys some of the top Local SEOs in the world. Here is the 2012 edition:
http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml
Also, I recommend you become a regular reader of the following 3 blogs:
http://www.blumenthals.com/blog
http://www.ngsmarketing.com/blog/
http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/
In addition to this, I have recently published two comprehensive blog posts that received quite a bit of industry acclaim, covering both the psychological mindset and tactical approach to Local SEO. Here are these posts:
The Zen of Local SEO
http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1314
The Rudiments of Local SEO
http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1344
I hope you will find these resources to be truly helpful!
Hi Paul,
So glad you asked. This is one of those rather complicated Google My Business issues, so my answer is going to be a bit long to be sure I'm being thorough. Google's guidelines have long stated the following: (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en
The following businesses aren’t eligible for a business listing:
Historically, Google has forbidden the use of GMB listings for temporary sales offices located in model homes. If you had a sales office located somewhere permanently, you could list it, but if it was temporary, it wasn't eligible.
Now, the guidelines still read this way, and you can see GMB Forum Top Contributor Joy Hawkins citing them back in 2016 in this thread in which a business model similar to yours got all of its listings suspended:
*Please note that the above thread contains references to Google Mapmaker which no longer exists.
However, a couple of months after that initial thread, Joy received some new information from Google (see: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Spam-Policy/Platinum-Homes-Account-Suspended-having-17-locations/m-p/825706#M5299), which I'll copy/paste here:
"I just heard back from Google because I double-checked with them. They told me:
_ We (GMB) recently decided to allow leasing offices for model homes on the Map so I'm wondering if that is what the user is saying they see often. If it's actually just empty model homes and not the leasing office, we should remove them."_
So, it seems that if you have a leasing office within a model home, Google is now okay with this (though you still should not list an empty model home).
However, moving on with your question, Paul, if the newly built communities aren't mapped yet, you will see further down in that second GMB forum thread that this represents a problem, which Joy addresses this way:
"Since Street View doesn't confirm or show any of your sales offices, the only way for me to get these all reinstated is for you to get photos of inside and outside each of them to help Google see they exist. The easiest way to do this would be to add them to your website and let me know where they are so I can reply back to Google. Let me know when you've done that."
So, what I'd recommend, then, is that you get photographic documentation together of any staffed sales offices located in a model home that isn't yet visible via Street View, and that you then post this to the Google My Business Forum, asking that a Top Contributor like Joy please help you get recognized. Hopefully this will help you avoid the problems that the poster in the Google forum ran into with suspension, but I can't guarantee it. It's confusing when Google's public guidelines don't reflect their current internal stance, and this is one they need to update publicly if they've changed their policy. At least you now have in your hands the forum threads that document what Google told Joy, in case you run into TCs or Google staff who do not understand this change of policy.
As for what to do when a sales office closes and is finally sold to a buyer, what is the model of this business? Specifically, are different communities they build branded with the same name? For example, are multiple communities named "Golden Homes", or is one called "Golden Homes" and the second called "Oceanview Homes" and the next called "Riverside Homes"? Please, let me know, as good advice on this question could depend on how the business operates.
Hi Greg,
In order to qualify for Google+ Local (which was called Google Places in the past), your business needs to meet the following criteria:
Have a unique, dedicated physical street address (not a shared address, not a virtual address, not a P.O. box or any other type of box)
Have a unique local area code phone number (not a shared number or toll free number) that matches the city of location
Have in-person transactions with customers, either at your place of business (like a restaurant) or at their locations (like a plumber.
If your business doesn't meet all of these requirements, you do not qualify for inclusion and should not create a local account.
If you do have in-person transactions with clients and are operating out of your home, and no other businesses are operating out of the same address, you can use your home address and local phone number as your location. However, you must be absolutely sure that you comply with Google's rules regarding hiding your address. All home-based businesses and businesses that go to their clients' locales to serve must choose the hide address function when creating their page or they will be removed or penalized.
And, be sure you create only 1 Google+ Local page for your city of location - do not create other pages for the other cities you serve. That's not allowed.
I recommend that you study the Google's Places Quality Guidelines to be sure you know all the public rules:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528
In addition to this, there are 'unwritten' rules that apply to optimizing your Google+ Local Page that require study as well. For example, in writing your business description on the + page, do not put any geographic terms, your business name or any links in the copy. There are a number of little taboos like that that you'll need to be aware of in going into this in order to avoid penalties.
It's so critical to get this right. If Local SEO is all new to you, you might like to read this:
The Rudiments of Local SEO
http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1344
Hope this helps!
Hi Jeff,
I'm looking right now at your scenario and am going to jot down what I see as I go:
Searching from my location in California for "church spring hill tennessee", I see Community Baptist Church coming up #15 in the local finder view (to the left of the map).
In order for me to make Covenant Community Church appear in the local finder, I have to zoom in 2 levels on the map, at which point, your church appears at #20 in the local finder, with Community Baptist being at #11.
This indicates to me that your church (Covenant) is being impacted by a Google filter, like the Possum Filter (read: https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-possum) which has the effect of filtering out businesses that share a building or a category. I'm not positive this is actually Possum, because the two churches do have different categories, but I suspect it is a shared-building filter of some kind.
I'm assuming you are located near your church, and I would advise you to try to replicate what I am doing zooming in on the map, click by click, to see if your church then appears in the results. If you see the same results behavior that I have from my locale on the West Coast, that is further confirmation of a filter.
Some good news, is that if I search Google for just "Covenant Church Spring Hill TN", you are the ONLY entity that comes up, with it's own knowledge panel and everything. So, if I were new to town, and was of a Covenant affiliation, Google would be showing me your organization as a result. That's good to know! I'm also glad to see that the two churches have different phone numbers.
I would advise you not to worry about people searching for you by address. If I am looking for a church, I'm going to look up "Baptist Church Spring Hill," or "Episcopal Church Spring Hill". I'm not going to look for a church by typing "123 Main St." into Google or Google Maps, right?
I want to ask about your use of a suite number. Is your congregation actually occupying a different building on the church grounds than the Baptist community is? My guess is no on this, and that you are both using the same church at different times of the day. If I'm right about that, you should remove the suite number from your Google My Business listing and other local business listings. Google pays no attention to suite numbers, but you want to be totally accurate in how you represent your church's location, and use of a suite number does not prevent filtering (as we're seeing with our own eyes in your scenario).
It's up to Google who gets a place label icon (the little church symbol you see) and typical advice on that is that you need to build up authority to earn one. The fact that the Baptist organization has the symbol and the higher local finder visibility leads me to suspect they are simply the stronger "competitor". I know it's kind of weird to talk about "competitors" when we are talking about churches, but that is how we'd phrase this if we were talking about two businesses occupying the same location, and all of this leads me to my next point.
If you are concerned that the Baptists are outranking you in some way that would be preventing Covenant affiliated folks from finding your community, then you will need to conduct a competitive audit to see where the "competitor" is stronger than you are. Again, sorry for the business-type language! This recent post of mine (https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit) will walk you through the process of doing a basic audit, so that you can discover areas in which the Baptist church may have superior metrics that are causing it to outrank your church for a generic search like my original "church spring hill tennessee".
Always keep in mind that local results are not static. Because Google now sees the searcher as the centroid of truly local searches, this means that people living right next door to (or driving past) your church building may be seeing different local results than people who are doing the same search while being located up on Buckner Road on the north side of town. And, folks 30 miles away (like in Nashville) are likely seeing yet different results. I just mention this as something to always keep in mind when looking at the results.
If you take the time to do the audit referenced in point 9, and any questions arise from the data you total up, please feel free to come back to this thread and ask me. Thanks for the chance to look at your scenario.
Now how's that for coincidence? Doug, the post Oleg has linked to was written by Mike Blumenthal after a conversation he and I had about this advice that was being published about linkbuilding to Google Places. So, what you'll see there is Mike's excellent reply to my question!
Good answer, Oleg.
Hey There!
In the scenario you've described, my answer would be "no", creating a landing page for a single location brick-and-mortar business does not make good horse sense. As you've rightly pointed out, the entire website is optimized for this location, nullifying the need for additional landing pages. If the dental practice opens a second location, then yes, do create these types of pages, but right now, it's not necessary either for patients or for your SEO efforts.
More on this: right now, the dental practice's only association with cities other than its city of location is that some patients may come to the locale from additional towns. That's fine, but it's nothing to really publicize. After all, a famous restaurant might have diners travel from all over the world to patronize it, but it just wouldn't make sense for the restaurant to build a landing page for each possible customer origin, right?
So, if the dental practice wants to build awareness of itself in neighboring communities, then it needs to have some stronger relationship to publicize than the fact that some if its patients live in towns B, C or D. This is where the role of relationship building comes into play. A dentist in Town A could possibly sponsor events in Town B, or speak at a conference in Town C, or offer a discount to parents for kids' first dental exams in Town D. These would be actual topics to write about on the website, or to promote via social media. Genuine relationships could be built by this type of outreach, and while it wouldn't be highlighted via landing pages, it could begin to build up brand awareness in these additional communities where the dentist lacks a physical office.
I'd also advise the dentist to consider what he can offer, in Town A, that is lacking in Towns B & C. For example, I traveled several towns away to a holistic dentist to have my mercury filling safely replaced for health reasons. No one in my own town offered this. If I were that dentist, I'd be doing everything I could to publicize rare or valuable services that are worth traveling for.
And, in the meantime, be sure the Contact page for the single location rates an A+ in thoroughness.
Hope this helps!
Hi Ivgi,
Good question. In Local SEO, what you're describing is typically similar but not always exactly the same. There are 2 ways to typically get local results delivered to you by Google.
Typing in a keyword Google judges to have local intent and then matches to the location of your device. So, if you're in Dallas and search for 'grocery store', then Google will show you local grocery stores near you.
Typing in a keyword+geo term (Dallas) so that you are signalling to Google that you want results specific to that location. It doesn't have to be the location you're in. After all, someone located in Dallas may be looking for a hotel room in San Diego and by including 'San Dieogo' in their search term, they are signalling to Google that they want local results for a different city - not for the city in which their currently located.
You can do some testing of this and you will see that Google will show similar results for both types of queries, though there are typically some minor ranking differences. For example the searcher in Dallas who doesn't include 'Dallas' in his search term may see slight variations in which businesses are ranking where in the local pack of results than the searcher does who is including 'Dallas' in his search term, but isn't actually located in Dallas. The differences are typically slight.
You can also test this out by using Google's search refinement tools to set your location to different cities and perform searches. Again, you may see some slight differences than when you aren't setting your location, but they are slight.
I've explained the above because I'm not sure whether the sample search term you've included in your post is your actual search term. I've explained how Local works, but, all this being said, your sample search is not typically going to bring up Local results, because of the inclusion of 'online' in your query. That is telling Google that you don't care if a business is in Dallas or not. You want to buy something online.
In that case, then, no, you are unlikely to get the same kinds of results for the two different queries. 'Buy Groceries Online Dallas' is likely telling Google you want results from Dallas-based virtual businesses that sell groceries on the Internet, whereas 'Buy Groceries Online" is almost certain to return you generic, national results, regardless of where you are located. There may be some Dallas results included, but I would predict that there would be national ones as well.
The best way for you to research this is to perform your own varied searches for whatever your real search term is. Hope this helps!
Good morning, Andrew!
Is any of the content of this page unique to the page and to your business? I'm seeing that quite a bit of the page is TripAdvisor's content. Is this an affiliate site?
Hi Hitesh,
I think it would be really helpful if you did a quick study of the Google Places Quality Guidelines I linked to in the earlier post to get a sense of eligible and ineligible business models. In sum, in order to qualify for inclusion in Google's local product, a business must meet all of the following criteria:
Have face-to-face transactions with its customers - either at the company's location (like a restaurant) or at the clients' locations (like a plumber).
Have a unique, non-shared physical street address - not a virtual office of any kind.
Have a unique, non-shared local area code phone number - not a toll free or call tracking number.
If a company cannot say 'yes' to all three of those points, then it should not seek local inclusion. Instead, the company should rely on organic SEO, social media and forms of marketing apart from Local SEO to attain visibility in its focus markets. Hope this helps!
Hi There!
Good topic, and I'm sorry to have to say that, no, you can't directly tell Google that their radius is too small. You've done a good job of documenting what sounds like an interesting and recent shrinking of the radius, but when Google decides to do something like that, it's because they've determined it's "best", or are doing some kind of test.
Important to mention here that local search is traditionally city-specific. I can imagine it's frustrating if your clients were formerly enjoying local rankings for a regional search and, as a result of this change, they no longer are. Basically, they are now in the same boat as most local businesses ... having to compete locally for searches related to their physical location in a specific town/city.
My advice would be to go hard after the organic rankings for these terms, and continue to monitor Google. The radius could change again at some point.
Hi Adnan,
True local results revolve around cities, not counties, and inclusion in the local pack of results typically requires having a physical location in the city of search. Beyond this, you can develop content for additional cities where you're not physically located, and that could include content you develop for counties, too, if research indicates county terms are important in your niche, but the goal of this work would typically be organic visibility rather than visibility in Google's local pack of results. Hope this helps!
Thanks for the additional details, William.
Two years ago, I wrote this piece on the eligibility of coworking spaces for GMB inclusion: https://moz.com/blog/are-coworking-offices-eligible-for-google-my-business-listings
I recommend that you read that to get a sense of local SEO surrounding these types of locations.
I will add an update, though. Three months after I wrote the above article, Google rolled out the Possum filter. What this means is that, if any other business at your WeWork location is in the same category as your business, you will be struggling to rank at that address, because one of the chief outcomes of Possum was the filtering out of listings that share category + physical proximity.
So, if after reading the above article, you determine that you would be eligible for a GMB listing at the coworking building, but you are finding you're not ranking for your most important phrases, you may be running into the Possum filter. The only way to overcome the Possum filter is to build your "authority" to the point that Google chooses to show you and filter out your competitors. This can involve a great deal of work if you have active, motivated competitors.
Because of this, you really do need to consider what is best in terms of address for the business. Options I am seeing for you (with an imperfect knowledge of your entire business scenario):
If you don't have any same-category competitors at the WeWork building or within a couple of blocks of it, determine your eligibility for a GMB listing at that location. If you find you are eligible, use that address.
If you determine you are eligible, but DO have same-category competitors in close proximity, assess whether you have the time/funding to do a full competitive audit and then put in whatever work necessary to become the un-filtered result.
If you are either ineligible to use the WeWork address because of nuances of your business, or lack the resources to become the un-filtered result in a Possum-affected scenario, but you still have an office on 34th Street, use that address and list yourself as an SAB. Or, if you no longer occupy the 34th street location at all, you may need to use your home address (or the home address of the business owner, if that's not you), and, again, list yourself as an SAB.
Don't focus on whether being brick-and-mortar or an SAB helps/hurts rankings. Focus on representing your business accurately, as failure to do so can lead to listing suspension.
My apologies if, not having a completely clear vision of your business scenario, I'm missing any important details. From what you've described, this is what I see. Hope it helps!
P.S. Obviously - once you've settled on your address, you need to update all your assets and citations to consistently reflect the chosen address.
Hey There,
I doubt that the URL structure is the cause of the internal landing pages not ranking for your queries. I agree with Zoe's comments about the way you are linking internally to these pages counting, and beyond this, it's going to be the strength of the individual pages that counts most.
The most common issue I see with multi-location/multi-service businesses is that they build pages for their various keyword combos, but the pages are weak on content, or worse, duplicative of one another. If you are confident that you are publishing the best page in your industry/geography for each service topic, and there are no thin or duplicate issues going on, then the next thing to look at would be the third party links pointing to these pages, giving Google cause to believe they deserve to rank higher than your home page or competitors' page for given queries.
Barring any technical issues preventing these pages to be indexed and trusted by Google, it's likely to boil down to a combination of site architecture, page quality, links and age. Nothing too groundbreaking here, but general advice.
Hey Jack,
I recommend that you tell the client that the first step is the create a really good landing page on the website for each of the locations. You can then link from each citation set you build to its respective landing page. The alternative is to link citations for both locations to the homepage, but statistics indicate this may decreased conversions.
So, yes, you build a unique citation set for each location.
In terms of linkbuilding, if the locations are in the same city, it's likely your links will be relevant to both, but if they are in different cities, then it would be smart to begin developing relationships in each locale that can lead to good, local links for each branch.
You should be doing Schema markup for each of the locations, yes. I recommend you read Schema expert David Deering's explanation on this page: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/lULikkVHVRo
Regarding on-page SEO, the difficulty typically lies in the fact that a business that formerly had a single location (and optimized their whole website around the single location) now has two of them. You're left asking if you should just add in the second city name to optimize core pages (home, about, etc.). With just two location, you can often go this route (e.g. "Serving Dallas and Sugar Land" instead of just "Serving Dallas" in your tags and text). Then, you'll have to see how far that approach gets you with the second city. More often than not, though, you'll come back to the concept that you really do need a unique landing page for each locale so that you have at least one, very focused, fully optimized page on the website for each branch. This article can help you get going with this: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
The client you are marketing is at a turning point if they've just recently expanded. Now is the ideal time to consider their strategy, to determine to create strong landing pages instead of duplicative/weak ones, to base their citation building on the existence of these well-created pages and to go forward on a strong, clear path, instead of giving only a half-effort now, only to have to come back and correct it later.
Hope this helps!
Hi Klemens,
Joe's advice is right on, and I'd recommend these Whiteboard Fridays to help you get into a powerful mindset about this topic:
https://moz.com/blog/beat-your-competitors-rankings-comprehensive-content-whiteboard-friday
https://moz.com/blog/optimizing-for-rankbrain-whiteboard-friday
Hope you enjoy those!
Yes, as Casey says, the accuracy of GMB Insights is pretty questionable. I don't think it's a case of Google intentionally skewing those numbers. It could even be a longstanding bug. The numbers I see make no sense.
Interesting discussion of this here, if you'd like to read more on this topic: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2017/05/06/how-accurate-is-google-my-business-insights/
Hi There!
Yes, Google has been making some changes. Please read Dr. Pete's post on this for complete background and tips: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-write-meta-descriptions-in-a-changing-world
Hey Oleg,
Ed has provided an excellent answer, and while I don't recommend outsourcing linkbuilding, I do highly recommend that you check out ZipSprout's sponsorship finder product: https://zipsprout.com/
It's a great way to help you build local relationships. Recommended reading: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-local-sponsorship-marketing
Hey Ruben,
The review help site I am most impressed with is getfivestars.com. Have you checked that out? It's pretty cool, in that it helps you earn not just third party reviews, but also on-site testimonials. It was developed by Mike Blumenthal, and no one knows local better than Mike:) Hope you'll check it out!
Good afternoon, and congratulations on launching your tiny house business. Those tiny houses are fascinating!
In regards to your question, I'm understanding your scenario this way:
You do woodworking/carpentry/repairs via an existing local business for local customers with whom you meet face-to-face.
You've now started a national business in which you will ship tiny house kits or materials to customers across the U.S.
If I've misunderstood that in any way, please correct me.
If I'm correct, read on.
Having a Google My Business listing is dependent on you having face-to-face interactions with customers. So, if your consumer base for the tiny houses is completely national rather than local, and you are not meeting these shoppers face-to-face, you do not qualify for a Google My Business listing.
But, if at least some of your customers for the tiny houses are local and you are meeting with them either at your place of business or are going from your place of business to meet them out at their houses, then, yes, you would qualify for a Google My Business listing.
In other words, you have to be meeting at least some of your customers in person to be eligible for a listing.
Moving along, if you determine that you are eligible because you're meeting some tiny house buyers face-to-face, you have a second problem to tackle: the problem of co-located businesses at the same address.
If one of your businesses was the tiny house business and other was a computer repair company, you'd have no problem having them share addresses, provided you equipped each business with a unique phone number and a unique website.
But, in your case, both of your businesses appear to be related to carpentry (houses, furniture, woodworking, etc.). Google does have separate categories for Home Builder, Furniture Repair and Carpenter, but I would have a moderate concern that Google might decide that you are a single business (a carpentry business) attempting to appear like multiple businesses with multiple Google listings. It's possible that they could decide you are trying to spam them, and penalize or even remove one or more of your listings.
Given this, you have two options to proceed with guaranteed safety:
Decide you are really just running one carpentry business with a variety of services promoted via a single website and a single Google My Business listing.
Decide you are really running two distinct businesses and locate one of them at a different physical location, as well as ensuring they each have their own website and phone number, and completely unique branding (a different name, etc.).
The first option should be no sweat. The second option, if all of your woodworking tools are in a single shop, could involve some difficult structural business changes, such as opening up a second workshop. You will be best able to determine whether that's possible.
Please let me know if anything I've written needs further clarification. And good luck with your new work!
Really good discussion going on here, gentlemen! Everyone on this thread likely agrees that Yelp's policies have made them the focus of a great deal of controversy over the years.
Their official stance on removing reviews for paying customers is:
No. You can’t pay us to remove or reorder your bad reviews — it’s just that simple. It’s worth pointing out some additional checks and balances that we build into the system: among other things, our sales team doesn’t have the administrative privileges that might allow them to remove a bad review for an advertiser; similarly, the folks who do have those privileges don’t have anything to do with sales and aren’t compensated on the basis of sales performance ... Our recommendation software treats advertisers and non-advertisers exactly the same. You’ll find plenty of Yelp advertisers with negative reviews, and plenty of non-advertisers with five-star ratings across the board ... In short, there is no relationship between reviews and anything having to do with Yelp Ads or the Yelp Ads sales process. Period.
(see: https://biz.yelp.com/support/common_questions)
My read of this is that Yelp is declaring that money can't influence review take-down because their sales department doesn't handle taking down reviews - but - that there are staff members who do have the privilege of taking down a review.
Robert, two things about what you've documented here are standing out to me:
It sounds like the company in question had multiple negative reviews that have now been removed. To me, this indicates some sort of close manual management going on on Yelp's side in conjunction with this business. Could legal issues be involved? Could there be some kind of extenuating circumstance that would warrant a general take-down of all negative reviews for the business in question? Maybe like a change of management, or legal pressure, or something along those lines?
You mentioned that you multi-posted your review. I am failing to find the guideline on this, but I am positive Yelp has a policy against re-publishing Yelp reviews on third party sites. Could it be that your mutli-publishing approach might have fallen afoul of this and looked to Yelp like you were re-publishing content (your review) that they consider to be theirs? Could this have happened with any of the other reviews that were taken down? Just a thought!
I think you've done the smart thing by personally asking Yelp for an explanation of what happened. It would be very educational, I'm sure, if you could share the reply you receive with the community as, clearly, there are some hard feelings about situations like this. Thanks for starting a good discussion!
Hi Nikki!
I'm so sorry you haven't received a response yet to your good question. Often, that zooming behavior you're reporting is a sign that Google is filtering out the listing. First question from me. Are there any other businesses in the same category of business located in your building or within the surrounding couple of streets? Please, let me know the answer to that.
Also, is the search term you're asking about specifically "pool renovations brisbane"? I see your business as being listed in Camp Hill Queensland. What is the relationship of Camp Hill to Brisbane, please?
Thanks!
Hey Ruben,
Where does Google think you are? On the map, I mean, are you categorized as Trinity or New Port Richey? Whatever they think is how you should be listing, promoting and optimizing, lest you be at odds with their take on geography.
Hi Nikki,
Searching for "pool renovations brisbane" from the US, I am seeing your business come up 12th in the local finder view. I see that Google is marking the city center of Brisbane roughly at the corner of Albert and Queen Streets and that the majority of the businesses in the local finder are clustered right around that nexus. However, I do also see some other businesses (including yours) are on the other side of the Brisbane River from this, including one that is farther away than yours (MPR) and is outranking you. From my location, I'm unable to reproduce the filtering activity you are experiencing, but clearly, you're seeing it happen.
Scenarios like this generally require doing a full competitive audit. I would actually recommend that you do two of them, in this case. I would look at the top ranking business, and I would also pay special attention to Wahoo Pool, which is also far from the other businesses, but has earned many more reviews and is managing to rank #3, at least in my results. This article contains a spreadsheet for doing this type of audit, though you may want to look at even more signals than it covers: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit
I'd stack up my client's numbers against both the top ranked business and this other competitor to see if you can find where they are pulling superior numbers. Like your client in the legal business, it may well just be a case where you'll have to out-do competitors to convince Google that this business is the one that deserves to rank. And, of course, you'll be wanting to resolve any issues the audit turns up for the business.Typically, audits yield insight, but if your audit turns up no clear narrative that could explain why the client isn't showing up at the automatic zoom level, you are left with:
Something you are overlooking
A bug or weird behavior on Google's part that could resolve
Hope these thoughts are helpful.
Hi There, RBMac!
Yes, I am with you on ensuring that both businesses have a Yelp profile, and this could potentially resolve the issue you are experiencing, but in reading through your scenario, I think there is a larger issue at hand that both business owners should discuss. The presence of two businesses in the same industry occupying the same address is pretty much the recipe for running into this type of citation confusion, which can then sometimes lead to even larger problems in Google (lack of trust, accidental merging, etc.). Given that these are two legally separate entities, have the business owners considered getting a legal suite number for one of the two businesses, to permanently differentiate them? While this would not completely remove the risk of merging or other mix-ups like the one you're seeing with Yelp, it could substantially decrease that risk. You would then, of course, want to be sure that all citations correctly reflected the separate addresses. Something to consider.
Hmm, I wonder if there's a bug, Matt. How this should work is that you simply remove your open hours when you're not open and then put them back up again when you are. But you're encountering an error message? If that's right, I'd take this to the Google My Business forum: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Basics-for-Business-Owners/bd-p/Basics_for_Business_Owners
Do a search there first to see if anyone else is encountering a similar problem right now. If not, post your business details, explain exactly what you're trying to do and ask if you're dealing with a bug or are making a misstep somewhere along the way.
Hi Michael!
Glad you asked! You definitely do not want your customers using your company's Google account or using a review kiosk in your store as both will likely result in your listing falling under suspicion and your reviews being removed. Yikes - don't want that!
The customer must always use his or her own account to leave you a review and you must never post reviews on behalf of a customer, or you will be violating Google's own guidelines about this.
The best place to start in formulating your company's review acquisition strategy will be with a quick study of Google's review policies:
https://support.google.com/business/answer/2622994?hl=en&topic=1656880&ctx=topic&rd=1
I then highly recommend Phil Rozek's exhaustive post on review acquisition:
And then go through all of the resources linked to at the end of his post.
Once you've gotten through all of that, you are going to know a TON about this area of marketing and should be creating your store's strategy from an extremely educated basis. Hope this helps!
Hello there!
Just to confirm, are you inquiring about this functionality: https://searchengineland.com/google-my-business-insights-adds-queries-used-to-find-your-business-301500
Please, let us know!
Hi Travis,
I think, in addition to the advice David has given you regarding starting your work with ensuring that your citations are in good order (do a quick check to start you out on moz.com/local/search) on the major citation sources, there are two categories of links that would be most helpful to you:
A presence on any locally-relevant site of high quality
A presence on any industry-relevant site of high quality, regardless of its location
So, for example, you could aim to get a good profile going on your city's chamber of commerce. In addition to that, let's say you're in the fence building business. In that case, a presence on any contracting industry sites would be helpful to you. This might include places you're accredited or otherwise associated, regardless of if they are physically located in your city or a completely different state.
A two-pronged approach to examining your opportunities should cover the waterfront.
Thanks so much for confirming, and I really appreciate you letting us know you're interested in this function and already have smart plans for how you would use it. We've been watching the rollout of Query data with interest, too, but unfortunately, Google hasn't yet made it part of their API, which Moz Local relies on.
Right now, our engineers are actively following, researching, comparing it to GSC results, and otherwise evaluating it, but it will be up to Google to give this feature prime-time treatment. It's really good to know it's something you'd be interested in seeing. It's important for us to hear that, and I've shared your feedback with our team. Thank you!
Hi Corn!
Important question. Definitely do read Google's guidelines https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en which are very clear on this point:
Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location. PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable.
Google's guidelines are fundamental reading materials for all Local SEOs and local business owners. Study them, share them with your clients and check back on them periodically for updates, which tend to occur one or more times a year.
You might also like to read a similar thread going on here regarding virtual offices:
https://moz.com/community/q/virtual-offices-google-search
Your client's options are:
To wait until they open a physical office before participating in Google's local product
Use their home address in creating their listing but then use the options to have it hidden, in which case, Google will only display the city and phone number ... not the street address
But, using a mailbox of any kind is definitely not permitted. So glad you've asked!
Hi Wagada,
I've seen this come up before at Google's forum: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Basics-for-Business-Owners/quot-Owner-quot-Q-amp-A-Responses-not-being-displayed/td-p/1675268
Read that one, and then I suggest you post a thread there on this topic and see if there is currently a known bug surrounding this.
Hi Ricky,
Your gut feeling on this rings true with me. Not a good practice. Google's review policy states:
We’ll remove content that violates any of the content policies below:
So, Google's policy explicitly states that they will remove content they feel was created by any person misrepresenting themselves as a customer in order to artificially inflate the reviews of another business. This indicates that Google has a way of assessing this.
Facebook makes similar statements, including:
Ratings and reviews must follow the Facebook Community Standards, focus on the product or service offered by the Page and be based on personal experience. Reviews that don't follow these guidelines may be removed.
So, again, this platform is emphasizing that a review must be based on personal experience and may be removed by Facebook if it doesn't conform to this policy.
You'll find similar policies on pretty much any major review platform.
Here's the most recent case of crackdown I can think of: http://www.localsearchforum.com/internet-marketing/32983-yelp-warns-its-users-shows-evidence.html
And Yelp has sued business owners for alleged fake reviews: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/yelp-sues-small-san-diego-law-firm-over-alleged-fake-reviews/
And NY law enforcement has gotten into the act on occasion as well: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/technology/give-yourself-4-stars-online-it-might-cost-you.html?_r=0
And Google has been quoted as saying, "While we take down thousands of false entries each month, there is a small subset of bad apples out there." see: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/yelp-google-and-urbanspoon-targets-for-fake-reviews-1.2826154 (emphasis mine)
And Mike Blumenthal has written some posts on this I've never forgotten: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/08/09/in-search-of-the-purchased-google-review-yours-for-1-40-ea/
So, both on-line and legal consequences can be the result of spammy review practices. These are just a few cases I've thought of. I'm sure you can find a ton more. My take on this is that most platforms have policies precisely targetting fake reviews, but their ability to actually police this stuff is likely not up to the task, considering the prevalence of spammy activities like the review farm you've been looking at. Hope this helps!
Thanks for the screencast. This is a super frustrating case for your client, honestly. When I first looked at the map, it looked to me like they were clearly on the Racine side of the line, but after looking at your screencast, I agree - it's borderline.
Sadly, because of this, I don't think you have much of a case to make to Google if they are insistent that the business is technically in Mount Pleasant. It's especially unfortunate, because clearly, the business has a Racine postal address. Obviously, the postal authorities believe the business address in technically in Racine, but Google follows their own lead on this.
I will ask around among some GMB forum Gold Product experts to see if there is any hope of appeal on this. I think I've seen folks make slight moves to the map marker to change this sort of thing, but I don't want to tell you to do something that could end up being problematic. If I hear anything positive, I'll return to this thread.
Hi Ruben,
Back in 2014, Google stated that they don't want markup on testimonials on your website. You can read about this here and figure out how you'd like to proceed, given this policy:
This caused quite a bit of talk at the time, and I don't believe all sites are complying, but important to know.
Regarding third party reviews you are republishing on your site, I have not seen individual reviews coming up with stars on them for some time, but this seems to change so frequently. For example, up until recently, I was seeing Facebook listings coming up in Google's SERPs with stars on them. Now, that appears to have changed. So, I'm not sure what, if anything, you could do right now to get individual reviews posted on your website to show up with stars in the SERPs.
If anyone has seen a different pattern, please do share with Ruben!
Thanks for the further details, Agrier. The answer to this is not simple, but I'll do my best to be concise, and will number the following suggestions:
If the parent company needs to maintain its GMB profile, but is in agreement with the branch that they shouldn't be outranking the branch, have the parent de-optimize their listing. Remove photos, the business description, hours of operation and service menus. Don't have them use Google Posts, Q&A, SWIS or any other influential features. I'm not sure of the business model, but if they can accurately list themselves as an SAB instead of brick-and-mortar, that could help, too.
Next, go full bore on the branch listing. This means optimizing every single aspect of the GBP you can. Here is a complete guide to this: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-cheat-sheet-google-knowledge-panels
Underpin the branch listing with the strongest possible landing page on the website that you can. This means good content + good internal and inbound links to it.
Steps 1-3 are your best bets for overcoming the present ranking advantage the parent company has, as well as any filters that might be happening if the two businesses are closely located to one another.
Finally, remember that local rankings are not static. What customers in one part of this branch's town are seeing may be quite different from what customers on the other side of town see. For more on this, I recommend reading the following: https://moz.com/blog/find-local-competitors
Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions!
Hey There!
If the helmets are actually 3 different styles (rather than just colors) then these really are 3 different products that might have differences in terms of comfort, durability, design and customer satisfaction. Given this, I would not recommend showing the reviews of Style 1 on the the page for Style 2. It's not just a matter of whether or not you should duplicate content here, but rather, ensuring that your customer is being shown reviews that speak to the exact product they are considering buying. After all, what if a customer who purchased Style 1 writes that they they really appreciate the nylon comfort lining in the helmet, but Style 2 doesn't have this comfort lining? If a customer reads the reviews of Style 1 on the page for Style 2 and is misled about that comfort lining, they will be disappointed in the product.
So, a better path here would be to form a strategy for increasing the reviews of the actual products, rather than trying to make the reviews of one product serve as testimonial for others. I think it can be helpful to put yourself in the customer's shoes here. When you're looking for a product, you'd certainly want to read reviews about it, rather than reviews of a different product, right? In the online world, where we can't see/hold/examine an item in person, our best option is to glean information from product descriptions and reviews, and we wouldn't appreciate a mixup of customer sentiment being posted with the wrong product.
Hope these thoughts are helpful!
Hey There,
So, when a business is local, it's typical that we consider what Google wants first, because of their dominant role in local search.
What Google wants you to put on your listings is whatever name appears on your street signage, how you answer the phone, etc. So, if you are Cars UK on the sign above the door, you should be Cars UK on your Google listing. This then, would make sense as how you brand yourself in other areas, as well, such as in your schema, so that Google can associate your listing name with all other assets belonging to the business.
What I can't answer for you is questions related to legal requirements in your country. That would be something to discuss with a government official or business attorney.
Hey Ryan,
Has the business owner tried to respond and make amends on the high ranking forum? This would be my first choice, even if it's a bad situation, like forum spamming that angered the community or something like that. I'd try to make amends there first. Any hope of that?
Hey There!
Be glad to take a look. Please, let me know, what are the locations of your two businesses (street, city, state, zip). Thanks!
Hey Dragon!
Robert is offering good advice. I'll just add a few things here.
Different platforms have different policies on this. For example, look at this conversation on TripAdvisor about ownership changes and old reviews: http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g1-i12105-k7183031-Removing_bad_reviews_with_new_ownership-TripAdvisor_Support.html
And here's a good discussion of the details of Google's policy: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/Vz8WIPI95M4;context-place=topicsearchin/business/new$20ownership$20reviews
And here's Yelp's section on what to do in a variety of scenarios surrounding a change of ownership/management:
http://www.yelp-support.com/Reporting_Business_Changes?l=en_US
So, I'm mentioning the above because it will likely be worth it to handle this on a platform-by-platform basis, researching general best practices and deciding how to proceed.
Hope this helps!
Hi Robert, I hear you on this: "The difference here is that people in business are good at the business they are in. They do not have time to go out and learn SEO/SEM. They trust the person who seems to know and they hope they have not misplaced the trust." This is so true. I have been working with SMBs for about a decade now, and unfortunately, too many of them have come to me with a sad story of being rooked. The SMB is the busiest man or woman alive, and too often, they simply don't know what to look for to discern whether they are talking to someone who will help them or scam them. This has always been a facet of SEO and it has very much become part of Local. Hate to see this happen. Regarding all of the marketing being aimed at your clients by directories - I know just what you mean. This is what I do. At the time that I am setting up my clients' listings, I tell the client, in writing, that they are likely to be contacted by these companies offering additional paid services. I tell them that they are not obliged to purchase any of these services and that we do not recommend these services. I also tell them that they are welcome to forward any marketing offers to me. I am explicit about this at the time we are doing the work and if the client forgets, I simply keep repeating the same message over and over to them. It's just part of the job, I guess. Some clients eventually get it, others don't. One of our oldest clients still sends me emails from the most ridiculous sources offering to do the most ridiculous things for them. It's obnoxious, yes, but I'm glad the client is at least well-trained not to make a move without consulting me first. That's the kind of trust it takes time to build and of which one can be proud. I enjoyed reading your rant. Hang in there. You are not alone! Miriam