Hi DarrenX,

You've gotten some very good feedback here. In sum:

1. Let your customers review you where they want to. A diverse review profile is good insurance against massive review loss (which happens in big waves on Google). If you lose some reviews at one site, at least you still have some at other sites.

2. When you have a chance to gently steer a customer toward a review site, Google+ Local is always going to be a top choice, because they dominate all local business verticals. Yelp is the obvious runner-up, given how much prominence Google currently gives their pages, but it is against Yelp's policies to ever ask for reviews, so you have to be careful there. Then, depending on your industry and geography, as members have said, you will find that certain directories happen to attract more reviews than others. See where your competitors are prominent and keep those directories in-mind.

The above is best practice advice for local businesses. However, you indicate that your current client is virtual rather than local, and develops software. I am not experienced with your industry, but would suspect that product review and technical publications/websites would be your target review sources. Maybe things like: http://reviews.cnet.com/?

I think the key here for you is to figure out where your customers are. Where do people go to find software reviews? That's where you need to be prominent.

Hi Silkstream,

Thank you so much for clarifying this! I understand now.

If I were starting with a client like this, from scratch, this would be the approach I would take:

1. View content development as two types of pages. One set would be the landing pages for each physical location, optimized for each city, with unique content. The other set would be service pages, optimized for the services, but not for a particular city.

2. Create a Google+ Local page for each of the physical locations, linked to its respective landing page on the website. So, let's say you now have 25 city pages and 46 service pages. That's a fairly tall order, but certainly do-able.

3. Build structured citations for each location on third party local business directories. Given the number of locations, this would be an enormous jobs.

4. Build an onsite blog and designate company bloggers, ideally one in each physical office. The job of these bloggers would be something like each of them creating one blog post per month about a project that was accomplished in their city. In this way, the company could begin developing content under their own steam that would meet the need of showcasing a given service with a given city.  Over time, this body of content would grow the pool of queries for which they have answers for.

5. Create a social outreach strategy, likely designating brand representatives within the company who could be active on various platforms.

6. Likely need to develop a link earning strategy tied in with steps 4 and 5.

7. Consider video marketing. A good video or two for each physical location could work wonders.

I'm painting in broad strokes here, but this is likely what the overall strategy would look like. You've come into the scenario midway and don't have the luxury of starting from scratch. You are absolutely right to be cleaning up duplicate content and taking other measures to reduce the spaminess and improve the usefulness of the site. Once you've got your cleanup complete, I think the steps I've outlined would be the direction to go in. Hope this helps.

Hi CWseo,

Yes, the 'in' search has always done that. Odd, isn't it? I've never understood why Google does that in that way, but it's been like that since 2010.