Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Again, No, I don't believe it makes any difference whether your hCard is in the header, footer or nav, so long as it is sitewide.

Hello AWCthreads,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and want to applaud the good response Nicholas has given you.

You have explained that your venture is an e-commerce site. Does this mean that the business is virtual (no person-to-person contact either at your office or at the homes/businesses of clients?). This is a critical point of information, because having a real physical location in your city/state puts you in a very different category than if you conduct all business virtually.

If you are doing business virtually, then, yes, I would say that heavily optimizing your website for your city/state is sending a strong signal to the bots that you hope to be viewed as especially relevant for 'blue widgets city state' as opposed to just  'blue widgets'. Is there a good reason for you to want to appear as most relevant locally? Does the thing you sell apply most to local people or is it a product used nationally? My question is a little vague because I lack information about what the product actually is.

Now, if the business is NOT virtual, and you have taken steps to optimize your website for it's local geographic terms, and have also gotten the business profiled in Google Places and other local business indexes, then Google is naturally going to view the business as most relevant for local searches. It is possible to run local and national SEO campaigns simultaneously, but different strategies will depend on the business model.

So, I would like to close with my question for you regarding whether there was some reason you heavily optimized your site for a local audience. What is the reason for/thinking behind this. Clarification on this point would be really help!

Miriam

Hi Elvin,

This question actually has some tricky nuances to it, due to a recent change in Google's Places Quality Guidelines. The two categories you have mentioned (dry cleaning and laundry services) are so closely related and are being run out of the same location, so a couple of weeks ago, I would securely recommended the following:

1. One website

2. One Google+ Local listing

But, things have become less certain in this area, due to the guideline update.

Previously, the language in the guidelines read:

Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the hospital or clinic at large.

Now, the language reads:

Departments within businesses, universities, hospitals, and government buildings may be listed separately. These departments must be publicly distinct as entities or groups within their parent organization, and ideally will have separate phone numbers and/or customer entrances.

It is up to you and me and every other local business owner to interpret what Google means by this change. I believe that what Google is attempting to resolve here is a situation such as that of a hospital which is now allowed to have a separate listing for the ER with a different phone number than that of their Radiology Department. Does this apply to your business? I am less secure, because there have historically been problems with Google's handling of similar businesses located within the same building. For example, even when 2 doctors have had different suite addresses within the same building, Google has sometimes conflated their 2 listings.

In the past, the old guideline language seemed to refer pretty clearing to situations like an HVAC guy who might abuse the system by creating 1 listing for his heater repair and a second listing for his air conditioning repair. Google clearly didn't want him to do this, and frankly, my gut feeling is that Google still doesn't want him to do this. I think the new language is really geared toward things like hospitals and colleges.

So, as I said, this is a bit tricky. I have some further questions for you:

1. Do you have 2 totally distinct business names for the business? In other words, is one business called Laundry To You and the other called Rosita's Dry Cleaning, or are the business names similar, like Rosita's Laundry Service and Rosita's Dry Cleaning?

2. Are there 2 different physical entrances to the building? In other words, do dry cleaning clients go through door 1 and laundry clients go through door 2? Or, are they both entering through the same door?

3. Have you always had 2 different local phone numbers for the 2 services or do they share a phone number?

4. Please thoroughly describe what the 2 services do as separate entities. How are the services different?

Please, provide as much detail as you can and I will do my best to continue hashing this out with you. My concern here is that the shared address may have always been causing you major NAP consistency issues, but I need to know more, and as I've said, the new guidelines are open to anyone's interpretation, in terms of applicability.

Hi Trey,

I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A and just wanted to pop in to mention that Google does not show Places results for web design companies. They haven't since January of 2010, if I recall correctly.  Definitely check out the tutorial JP has mentioned, but bear in mind, your efforts to rank organically for any term are pretty much going to come down to the old standby's of how the site is optimized, linked within, linked to, marketed and used by humans.

Miriam

Hi Ignite,

You've pointed out an interesting negative nuance of being included in the local results. Google will sometimes show more than one location in the local pack of results for a multi-location business, but not always, and if you have more than a couple of locations, it's very unlikely that they will all show up in the Local results unless you are literally the only game in town. For a broad phrase in a metro location, you probably will never achieve more than a single Local result, unfortunately, so, yes, I can see what you are saying about your previous organic results essentially being a more accurate representation of a franchise-type business than a single local result would be. There isn't really anything you can do about this, per se, but developing content that achieves you broader visibility organically for things like 'best clam chowder in boston' and other more long tail-type phrases is a path open to you for diversifying traffic.

Hello Alex,

Yes - at the very least, the NAP needs to be in real HTML text in your footer - not within an image.

Identifying your business as being in Atascadero is not going to hurt your rankings in other towns. It's going to help establish you where you are located. Bear in mind, though, that Google is always going to consider you as being primarily relevant to the town you are located in - not the towns in your extended service area. The point of doing city landing pages for your service cities is to try to compete for ORGANIC rankings - not local ones. Google will almost always show your competitors who are actually located in the other cities in their local results for these searches, whereas you will have an advantage for Atascadero searches if they are not located there. So, Atascadero is your true local city for which you are hoping to get locally ranked (with a red/grey pinned result) - your service cities represent opportunities for you to attempt to do content creation/link building for secondary organic rankings.

Your sample meta description looks more like a title tag to me. Meta descriptions should typically read like a complete sentence - a mini sales pitch. What you've written with the pipe symbols is the common format for a title tag.

Finally, regarding ALT tags, you could experiment with adding NAP to some of them, and using others to highlight some of your main keywords, such as 'carpet cleaning in atascadero, ca', etc. ALT tags should always be an accurate description of what's in the image. Perhaps the image of your company truck would be a good one to put NAP on, but images of you doing work with various machines could be good opportunities to focus on other key terms.

Hope this helps. I'd like to close with the suggestion that you consider consulting with a good local SEO at some point, if this is within your budget. I can only provide limited guidance here in the forum, but you've got lots of questions and would probably find it very valuable to seek professional consultation at some point. I'd be happy to work with you further in future, Alex.

Good luck!

Miriam

Hi Kenoshi Creative,

Unfortunately, due the the fact that I'm in the US, Google isn't allowing me to change my location to Calgary, so I'm unable to produce the sitelinks display you are seeing for the terms you've mentioned, but I do understand what you're talking about. To my recollection, these displays started getting attention around the middle of 2011.

Here is a blog post on this subject, but I'm afraid it may not be of much help to you because it sounds like you're already implementing most of these things:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2011/08/17/google-places-sitelinks/

Perhaps of more use to you will be Linda Buquet's piece on this + the discussion that follows it:

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-one-box-local-sitelinks.html

And this post by Matthew Hunt:

http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/seo/google-displaying-new-sitelinks/

Are these of any help to you? I sincerely hope so!

Miriam

Hi Peter,

Thank so much for the live example. I totally get what you mean now. Okay, so the example you are showing is from TripAdvisor, and yes, Google consistently displays stars and review counts, etc., for TripAdvisor-based results, and for other large sites like Yelp. I presume (but am not certain) that these are rich snippets. Here are 2 articles from Google on this subject:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146645

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/richsnippetslocal/

In mid-2012, Google stopped showing stars on their own results after switching to Zagat as their provider. See:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/06/12/google-we-can-show-stars-if-we-want-to/

The most public test case of rich snippets appearing for a small local business was Mike Blumenthal's writeup of getting stars and other data to appear for a jeweler client of his. However, this data then disappeared, only to reappear sporadically some months later. Read this:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/08/09/are-rich-snippet-reviews-making-a-limited-comeback-in-local/

So, sometimes Google will still display this type of data for small businesses alongside their organic results, but it is sporadic. Looking at that same client of Mike's today, I don't see any stars, but who knows, they could come back again tomorrow.  Mike's opinion is that is still makes sense to mark up pages, and his advice is trustworthy.

And, of course, you do have the option of listing your local business on entities that consistently do show stars (like Yelp).

Hope this helps, and thanks again for the screenshot!

Hi Trey,

I'm sorry you've been on the trail of this puzzle for months to no avail. I want to assure you that I do understand what you are talking about in regards to the setting of location within Google, etc. I have a feeling the reason asking this question in fora isn't yielding a simple answer is that there isn't a simple, standard, across-the-board reason for the ranking variations that you've observed.

I believe that, as the SEO on the project, your best shot will be to use whatever competitive analysis tools you prefer (we have awesome ones here at SEOmoz) to see if you can spot a meaningful difference that would explain why Google feels one site is more relevant to the query than the other, if the person is searching from within the city in question. It may turn out to be something as simple as a title tag structure that favors the local term to something as complex as the authority or locale of the links pointing to one site or the other. It will take some digging and is not something that can be answered at a glance.

That being said, I'd like to throw a couple of notes in here for your observation.

Using your hypothetical query (I understand this isn't really your client's industry or city), I see slight variations in rankings when I search for 'web design dallas' from my own city in California, 'web design dallas tx' from my own city in California and 'web design dallas' when setting my location to Dallas, TX. The top 4 businesses are all moving around slightly within the top 4 positions for these very slightly different searches.

What makes me curious about this situation is that 'web design' is one of the few local queries for which Google refuses to show local results. Their policy is not to treat web design firms as local, but looking at the little ranking variations, I have to wonder if some of the local search ranking factors are being applied under the surface. Now, what I don't know is if your client is actually a web design firm or in one of the other few industries that are barred from inclusion in local search. If they are, I wonder if Bill Slawski at SEObytheSea has written about any patents that might speak to these observable variations. It might be worth contacting him directly about this. He's very good.

There are also the effects of personalization to consider, and whether this is causing any of the ranking variations.

The upshot is, I can't provide a simple answer because I believe in-depth analysis will be required to discern the differences, however large or small, that might be causing Google to handle the results this way. It's probably going to be slightly different in every case. I think you've got a big challenge to surmount...and I hope you don't have one of those difficult clients who pins all expectations on rankings instead of conversions.

Sincerely wishing you good luck in your work and I would be very happy to hear from you if you managed to discover what you feel the solution is!

Miriam

Hi Partyrocks,

Do you mean a Google+ Local page or a Google+ page? Sorry, but the terminology is often confusing. There could be a number of reasons your page is not appearing, ranging from ineligibility, to guideline violations, to duplicates. Without being able to see your unique listing, it is unfortunately not possible to diagnose this scenario. If you can share your complete details, including a link to your listing, I'll be happy to take a look. If, for privacy reasons, you cannot share, your best bet would be to hire a high level Local SEO (if it is a Google+ Local page) to do an audit for you in private.

Hello Cakes Website,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. You've brought up a meaningful concern. I would strongly recommend that you keep your clients' emails consistent across the major local business indexes...including but not limited to Google Places. As you are a Local SEO, you are probably already familiar with David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors annual survey, but just in case you aren't, here's the link:

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

I'm referencing this so that you can take a gander at the 10 most important citation sources in the document. In these, and all of the major indexes I would consider it best to use a standard business email throughout.

And then, train your clients to either forward emails containing sales pitches from the directories to you so that you can offer them guidance, or teach them to delete them. We all have to deal with spam, unfortunately, but avoiding some of it is not going to be of equal value to maintaining consistency across all citations of the business.

This is my opinion on this, and I hope it is useful to you.

Miriam

Hi BobGW,

I have not encountered any studies or evidence to indicate that adding a second location would cause a ranking drop of the original location - though, of course, you have in a sense split your KWs in half by doubling them (adding Utah).

I'd like to ask a few of my Local SEO colleagues for any feedback on this in case anyone can point to a similar case. I'll be back.

Miriam

Hi Elvin,

Thanks for providing such complete answers. This may not be what you're hoping to hear, but my best advice is to ditch the second website. You're running a single business with a variety of services under one roof, despite the separate phone numbers. I would advise you to have

1. One website that fully describes all the offerings of your company and prominently displays your address and one local phone number.

2. A single Google+ Local listing for the business that adheres to the guidelines in every way.

Having read your answers, I'm 99% certain that any other approach will be problematic for the business and could lead to penalties.

Invest in good copywriting for your website so that you've got great content covering all of your services rather than investing time in attempting to build out the services as if they belong to two different companies. That is my best advice.

Hi Ben,

Very good question. In the Google Places Quality Guidelines, Google states:

-Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or “refer” users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.

So, from this guideline, we know that Google doesn't want you to list a URL that redirects to something you don't own, but in this case, apparently this business owns TheCarmelDentist.com. They are not redirecting to a domain that doesn't belong to the business.

This scenario brings up questions. Why is this business doing this? One good guess might be that they've bulit this new website at thecarmeldentist.com and have redirected the old fishers site to the new one, but have yet to update their Google+ Local Page to reflect the URL. All attempts to reach the fishers site are redirecting, so the + Local Page is simply redirecting, too. I can't think of any good reason why they wouldn't just simply list the URL, so my best guess is that they just haven't updated the + Page yet.

Looking at this specific scenario, I just doubt that the redirect is being done with an intent to spam. Because the whole old site has apparently been redirected to the new one, I think this business has simply moved to a new domain.

I would also guess that the redirect rule in the guidelines is meant to speak to the practice of either competitive hijacking of listings and redirecting the URLs to competitors' stuff, or, possibly, spammy stuff in which a snake oil marketer might convince a business owner that their URL should be redirecting to some sort of directory page instead of to the company's website. But, it doesn't look like this is what is happening in your example, unless I'm totally overlooking something.

Now, you are quite right that the EMD penalty does not seem to have hit hard in Local. Like you, I see plenty of these rankings just fine. At this point, it is still quite possible to rank well with an EMD, and if the EMD is supported by strong content, it probably won't ever be penalized.

That being said, if asked whether I would personally advise a client to switch from BobJonesDDS.com to carmeldentist.com, just in hopes of a ranking boost, my answer for 2013 would be a resounding 'no'. Every move Google has made over the past 2 years clearly supports, in my eyes, their preference for authentic presentation of brands. If Bob Jones DDS is your brand, then use it, I say. Don't go for the EMD because it doesn't truly represent your brand...it represents an attempt to rank. Google is getting impatient with anything done simply to rank.

Within the scope of Q&A, I can't do a a full competitive analysis of the situation you've highlighted, Ben, but remember, a domain is just a fraction of the local search ranking factors. Don't forget proximity to centroid, business cluster, domain age, links, citations, reviews, etc. All of these things and so much more determine rank. I don't believe an EMD can be seen as THE cause, though it could be part of the cause.

One last note. The dentist in question does have some problems going on. Their +Page is calling them The Fishers Dentist. Their website is calling them The Carmel Dentist and their address listed on their website is Indianapolis. Even if I'm not predicting a swift EMD penalty, the confusion of the signals they are sending to Google about their brand and locale is pretty serious and could lead to all kinds of problems for them. Not good.

Hope these thoughts help. Please, feel free to share more about your study, Ben.

Hi Partyrocks,

That's good that you are starting to see your listing show up for important terms. Improving your rankings will depend on a variety of factors including the following:

• Physical Location in City of Search

• Citations you've built on 3rd party indexes/directories

• Reviews you earn

• Proper category choices

• The authority of your website

• Lack of violations on your Google+ Local page

• Authority of links pointing to your website

These are just a few things, off the top of my head. Edging out competitors means making a greater effort than they are in areas like the above. I would recommend that you do a close study of the most recent Local Search Ranking Factors to consider the top ranking factors, gauge where you are in the process of promoting the business and see where you can focus your energies to improve your visibility. For example, your current Google+ Local page has zero reviews, so this is easy to identify as worthy of effort. Hope this helps!

Hi Alex,

I'm delighted my input is helpful. To get you in the right mindset for approaching Local SEO, in general, it's important to understand that the whole thing hangs on NAP. Your legal business name, physical address and local area code phone number are the three most important details about your business in the eyes of all search engines. Without these three items, you don't qualify as local and don't qualify for a Google Place Page.

Because of this, you want to send the strongest possible geographic signals from your website. This means optimizing your footer (or masthead) sitewide with your complete NAP, having it on your contact page and possibly on other pages such as your home and about pages. All tags and text should also be written with your local focus in mind (your cities, regions, neighborhoods, zip codes, etc.) Approach everything from the perspective that you are A) a neighbor who needs information B) a bot that needs to understand you are local to a certain location.

I do recommend using hCard as it strengthens the signal.

Finally, I want to address this comment you've made to be sure I'm giving you the best advice. You write:

i really try and keep my address of the page as much as possible since it is not a commercial building, just my home and a shop, but I am open to it if there is a benefit SEO wise or if you feel the end user would appreciate it.

We've just addressed how critical NAP is to your entire local campaign, and lots of businesses are run out of a home office. The one thing I wanted to double-check on is your mention of a 'shop'. Do you mean there is another business (a shop of some kind) running out of your home at the same address? If so, come back to me about this as there will be different issues to consider. But, if that's not what you meant and yours is the only business running out of the home address, that is no problem. Bottom line: highly publicizing your NAP is the foundation of Local. Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Again BobGW,

As promised, I ran this past a few colleagues. As I expected, the response was "correlation is not causation". Unless the Local SEO on your site or on local business indexes was mishandled, it seems unlikely that your targeting your second location is responsible for the ranking drop you observed. Now, if Google got mixed up about your addresses, that could cause a problem, but provided you've handled your Local SEO correctly, this is probably not the culprit.

Hope this feedback helps!

Miriam

Hi Peter,

Yes, it would affect your citation consistency. You should always list your primary local number first on all local listings, and be sure it is in crawl-able text on the website. I do not recommend creating any local listing with only your toll free number.

Hi GFujioka,

Good question. Let's start by discussing the definition of a citation. A citation may be defined as a partial listing of a business' NAP (name, address, phone number) anywhere on the web. So, by nature, citations revolve around physical locale...not around service radii. So, for example, a business with a physical office and local area code phone number in San Francisco, CA could ostensibly serve Los Angeles, CA, Portland, OR and Seattle, WA., but their citation campaign would have to revolve around just one locale - their physical one - because citations are all about NAP. Your client has a single NAP, according to your description, so your citation campaign must focus on that.

If the client's competitors have multiple physical addresses paired with unique local phone numbers, then they will definitely have the advantage over your client, because they will not only be able to build out citations for each physical locale, but will also be able to have a unique Google+ Local page for each physical locale. In other words, your client cannot compete on a true local level with a competitor who actually has a physical locale and unique local phone number in Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, because Google's local results are based on having NAP within the target city.

Where does this leave your client? He must do all he can for his single physical locale (get listed in Google+ Local, build citations, etc.) to participate to the fullest he can in Google's Local products, but the rest of his efforts for his location-less service cities will need to be organic in nature - not local. So, instead of citation building for these location-less service cities, your efforts will likely include content development, link building/earning and social media to help him build organic visibility in places where he has not real physical presence.

You might like to check out this recent post of mine on the subject of city landing pages:

The Nitty Gritty Of City Landing Pages For Local Businesses

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

I think that might be really helpful for you to read at this point in creating your client strategy. My bet is that blogging and social media marketing coupled with a strong effort to earn links will be this client's best hope of gaining some organic visibility for cities/states where he does not have a physical presence.

Hi 1akal,

Drilling further down into the GetListed.org page vzPRO linked to, you will find two sections that will help you:

https://getlisted.org/static/resources/local-citations-by-city.html

https://getlisted.org/static/resources/local-citations-by-category.html

I also recommend that you check out the Local Search Ecosystem 2013 infographic to understand the relationship between data providers:

http://moz.com/blog/2013-local-search-ecosystems

Adam Steele wrote a very good post on US citations earlier this year:

http://www.leanmarketing.ca/lean-top-50-best-local-citation-sources-in-the-usa/

However, if you are not located in a major city, you may not find a lot of preexisting lists of things like classified, local blogs, news sites, etc., for your city. You will likely need to do your research beyond the broad data provided by resources like the ones I've linked to, above. In that event, you will need to learn how to judge the quality of a citation. There is no standardized way to do so, but I really like Darren Shaw's article on this topic:

http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/12-how-to-identify-quality-citation-sources

Hope these resources help you!

Hello Alec,

Kane Jamison is right - if you were to do the 40x40 project, you'd have to write 1600 pages of content! Though not totally impossible, it's pretty much the next closest thing to impossible.

Kane is on the right track. What you are in need of is a plan for organization. Such a plan might looks something like this:

-Have a landing page for each of your dance schools.

-The page must be well optimized for the schools' locations.

-Write good, unique content for each of these landing pages (at least we're only talking about 40 pages here).

-List the main classes that are available at each school on its respective landing page.

-Build an onsite blog.

-Every week, write several posts about special classes, new classes, events, etc. going on at different schools.

-Have an area on each dance studio page from which you link to some of the blog posts that are specifically about something at that studio.

In this way, you can build content in a gradual way about different things that happen in each of the schools, without undertaking the crazy work of trying to write copy for 1600 pages.

Chances are, you won't rank #1 for every single thing you offer, but if you out-write and out-link most competitors, you should end up getting lots of good rankings.

What' I've suggested is just a strategy brainstormed in a couple of minutes. You can work out the fine details. You definitely need to decide on the architecture of the site first.

Good luck!

Miriam

Hi Bristolweb!

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your very good question. Here's the deal - there is nothing you can do to control or alter this for your clients. 'Related Places' is a built-in feature of Place Pages - Google thinks it is helpful to the user to show him similar businesses nearby. I sympathize with the feeling that this isn't exactly fair to a business owner to advertise his competitors on his own Place Page, but so long as Google feels it is worth it to do so, the Related Places section is here to stay.

You ask for help improving a Place Page...would you like to link to a specific Place Page or are you asking for general advice? Please, let me know.

Miriam

Hi Peter,

You should not be using a toll free number as part of your NAP. Your Local number is the  'P' in NAP. Anything else is a supplementary number. Different Local SEOs may have a different approach than mine, but when I am doing local SEO, I do not include toll free numbers in crawl-able text on the website - I put them in image text in the masthead, if required. I put the complete NAP (name-address-phone) in the footer and on the contact page, encoded in Schema markup. I list the local phone number on all local citations. If it is necessary to list a supplementary number like a toll free number, I do that in the additional phone number field offered by some of the indexes/directories. Google understands which number is local if you've put in in the primary number field and it matches what they find on your website and elsewhere. But, should you decide to put toll free numbers as though they were the primary number in some of your citations, then, yes, there is a concern that Google will not trust their data about the business.

Does this make sense, Peter? I want to be sure I'm explaining this well to you.

Hi Ilya,

This is the first time I've had this question come up, and unfortunately, Google+ for businesses is still so new-ish that I can't find any convincing documentation that speaks to the benefits/drawbacks of opting for any of the 3 different categories you've cited.

My belief is that you would be best to go with the Local Business category, especially if you are taking advantage of Google Places for your business model, but I need to be clear that this is based on my early opinions on this and not on any sources I can cite or data that has been aggregated. Sounds like good material for a blog post!

I will leave this thread as 'unanswered' in case any of our members have a different opinion to share. So far, in Local, every local business I've worked with or heard about is choosing the Local category...but you may have some other reasons specifically relating to your company that would pull you towards choosing one of the other options. Without knowing more about your business model, and without more documentation on this topic to study, I think we're all making those early-days type of decisions right now with Google+

Miriam

Hi Arthur,

As others have mentioned, if you're talking about 2 locations for the same business, there's no problem with using the same email address for Places. Go right ahead.

Hi Bob,

I'm delighted my response was helpful! Regarding your questions:

1. This is why I am recommending that Debi form a relationship with a Local SEO. Someone needs to do a full discovery assessment of her business (where are her clients, where does she see them, at her office, at their homes, at a medical center, what are her core terms, what are the most logical geo terms to add to her core terms, what types of content need to be added to the site, is the site currently using hCard or rich snippets or what have you?). There isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to this. The Local SEO has to really examine the nature of the business model, the goals of the client and the needs of the customer to formulate an educated plan of action. You can try making recommendations to your friend that you think will help her, but as you say, Local just isn't your thing. My opinion is that Debi needs to work with a Local SEO so that whatever she invests time in will be part of an overall plan rather than just a stab in the dark. Does this make sense?

2. You raise a very interesting point regarding citations and links. Google's link-related penalties are well documented but in the half a decade I've been doing Local, I have never heard of a citation-related penalty. So, while I wouldn't be worried about citation penalties, I understand the need to find reliable citation. In addition to Whitespark's tool, which I've linked to in my original response, I recommend you look at Myles Anderson's much lauded list of the top 50 citation sources for the USA and the UK, here:

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

I hope my suggestions are useful, Bob. I know how it can be when you are helping a friend, or even a client. They may need guidance with specific practices that just aren't your area. That's when it's time to refer them out to someone you really trust and who does specialize in the type of consulting or implementation the valued friend of client needs.

Great! So glad to be of help.

Hi Jonathan,

In taking a brief look at your website, I see that you are not giving equal treatment to your 2 locations. Your Austin address is the only one appearing in the site footer and neither address is appearing on your contact page. If you have a unique address and local area code phone number for each location, it's vital that you list them both, in addition to creating unique content on the site revolving around the 2 locations, getting Google Places/Google+ Local pages for the 2 locations (with address likely hidden) and engaging in other work like linkbuilding. Right now, 'Denver' appears like an afterthought on the website. If you've got 2 locations, they both deserve full treatment.

Hi Bob,

I honestly think you will be best off posting the full scenario in the Google And Your Business Forum in case any bugs are involved. In the meantime, here are some resources that might help:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-important-updates/168-how-detect-verified-status-google-local-pages.html

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/missing-google-places-google-local-images.html

http://www.localsplash.com/local-seo-2/how-to-determine-whether-a-google-local-page-has-been-claimed-and-verified.html

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/business/FcPdPDzbMbk/xJWAFVeRJrkJ

The Local Search Forum article is especially good, but I've included the others in case they have some info in them you haven't seen before.

Hi Bob,

I agree with the advice others are giving you. Definitely, break these topics up into individual pages. While not every page may not be a highly searched for term, I've done copywriting and Local SEO for dental practice clients and I know that many terms related to dentistry are real winners.

You'll want to start with a session or keyword research for each page, and create an article of 400-600 words in length, fully describing the benefits of each service. FAQs the dentist has noticed his patients have asked are a help in this. For example, if the dentist offers Sleep Dentistry, what has he noticed his patients most frequently ask about it? What are their concerns? Do they need someone to drive them home after the appointment? Are there any medications they shouldn't be taking if they go with this option? Can they eat the day of their appointment? And focus on the positive...how will this service allay their fears?

Be creative and you may well end up with articles that exceed 600 words...I often find that. And don't forget the dentist's geo keywords, too. Those are important!

If the dentist is willing to invest in really good copywriting, he will be greatly strengthening his ranking potentials for many terms, as well as offering very helpful information to his current and prospective clients.

Miriam

Hi Bill,

You're getting some excellent feedback already from members here. I thought I'd pop in to make sure your question is being understood. You write:

"When doing keyword research it is very difficult to find keywords with lots of search.

For example, if I am optimizing for a Ford dealership in Hackensack,NJ there are not a lot of searches for this term."

In Local SEO, one seldom finds high volume keyword phrases with the geo keywords attached. Unless the business is in LA or NY, the number of searches DISPLAYED with city keywords attached will generally be low because the available data centers aren't showing you actual local data. So, your core term takeaways from kw research tools are going to be non-geo-specific keywords (car dealership, ford dealership, ford cars, used cars, affordable cars, car lot, or what have you). Make your list out of these terms and then add on whatever geographic terms are necessary.

Perhaps you already know this, but from the way you phrased your question, it sounded to me as if you might be judging search volume on criteria you can't count on. This is an oft-voiced beef in the Local SEO industry...keyword research tools do not present an accurate picture of true local searches. So, the workaround I've described is what is used by pretty much every Local SEO I know.

Does this make sense? Please, let me know. Great discussion in here, everybody

Hi Jeff,

While I can't produce the exact results you are seeing in Canada, I am seeing some of the same things you are. Interestingly, the title of the result that says 'Two Small Men' isn't stemming from the Google+ Local page if you click through, and it also isn't stemming from the title tag of the home page. Wonder if there is a duplicate listing? On the one with (Moving Company) in parentheses, yes, that's a pretty clear violation.  I understand how frustrating it is to have competitors getting away with violations. It's just like this in Local. Businesses can get away with intentional and accidental violations for months or years before Google takes notice and hammers down. You might consider reporting that your cities results are full of spam on the Google and Your Business Forum (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business). It might help, but I wouldn't count on it, unfortunately.

Regarding your duplicate, did you first use the 'report a problem' link on the duplicate listings? If so your next step would be to use this troubleshooter, which is the best way to seek resolution:

http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.cs

If you've not tried this yet, give it a try.

Hi Rahul,

I'll do my best to provide some insight in the many areas about which you have questions.

1. Yes - the formula by which Google evaluates web pages is called an algorithm. Google has separate formulae for organic results vs., say, purely local results. Each algorithm contains several hundred components.

2. I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark here and guess that you mean Google+ Local listings (if I'm wrong, please correct me any let me know you are talking about purely social Google+ pages rather than  local-focused Google+ Local pages). It isn't possible to say it takes X amount of time to appear in Google+ Local for desired terms because the competition in each geography is completely unique. You must analyze your competitors and work to surpass their authority so that you can break into the local results and surpass the competition. This can be easy, hard or next-to-impossible depending upon how entrenched your competitors already are.

3. I will CC our help staff for a technical explanation of how our tools work.

4. If, again, you mean here Google+ Local listings rather than just Google+ listings, the answer is that it is possible, but rare. Since the Venice update in early 2012, very few companies have had a double Page 1 ranking (both an organic and a local listing). Where a company has managed to get a double listing, it is typically either because they have optimized a secondary page on their website well enough for it to rank organically alongside the Google+ Local listing, or because the business has little or no competition (like the only lawyer serving 3 small towns). However, an enormous shakeup has hit the Local SEO sphere this week with the introduction of the local 'carousel' for verticals like restaurants, hotels and entertainment-oriented companies. At this moment, everyone is assessing how this may have changed what is showing on page 1 of the results and one of the things worth investigating is how this may have affected the double ranking scenario.

5. Unfortunately, no one that I know of has published an expert level study on this topic. Part of the reason for this lack could be that the Google Places dashboard does not provide accurate analytics data. This is a very good question, but one for which I do not have an authoritative answer.

Hope this helps, and I've said, I'll ask our technical help team to look at your question #3.

Hi Travis,

I can answer the local portion of your question. If there are 5 pre-set Google categories that accurately match your business, then you can do all 5 as pre-set categories, but many businesses find that fewer of the pre-set categories than 5 are appropriate for them. Perhaps 2, 3 or 4 are a good match, and then the rest need to be made up from custom categories your write yourself. My rule of thumb is that you should try to select at least 2 pre-set categories as your first 2 choices.

When writing custom categories, follow these guidelines:

1. Do not include any type of geographic terms in your categories. No New York, no New Jersey, no Boston, no San Francisco, etc. Never put anything like this in a category.

2. Make sure that any custom category you write follows the is-not-does rule. This means it should say what your business is, not what it does. So plumber, not plumbing, electrician, not electrical services. In your case 'truck repair' is not an allowed category, but truck repair company would be.

3. I try to avoid being too repetitive in my categories. For example, I wouldn't want lawyer, lawyers, accident lawyer, car accident lawyer, auto accident lawyer. Note, this is a gut feeling rather than a well-documented rule. Thought I'd mention it though.

I hope these tips help. I am not sure about your WordPress and Yoast questions and will ask one of our great SEOs to stop by for additional advice.

Hi Inhouseseo,

Yes, I have made similar things happen for clients. Most typically, this type of results stemmed from overhauling a bad website. In one case, the client's sales (the real test, right?) shot up 125% in one year. I've had similar results with other clients.

My take on all SEO is this: the strength of your efforts must be based on the competitiveness of your target industry. If my client is a quilt shop competing against 2 other quilt shops in a 50 mile radius, chances are, I just need to put up a really good website for them to beat out the other two, who probably aren't going to have hired someone like me because the industry isn't very tech-oriented. If I put a blog in the site and client uses it once a week, she will probably be going way beyond the efforts of her competitors. I'll get her Local SEM firmly in place and she will dominate the whole local scene on the web. No way am I going to have to do linkbuilding. It's just not necessary.

However, if my client is a personal injury lawyer in San Francisco, that's a very different story. I can write content for him all day, and it will help, but if his competitors are all spending $3000+ a month on linkbuilding with hotshot linkbuilders, he's going to have to match and exceed their efforts if he wants to outrank them. There could be exceptions to this, but I would call this pretty typical.

So, my experience with this is that the efforts one has to make for each client are unique. It all depends upon what efforts their competitors are making. In some cases, all you need is good on-page SEO. In others, it will be a combination on on-page plus Local SEM. And, in others, you will have to bring out every weapon in the arsenal, from linkbuilding, to SM, to video marketing in order to gain the visibility the client seeks.

Hi Andy,
I've just replied to your PM. Hope it helps!

Hi BC,

Yes, you can typically expect the organic rank to be subsumed into the Places rank if you create a Google Places/+ Local page for the client. This is a very common outcome and it remains uncommon, though not impossible, for businesses to have more than one results per SERPs page.

Greetings, Cane,

Not understanding exactly what the service is that your company and its agents provide, I'll use an example from another industry: the real estate industry. You will know from my example whether what I'm describing applies to your business model.

Let's start with Google's Places Guidelines. The language in the guidelines applicable to the real estate agency (and I'm hoping your own business) is this:

Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the office.

(emphasis mine)

So, a real estate office with 10 realtors working with in can have 1 listing for the business itself, and one for each agent.

These are the official guidelines.

That being said, due to weaknesses and bugs in Google Places, there has been a historic problem with multiple listings sharing the same address but having different data in areas like the business title, phone number field, etc. Merging of the listings can happen so that you might end up with the main listing having the phone number for Agent #6 instead of the direct office number. Reviews for Agent #3 may end up on Agent #4's Place Page. And, yes, you might encounter your main office being outranked by the individual agents' listings.

Your task is to develop a company policy regarding how to handle this, knowing that merging is indeed a real danger, but that the benefits of each agent having his/her own Place Page can also mean increased overall visibility for your whole business. You need to determine whether you will allow agents to have their own Place Pages and whether these will be controlled by you (within your own Places account) or whether every agent will be given the keys to create their own listing under their own steam). Both routes have potential benefits and pitfalls. For example, if you control the listings, you control their data and will also be able to realize if anything becomes penalized or problematic. On the other hand, managing a large number of listings (especially for an International business) is a very big job, indeed. Do you have the time to do this, or would it be better to make it company policy that each agent control his own listing?

I can't make the decision for you, but these are the issues you need to consider in coming to a final decision as to how you want to handle this complex scenario.

Hope this helps!

Hi Robert,

Funny topic, and a good one!

Chris Silver Smith wrote a good post on this last year, in which he states:

It may not ever be possible to know for certain if Google is using quantitative check-in data for calculating rankings along with all of their other factors. As Danny Sullivan has noted before about this kind of data, "correlation isn't causation“.

I think you'll enjoy this piece, Robert:

http://searchengineland.com/are-check-ins-a-local-ranking-factor-112222

I've not seen anything more recently than this that made me feel anything has changed since Chris wrote that, so hopefully, it will be a good read for you about the current feelings on check-ins. Hope you're having a good weekend!

Hi Umar,

You've gotten some helpful replies here. I'm a professional copywriter, and will share my own guidelines with you here.

1. Discover a topic you want to write about.

2. Do keyword research to determine how people are searching for information about your chosen topic

3. Cover your chosen topic as thoroughly as you can. You may only end up with 600 words on a given page, or you may end up writing a 2000-3000 word piece if a certain topic merits it. Don't focus on word count - focus on the thoroughness of your coverage of the topic.

4. As you write, keep your keywords in mind. Don't focus on including them a certain number of times. Use them where they make sense from a human perspective. This means your keywords will be sprinkled throughout the page, rather than crammed together in any one place. This is natural.

5. Make the copy a pleasure for humans to read. Yes...those keywords are in there, but they have been highlighted in a natural, non-robotic manner.

6. Once you've written the copy, read it through and craft a compelling title/headline for it, again, taking your keywords into proper consideration.

7. Run spellcheck and read the piece through at least twice before hitting publish. Weed out any typos, errors and awkward language before you go live.

8. Where appropriate, enhance the text copy with images, videos and other relevant tie-ins.

Hope this helps!

Hi Bob,

While I'm not sure while you've not had success with this type of work with your other website, it's definitely possible to rank highly for two locations with one website. Be sure you are following best practices for onsite Local optimization and adhering carefully to the Google Places Quality Guidelines, which are here:

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

You will need to build reviews, citations and, possibly, links separately for both locations as well as creating great, unique copy for both locations.

*You probably already know this, but just in case you don't, I'll mention that it is essential that you're using 2 different phone numbers for the 2 locations, in addition to the unique addresses. It occurs to me to mention this, because I talk to many Local SEO clients who think they should be redirecting to a single phone number and this hinders there ability to create two unique NAPs.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Jeff,

So your client's profile's duplicate listing has a different website address than the authoritative listing? My advice is the same to follow the steps I've outlined and see what happens. Patience is a big virtue in Local. But, I will add to this...you are going to need to back this up with a citation cleanup campaign if there are other local business listings out there with your client's old website listed on them. You need to clean up the whole Internet record for the client in a case like this, or there is a chance that your Google+ Local listing will revert to old/bad data because of the way data feeds from one source to another. Thought I would mention.

Greetings, Emerald!
Thank your for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. While a local campaign in highly unlikely to injure your international results, you must be able to answer yes to having ALL of these items in place in order to qualify as a local business:

1. A legal business name.
2. A real physical location in a city in the US (not a virtual office, P.O. box, shared space or any other substitute)
3. A local area code phone number in the city of location (not a redirected phone number or toll free number)
4. You must either be the sort of business to which clients come to do face-to-face business in your office in this city, or, you must have staff that goes out from the office to the clients' homes or businesses. If business is conducted virtually, it does not qualify as local in the eyes of the search engines.

If your client can answer yes to all 4 of those things, then they can certainly engage in some Local SEM. You would want to have a good landing page on the cite for the city in question, and also include the complete NAP in the website footer site-wide. You would want copy that speaks to the geography of this physical location. Additionally, you would want to get your client correctly profiled at Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local and other relevant directories.

Sincerely hope this answer helps. Good luck!
Miriam

Wait...doesn't EVERYONE read about SEO for fun???

Heh-heh!

Glad that was a good find for you, Robert!

Miriam

Hi James,

The way this was done is not good, but the idea is right. If the client has 14 different offices, it is a standard best practice to create a unique page for each of them, and, yes, that means unique content. too. Rather than dealing with re-directs and rels, my advice is to reconsider your stance on creating meaningful content for each page. You just need to find a unique story to tell for each page. If the client is a service business, then doubtless, he's got a unique story from each service area to share. Put a minimum of 400 engaging words together, put the complete NAP(name, address, phone), a map of the service area, 5-10 local testimonials, maybe a video of the client at work in the local area and, bingo, you've now got a strong page that's been locally optimized for the community it serves.

Are you sure this isn't an option? It will take some effort/funding, but the business needs to understand the importance of taking a high quality approach to presenting themselves on the web, or they are going to be overrun by competitors who are willing to make these efforts.

Hi Bob,

I want to begin by clarifying what you mean by NAD. I'm familiar with NAP (name, address, phone number) but I've not encountered the term NAD before. From context, I'm guessing you mean NAP but please let me know if I'm wrong. I'll proceed as though I've guessed correctly.

As you may have reckoned, your California location doesn't qualify as truly local, because of its lack of a dedicated street address. You can't submit a hotel room number to Google Places, so until such time as you've got a standard address for the California branch, what you can do is going to be somewhat limited.

Typically, when dealing with a business model that has just a few locations, like yours, you would put the complete NAP in the footer sitewide, and on the Contact Us page, and you would also likely be creating a landing page for each of the 2 offices. Typically, you would be creating a Google Place Page for each location, creating other local business listings for each location and building out content, citations and links for each location. You can do some of this, but the lack of address for the California business is definitely going to hamper your Places efforts. You may be able to build good rankings organically, but if your core keyword phrases are most heavily used by local searchers and receive local SERPs, then you are likely to be outranked by businesses that can publish an address.

Have I helped to answer your question? If you need to add more info about your scenario, you are welcome to do so.

Hi Mnkpso,

I would not worry about small differences like 'S' and 'South' or 'Suite' and 'Ste' and '#". It is my feeling that Google understand equivalents like these. What would be a problem is if some of your listings left off your suite number entirely, had a wrong zip code or had your address numbers backward. Then, you would need to correct these things.

Hi Guys,

I can't recommend attempting to secure addresses where you aren't physically located. Honesty is the best policy with this...if Google thinks something is fishy, their hammer is swift in falling and unforgiving. Also, be sure to take note on this new policy change if you are dealing with go-to-client-type business models:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap

Rather than spending effort/time/money on getting addresses, my advice would be to hire a copywriter to start gunning for secondary organic rankings for all of your service locations. It's not only allowed, but it can really work.

Hey Don,

'Growing pains' is a good description. I agree with you on your assessment. There are things that just aren't working well yet and Google is aware of it. Hang in there.