Hi Ira!

Mike Blumenthal wrote about this same question at LocalU in 2014. See here. The discussion in the comments there is quite good.

Hi Search Guys,

Thanks for giving me a little time to look into this. I am familiar primarily with Local in N. America, so I contacted Ash Nallawalla who is one of the better known Local SEOs in Australia. He replied that, at this point, he isn't aware of a Yext-type service for Australia, unfortunately. He also said that things are really Google Places-centric at this point in OZ. Sorry not to have a solution for you. For now, it looks like manual management is the way to go.

Hi There!

No, this would not be a recommended practice to markup your third-party reviews with Scheme. Google recently updated their guidelines specifically regarding this. For more on this, see: http://searchengineland.com/google-updates-local-reviews-schema-guidelines-257745

Hi MozMan2,

Nice to see you here today! Okay...so you went about this 50% right, in my opinion. What's missing is getting the client an actual registered suite number at which he receives mail.

Initially, this is important in the even that Google (and others local business indexes) give you a postcard-only option for verification of the listing. Sounds like you're past that point, but remember, the need to re-verify does sometimes reoccur if you have to make certain changes to a Place Page.

For the long haul, the issue is one of differentiation. The inherent danger in different businesses sharing an identical address is that Google will conflate the listings, merging them into a mess of mixed addresses, phone numbers, reviews and descriptions.

Ideally, what the chiropractor should do is convince each of the professionals in his building to get their own suite number to prevent this from happening to any or all of them.

If he can't get them to see the light about this, then he should at least protect himself by getting his own suite number. Depending on where he lives, he may need to go to the post office or some other local authority to get this thing legalized so that he's got a separate mail box to which the mailman delivers his mail at his suite address in the building.

So, again, your overall approach is correct, but the suite number should be legit to keep this on the level. And you should make sure the suite number is consistent across all mentions of his business on the web.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Andrew,

Helpful details! I understand your situation well now, and I can see why this is problematic. I've just tweeted GMB support, because I'm honestly concerned you may be stuck here, unless they have a tip I've not encountered before. The problem is, were you to attempt to get rid of the GMB listing, it might well end up being marked "permanently closed" which is definitely not the signal you want to send to your B2B partners. We'll see what support says - they're typically pretty great, but I'm not sure there's a foolproof solution here. Your situation isn't unheard-of, for sure. See: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Enhance-Your-Presence/How-to-replace-Google-Local-listing-with-Knowledge-Graph/td-p/496345

In the meantime, as you've got the GMB listing currently representing your brand to the public, I'd say the most important thing you could do would be to ensure you've got a strong review acquisition campaign going so that you can encourage better sentiment to appear that better reflects the current status of your operations. In the local business world, a whopping 73% of consumers don't consider reviews older than 3 months to be relevant, according to BrightLocal (https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/local-consumer-review-survey/). So, I would expend a great deal of effort over the next year to push down those older negative reviews with newer positive ones.

I'll definitely return to this thread if I hear back from Google's Twitter support. And, if anyone in the community has dealt with this situation before, please chime in!

Just wanted to update this thread with a little note that I've created a blog post about this very topic, published this afternoon on the Moz Blog: https://moz.com/blog/lost-anonymous-google-reviews

Hi TechWyse,

I want to be sure I am understanding your question correctly. Are you saying that the business has no usable address whatsoever? Not even a home address? Please clarify.

It is totally possible to build citations for service area businesses (like carpet cleaners, landscapers, contractors, etc.), but they do need to have a physical address in order to participate. This work typically goes like this:

1. You create a Google Places Listing for the business and be sure to pick the 'hide address' function during creation. Google does not want service radius businesses to display their addresses on their Google Places/Google+ Local pages.

2. You can then build a variety of citations in other local business indexes. There are two approaches here. Even though Google doesn't want service radius businesses to show their address on Google's products, there is nothing to prevent you from listing that address on other listings, like Yelp, Merchant Circle, Best of the Web, etc. Alternatively, if the client does not want his street address to appear anywhere on these directories, he can stick to publishing his listing only at those directories which allow you to hide your address. Here is Phil Rozek's helpful list of such resources:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/08/13/can-you-rank-well-in-local-google-without-revealing-your-street-address-anywhere/

Important To Understand

It is perfectly fine, at this point, for service radius businesses to use their home address as their physical address, provided that the address is not being used by any other business. For example, if a husband had an accounting business and a wife had a pet grooming business, both operating out of the home, they could not both use the same address nor the same telephone number. So, both phone and address must be dedicated and unique to avoid problems.

Also, at this point, it is a violation of Google's guidelines to use anything other than a real physical address as a business location. No P.O. boxes, no virtual offices. Despite the fact that Google requires the hiding of the physical address in their system, the address is still entered in the back end dashboard and must be a real location.

Hope these pointers help, and if I've in any way misunderstood your client's business model, please feel free to provide further details.

Hi Jeff,

I would recommend that you gather as many screenshots and as much other evidence as possible. Then, tweet to @GoogleMyBiz and let them know you want to DM them evidence of a concerning case of widespread review spam. Wait for them to DM you back. I don't recommend doing any of this publicly. Confine your communications to DM.

All you can do is report it and hope for the best. Google doesn't always act on these reports, regardless of how much evidence you send.

If you aren't satisfied with the outcome of your private interaction with Google, you can then make the decision about whether to go public. If an issue is so egregious that it receives a large amount of press, Google can typically be shamed into removing review spam. However, the story has to be fairly sensational to garner that kind of attention.

Good luck. Fake reviews are so prevalent and so bad for real-world communities who don't know what they are reading is fake. Hope it goes well for you.

Hi Instantly Popular,

As Keri has mentioned, virtual offices violate Google's guidelines which read:

Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist.

See:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

Google definitely does not want virtual offices in their index, and though you will see many businesses getting away with this practice, Google is getting better and better at fighting spam in Local and any business with this type of listing is in danger of being penalized...possibly even banned.

Building city landing pages on a website is a good practice, but typically, the results of this will be organic, not local, in nature. There are some exceptions to this, but they have been few and far between since the Venice update in early 2012.

Hi Zx3,

So, if she meets clients at their locations instead of her own, that would be a service area business (SAB) which you will find described in the section of Google's Guidelines called "Address" (see:https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB).

It's actually Google's requirement that SABs hide their address. When creating the listing be sure to select the option reading "I deliver goods and services to my customers at their locations." Do not select "I serve customers at my business address". This should lead to the outcome of your client having a GMB listing that shows her city name, but not her street address.

However, there are a couple of provisos you should always share with home-based businesses with privacy concerns.

1. You can't guarantee that Google will keep the address hidden forever. There have been bugs that have caused SAB addresses to go public temporarily. Also, Google could change its policy at any time and decide to show SAB addresses instead of hiding them.

2. When it's imperative to keep an address hidden, citation building is somewhat limited. Some directories won't accept a hidden-address listing, though others will. Please read this post by Phil Rozek for a list of directories that allow addresses to be hidden on listings: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/ It's a bit old now, so I would double check that each entity on there is still supporting hidden addresses, but at least that's a start. The reason it's important to let your client know about the limitations of hidden addresses is that she may not be able to be quite as competitive as some of her competitors who have visible addresses.

Hope this helps!

Hi Clicksjim,

There's nothing silly about your question. I think it's a smart one. It took me a couple of days to get back to you on this because, like others on this thread, though I work in Local, I don't work in the UK. I wanted to speak with someone who does. We had a little chat.

Basically, I think there is agreement in the Local SEO community that a local area code is a ranking signal, but the strength of that signal, in relation to all of the many other signals, is unknown. It may be that Google uses that local area code signal to associate certain content with a geographic region, but how vital this is, in the whole scheme of things, is unclear.

The Local SEO I know (a very smart guy I trust) with UK clients says he ALWAYS advises clients to use a local area code landline because he feels it may give them a slight edge over competitors who don't, but he didn't state that he felt it gives them a really big advantage (but, most of us will try to take any opportunity we have to edge out the competition, right?). Another Local SEO I spoke with said he wondered if mobile numbers get less calls that landlines do, but he was just theorizing.

So, in your shoes, I would go with a local number for your UK clients, if you can, because it may give these clients a bit of an advantage, but if you absolutely can't do this for some of your clients, the effect will probably be slightly disadvantageous rather than majorly. so.

Hope this helps!

Hi Anaid,

Google's definition of a local business is one that has a physical location and unique local phone number within a given city. So, the goal of ranking locally for cities where you don't have these things is not one I would set. Rather, you should strive for true local rankings for the cities where you do have that real office and dedicated local phone number, and hope for organic rankings in those cities where you serve, rather than where you are.

You are right to be concerned about duplicate content. Chris has given some good suggestions. I would further suggest that you consider blogging. Get your service people in on the action to write up their projects in different service cities. Take photos and videos. Develop a body of unique content this way, rather than going with the thin/duplicate content approach.

The decision to target every major city in the USA may not really be ideal. I don't know what your business is, of course, but I would say that nearly any business taking this approach would be tempted to put up tons of duplicate content, because the effort of writing thousands of pages would be so intensive. Better to have 50 awesome pages rather than 900 poor ones. If you're a B2C company, perhaps some of those efforts to reach out can be Social rather than via creating landing pages, but landing pages can certainly be an important part of your effort, so long as they are great content.

Just remember, your local goals need to revolve around your brick-and-mortar businesses. Everything else needs to be viewed as an organic effort.