Hi Autoczar,

How is Google doing handling the annex that happened? Are the properly listing competitors who used to be in city B as being in city A as of 2007? This would be my main concern, as Google is sometimes very, very slow about understanding and implementing changes of this kind.

I've run into so many scenarios in Local where the business owner is confused about the best way to proceed, given the various rules about address and citation handling, but I want to let you know that this is the first time I've run into your specific situation. I think it would be worth your while to post your question to the Google And Your Business help forum, which is staffed by Google employees as well as a lot of smart Top Contributors. I think your situation is unusual enough to inspire some kind of response, and I'd be really interested to hear what that response would be. Here's the link, in case you don't have it:

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

I would title the question something like:

My City Annexed By Larger City - How To Proceed

You will need to be willing to give full details as to what your Google+ Local listing is and what your cities are in order to receive the best response. I hope you can give this a shot and receive some useful advice straight from the horse's mouth on this. If you do, I'd love it if you would update this thread with what you heard.

Good luck!

Miriam

Hi Raymond,

Good discussion going on here. In my opinion, first step with a client with a NAP consistency issue like this is to be sure that they do have at least one legit physical address and phone number. Not a P.O. Box or virtual address or what have you. Whatever the legit address is...that's the one to go with on all platforms. Then be sure that address is consistently implemented everywhere and clean up all citations that do not match. This can take some doing! Hang in there and hopefully you can put in the work to get this client to the primary goal of having a clean, consistent record. Good luck!

Hi Tom -

I believe you might find determining your business model and reading the relevant text on this Moz Blog article helpful:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Hi Jonathan,

What needs to happen here is that the photographer stops using a prohibited address on any of her profiles or website. Use of a P.O. box, Pak Mail address is against the guidelines.

Instead, she should be using her home address, but hiding it. She doesn't have to put it on her website and she can stick to listing herself in indexes and directories that allow the business to hide their address. In other words, she'll be inputting her address as she creates her profiles, but she'll be selecting the option to keep the address un-published. Happily, a ton of indexes/directories allow this type of listing. Here are 2 pieces by Phil Rozek listing places where you can submit your business but hide your address:

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

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/

So, the steps I would take would be:

1. Tell the client that you made a mistake. Her company's welfare comes first and telling her like it is will be so helpful to her, even if it's a little embarrassing for you. Better late than never, right? And as you haven't charged her, she can't really be put out if free advice was wrong.

2. If you want to, tell her you'd like a chance to remedy the mistake, for free.

3. Sit down together and read Google's Places Quality Guidelines. Explain to her what I've just explained to you about using but hiding her home address. Privacy concerns are very real, so she should be happy to learn that it's possible to get listed but keep her address private.

4. Remove any reference to the taboo address from her website, blog, Social Media profiles or what have you.

5. Engage in a cleanup campaign hitting every local business listing that exists for her that references the forbidden address. Edit the listings to list but hide her home address. Continue to check the ecosystem over the coming months to be sure the bad address doesn't surface again on its own.

6. Be sure you are adhering to Google's guidelines in every respect from here on out.

This is a positive and pro-active approach you can take with the business owner that should eventually lead to better outcomes.

Hi Catherine,

From another thread here, I believe you are located in the UK. Unfortunately, the GetListed tools for both the UK and Canada have not been working in recent times. I confirmed this with David Mihm (the tool's creator) today. He hopes to have them back up in a few weeks, but for now, they are down.

Hi Erik, Smart question, and it's one that I've actually discussed in the past with other Local SEOs. My belief is that Google has no problem understanding that Ave and Avenue are the same thing, so this is not the kind of consistency you really need to worry about as I do not feel it has any effect on rankings. What does have a big effect is inconsistencies like differences in business name (i.e. Joe's Plumbing vs. Joe's Plumbing & Heating) and failure to correctly list elements like suite addresses every time. Hope this helps! Miriam

Hi Brian,

There is so much confusion surrounding this very common topic because Google has repeatedly changed their stance. The thread Amber has pointed to on Linda's forum quotes the most current Google policy on this. Linda's thread doesn't link to the source of this, so I will here: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/S6APN5ijnOQ

And here is the complete language of what Google staffer, Jade, wrote:

Verified business owner of a page, and is your business moving locations? Here's what you do.__Edit your address in Google Places for Business or in the Google+ page admin area, whichever you are using to manage the page. This will either make a new page or edit the address on the existing page. It may take a week or two after editing your address before you see an update. At this point, you may need to go through a verification process again. Don't worry -- this is normal.__If you see a page that's still got the old address, click on Report a problem and mark that location as closed. Provide the link to the new address or information about the new location if possible. You can find more instructions on closing a location here: http://goo.gl/YZIjq*Now, remember, following the above steps must be followed up by a citation cleanup campaign. You need to find all web-based references to your old address and edit them so that they reflect the new address. This is very important.

Hey Pete,

It's a great question, and I'd love it if someone with a case study would chime in here, but I've never seen one done on this topic (would make a great blog post if you had proof one way or the other, huh?).

In my experience, I've not seen shared photos between listings have any noticeable negative impact on listings, nor can I see that having unique images has had a positive impact, but as I've said, I've never done a side-by-side study of this or seen one published.

The only reason I can imagine for fearing a negative impact of this would be increasing a risk of merging between multi-location business listings, but I strongly doubt Google uses image file names as a differential factor. So, I really wouldn't be concerned about this.

I'll also add ... I've been a participant in Local Search Ranking Factors since year 1 and I've never seen this cited as a strongly-felt negative or positive ranking factor.

So, bottom line, my gut feeling is that if this comes into play in any way, it is so minor that no one has documented it.

Looking at this from a non-ranking perspective, however, we can make the argument that unique photos might positively affect conversions. Let's say your client is a realtor. If he puts the same 5 generic images of houses across every single Google+ Local listing his company has, the impact might be less local feeling for human visitors than if, say, his San Francisco branch shows some of those famous city Victorians while his Palm Springs page shows some classic Mission-style houses. Some industries may have stronger visual queues than others - so there is likely some grey area here. What I would say, in conclusion, is that I would consider Google+ Local photos from a usability/conversion perspective more carefully than I would from an SEO perspective.

I know I've seen discussions on fora of how images on Google+ Local pages may influence conversions, but I'm not finding any easy-to-hand. This might be worth your researching further. I hope you'll get more feedback from our community, too:)

Hi Christina,

If you can assemble enough before-and-after data, that might make a very nice submission to YouMoz! I would be very interested to read your results.

Miriam

Hi SEOKeith,

In the US, I've never had a problem with GetListed.org being down. What I really like it for is a quick glance. For example, if a local business owner phones me for the first time, I can punch in their URL and zip code and, right there while I'm on the phone, I can get a very quick idea of whether they've done any Local SEM or not. I find that very helpful.

Interesting suggestion from SEOSHARK regarding citations, but, basically, Google does the choosing when it comes to what they display about your business. Is the title you don't like actually incorrect (such as incorrectly listing your business name)? If so, you could try reporting this as a problem to the Google and Your Business forum, but if there isn't actually anything incorrect in it, you're pretty much stuck with what Google considers to be most relevant. Sorry not to have a happy solution on this one.

Hi Greg,

In order to qualify for inclusion in the local results, your client must:

1. Have a physical street address in the target city (not a P.O. box, virtual office or shared address)

2. Have a local area code phone number matching the target city (not a toll free number, call tracking number or shared number)

3. Have face-to-face transactions with customers, either at the place of business or at the customers' homes or businesses.

If your client can answer yes to all 3 of these criteria, then you can create a strategy including some or all of the following components:

1. A high quality website with excellent content optimized for both his services and his geo terms. Optimize title tags, meta description tags, header tags, alt tags, internal links and copy so that they reflect both what he does and where he does it. Build a unique page on the website for each of his distinct services (water heater repair, sewer repair, septic service, etc.). If the business model is go-to-client (like a plumber), build a city landing page for each of the main cities he serves (see: http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403). Be sure that every page you publish is unique. No cutting and pasting from one page to the next.

2. Put the business' complete NAP (name, address, phone number) in the footer of the website and on the Contact page, preferably encoded in Schema.

3. Consider having an onsite blog to continue publishing local-focused content over time.

4. Create a Google Places for Business Page, adhering strictly to the Google Places Quality Guidelines (see: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528)

5. Begin building citations on a variety of indexes and directories to strengthen and diversify the number of places in which your client is being profiled. Be sure NAP is totally consistent everywhere it is published.

6. Work to earn reviews from happy customers.

7. Consider linkbuilding and social media efforts that will build authority.

This is just a brief summary. Every step has its nuances and there is more you can do, but this should get the client started with building a Local presence on the web.

Hi Mirabile,

I actually have a specific recommendation for this tough scenario. You might try getting in touch with Andrew Shotland over at LocalSEOGuide.com. I know he has dealt with a similar issue in which a wrong location was showing up in sitelinks, so he might be able to give you some pointers for dealing with your scenario. Could be a case of weak or bad data causing this, and deserves further investigation in an environment in which you'd be comfortable disclosing the search in question. Things like this can be really hard to pinpoint without knowing the actual search. Hope this helps!

Hi Chris,

I think I may need a bit more information to provide a helpful answer. Please, provide answers to these three questions:

1. Do you mean you are developing a general local business directory (like Yellow Pages, CitySearch, Best of the Web) or some other type of directory?

2. Where do you want to drive inbound traffic to? The directory or something else?

3. Please define what you mean, exactly, by 'hyperlocal searches'?

The more information you can provide, the better answer you will receive from the community. Looking forward to your further details.

Hi Catherine,

I understand. Unfortunately, by having the 2 pages with different business names pointing to the same website, you are pretty much guaranteed to run into problems. Your client is ranking well right now, but with that situation going on, this could change at any time.

When a business decides to change its name, consequences are very real on the Internet, in ways that they would never be in the offline world. I have a really good resource for you to read.

Andrew Shotland wrote a guide for this situation about a month ago: http://searchengineland.com/the-smb-guide-to-changing-business-names-seo-128939

This article does a good job of outlining the steps that must follow a business name change, but as you will see, every Local SEO kind of cringes in this scenario, because loss of rankings can definitely happen, even if you do take all the right steps.

So essentially, you are faced with a double dilemma with your client. If you leave things as they are right now, trying to maintain the current high rankings, you can almost bet that there will eventually be a day when the rankings will end because you are sending mixed signals to Google about the client's core NAP (name, address, phone). And, if you make the suggested changes now (as the article explains), you may experience some loss of rankings anyway.

The upshot, unfortunately, is that name changes in the Local SEO world are a big pain in the neck. Give the client all the information you can about this so that he/she can make an informed choice about what steps to take, and make sure your contract states clearly that you cannot be held responsible for ranking changes or penalties.

Hope this helps!

Hi John,

Searching for 'artificial grass newcastle' from my location in the US, I actually see your company ranking #1...not that this is of much help to you. I have some questions:

• If your core phrase is 'artificial grass newcastle' is google showing true, pinned local results for this term when you search for it from your location in Newcastle? Or, is everything organic (no pins)?

• If this is not your core term, what is?

• Is there a term related to your business that does bring up pinned local results? If so, what is it?

I'm asking these questions because it's important to determine whether you need to pursue a local SEO strategy or a traditional organic one in order to gain high rankings. Can you provide further details, possibly screenshots of what you are experiencing? I'll check back.

Hi Again and Happy Monday,

Since the Venice update about a year ago, yes, it has become much less common for any business to have both an organic and a local listing on the same page. If one manages to get into the local results, their organic ranking is typically subsumed into the blended local listing.

There are some exceptions to this, usually in areas of low competition for which Google has less data, and there have also been experiments done in which Local SEOs have managed to optimize an interior page of the website in such a way that they've picked up double page one rankings (see this: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-seo-ranking/5180-double-ranking-organic-maps.html), but this is not what I'd call a run-of-the-mill scenario.

So what is the answer to the phenomenon you are experiencing? Why does Google consider you more organic than local for those particular keyword variants? I don't believe this can be resolved with the general advice we can give here without investigating the actual business in question. I think you have 2 options:

1. Run the site through the 51 blocks tool, as I've suggested and see if you can discover some areas in which the competitors included in the local pack are outdistancing you.

2. Hire a really good Local SEO and give him/her the keys to the website so that they can try to uncover the nuances specific to your business.

*One thing I will point out, however, is that if you are managing to rank organically above the local packs for these variants, you may want to consider carefully whether you've really got a problem at all. Over the past couple of years, I have read so many comments (like this one: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/business/Tq4DsCCth7s/2Z-MyLEc2mMJ) in different places from business owners who have stated that their transfer from an organic to a local format resulted in a drop in traffic. This is an issue you might want to read up on further while making up your mind about whether something actually needs to be 'fixed'.

Hope this helps!

Hi Sachin,

I believe what you're saying, then, is that the second business is going to be re-branded under the original business' name and website. Unfortunately, there is a chance that rankings will be lost, whether temporarily or permanently. I've never personally conducted a re-brand of this kind, so the best I can do here is link you to some resources on this topic:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/rebrand

http://searchengineland.com/rebranding-seo-important-considerations-184208

http://searchengineland.com/the-smb-guide-to-changing-business-names-seo-128939

http://www.localsearchforum.com/local-search/355-rebranding-name-change-problems-google-local.html

http://imprezziomarketing.com/seo-blog/google-maps/is-permanently-closed-killing-your-ranking-4-case-studies/

I hope these are helpful!

Hi Chris,

Thanks so much for the detailed response. As you know, the local business directory field is pretty saturated and is dominated by major players (think Yahoo, Yelp, etc.). That being said, at least you are focusing on building a niche directory (for accountants) rather than a general one (for all local businesses). This does cut down the competition, but it is still going to be a massive undertaking trying to get Google to rank your directory pages well if they already have older, larger sources to choose from, in addition to their own delivery of local pack results for searches like 'accountant dublin'.

Here are some suggestions for what you can do to begin building a good directory:

1. Allow accountants to create listings with a significant amount of unique content on them. For example, have a large business description field for each listing, and specify that the content the accountant uploads to it be unique. Also, create fields for things like professional associations and certifications and anything else you can think of that an accountant might list about their services, their policies, their business model, their location, etc.

2. Allow for UGC in the form of reviews on each listing.

3. Be sure you are using Schema properly to markup both the listing data and the reviews.

4. Develop a blog on the directory, perhaps with guest posting opportunities for accountants.

5. I understand that accounting may be one of those dreaded so-called 'boring' industries, but you've got to discover a way to come up with interesting content that has the potential to be shared and bring traffic and links. We had a good YouMoz post on this very topic about a year ago. See: http://moz.com/blog/the-guide-to-developing-a-content-strategy-for-boring-industries

6. Designate a staff member to participate in/speak at relevant industry conferences. If there are conferences accountants attend, your designated member needs to be there, helping at the same time as exposing attending accountants to your brand.

7. Discover which social media platforms your listed members utilize and develop a presence there so that you can participate/offer help in some way.

In my opinion, it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of giving of your time to begin to brand your venture as something accountants need to participate in. The more accounting firm listings users build into your index, the larger it can grow and the more valuable a data source it will become to search engines.

Hi Probikeshop, You've gotten some good responses here. I think you might like to watch this Whiteboard Friday from 2011 about fast indexing: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-get-indexed-faster-with-richard-baxter Things haven't changed significantly since that was posted and it has some great tips. Make sure you've done a good job with your on-page SEO and that you've got a really crawlable structure, upload your site to Google Webmaster Tools, create a flurry of Social Media buzz about the launch of your new site, get a few good links as quickly off the bat as you can and then prepare for ongoing efforts. Noting your screen name - Probikeshop - if you've got a local business, it's time to get started with your Local SEM. Your website will get indexed...though possibly not in 24 hours...but it will be indexed quickly if you are making the right efforts to build well and promote actively.

Hi Kim,

So glad you came here to ask this question.

Yes, it has been standard best practice to ascribe unique categories to each practitioner within a practice, however, things got really wacky with Google's new behavior towards businesses like doctors, dentists and lawyers. Let me link to some resources here that I think are must-read for anyone dealing with this type of business:

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-duplicates-doctor-dentist-lawyer.html

Note in the above Google's announcement that they will no longer delete duplicate listings for doctors and the advice to mark them as 'permanently closed'. However, also note, that since Linda Buquet wrote the above post, Google changed the 'permanently closed' message so that it reads, "This Places Has Closed or Relocated". So that's a bit different.

Next, read this other post about Linda Buquet's experiment with managing to get a duplicate doctor listing removed:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-search-general-discussions/861-dr-dupes-google-local-user-edits.html

I recommend you read the initial post and all follow-up posts on the above  thread.

These days, because of the issues with exactly this scenario, there is no way I would recommend that a new multi-partner practice set up a listing for each practitioner. I would simply set up a listing for each location and forget about listing the individual partners. Hope the materials I've linked to will help you understand the latest issues with this complex scenario.

Hi Doug,

I think Localeze will help you remedy some of the NAP consistency issues your client has, but I would recommend that this be backed up with a manual check on your part to discover bad data. In my opinion, no service beats manual action as a way to remedy bad NAP data. It can be quite a big process. Hang in there and good luck!

Hi Christopher!

David Deering over at Whitespark just wrote a really super blog post on this topic. I highly recommend:

http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/50-how-to-make-your-local-business-schema-better

Is it absolutely necessary for every local business to use Schema? No ... honestly not. But in a competitive market where your client wants to be the best, then yes, clearly structured data may be a competitive difference maker. I think Deering's article will help you assess whether the effort will be worth it for your client, if you weigh it against their level of competition and their need to be on top.

*Also, be sure to check out this Moz thread on the subject of recent changes in Google's stated attitude toward schema and testimonials:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-add-customer-testimonials-from-customers-from-each-city-encoded-in-schema-review-markup

I'm so glad my answer was helpful, Chris. Best of luck with your venture!

Hi Probikeshop,

I think you'll find our section on sitemaps in the Beginner's Guide To SEO to be helpful:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/search-engine-tools-and-services

Hi Alex,

So sorry for the acronym.

NAP stands for Name-Address-Phone Number. These are the core factors in your local business data. Everything in local hangs on NAP.  It's a standard Local SEO best practice to put the complete NAP of each location on a Contact Page and, typically, in the website footer sitewide.

To further strengthen the signals your NAP is sending to the bots, you can choose to encode your NAP using Schema. Here is the definition of Schema from Schema.org:

What is Schema.org?

This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.

A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, search engines have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.

Local businesses can use Schema to markup their NAP. Here is a generator to help you with this:

http://schema-creator.org/

*Be sure to choose the 'Organizations' tab from the left menu.

You might also like this:

http://raventools.com/blog/free-schema-creator/#explanation

Hope this helps!

Hi Dan,

In general, you are correct that Google doesn't commonly show a double organic/local ranking on the first page for most companies. There are two main exceptions to this:

1. If the query,locale or both have little competition or Google lacks data about them.

2. The scenario in which a second page on the website is authoritative enough to gain an organic listing, independent of the page that is being linked to from the local result.

Around the Venice update in early 2012, double rankings became almost impossible to find. Slowly, it appears to me that they have become more common in recent times, typically in the above scenarios. There may be other exceptions, as well, but I believe these are the most typical.

Hi Lel!

You've received some very thoughtful answers from the community. I've never actually had a client with this specific business model, but what I do know is that in local search, it's all about address. If you've got 1 physical address, that is going to equal 1 Google+ Local page. Yes, you are quite right about Google's guidelines regarding you having to pick 1 language and then letting them show it to users in other languages. After all, if I'm searching for a hotel in Stockholm, Sweden, I don't have to search for it in Swedish. Google knows what I'm after and shows me hotels in that city, regardless of me being located in the U.S.

Regarding Facebook, this was ringing a bell for me, in regards to your business model:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/17/facebook-global-pages/

I know Twitter offers multi-language targeting, but I not aware of Pinterest's policy on this nor can I find it, unfortunately. I remember an announcement about them supporting Spanish, but cannot find anything about their policies. Anybody else have access to guidelines on this?

I very much agree with what Robert has said about your business model likely requiring the development of a very clear strategy based on the internal resources at your disposal plus the guidelines of the various platforms. Overall, this will probably look something like:

1. A single page where Local is involved

2. Targeting where social is involved, if possible

3. Multi-language website/blog/content outreach

But planning out the details is going to take lots of thought!

Hi Again, Jess,

Do you feel you've received a helpful answer here, or do you have other questions about this? I want to be sure you've been helped!

Great! Glad to hear it.

So glad to be of help, Kim. Thanks for using Q&A!

Hi Sida,

Thank you for the additional details. So, you are saying that despite the fact that you are searching from Bromley (where your head office is) you are being shown the Manchester office for a plain branded search. If this is the case, then yes, Google is for some reason favoring that Manchester location beyond the effects of localization. Normally, Google would be showing you the office closest to you (the Bromley one), so, something is going on here. Traffic could be part of it, but I suspect there may be more to it than this.

Unfortunately, at this time, Google does not offer the ability to set a preferred office location (wouldn't that be nice?). Everything is going to be handled by the algo, so whether it's authority or distance or what have you, Google has decided that your Manchester office is more relevant. This being the case, since you cannot alter the distance aspect, your only path would be to try to improve the authority of the main office. See, above, my original comments about on-page optimization, citations and reviews. If you could gear your work towards making the Bromley office surpass the other 2 locations in these areas, it might work.

I was looking at a similar but not identical issue at the Google and Your Business Forum in which a secondary office was 'outranking' the main office, but in that case, the secondary office wasn't actually staffed and should not have been created in the first place. See (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/main$20location/business/kpVehQBlqqY/G8DgE_pQmysJ) . In that case, a Google MapMaker RER helped the business owner get rid of the secondary listing.

Here's another one that's pretty similar to what you've described. In it, you will see the Mapmaker RER giving you basically the same advice I am about increasing the authority of the main location: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/main$20location/business/Bov09hyd1LM/AuIjdGSy_YYJ

Beyond this, Sida, I would suggest that you consider hiring a top Local SEO in your country to consult one-on-one with you if the issue persists and is causing genuine problems for the company. You need to be able to share the complete details of your unique business and have someone assess your situation to see if there is room for improvement and hope of change. I'm having to speak in generalities because I'm not actually auditing your specific company, but someone you hire will be able to look at the fine details of the whole picture. I do hope what I've pointed out at least gets you thinking along helpful lines.

That's great, Yasir. Glad to hear it!

Good to know, Jess! I'll mark your question as 'answered'. Thanks to everyone on this thread for contributing such helpful answers.

Hi Catherine,

Yes, so long as you've got a unique address and phone number for the 2 distinct locations, you are definitely allowed to create/maintain 2 listings. That's perfectly legitimate. Hope Andrew Shotland's article was helpful.

Miriam

Hi Michael,

I must politely beg to differ with the advice being given by David and Hampig regarding a virtual office. Google is not in favor of these and, in fact, should such an office come under scrutiny, it could cause serious damage to your whole local profile. Because of this, I do not advise purchasing a virtual office, using a P.O. Box or anything along those lines.

You are quite correct that lack of a physical office in Austin will make it next to impossible for you to rank in the local set of results for Austin-based searches or searches containing the word 'Austin'. Google considers a business as being most relevant to its city of location - not to neighboring cities - so in Google's eyes, you are a Bee Cave business, not an Austin business.

I empathize with the frustration of this. Tons of business models (carpet cleaners, chimney sweeps, realtors) serve within a wide radius, and tons of businesses are located just on the borders of big cities like Austin or Dallas, but Google's local product just isn't set up to favor these business models.

This means that your attempts to rank for Austin are going to have to be organic rather than Local. Now, that being said, Michael, I am seeing a couple of areas of concern that I thought I'd point out as I noticed them while taking a look at your business. Here is the Google+ Local Page I found for your business: https://plus.google.com/111099812929349352484/about?hl=en

On it, I see the address being listed as: 13500 Galleria Circle #115 Austin, TX 78738

As you've stated, you're not in Austin, so where did this address come from?

Also, in the business description field, I see this:

The Experts in Austin Real Estate

This needs to be rewritten to avoid possible penalties. Never put geographic terms in your business description.

Further, I see that a bunch of your reviews mention the names of agents at your business. You have little/no control over what others write, but there is some thought that the use of names may be a cause of lost reviews. If they disappear (as thousands/millions of reviews have done lately) you may want to remember this, because it could possibly be the cause. Google is just a nightmare for reviews right now.

One other thing that can be very difficult for multi-partner or multi-agent firms such as realty firms, law firms or medical practices is the allowed use of creating unique Places-based listing for each partner in the firm. Google allows this, but rankings can tank if multiple partners are using the same categories, or, listings can be merged because of similarity in business name, address or phone number. I don't know if this is an issue with your business at this point, but if you were actually located within Austin and having trouble ranking, this would definitely be a point I'd investigate.

So, bottom line, short of getting a legitimate office in Austin, ranking in the local results for things related to that city cannot be seen a very realistic goal for your business. It's not that it never happens, but it's very, very rare. Perhaps the business will be able to relocate there at some point in the future, but until that time, your true local efforts should target and appropriately reflect Bee Cave, while your organic efforts can target Austin. Hope this helps, and good luck. You are in very enormous amounts of company in wishing Google handled things like this differently!

My pleasure, Sida, and good luck!

Hey Kevin,

I don't find that Keyword Planner is terribly helpful with local terms. Now, obviously, if your clients are hotels or other distance-type businesses like that, people are going to be using a ton of geomodifiers because they are located in one city but then looking for lodgings in another, but if the industry is  plumbing, or something like that, likely you'd see less use of city names, in queries, particularly on mobile devices.

Your question has made me go searching around for any recent statistics on use of geomodifiers and what I'm coming up with is pretty old:

http://searchengineland.com/how-users-search-for-local-businesses-5-tips-to-optimize-local-listings-97612

marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-seo-geo-modifiers.html

http://www.ngsmarketing.com/the-two-types-of-local-search-and-how-local-seo-should-reflect-them/

If anyone in the community has done or knows of a more recent study, please do link to it.

A very good indication that users use geomodifiers in looking up all kinds of local businesses can be seen in the 'related search' results at the bottom of Google's SERPs. For example, If I just look up 'plumbers', the related search results are returning me 8 suggested terms 3 of which contain city names. So, that would be something to look into for your client

Sorry not to be able to turn up any really recent data on this. It would certainly be good if someone would do a new study!

Hi KS!

I'm responding on your other thread. Thanks for asking!

Hi Catherine,

No worries at all. I'm here to help you. When the business changed its name to SpaByCar, then that was when the re-branding happened, so, I would consider Andrew's post applicable.

Once you change the the title of a Place Page, yes, it is typical to expect both re-verification of the listing and possible loss of rankings. Remember, all citations, reviews and other references to the old business name 'Mobile Nail Technician' will now be lost. Google will not associate this data with a brand new business name, so, yes, ranking loss is very probable.

Yet more reasons why a name change is shied away from by so many Local SEOs. Too bad the client couldn't just keep her name and offer a new service called SpaByCar...rather than changing her brand, but re-branding does happen in the real business world every day. It's just on the web where it is so problematic because of the way the Internet works.

Hello!

Google+ Local is Google's new interface for their local index and is their attempt to increase the social aspects of Local. However, Google Places still exists in that it is the dashboard via which the listings are still being controlled by many business owners. So both things still exist.

If you'd like to read more from the period of time when Google+ Local was first rolled out, here's a good post that also links to a ton of other announcement-style posts from that time:

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

You should not create a second listing for your second website. If you have 1 business, you are entitled to just one listing.

See:

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

I recommend that you study those guidelines and be sure you are complying with them to the letter. This rule specifically applies to your situation:

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.

Regarding your EMD sites, I just want to check in to be sure that you are aware of the recent, large penalties affecting those types of websites. If not, here's some good reading on this topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-emd-algo-update-early-data

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-exact-match-domain-playbook-a-guide-and-best-practices-for-emds

Hope these resources will be just what you need!

Hi Sida,

Just to be sure, are you saying that your company has 3 different public-facing offices to which customers come to do business? Yes? And that now you are seeing the office that isn't your official headquarters showing up with your brand name search, but are seeing one of the other 2 offices?

When performing your search, are you searching on a device based in the same city as your home office, or are you located nearer to one of the other 2 offices?

How do the + Local pages of the 3 offices compare in terms of reviews? Could one of the secondary offices have more reviews that the home office, perhaps?

How about citation building? Could you have accidentally built more citations for one of the locations other than the home office location?

How about on the website? How are you listing the 3 offices? Is there anything to indicate that 1 of the 3 locations is more important or official than the other 2, or have they all been given equal treatment?

Please, provide as much detail as you can.

Unfortunately, Google has had a very spotty record of policing their local-organic results since day one. I totally get how frustrating this is. The only thing a legitimate business owner can do in a scenario like this is work hard to be SO much better than the spammy stuff, that they eventually surpass it. If local business listings are spammy, they can be reported to Google, of course

Hi Rachel,

I know it can be tough, and scenarios like yours have grey areas.

Here is the straight and narrow on this:

• You build GMB listings for your two offices, but not for the truck drivers houses.

• Unless people are actually walking into those offices off the street during stated business hours, yours is a service area business and should be checking the boxes for this, rather than for serving customer at the physical location.

• You can set a service radius for each of the 2 locations, yes, but I advise going easy with this and not setting too large of one.

• You develop a landing page on your website for each of the cities you serve and, hopefully, earn some links to these pages as well as linking to them in a visible way internally

• You build all your other citations for the 2 locations, but not for the truck driver's houses.

• Be sure each physical office has its own unique local phone number so that they don't get mixed up

• Be sure to earn reviews for both locations

With the above path, you should be free of worry that you are violating any guidelines and can simply focus on building up your branding to be all it can be.

Now, here's the grey area and not so straight and narrow:

You could ostensibly argue that each of your truckers is, in fact, working from an office in his house and answering the phone "ABC Trucking" each time it rings. I can see that, and, I can also see the horse sense in wanting customers to know that a truck driver is right near them, if the service is one in which time is of the essence.

The problem is, what sometimes makes good horse sense doesn't always make good Google sense. We know for a fact that Google has the capability not only of looking at streetview-level images of any address, but that they also read signage on buildings. This is where the stress of worry may come into going with anything other than the straight and narrow.

Imagine you are Google. You receive a report from XYZ Trucking that ABC Plumbing is outranking them in 10 different cities, when all they really have there is a house. "It's not a real office!" XYZ plumbing complains. At this point, Google has the capability of checking up on this using their own tools, and if what they decide is that ABC's business with just 2 real offices is trying to make themselves look like they have 12 offices, it's unlikely that you are going to even have a chance to argue the horse-sense point of view. Rather, you could wake up one morning to find those 10 listings gone and the 2 for your legitimate offices falling in rankings. It's not an experience I'd wish on anybody!

Some business owners take risks. Google isn't the best at policing their own data sometimes, and people can get away with things for years, but in this case, you are the SEO on the job, and the stability of your client's visibility tops any hopes of temporary gains.

If this were my client, I'd explain all of the above to him and then explain how we are going with the straight-and-narrow, for the long-term health of his business and reputation.

Long answer - whew - but I find it helps to tell myself a story when weighting possible outcomes. Finally, regarding your question about putting the truckers' home addresses on the website, I'm not seeing a good reason for this as I'm guessing they don't want the public showing up at their homes, and there is a chance that the presence of all this non-physical-location NAP could get mixed up with the NAP for the 2 physical offices you'll be doing your best to build up.

Hope this helps, and I think you've asked some very important questions, here!

Buonjourno to you, David,

Local rankings take a ton of different factors into account - not only your own factors, but the factors of all of your competitors' as well. A strong local campaign typically involves:

1. Developing an awesome, locally-optimized website

2. Inclusion in the major local business indexes

3. Additional citation building

4. Review acquisition, over time

5. In competitive arenas, link building

That's just a quick rundown, but you have to take into account things like proximity to the centroid (how close are you to the center of business), web authority, and etc. Both organic and purely local factors all work together.

And, there is also the necessity of evaluating possible problems, such as duplicate or merged listings splitting your ranking power, lack of consistency in citations, penalties for over-optimization, Google bugs and etc.

All of these things need to be taken into account, so, as you can imagine, there isn't a simple answer to your question without a couple of hours of deep digging to discover your weaknesses and potential opportunities for improvement.

I recommend that you read:

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

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/19/google-pages-for-local-known-bugs-quirks-after-the-g-local-merge/

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

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/18/will-citations-stop-being-effective-for-local-optimization-in-the-future/

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

That's a lot to read, but a good place to start in your investigation of your possible problems and areas of potential improvement.  Hope this helps!

Hi Russel,

If you were my client, I would advise you to stick with your one website and then work on building out awesome content for your surrounding cities. Why would I advise this:

1. Everything you build on your one website serves to strengthen your overall presence. Rather than dividing things up onto a bunch of different domains, you're building a big, powerful website.

2. I seldom find it warranted for a single business to have more than one website. For example, a San Francisco-based plumber is offering identical services, whether within San Francisco, or traveling to serve clients in San Jose, Oakland and Mill Valley. I'm not convinced of the genuine need for him to have millvalleyplumbing.com, sanjoseplumbing.com, etc. To me, it looks like an obvious attempted grab for rankings rather than a client-focused decision.

3. Tied into that is the fact that few plumbers have the time to develop enough truly unique and helpful content to flesh out multiple websites. This puts the client in danger of suffering EMD or duplicate content penalties for publishing a bunch of thin content (or worse, duplicate content) websites. From my experience working with local business owners, I've found that an attainable goal is creating a really strong, unique page for each of their service cities...not creating whole websites for each of their service cities. There could, of course, be exceptions to this, but this is what I've found to be the case most of the time.

4. It's so much easier for the client (and you) to manage a single website than a bunch of different mini sites.

So, those are some reasons I'd advise going with a single website and creating city landing pages on that site for the client's service cities. Do not create duplicate pages. Create fantastic, unique pages. This is a must. Hope these make sense. And yes, write good URLs, for the city landing pages when you create them.

Hi Noah!

Without looking at your actual data, I have to generalize here. Here are some things to consider:

1. Google is pulling the wrong address info from elsewhere on the web. This is a highly common scenario. NAP (name, address, phone number) inconsistencies can cause precisely the problem you are describing. You need to do a citation audit to see if you can find the client's name associated with the wrong location anywhere on the web and clean up any problems you find.

2. The client has a duplicate Google Places/+ Local listing that is associating them with this address. For more on this, read http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-duplicates-merges/8307-easiest-way-find-out-if-multiple-listings.html

My advice is to follow through on these first two steps. Then, if you cannot find any of the above issues, your next step would be to

1. Use the 'report a problem' link on your Google+ Local listing to report the issue. Give it a couple of weeks to see if you get anywhere.

2. Then, if no change has appeared, use the troubleshooter at https://support.google.com/places/troubleshooter/1386120?hl=en Select the radio button regarding wrong address and then the radio button that says you've already tried using 'report a problem' and this should lead you to the option to have a phone call with Google's phone support. They are getting very good at quick resolution of many issues. *BTW, if you have the new Google Places for Business Dashboard instead of the old one, you will need to use a new troubleshooter. I've only read about this, but can link you to a post about it if you need it. Please, let me know.

I hope this list of steps, though sort of complicated, will walk you through a process towards resolution.

Hi William,

Good question! Let me give a definition of Local SEO that I think may be helpful.

Local SEO is good SEO + geography.

What does this mean? If you're familiar with SEO best practices, nearly all are directly applicable to Local. You'll need:

• An optimized, crawlable, high quality website

• A presence on other websites, namely via the building of citations on local business directory-type sites, but also via other types of websites such as industry publications, local blogs, etc.

• In competitive niches, links and social

• A plan for ongoing content development.

All of this is, indeed, just good design, usability, SEO and SEM, but the main difference is that geography is at the heart of what you're doing in each of the above practices. You're not trying to rank for the world, for the US, for a whole state; you are trying to rank for a specific city or a number of specific cities, and so everything you do must reflect this.

SEO is an excellent lead-in to learning Local SEO, because so many of the best practices you've already learned will be directly applicable. Does this help answer your question? If not, please let me know. I helped create the Moz Local Learning Center and if you've found something about it to be unclear, I'd be happy to chat further!

Hi Dennis,

Google's policy is that you are allowed to claim 1 listing for the business and one for each partner within it. It sounds to me as if you haven't created a Place Page for medical center itself (linking to the homepage). You are allowed to do this.

Regarding Yelp - I'm not 100% sure, but I do believe you can link to a page other than the homepage. However, I'm not sure of the value of doing this at this point. It may be smarter to just go with the homepage and a general overview listing of the medical center.

Good luck!

Hi Christopher,

Yes, I'd say that would end up looking pretty spammy if they've got a list like this for every state in the South East on their contact page. For the same reason that an e-commerce website wouldn't list all 1000 items they carry on a single page, this is not something I'd recommend.

What's the business model? Virtual or Local? If local, a more natural approach to this would be to have unique pages for each of their physical offices. I very much doubt they have an office in every one of those cities in South Carolina, right? But, perhaps they have 10 offices throughout the South East and could have a unique page for each of them?

Maybe you could share a few more details about the type of business this is?