Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Markas,

If your goal is to be running a high-quality Yellow Pages-type directory for the Baltics, then it's a good start to get as many businesses as you can into your index. Things that will improve the authority of your directory might include:

1. Getting business owners to take control of their listings and add their own details to them, including business descriptions, hours of operation, payment forms accepted, parking available, credentials, years in business, website address, photos etc. Take a look at Google+ Local listings, YP listings, Yelp Listings and see the types of information being included on the individual listings to make the rich sources of information.

2. Harness UGC. Become a review platform and enable customers to review their favorite business, the way sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor do. This will build up the unique, useful content on your directory with nearly all of the work being done by members who use the directory and want to review businesses they patronize.

3. Form relevant partnerships. In the world of YP and local business indexes, a lot of data changes hands. Take a look at the relationships documented in Get Listed's Local Search Ecosystem infographic and you will see how different players team up to share data: https://getlisted.org/static/resources/local-search-data-providers.html. Unfortunately, I don't have any first-hand experience with the local business scene in the Baltics, but if you can identify partners, you can help one another build authority.

4. Then, there is the obvious: making sure your directory is search engine friendly. Be sure all important URLs can be crawled and that your navigation system is easy to use. Be sure you've got good basic content on your site (contact page, about page, policy pages, etc.) and then see what else you can build that will make your directory site unique and useful. Be sure you've covered the basics of on-page SEO to make your pages as clear as possible to search engines and human users.

These are just a few ideas. I think the main thing here is for you to study how other directories have gone from being small-time to becoming major players. If there aren't currently a ton of well-established local business indexes in your geography, you may have an exciting opportunity to become a major player. It really depends on the competition. Study local competition and look at the big guys in countries like the US to see what makes them tick. Hope this helps!

Hi AllenRocks,

I want to be sure I'm understanding the structure of your website. Do you have:

A set of service pages

and

A set of city landing pages

or only one or the other?

In most cases, you should have a fantastic page for each main service you provide, optimized for your city of location. Then, if you want to build out city landing pages, come up with new types of content to make those pages have a point and be interesting and worthwhile.

Something that might help:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages for Local Businesses

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403

I have had a ton of people tell me that this post really helped them and I think it might be a good read for you.

Feel free to provide additional details if I haven't gotten to the root of your question.

Hi Jon,

Unfortunately, what you are experiencing is one of the potential issues with having multiple listings, whether this is for multiple practitioners within a single location or multiple locations within a region. It is up to Google to decide which of your listings they consider to be most authoritative.

I will repeat a question asked by Ron. How far apart are your different locations? Are you searching from a single location or are you going to the devices at different offices and searching for the respective locations from them? Google will typically localize the results either to your device, or to keyword indicators you provide in the search term, such as a city name. Would you like to provide more specifics as to what you are searching for and from where you are searching for it?

I will be happy to stop back by this thread if you can provide some further details.

Hi ThinkCreativeGroup,

Great discussion going on here. I'll try to add a bit.

• Yes, have a unique page for each of the locations on the website. Make sure that the content on each of the pages is unique. Do not simply change out keywords from page to page. Take the most creative approach you can to each location and find something of value to the user to write about.

• Optimizing the website footer with the NAP (name, address, phone) for each of the locations is a best practice if the total number of locations isn't too large. I would say 6 or less would be fine.

• You can also put all of these locations on a main contact page.

• Yes, having the name of the city in your legal business name or DBA may be of some value, but be careful that:

1. You are listing it identically in all places across the web. In other words, don't be Bob's Chicago Taco Shop in some places and Bob's Taco Shop in others. Unless the business is utterly new and has absolutely no footprint (including offline Yellowpages), then chances are the name of the business has already been indexed in a variety of places. If the business chooses to change its name, all citations must be updated to match so that only one form of the business name exists everywhere. Also, be advised that if your client has already built up a good rep on the web around their existent name (with local listings, reviews, citations, etc.) then a change of name can be catastrophic. You can expect to lose all reviews and many citations by changing the name of an established business, as a new name will be a signal of a brand new business. So, be careful with this!

2. You are not over-optimizing your title tags. A few months ago, Andre Weyher (formerly of Matt Cutts' search quality team) said in an interview, "Don't put more than 2 commercial keywords in your titles or Google will frown on it." This statement led to an interesting theoretical disussion over at CatalysteMarketing's local search forum in which it was suggested that a city name not appear too many times in a title tag. (see: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-seo-ranking/984-local-search-engine-optimization-warning-city-title.html)

I mention this here because, if you are Bob's Chicago Taco Shop, and you're putting your business name in your title tags, then your name represents one usage of a city name. So, be aware of that and don't over-do it.

Hi Steve,

You need to go with whatever the legal business name or DBA is and then correct all citations to match this. It can be a lot of work, but considering that the recent David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 lists consistency of structured citations as the #3 ranking factor, this is about as important as anything can be!

You may need to re-verify some listings (particularly the Google+ Local listing) with the naming change, and yes, there may be a bit of a drop, but if you can get all citations into compliance, it should be uphill from there. I'd look at it this way: right now, the business is in a negative situation with citation inconsistency issues that, if fixed, could yield better future results for them.

Good luck with the work ahead!

Hi Jason,

I need to start by saying that I typically work on the other end of things - trying to get local rankings for businesses. I've never had a client in your particular situation of wanting to build national authority while trying to keep local rankings.

For your installation services, do you have a unique office in each city from which staff goes out to install your product at client locations, and if so, did you create Google+ Local pages for each of these offices? If so, do these Google+ Local pages link to unique landing pages on the website, such as mysite.com/widget-installation-san-diego? Also curious to know how many physical offices you have - 3, 15, 100? And, are you currently getting local pack rankings for these various offices, or have your good rankings been organic rather than local? Lots of questions!

The sample URL I've written would typically be how city/branch landing pages would be structured for an SAB (service area business). I wouldn't typically recommend creating a subfolder for this. Google has stated that they don't care if you use subdomains or subfolders, provided they can be crawled, but I typically utilize subdomains as I find them easier to manage and keep track of than multiple subfolders.

It is possible to rank both nationally and locally (think of major brands like McDonalds with a corporate headquarters and multiple franchise locations around the globe). As Todd says, national rankings depend on building a very high level of authority (again, think McDonalds) for your brand.

If you would like to provide some further details, I will be happy to stop back by. And perhaps some members will also pop in who have accomplished, first-hand, what you are hoping to achieve.

I just want to second Keri here in saying that this thread is AWESOME! I want to thank each of you for taking the time to contribute such carefully considered ideas. Just terrific.

And Robert, best wishes for a speedy recovery! Sending good thoughts your way.

Hi Guys!

If you ask Local SEO questions here in the Moz Q&A Forum, you and I have probably had the chance to chat at some point or other. This time, I'd like to ask you question! I'd like to request feedback from the community regarding a practice I've been running into for as long as I can remember. Here's what I'm talking about:

Let's say the company is a national florist company, a cell phone service company, a website design company. They have national headquarters but either very few or zero physical locations beyond this. In other words, they are virtual rather than local, apart from their national headquarters. Their approach to online marketing revolves around creating a landing page for every conceivable city or zip code in the U.S. I would guess that the thought behind this strategy is that their product is available in each of these cities, and this is their method of getting the word out.

Because I work almost exclusively with local rather than virtual companies, the scenario I've described falls somewhat outside of my work experience. It does, however, relate to what I do for a living because I frequently encounter these types of pages (some with near duplicate or very thin content) ranking in the organic results for local searches, alongside the local pack results.

My questions are:

1. What do you think of this practice?

2. Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value?

3. Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend?

I really appreciate you taking the time to read my question and consider replying!

Hi Ernieb,

Does your keyword research indicate that 'CKD center' is a term or equal value to 'Dialysis center'. Taking just a quick look at Google's keyword planner, it doesn't seem to be, but I'm sure you've done in-depth research on this and have better data than I do from a quick glance. 'CKD center' does not exist as a category in the Google Places for Business category taxonomy, so you can't optimize your listing for this, at least as a category, though you could mention in in your business description. You'd have to see if it exists as a category in any of the other citation sources, but it might not.

Right now, you are ranking highly for what may be your core phrase 'dialysis center city'. If you decide to re-optimize core pages of the website to reflect not one but two terms, then there is a chance that this will split your authority and result in a loss of rankings for the initial phrase, because you are now telling Google that you want all of your authority to go towards ranking two phrases instead of one. I'm not saying that this will definitely happen, because I can't judge this without knowing how authoritative the website is. It may be that the site's Domain Authority is so high, it could stand this without any drop in rankings for the initial phrase. It's just hard to judge something like that from a generic standpoint.

You may need to create new content to reflect this second phrase, add the new keyword to some of the existent pages, earn links that reflect the new keyword and edit the description area of your citations to include this new keyword. Other efforts like Social Media activity or Video Marketing could also help you to start gaining some quicker visibility for this phrase. And, of course, there is PPC. If you need to rank for this new term quickly, you can pay to do so while you are working to build up organic visibility for the new phrase.

Does this help?

Hi SearchParty,

If these are all real physical locations to which customers come to do business or from which staff goes to serve clients, then my rule of them is to include up to eight of them in the footer, properly marked up using Schema. There should also be a unique page on the website for each location.

Hi BBuck,

You've received some thoughtful replies here. I'm going to throw in a monkey wrench, however. Regus offices can, indeed, be problematic. I recommend you read through the threads pulled up in a Google And Your Business Forum search for the term 'regus' and you'll quickly see what I mean:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/regus

Here's a good example of what I'm referencing:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/regus/business/4WCI624GamE/xQtCLQw4HSMJ

And here's a good discussion of Regus offices, including the comments of a Google And Your Business Forum TC and a Google MapMaker RER:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local/1810-using-toll-free-main-any-chance-rank-2.html

I'd look into this further before going down this road. Hope this helps!

Hey Wayne!

The WB Friday you're referencing isn't ringing an immediate bell with me, but as to your question, what RangeMarketing has mentioned would be standard Local SEO advice. Provided your location landing pages are of high quality (not thin or duplicative) and feature all of the info the customer needs to understand your services and contact you, then yes, it is considered a best practice to use these URLs in your citation building. Additionally, these types of landing page URLs for your various physical locations may help reduce the risk of Google merging your listings on their end, because the URL is one of the signals differentiating the various locations. Hope this helps!

Hi Noah,

I think the first issue here is actually going to be that Google+ Local doesn't consider rental properties as appropriate candidates for inclusion. Here is the language regarding this:

Ineligible Business Models

Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments, are not eligible to be listed on Google Maps and should not be verified. Instead, verify the listing for your sales or leasing office or offices. If you have a property with an on-site office, you may verify that office location.

Does the company have an on-site office? Otherwise, they will not be able to fully participate in typical local search activities.

They should definitely not be using another company's phone number. Google will be aware that this phone number belongs to the booking agency, and actually, having the client publish this in index-able text on their own website will harm the NAP consistency of the booking agency.

In order to fully participate in citation building, the client needs a physical, staffed office and a unique phone number at which the person who answers the phone answers with the company's name - not the name of a third party business.

I think you've surfaced a really interesting case here. You've made me wonder how many vacation rental companies are in this same boat!

Hi Chad!

Congratulations on all of the hard work you've been doing for this church. They are lucky to have someone who is so concerned about making the best possible effort.

What I see in looking at your stats compared to the other church is that you are pretty much neck-and-neck. You are higher in some areas and they are higher in some areas, so the fact that the two churches have similar rankings for this and that seems normal to me.

I agree with Egol's assessment that it would be better for you to be more specific in your optimization efforts. I can only base this on my own experience. If I am a Catholic and am new in town, I'm going to search Google for 'Catholic Church' in my town. I'm not just going to search for 'churches'. Similarly, if I am a Baptist or a Reformed Baptist, and am decided about my religion, I'm going to search for my religion's particular type of church. The only reason I can see for any religion to want to simply rank for 'church' would be if they are trying to promote themselves to people who have no decided religion ... or possibly to tourists who like to visit various interesting churches as places of interest on vacation. So, I'm not sure if the decision on your part to simply rank for 'churches' stems from an evangelical effort to interest people who are not already Reformed Baptists or if there is some other thinking behind this. To me, wanting to simply rank for 'church' is a bit like wanting to simply rank for 'store'. It's more clear and direct to be a 'Reformed Baptist Church' or a 'Shoe Store', right?

In fact, here's something odd and anecdotal: setting my location to Tyler, Tx and searching just for 'churches', Google isn't even understanding my intent in their local pack of results. Instead, they think I'm looking for Church's Chicken Restaurant! Oops! But, if I search for Reformed Baptist Church with my location set to Tyler, you'll be happy to know that your church is ranking #3 organically and has a full result, complete with its Google+ Local information. Reformed Baptist Churches as a different search gives me a local 2-pack and you are #1 in it. For just Baptist Churches however, you are not in the 7-pack but are in the organic results. Forgive my ignorance on this - I'm not totally sure what the difference is between a Baptist Church vs. a Reformed Baptist Church, but if Baptists can choose to go to various types of churches, this would be a search I'd think it was valuable to rank in the local pack for.

Given all this, what I would suggest would be:

1. Consider fine tuning your on-page optimization to be specific rather than generic about your religion.

2. Looks like you're in lots of the major citation sources but there are inconsistent and incomplete listings, according to our Moz Check Listing tool:

https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMlN5bHZhbmlhJTI1MjBDaHVyY2glMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjI3NTcwMSUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMlN5bHZhbmlhJTI1MjBDaHVyY2glMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjIyODAxJTI1MjBTb3V0aCUyNTIwU291dGhlYXN0JTI1MjBMb29wJTI1MjAzMjMlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjI3NTcwMSUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjkwMzU5MjE1OTElMjUyMiUyNTVE

Clean these up and be sure you're listed on all 15 platforms, as well as other citation sources. Pay close attention to any listing Moz Check Listing surfaces as a duplicate.

3. Your Google+ Local page has only earned 5 reviews. This could be improved, for sure!

4. Take a close look at your Google+ Local categories. You have them listed in this order: Church, Reformed Church, Baptist Church. Google wants categories to be as specific as possible, so, if you determine that ranking for Baptist Church is more important than just Church, I'd make Baptist Church your primary category. Correct categorization is so important!

5. Don't forget that Local SEO hinges largely on the concept of the user-as-centroid these days. Your congregation members on one side of town will likely be seeing a different ordering of the results than those on the other side of town. Don't overlook this important point, because it relieves some of the pressure you may be feeling about attaining some kind of ultimate #1 rankings; there are no ultimate #1 rankings - everyone sees different ones. Consider the user as centroid and the possibility of some additional hyperlocal optimization. See: https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid

6. Take a close look at the mindset behind how you are promoting the church, in terms of whom you consider your competitors to be. In my view, your competitors are other Baptist Churches - not Catholic Churches, Methodist Churches, or just 'Churches' in general. Making this distinction could help you view your website and other marketing efforts in a whole new, more accurate light.

Hope this helps! My comments can't replace a formal audit, but I hope they are a useful start.

Hi Couponguy,

Smart question. You're right to be concerned here. Swapping out a geo term across near-identical pages is not going to be enough to differentiate your pages. You could, indeed, be at risk for a duplicate content penalty. I highly recommend that you write unique content for each page. My rule in this scenario is: if you can't find something unique to write on a local landing page, don't create the page. There are instances in which a company is covering just too many cities to create unique pages for all of them, in which case, they might be better served by creating an interactive map of some kind to show their service areas to their clients and then utilizing PPC, instead of of SEO, to gain visibility for all of these cities. Hopefully, though, you can find a creative approach for creating unique content for your pages. This is ideal, when it is possible.

Hi Gavinn!

Good question. This is an "it depends":

• It depends on how diverse/broad your service menu is

• It depends on how much authority your brand has built in relationship to its topic

• It depends on how much you can reasonably optimize your homepage for your services

Ideally, yes, you want your homepage to rank for your most important services, but it's typically not possible to cover them in-depth there. So, you'll have multiple types of supporting content (service description pages, videos, blog posts, images, etc.) supporting your goals of search visibility for each service.

Good evening!

I suggest you read through this explanation about merging from Mike Blumenthal and see if it speaks to the situation you're describing. It's a good one:

http://localu.org/blog/merge-google-pages-usually-cant-now/

Hope it helps, but if not, please let me know.

Hi There!

Unfortunately, as both Ben and Pau are mentioning, this absurd practice is still hanging around the web. While it's very unlikely the stuffed footer is actually helping this competitor to achieve high rankings, it is aggravating to think it isn't preventing them, either.

Your post doesn't mention whether this is actually a business model with physical local offices or is fully virtual, but what I have seen in cases like these is that big brands tend to get away with a great deal of stuff I would never recommend to a smaller brand. It begs the question: how can we explain this phenomenon?

In the past, I've seen folks asserting that Google is soft on big brands. There could be some truth in this, but we've all seen Google take a massive whack at big brand practices with various updates, so that really makes this an unsatisfying assertion.

Another guess is that big brands have built enough supporting authority to make them appear immune to the consequences of bad practices. In other words, they've achieved a level of power in the SERPs (via thousands of links, mentions, reviews, reams of content, etc.) that enables them to overcome minor penalties from bad practices. This could be closer to the truth, but again, isn't fully satisfactory.

And, finally, there's the concept of Google being somewhat asleep at the wheel when it comes to enforcing guidelines and standards, and whether or not that's kind of excusable given the size of the Internet. They can't catch everything. I can see this in this light, but at the same time, don't consider Google to have taken a proactive stance on accepting public reporting of bad practices. Rather, they take the approach of releasing periodic updates which are supposed to algorithmically detect foul play and penalize or filter it. Google is very tied to the ideas of big data and machine intelligence. So far, it's been an interesting journey with Google on this, but it is what has lead to cases exactly like the one you're seeing - with something egregiously unhelpful to human users being allowed to sit apparently unpunished on a website that outranks you, even when you are trying to play a fairer game by the rules.

In cases like this, your only real option is to hang onto the hope that your competitor will be the subject of an update, at some point in the future, that will lessen the rewards they are receiving in the face of bad practices. Until then, it's heads down, working hard on what you can do, with a rigorous focus on what you can control.

Hi Alexander,

Good question and good discussion going on here. I am going to recommend against having two websites, as it sounds like you are operating a local business with a physical location.

What is the purpose of you having two websites? How do you feel this helps your customers?

I believe you are right to be concerned, and here is why:

When Google crawls the web to bring data into the 'cluster' they have about your local business, what they are 'hoping' to find is a clear business name, clear address, local phone number and authoritative website consistently associated with your business. In your case, what Google is finding is that two websites are associated with your business name and address. What are they to trust in this situation? By the same token, which website are your customers meant to trust?

Having multiple websites for a single business often represents risk for:

• Citation inconsistencies

• Ranking problems

• Merged listings

• Duplicate listings, including hidden duplicates

• Duplicate content

• Customer confusion

• Bot confusion

I don't know all of the nuances of your unique situation, Alexander, but chances are, if a client came to me with this scenario, I would be recommending that he pick a single authoritative domain and redirect the second domain to it, then work on building his authoritative domain into a powerful asset. Splitting up your authority over multiple domains just seldom makes sense, and there are definite risks involved. Hope this helps.

Hello there!

The best article that's been written about this topic is here: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2018/10/03/local-mobile-image-thumbnail-serps-its-all-about-context/

Hope this is just what the doctor ordered

Hi Steven,

I believe this WB Friday will be quite apropos to your question: https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

*But do remember, rankings are not static. Where you may be #2 for one searcher, you could be #1 or #10 for another, particularly for localized phrases like the ones you are targeting.

Hi Faye,

It sounds like you are working hard to do good things for the business, but it could be that, if you're seeing this client floundering many pages deep in the SERPs, there could be other negative issues at play. Nothing can replace a formal audit in a case like this, but here are some suggestions:

1. Go through this post, bit by bit:

https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit

2. This one from me is a year old, and due to changes in Google, some of the methodology and terminology is outdated, but the problem concepts remain accurate:

https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures

3. Pay very, very close attention to duplicates. In the dental arena, practitioner duplicates are a very common problem. I recommend you read anything Linda Buquet has written about dental duplicates at her localsearchforum.com. You might also consider starting a thread there, as well as your one here, in hopes that she will turn her expert eyes on your case. Linda has more experience in Local SEO for dentists than any other pro I know.

I hope these will be a start.

Hey Luke!

Good conversation going on here. I'm going to respectfully disagree with the advice of adding a fictitious suite element to the address, as using your real-world address only is one of the guidelines about which Google is very clear. Using suite addresses in this scenario has, indeed, been something people have experimented with in the past, prompted by Google's past fiasco with large numbers of listings merging due to shared partial details. However, Google seems to have gotten much better at not merging listings, and, in fact, seems quite capable of discerning one business from another despite a shared address. However, I will make these provisos:

1. Luke, I want to be sure I understand what you're saying about only the phone number being different? Aren't the names of the 2 businesses different? If not, and this is actually just one business, then they are only eligible for a single GMB listing - not two of them.

2. Yes, the phone numbers must be unique.

3. There can be trouble if the two businesses are in the same industry. In other words, if one business is Bill's Garage and the other business is Frank's Garage, you'll want to regularly monitor for any signs of merging.

4. It's a good idea not to share Google categories between the two businesses, if it can be helped.

5. Always make sure (as the Local SEO) that you really are marketing two separate businesses that adhere to Google's definition of that. For example, you may encounter clients who want to market their air conditioning repairs as a separate business from their heater repairs, when in fact this is actually just a single business. You'll do more harm than good by helping the client try to market themselves as though they were two. Point to the guidelines and explain the disaster that can come from getting on Google's bad side and you'll be doing the client a world of good

Hope this helps!

Hi There!

Great question! Before I answer, I want to emphasize that without knowing the exact competitive landscape of your specific geography, no one is likely to be able to make predictions about rankings. Because of this, I'm going to base my recommendations on what would likely offer the best usability experience to your customers, which often, in turn, is what Google wants, anyway.

I recommend that you:

• Create a landing page for each of your locations

• On each landing page, include a list of the services offered at that location

• Have the services listed in the list be links to a set of service pages, fully describing each service.

• Have the service pages contain a list of the locations in which they are offered, linking to those location landing pages.

So, in other words, you have a single set of location landing pages and a single set of service description pages that interlink as needed. But, you don't create another set of pages for every possible service/city combo. That's just too convoluted to be of use to customers.

Hope this helps!

Hi Davit,

Something very important to take into consideration here is that this is a local business and you are competing for local queries, including localized organic queries. This means that Google's local and organic results will be localized to the searcher, basically creating a scenario in which there are no static #1 rankings. Whether you are competing for geo-modified or non-modified keywords, the SERPs will change based on search language and searcher location.

It sounds like you've begun a competitive audit between yourself and this competitor (we have a free spreadsheet for doing that, mentioned in this blog post, if it helps). Have you studied the geographic relationship between your physical location, your competitor's physical location, the centroid of the city you're competing in, and the relationship of both your businesses in regards to the perimeters Google shows on the map when you look up your city? What are you seeing when you do so?

Also, if you can share your own domain, that should help the community better understand your scenario. Hope this helps!

Hi Davit,

Thank you for the follow up. I'll number my replies again, for organizational purposes:

1. I think we're fairly safe in assuming that the distance of your business from Google's automatic Maps zoom level is playing a role in this. I actually have to zoom OUT (not in) to begin seeing competitors in your neighborhood show up in the local finder, so, I think we're safe in saying you are falling outside of Google's automatic radius for these queries for both local and non-local users. Only remedy for this would be to get a new office in a better location.

2. I also confirm that when I take myself to the Little Armenia area of the map, you do begin to show up.

3. That being said, in spending some time looking at your business these past few days, I am seeing a few things that I want to surface for your consideration:

• Your website is not doing a good job right now of sending local signals. It may be confusing Google that you have a listing for Washington DC pointing to your website home page where it's not clear that you're located in Washington DC and it's also mentioning that you are in Los Angles. I would highly recommend overhauling your homepage content to mention both locations, and then create a unique page for each of the two offices, optimized only for each respective office. Right now, when I go to your website, I feel like I have no idea where your company is and Google may be feeling confused by this, too.

• I mean this very kindly - your website could use some work to appear like a world-class entity. Both in terms of visual presentation and text, right now, your website is not representing your business as professionally as it deserves. Car hires can be a luxury affair, and that luxury feeling just isn't present yet on the site. So, investments in this could be important for you.

• So many of your competitors who are ranking for these terms either have exact match business names or are altering their names to appear to match (which is spam, and if you see cases of this, report it). So, this is one thing that could cause you not to perform quite as well, with your business name. DCAcar isn't a keyword, but there's not much you can do about this unless you were to legally rebrand your business.

• So many of your competitors are listing themselves as physical businesses instead of SABs, getting pins on the map and the appearance of greater solidity. I don't have the time to explore this in-depth, I'm afraid, but I wondered while I was taking a look how many of the businesses with visible addresses actually qualify to have their addresses visible. I recommend you look at that, and determine whether what I'm assuming is your business being run out of a residence could also be holding you back in some way.

• I didn't immediately see duplicate listings for your business, but it's harder to surface them for SABs. This would be worth looking into or having a good local SEO dive into for you.

• I'm concerned that Check Listing is surfacing almost no citations for you. It won't surface GMB because you're an SAB, but have you not done much work creating citations? https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMkRDQWNhciUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjkwMDI3JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyRENBY2FyJTI1MjIlMjUyQ251bGwlMjUyQyUyNTIyOTAwMjclMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjI4ODg4MDA4MTMwJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIydXMlMjUyMiUyNTVE

• Point for point, there are metrics in your Google Business Profile that need to be brought up to competitive levels. You need more reviews. You have no Q&A. Your description about the east coast doesn't make sense and could be making LA users think you are on the east coast. You need lots of good quality photos, etc. It's great you're using Google Posts, but your overall profile deserves some more investment.

• If you are seeing fluctation in when you appear/don't appear on an ongoing basis, remember that Google does test things and could be doing quite a bit of testing in your industry/highly-populated local. This doesn't rule out a problem, but it's something to keep in mind.

• Finally, I want to reiterate that what I'm doing here isn't a substitute for an audit. I'm taking a glance instead of diving deeply to discover if there could be any type of penalty or other problem associated with the business. I do recommend that you take all of the above into consideration, but that you also find a really qualified Local SEO to conduct a full audit for you. What we've done here is to get a basic picture of things that might be barring you from achieving your ranking goals, and we've identified some areas where you can improve, but I hope you can take this to the next step of hiring a heavy hitter to create a professional audit for you and found a strategy for you on its more thorough findings.

Thanks for the chance of taking a look! I hope this has been useful.

Hi Prime!

In short, Moz Local tracks a total of 15 platforms. 10 of these we directly update and manage for you. 5 of them you will need to manage manually.

The 10 we directly update for you are:

Acxiom

Best of the Web

Bing

Citysearch

Factual

Foursquare

Infogroup

Insiderpages

Localeze

Superpages

The other 5 we track but don't push to are:

Google

Facebook

YP

Yelp

Hotfrog

In order to sign up for Moz Local, you will first need to have either a verified Google+ Local page or Facebook Place as these are the 2 sources we draw data from and validate against.

Hope this helps!

Greetings, MozMan2,

As you know, Google's take on local is that it is address-based. Thus, if you have an office in San Francisco, you can create a Google Place Page and shoot for rankings in San Francisco, but not in neighboring Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose etc. Google's picture of Local has proved problematic for all go-to-client businesses (lawn care, tree removal, nannies, chimney sweeps etc.) because there is a genuine bias towards those businesses which at least operate out of their own storefront or at least within their own town. Service area businesses receive less specific solutions from Google Places.

So, what can a business like your client's do? You are on the right track with creating landing pages for the cities/counties/neighborhoods/regions in which you client serves, but you have to take the creative route with this. Don't simply duplicate content from page to page, and definitely don't just stuff a bunch of keywords in the footer. Make these pages interesting for your clients (and for the bots) by making each one a profile of the work the company does in that location. Tell stories, use photos, videos, talk about special concerns for that region (floods, droughts, watering, laws, maintenance). By taking this approach, you will be creating legitimate content that showcases what the client does in the areas where he serves.

You cannot count on this content enabling you to outrank competitors who have physical locations in the neighboring cities, but it is the strongest move you can make towards improved visibility for these secondary terms. After this, all traditional off-page SEO tactics apply (linkbuilding, Social Media, etc.)

Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Hi Jaun!

Typically, a site rebuild is required when:

1. The site isn't performing well due to technical barriers (like it's been built in Flash and can't be indexed properly)

2. The site isn't usable by humans (for example, it doesn't render properly for mobile users)

3. The site isn't usable by the business (like there is no CMS for the business to use to build out content on the website without having to have help from a third party)

Did the company that audited your website specify any of these problems in their recommendations or are you experiencing any of these issues? Did they provide details about what they meant by "modern standards"?

Hi Tommy, From a purely local perspective, it is very important to understand whether the client has just 1 or 10 physical offices. If only one, then the main thrust of his website will probably need to be slanted most strongly towards his physical location. The hope here would be to gain traction in the Local SERPs, whereas any other cities he wants to target, but in which he has no physical office, will be unlikely to be able to achieve high visibility in the Local SERPs. These office-less locations would need to fight for organic rankings for his other desired local terms. There is some grey area here on my side because I'm not positive whether your client's business model is actually local or not. Is there a legal business name, unique physical street address and unique local area code phone number associated with at least one of his target cities? Or, is his business (and his product) totally virtual? In the latter case, then breaking into the local SERPs at all is going to be next to impossible because of Google's preference for displaying true local businesses for so many geo-related queries. I feel like I've started to answer your question, but details like the ones I've mentioned are what one needs to understand before making a positive decision about how to proceed with a campaign. Please, feel free to give further information if you can about the client's business model, product and physical geography - but you do not need to give names or use real keywords. Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question! Miriam

Hi All,

I thought I'd jump in here. Some good and creative discussion here, and Martin's comment regarding David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors is an important one. Definitely, though, a ton has changed since the 2010 study (which I had the fun of participating in) and I can hardly wait to see how the 2011 turns out. The rollout of Place Search last October has really shuffled the deck.

Tbone, I know the hope of your question is to find a workaround for this client whose franchises have no address, and while weaknesses in Maps/Places certainly have created some rather staggering loopholes, I'd like to throw a question into the mix:

Have you explained to your client that his business does not fit Google's definition of Local and that, rather than gaming the system and incurring the potential future wrath of the bots, he may need to do what other business are: changing his business model so that it is an authentic Local fit?

When the phone book was invented, you had to have a phone number to get listed. Local is equivalent, and the requirements are a unique local area code phone number and address. I genuinely believe that the quality of everyone's user experience is dependent upon business owners following these two guidelines, rather than attempting to come across as having a physical location where none exists.

Eric Enge did a great interview with Carter Maslan a while back that dealt, in part, with franchise businesses (http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml), and while your client cannot legitimately claim a Place Page for his non-physical locations until he changes his business model, he can at least follow the lead of creating a Place Page for his headquarters and city landing pages on his site for his service areas.

In my own work with Local clients, I try to teach them a civic-minded approach to the scenario. When they don't fit Google's definition, I encourage them to follow Local news to see if Google's rules change to include other types of business models than they currently do. I get phone calls every week from people who either don't understand the definition of Local, or do understand it and want to bend the rules, and I see these calls as a great opportunity for educating folks.

Good luck with your client. He's in a tough spot until such time as Google decides to broaden its definition of Local.

Hi John,

You've gotten some good responses from members here. I have a few suggestions to add.

1. Remember that citations are extremely important in local campaigns. Citations are not necessarily links. They are simply indexed mentions of your company's name, address and phone numbers. These might included directory listings, mentions of you in local news, on blogs, review sites or what have you. If citation building is new to you, I recommend reading Miles' Anderson's list of top 50 citation sources for the UK and USA:

http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938

2. Also, I understand your concerns that your readers may not read all of your content. That's always the case, but remember that every page on your site is potential entry page to your website. Even if someone coming to a page about 'driveways in gateshead' does no more that glance at the title and look for a phone number, at least they've come to you because you've got a page that exactly matches what they were searching for. Copywriting is critical to nearly all local marketing campaigns.

3. Finally, as you mention you are new to SEO, and I'm inferring from that that you are also new to Local SEO. Is your site well-optimized for local search with strong local hooks in place? And, have you created and claimed a complete, violation-free Google Place page for the business? Be sure you are compliant with the guidelines. And don't forget about reviews. They count, too.

Hope these thoughts help!

Hi Robert!

Nice to see you. I would recommend that you read this post from Mike Blumenthal from a couple of weeks ago if you haven't already:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/11/10/8-tips-to-maximize-your-branded-presence-in-the-google-local-search-results/

Some of Mike's readers found the advice regarding the use of geomodifiers to be controversial and this led to an extremely long discussion between Mike and readers on this topic. I think you will find it to be relevant and extremely interesting, but you'll have to make up your own mind what you think!

Hello Parvesh,

I apologize that your important question didn't receive a speedier response from me. For some reason, our system failed to notify me. So sorry about that.

Your question is an excellent one, and one that has come up many times over the years since the dawn of Local. Basically, there is no keyword tool from which you can get reliable geo data. Even if you are in a major metro city (like New York City) and tools show you some data reflecting use of your city name in searches, that data is not really reliable.

Because of this, I (and just about every other Local SEO I know) follow this method in performing research.

1. Brainstorm your core terms and plug them into your keyword tool of choice, without any geo terms. So, for you, that might be terms like hair salon, spa, salon, makeovers or whatever it is that your business offers.

2. Open a spreadsheet and document the findings of your keyword research, based on what data you've been given about your brainstormed terms as well as any others that the tool shows you that you may not have thought of on your own. Very often, people search for things in surprising ways you might not have previously considered.

3. Now, go back and add in your geo terms. These would include city names, county names, regional names, state names, neighborhood names and postal codes.

4. For every service/product term, you now have geo terms with which to pair it. So, if you've got a hair salon in Bathurst, one section of your spreadsheet might be:

haircuts bathurst

haircuts bathurst, NSW

haircuts in bathrust

cheapest haircuts in bathurst

best haircuts in bathurst

haircuts postal code

etc.

So, essentially, do your KW research without geo terms and then add them back in, based on your locale. As of this moment, there is no accepted better method. Good luck!

Miriam

Hello Brandon,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question! I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum, and will do my best to give you a helpful answer.

Yes, using the landing page of each respective location is a smart plan. If there is a main home office, you might send that one to the homepage, but otherwise, I like the practice of using well-optimized city landing pages.

A quick heads-up on this. Don't be surprised if the URL Google displays on the various Place Pages looks like it's going to the main domain. They often do this, but if you click the link, it leads to the landing page.

And, be sure you are not using any URL that redirects. That's forbidden by the guidelines.

I highly recommend that you read this 2010 Eric Enge interview with Carter Maslan, particularly the area in which Carter discusses multi-location businesses:

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml

A few of Carter's remarks are now somewhat dated, simply due to the passage of time, but this portion of the interview is one I continue to refer to as the best advice regarding multi-location businesses:

Eric Enge: Let’s say you have more than one location, 100 for example. In your view, is it helpful to have individual pages on the website for all of the locations? Also, is it helpful to have the Google local business center linked to each of those individual pages rather than having 100 locations that point to a single web address?

Carter Maslan: I can tell you what I think the ideal end state is, and there are various levels of getting there. Ultimately, we would like to have the store-specific page known so that people can just click through and see today's specials and any kind of adjustments for that particular day. We would love to have all of that information on a direct click to the most specific page for that location.

That’s what we encourage, but there are still a lot of chains and things that just link to their top-level domain. I guess it's a split answer. We want to get to a store specific page, but we are not uniformly there across all of the businesses.

Eric Enge: Could that potentially be encouraged by making it a ranking factor, for example?

Carter Maslan: Yes. I guess there are two sides to it. If you create a store-specific page that really just has an address, it wouldn't be as helpful as having some genuinely good content on the page that the user would really appreciate having as the first click-through experience. That’s what I think we need to work through.

We don't want to arbitrarily tell people that they must create a store-specific page, because we are really just trying to find the most useful page for that business. That’s why I am not so definitive on the store-specific page or not. I really just want what’s best for the retailer, store or businesses, first and foremost giving the user what he would want to see when he clicks on that business.

Eric Enge: Say you have a store-specific page that lists specific and individual things about just one store location. Depending on the kind of business that could be an inventory list that shows you've got extra stock?

Carter Maslan: There is a chain of stores that carries yoga equipment that my wife really likes. They have special yoga instruction, carry special brands, and host lectures on some special days. There are all kinds of things that the retailer does that relate to that specific store location, and there is also a general corporate catalogue page. So this is not black and white, and even though we want to encourage it, it's not that there is a definitive guidance saying companies need to have that page.

Eric Enge: Obviously it’s good if there is a quality page with information unique and specific to each location.

Carter Maslan: Yes, that's great. If we know that there’s good information about that page, then that helps on search and the snippets that we can show on the search results, because we know that the page is referencing that place. It does help even if it ends up not being the page that you list as your primary homepage. If there is good content that we know is content about that place, then it helps us do a better job with query results.

If a company has a page that's store-specific and talks about its class schedule, and there is one that says its holding Tai Chi class tonight and someone is searching for places to do Tai Chi, then that helps us to score it. If a lot of people have found that page helpful about the Tai Chi class, then when people search for Tai Chi we would know that that location has something to do with Tai Chi.

*Bear in mind, Carter was not providing this information as though it were Google's 'official' stance, but I think it's as close to a plan of action as you can get in this specialized type of work of dealing with many locales.

Hope this is helpful. Good luck!

Miriam

Hi Tom,

Both Richard & TomCraig are giving you some good ideas here. There is no reason your website can't be optimized for both National & Local SEO and the suggestions being given are ones I would agree with. In addition to this, you should properly optimize the footer site-wide for the local address/addresses using hCard microformatting and make sure your contact page is rich in content and well-optimized. Best of luck!

Hi Savvy Panda,
Thanks for bringing your good question to Q&A.

It's important to understand that, by nature of your business, seeking inclusion in Google's local search results is actually out. If you do a search for 'web design firm milwaukee wi', you will see that Google does not display local, pinned results in its main results for this query, nor do they handle website design firms in this manner anywhere in the US. Google stopped displaying local results for web design and SEO firms in January of 2010, as I recall.

This doesn't mean you can't create a Google Place Page. You can, and it will be somewhere within the Maps index, but it will not be displayed in the main results and is therefore unlikely to ever be viewed my many people. You are allowed to create a Google Place Page only if you do some business face-to-face with clients. If all of your business is virtual, then a Google Place Page is not right  for you.

If you do serve some clients face-to-face and you should you decide to create a Google Place Page, only create 1 of them if you've only got one office. Do not purchase virtual addresses/p.o. boxes in an attempt to look like you are local to areas where you aren't actually located. Only utilize your own legal business name, your dedicated local area code phone number and dedicated local street address. Depending on your business model, you will need to go 1 of 3 routes with your Place Page.

• If your business serves all clients at your office, choose the show address path in Google.

• If your business serves some clients at your office and some clients at their locations, again, show the address and use the service radius tool to indicate the geographic region in which you serve. *There is some evidence that you should go easy on the tool. I can't share any examples with you, but I never advise my clients to set a service radius of greater than 30 miles because I have seen some indication that setting a wider service radius than this may actually harm your profile.

• If your business serves all clients at their locations, choose the 'hide address' function.

For more on this topic, see: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap

Regardless of whether you create a Google Place Page or not, by dint of Google's choice not to display true local results for web design firm queries, your efforts to gain visibility for different geographic terms are going to have to be organic in nature.

What you don't want to do is this: create duplicate pages of content that simply switch out geographic terms. You are quite right in guessing that this will not impress Google (nor will it be of much value to human users).

A better approach is this: find a real reason to write about your work in those cities. With my own local SEO clients, what I find to be a natural approach is a showcase of projects in specific cities. A combination of project details, client testimonials from the city in question, videos + transcripts, interviews of the employee/employees who undertook the project in that city and similar data gives you something unique to write about. Your page about the design you accomplished for a car dealership in Chicago can be completely different from your page about the work you did for a restaurant in Madison, with good planning and creativity. I have found this to be a winning strategy repeatedly for my clients.

You can then undertake whatever promotion you want of the page (linkbuilding etc.) to help it work its way up in the SERPs.

Perhaps there are other types of geographic-oriented content you can create as well. For example, you might host a seminar in a certain city or attend a conference, and you can write about that. You can blog about the business scene in various Midwestern cities. You might volunteer at something in the cities or sponsor something there for goodwill and publicity.

Basically, what it boils down to is thinking creatively and then being willing to expend the time/money/effort to write creatively about your genuine involvement in different local communities. This sensible approach is one you can feel proud of for years to come, and that's not something you can say when the approach is to game or manipulate the system. The writing is on the wall that Google has lost patience with a manipulative approach and I believe they will continue to move in that direction in the coming years.

Hope these tips are helpful to you!

Hi Carl,

You are not alone in wondering about this phenomenon in which a local listing appears to make organic visibility disappear. We've had several questions come into Q&A about this recently. In fact, what is happening is that the organic listing has typically been absorbed into the local blended listing which contains both first party data (like, from the company's website) + 3rd party data from Google's local index and other sources.

If clients are concerned, it will be helpful to educate them about this and, also, to show them heatmap/eyetracking studies like this one that shows how local listings get the lion's share of eyes on them in the SERPs:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eyetracking-google-serps

Many such studies have reached similar conclusions. Because of this, a high local blended rank is generally to be prized.

In the past, it was common for dominant businesses to have both a local listings and an organic one on the same page of the SERPs. I saw this everywhere, all the time. Now, I am hard put to come up with a single example of the results being configured in this way. Now, pretty much all local results are blended results and the appropriate goal for most local businesses is to get a high blended local listing for their main search phrases.

Regarding deleting the local presence from Google's index, it's really important to realize that this can be really tough to do - some would say impossible. Remember, Google can create a local page for any business at any time from third party data, hence, all the unclaimed listings that have always existed in their local index because they were created from third party sources and not from the say-so of the business owner. So, unless the client were to remove every reference to his local business from his website and across the entire web, there is always the chance that Google will re-create a profile for the business without his permission.

Because of this factor, and because of the vast power Google now has over the local business scene, business owners have had to determine to learn to play the 'game' with Google as well as they can. In most cases, the highest goal being aimed for is a high-ranking blended listing, which it sounds like your client has achieved. So, typically, this would be a time for congratulations rather than concern.

Hope these thoughts are helpful to you!

Hello JPretz,
What you are experiencing is a common phenomenon in which your former organic rankings get subsumed into your new blended/local rankings. These blended/local rankings are made up of many factors, including organic ones.

It used to be common for strong businesses to dominate page 1 of the SERPs. They might have several organic rankings, a local ranking, citations from 3rd parties, video sources and etc., all on one page. Around the time of the Venice update in March (see: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update), I and many other Local SEOs noticed this had changed. For the most part, if a company had a local listing, they no longer had an organic one and vice versa. There has been some fluctuation in this display, but I still find this to be the way of things for most businesses, even in tiny niche verticals in rural locations.

That being said, a couple of the Local SEOs I know have managed in the past to secure a double ranking since Venice. Linda Buquet of CatalysteMarketing is one who comes instantly to mind, as she published a post about getting a double ranking for a dentist:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-search-general-discussions/719-lqqk-incredible-shrinking-local-serps-traffic-drops.html

And here's a similar piece from Adam Steele:
http://www.nightlitemedia.com/2012/05/organic-and-google-places-ranking-on-page-1/

Basically, the concept of double rankings revolves around the optimization of a secondary page. I've never engaged in this, and I believe Linda actually recently saw the double-ranked dentist results changes. She and I work together in her Local Search Forum, and I believe she mentioned this to me, so this may all have changed again. I know she was offering training on this in her Advanced Places Training course, but am not sure of the status of this tactic/training at this point. You might like to get in touch with her.

At any rate, what you are experiencing is common and there is even discussion going on in the local sphere as to whether local inclusion causes traffic drops (making it preferable to remain organic). The thing is, this stuff changes almost daily, so the best we can typically due is keep up with the news and changes.

Hope the articles I've linked to will be helpful.

Hello Ferguson!

I agree with Chas on this that it's a little harder to answer without knowing the exact content. Most typically, I write URLs for city landing pages something like this:

whatever.com/city-state-service

For example, let's say the business is a mobile notary public in Berkeley, California. The URL might look like:

joenotary.com/berkeley-ca-mobile-notary

This would be for a business, and the landing pages might be for the different cities in which the business serves. Your situation is a little more complex with a single business with multiple locations in the same city and zip. Is your site a directory website? Or are you simply dealing with a single franchise's website? Perhaps you can give us a little more information.

At any rate, it sounds to me as if the only distinct items about the businesses would be their street addresses. How long are they? Would using them make them hugely long? What I'm describing would be something like this:

directory.com/joe-notary-123-centre-st

directory.com/joe-notary-39-brown-ave

a longer version would be:

directory.com/joe-notary-123-centre-st-boston-ma

It's not horribly long...but some businesses have really long street addresses with suite numbers and the like, so you'll have to judge whether an approach like this would start to look spammy.

Would this work for you? Has your question been answered? If not, please feel free to provide further details.

Miriam

Hi MVBryanB,

There are a variety of choices available to you in terms of markup. The main benefit of Schema is that Google, Bing and Yahoo have all agreed on it as a standard. I highly recommend that you read Mike Blumenthal's article on this subject from last autumn, as well as all the comments following it:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/10/07/a-free-tool-to-build-geo-sitemap-and-schema-org-compliant-files/

Take special note of the free Schema tool Mike links to. I think this resource is exactly what you are looking for.

Miriam

Hello Alice,

Were you attempting to do Local SEO for this business, then the answer would be 'no, you should not attempt to optimize for Dublin as your main target.' The reason for this is that local results are based on the validity of the physical address and local phone number.

Your case sounds somewhat different, however. If no customers come to the business, then it won't qualify as a local business in the eyes of Google. Because of this, yes, you can certainly optimize for phrases like 'near Dublin' if you feel this will assist the client in some way. But, what you should not expect from the work is that you will be able to outrank true local businesses, locally, who have physical locations in Dublin and are able to take advantage of the different local options like Google+ Local.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Tonyklu,

She'd have to have separate accounts, I believe - one for her gmail and another for Places. I do not, however, recommend that you claim her under any account of yours. Clients should always have independent control of their properties. Hope this helps!

Hi Chase,

Linda has given you very good information here. I also recommend that you check out 51 Blocks' competitive analysis tool: http://www.51blocks.com/online-marketing-tools/free-local-analysis/

Though not, per se, a ranking tool, it provides a great deal of free insight into why certain businesses are achieving certain rankings.

Good to hear how hard you're working on this. Way to go! I like to use hCard in 2 places: in the footer site-wide and on the contact page. If you have multiple physical locations, you could also use it on each city landing page.

Hello William, Thank you for coming to Q&A with your question, which is a good one! By coincidence, Mike Blumenthal and I just had a conversation regarding this which he eventually turned into a blog post. I think it will be well worth your reading: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/24/google-places-myth-linking-to-your-places-page/ Definitely read all the comments on it, too. If you have any questions after reading that, please do return. Miriam

Hi Aim213, I'm popping by because this thread was posted in the Local SEO category, but because Google stopped displaying true local results for web design firms several years ago, this is pretty much a straight up SEO/SEM question. I'm going to ask some of our other associates to stop by and contribute what they can here. Please, stand by.

Hey there!

I've reached out to Ed Reese, the author of that article on LocalU to see if something has changed since he wrote it (could be!). If we're lucky, Ed might be nice enough to reply. I'll return to this thread.

Hi Ignite,

They are included in current ranking reports for PRO members, yes. Hope you will give it a try!

You are experiencing a common phenomenon with your organic vs. local rankings. Since the Venice update, it has become uncommon for any local business to have more than one spot per results page. So, if you make it into the local pack of results, you are likely to see your previous organic rank disappear because it has been subsumed into your new blended local rank. There are exceptions to this, but what you are describing is pretty typical.

Unfortunately, I do not know of any high level studies that have compared CTR for local vs. organic. It would be great if someone would publish such a study. Hope this helps.