Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Google's Jade Wang has offered some important clarification on the scenario of set-and-forget Google My Business dashboards - Google could determine that they are inactive and un-verify the listings they contain. She writes,

"In some cases, we may contact Google My Business users via email to confirm that they are still actively managing a business page. If a user is unresponsive to our attempts to contact him or her and has not logged into Google My Business for a significant length of time, then we may unverify pages in the account. We're doing this in order to continue to provide users with the best experience when they’re looking for local businesses like yours. If you find that a page in your account has been incorrectly unverified, please contact support to get assistance restoring verification. It's a good idea to keep an eye on the inbox associated with your Google My Business (Locations) account. It's also a good idea to regularly log into Google My Business (Locations) to confirm that your business information is current and accurate."

Mike Blumenthal initially posted that it was necessary to perform a null edit (a tactic in which you view the edit screen of your Google+ Local listing and hit 'save' without making any changes), but Mike has since updated his post to clarify that a null edit isn't actually necessary. According to what Mike learned, you can simply log into the dashboard once every few months, or if you have to make real edits or you post on your page, that should provide an adequate signal to Google that the dashboard is still being actively managed.

In the past, an agency with a limited contract with a local business could create the company's Google+ Local page and step away from it. Of course, it's the ideal that your clients are actively posting to their Google My Business page, if it's the right social strategy for them, but many clients don't do this. And so, they'll likely be getting an email from Google one of these days asking if they are still active. If that's the case, you may be hearing from past clients asking if the email is real and what they should do. Fortunately, they should be able to make the the quick visit to the dashboard without help. But for agencies with large numbers of long-term clients, this business of keeping track of how often you've logged into the clients' dashboards could be a bit of a hassle. Just one more task to add to the to-do list.

Google has been going through some growing pains recently. With the lock-down of the editing function on Mapmaker and the further removal of Google+ links from more places, many Local SEOs and local business owners are wondering where Google is headed in the local space. To my mind, the fact that they are trying to police active vs. neglected listings is a bit of a sign the Google remains serious about delivering Local quality. And for all of us ... that's a good thing!

This week, I came across an article citing a fascinating statistic from The Harris Poll which surveyed consumers and found that the #1 reason they shop digitally for groceries is when they can’t purchase an item from their routine shopping sources. In other words, if the supermarket they shop at doesn’t carry Seventh Generation Laundry Soap (or some other product), then they’ll turn to a digital provider for fulfillment.

This survey focused specifically on grocery items, but what it sparked in my brain was the fact that ANY local store that doesn’t have in place an active campaign to discover unmet consumer desires is likely going to see an increasing loss of sales as shoppers turn to online competitors. I’m going to jot down a few ideas for how better communication could lessen these types of losses, and I would really love it if our community could add to the list of suggestions:

1. Have in-store signage that states, “Don’t see a favorite product of yours? Ask us to carry it!"

2. Have SMS/text messaging that requests this same info from mobile users.

3. Train staff to ask a clear, direct question like, “Is there anything you wish we carried here?” and have a process for aggregating that data to make new inventory buys.

4. Be sure the company website is also asking for this feedback and making it clear that the store will gladly order items not already in-stock.

5. Use social outreach to gather ideas from customers about favorite products that are missing from your inventory.

Those are just some ideas off the top of my head. Now, I’m a Local SEO, not a retailer, so some of you will be better equipped to answer this question than I:

How would you gauge whether a product is actually popular enough to keep permanently in-stock, rather than just being a one-time thing you’d special order for a customer with unusual tastes?

I do wonder about how that plays into this scenario, and how a retailer should invest in new products not knowing whether just 1 customer will buy them or they will be a major hit with lots of customers.

One final thought on this: a pain point I’ve noticed in the online/offline equation is time. I’ve had a store offer to special order an item for me, but if it’s something I need right away, I’ll look for a different source locally, or, if there isn’t one, may as well just order it online myself. So this makes me think:

• If you have access to extra fast shipping (faster than the average consumer could get a product shipped to his home) this would be a point to emphasize. If you can get a product overnight or maybe in 2 days without the consumer having to spring for a big shipping charge, this could influence his decision

• Google says that 30% of consumers state they would buy from a local store, rather than online, if they knew a product was available. So, this would indicate to me that making it very clear you’ve got the products a customer wants is vital.

I recently took a 50 mile trip to purchase a high quality picnic basket from a retailer, because I needed it quickly. I couldn’t wait the 3-5 business days the manufacturer said it would take if I ordered online. Point being, if a local retailer has geographic convenience and fast service on their side, they’ve got an advantage.

Please, add your thoughts and tips for strategies that could protect local retailers from losing customers to digital competitors. I’m really looking forward to reading any comments!

Hello There!

Good questions you've asked here. My standard advice for multi-location business models is that you have:

1. A page for every location

2. A page for every service or product you offer

3. Links from #1 to #2

What you're describing here, of creating a whole set of city-optimized versions of each service you offer even though the service is identical across all locations, is an option I don't particularly advocate. You could go this route, but here are some problems I see with this approach:

1. I have 10 services and my business expands to 100 locations. What a mess it would be to have to create unique content for 1,000 city-optimized service pages that are all actually saying the same thing. It's just not going to be sustainable for most businesses to do this.

2. I can't really say to myself that I'm creating these page for people. I'd feel I was doing it all for search engines, and (like Google) I don't really feel comfortable with that approach to marketing. My customer can be served just fine if my landing page for city 1 links to my page for service 1. If the service is the same for all customers at all locations, the only reason I'd create thousands of iterations of combinations of service+city would be for search engines.

So, rather than take this approach, I'd invest the time/money in something else. I'd go with a page for every city and a page for every service and put my budget towards content development and link building for these pages. I'd focus on building the overall authority of my brand in relationship to my topics, because I feel this would result in better ROI than creating a sort of octopus of near-duplicate pages solely in hopes of rankings.

Hope these thoughts are helpful in creating strategy!

Hey There, all my fellow Local SEOs!

Yesterday morning, I was searching for a car wash and was really puzzled to see my search return snack pack-style results, given that I wasn't looking for a restaurant, hotel or an entertainment venue. Sure enough, what I had run into was the rollout of Google's latest local SERPs, which for the sake of clarity, let's call the Local Stack. This is happening in multiple countries and across thousands of keywords and your local clients (or your local business) are likely to be affected by it, so I thought I'd post a heads-up here.

Good Reading:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/08/06/7-pack-becoming-3-pack-with-mobile-like-snak-pack-rollout/

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/08/07/thoughts-about-the-new-local-stack-display/comment-page-1/#comment-859275

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/35481-goodbye-7-packs-only-3-packs-no-phone-address-all-local-results.html

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/35515-new-local-3-stack-local-pro-opinions-roundup-change-rocked-our-world.html

That last one has a bunch more great links in it.

In June, I wrote a post here on Moz itemizing my concerns about the Snack Pack and its impacts on the hospitality/entertainment industries. Now, these same concerns are coming to me local-search-wide, with the rollout of the Local Stack. My early days key points from looking at the new Local Stack:

• No phone numbers without clicking through to Local Finder, which I consider to be really poor usability, given the invention of the cell phone and the way we use it call businesses.

• No links to the Google+ Local page, meaning that consultants like ourselves may have a really hard time explaining the value of creating a Google listing when so few SERPs will now actually lead to that listing.

• 3 chances to rank when your city has dozens or even hundreds or businesses in a single industry seems next-to-impossible. It's not a good reflection of the diversity of the business scene in the real world. There aren't 3 Italian restaurants in San Francisco or 3 lawyers in Boston. There are scores of them. Google's Local Stack is a poor reflection of the real world, in my view, and makes every city look like a one horse town.

• On the other hand, the baldness of the Local Stack is making the 'more' link at the bottom of it really jump out at me, and if you click through, up to 20 businesses will show with the Local Finder. So, I'm a bit torn on this. Are the 4 businesses that just fell out of prominence with the removal of the 7 pack worse off or are 13 businesses now jumping for joy because they are in a sort of pack today that they weren't in 2 days ago? I guess this depends on how willing consumers are to click that 'more' link.

• Given the meagerness of the Local Stack, organic is likely a great deal more important now for every local business, but I'm concerned by SERPs I'm looking at which are mainly taken up by directories rather than any actual local business websites.

So, those are some first thoughts from me and I would totally love to hear yours on this thread as you are trying to assess how you see this impacting your clients or your business. It's definitely a new day in Local!

Hi Patrick,

Darren Shaw's company, Whitespark, is located in Canada and is widely respected for their citation building program. You might want to check them out.

There is nothing quite so alarming as seeing your business suddenly vanish from the Google local packs/local finder. We got first wind of this when Moz community member CalicoKitty2000 posted that their fishing charter business in Florida had abruptly stopped showing after enjoying historical high local rankings for a very long time. Their company is Sea Leveler Sport Fishing Charters. Their organic rankings were still a-okay, and as I was digging around trying to rule out common problems like guideline violations, malware, penalties, I was lucky enough to come across a totally separate discussion of the same startling phenomenon at Linda Buquet's Local Search Forum.

To observe this phenomenon for yourself, look up 'fishing charters cape canaveral'. In the local pack, click the 'more places' link to get to the local finder. Observe what is in the local finder view, including the fact that only one business is located at 505 Glen Cheek Dr. Then, zoom in on the map, and you will see CalicoKitty2000's company, Sea Leveler Sport Fishing Charters, magically reappear in the results. You will ALSO notice that something like 8 other businesses, in addition to Sea Leveler, located at 505 Glen Cheek Dr., are also suddenly present in the local finder at that zoomed-in view.

What appears to be happening here is that Google has made a change in which they will only show a single business at a given address within the same category. This is a major, major change that poses a very obvious problem for businesses like legal firms and medical practitioners who share the same building and category. Coworking spaces hosting a variety of same-specialty tech startups also come to mind.

Joy Hawkins (one of the smartest Local SEOs I know), posits this in addition to the shared building/shared category factors influencing this change:

"I believe Google is A/B testing at the moment which explains the crazy fluctuation we're still seeing daily on trackers like Algoroo"

Joy says she's planning to write an article about this soon, so be on the lookout for that if this has affected your business.

In the meantime, I have two thoughts:

1. This filter is so unfriendly to so many businesses, I would not be surprised to see it go away. However, it never hurts to create buzz/raise awareness. If you've been affected, you might want to post your example in Google's forum with a plea to Google to treat you more fairly. I would argue that it is NOT creating a good user experience for people seeking a doctor, a chiropractor or a fishing charter in a specific neighborhood to be shown only partial, single results. I know I'd rather know that there are 7-8 choices of fishing charters conveniently located in a building on a marina. After all, if one charter is all booked up for the day, I'd like to know that other companies are there to serve me, wouldn't you? I'd say this apparent filter makes results less relevant than more relevant. I find it particularly weird that our example business, Sea Leveler, is being filtered out given how far ahead of most competitors they are in terms of review count. Wouldn't you want to see the most-reviewed business first?

2. Hopefully, this filter is just a test, but for the sake of damage control in the meantime, this might be a good time to invest in some Adwords to replace your missing rankings (hey, Google, I hope this isn't your diabolical idea behind the change, a-hem!).

If you've been affected, please, study your SERPs and share with our community any clues you are seeing. We can all help one another survive Google's curve balls better when we share. I would love to hear of anything you are observing about this, and am particularly interested to know if you are seeing a rotation of businesses ranking at different times of day. For example, if Businesses A, B and C are all at 123 Main Street, is only business A ranking all the time at the non-zoomed level, or at some point in a given day, are B or C being given preferential treatment?

Please, share your findings!

Hi Nathan,

If I'm understanding this right, your scenario is like a General Appliance Repair company that repairs all appliances, but has now separately branded just Washing Machine Repair as its own business. Both brands are actually just one company, operating from the same address. Is that right?

If it us, unfortunately, no, the business should not be trying to run two Google My Business listings. The General Appliance Repair company is forbidden by Google's guidelines from creating listings for each service it offers (as in 1 for washing machine repair, 1 for stove repair, 1 for dryer repair, 1 for water heater repair) regardless of the number of websites/brands it creates for these service categories. The guidelines read:

Do not create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts.

Likely outcomes should this business try to run 2 GMB listings as though it were 2 separate companies could include:

• Competitors or Local SEOs reporting the practice to Google or Google noticing it on their own

• Google taking down 1 of the 2 listings, and possible penalties

• Even if Google does not catch this now or even for years, Possum may simply cause the second listing to be hidden due to shared location/categories

So, the outlook isn't great for this scenario (please let me know if I've misunderstood details of the scenario).

This brings up the question - how can a business branch out in a Google guideline-compliant way? With these 4 things:

1. Don't build a separate brand of the same company - build a legally distinct second company, registered with government agencies. In other words: General Appliance Repair is one legally registered business and Washing Machines R Us is a second legally registered business.

2. Operate at a separate location

3. Have a separate phone number for each business

4. Have a separate website for each business, with no duplicate content and avoid cross-linking/cross-promotion

This approach is risk-free and completely guideline-compliant.

Hope this helps.

Hi Adam,

Good question. 3 tips:

1. Document the client's current and former NAP (name, address, phone) including any branding or phone numbers and any location they may have used in the past decade or so. And, if the client is a multi-practitioner model (like a legal firm, realty firm, dental office), document the names of all of the practitioners for whom listings may have been created.

2. Now, enter these name/zip combos for each entity into the free Moz Check Listing tool for a very fast check. By clicking the Duplicates tab in the results, you'll see all of the duplicates we were able to find on the major platforms based on the information you entered. If you are Moz Local customer, we can help you automate closure of the duplicates across our partner network (saves a ton of time and worry!).

3. You may wish to supplement this with a manual search for Google My Business duplicates. Here's an excerpt we published from Joy Hawkins eBook that covers duplicate listing management in depth: https://moz.com/blog/duplicate-gmb-listings. And, here is Joy's own blog post about managing duplicates: http://www.sterlingsky.ca/the-proper-way-to-deal-with-duplicates-in-google-my-business/

These three elements should get you going. Hope it helps!

Hey Marketing CH and Kevin,

Interesting! First I have heard of Google asking what is across the street/down the block from a business. Sounds rather aggressive. Might be worth posting in the Google My Business forum to see if you can get verification from Google that they are, indeed, asking for this specific type of info.

That's a good guess, EGOL. Google definitely does call, and there have been instances in the past where failure to answer the phone with the exact name on the listing have resulted in being "caught" for spam, and many other scenarios I've seen. I like your intuition here about why Google might be asking what is down the street. I think they should also add, "And how's the weather outside your building today, hmm?"

@btreloar Oh, my goodness! Thank you for catching this. It's a typo on my part. Should either read:

Prominence, relevance and distance (distance being Google's term)

or

Prominence, relevance and proximity (proximity being an industry term)

I will get this typo to the editor; it got past us both, and we'll get it fixed. Thank you for catching it!

Hi Ben,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your good question. So, first step is to be sure your company actually qualifies for local inclusion before you take a step in this direction. Can you say yes to each of the following points?

• The company has a physical address that is not shared with any other business. This cannot be a P.O. Box or virtual office, but must be a real, physical address at which mail can be received.

• The company has a local area code phone number. Not a toll free number. Not a call tracking number.

• The company has face-to-face transactions with its clients, either at the place of business (restaurant, dental office, travel agency) or transacts business at the client's location (carpet cleaning company, landscaper, chimney sweep). Business is not conducted virtually only.

If you can say yes to those factors, then your business qualifies for local inclusion. As far as pitfalls to this, you need to be aware of these:

• As you've stated, people can review the business, but you are correct - they can talk about your company whether you participate in Local or not.

• Google's Local entity is not for the faint of heart. Between constant changes in presentation of data, to numerous ongoing bugs, to competitive sabotage, there is a lot going on in Local that is a pain in the neck to deal with. You've got to stay on top of your listings once you begin. Things change frequently and you need to follow Local SEO news and monitor your listings.

• Before you start creating listings anywhere, but especially in the Google arena, be certain they don't already exist. If they already exist, claim the existent listings rather than creating new ones in order to avoid duplication.

On the positive side, the potentials for increased visibility are awesome and Local is one of the most exciting and lively areas in SEO. If you are just getting into this, I recommend that you read David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors 2012 at http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml. This is the industry's premiere annual report. I also recommend that you become a weekly reader of Mike Blumenthal's blog which most of us consider to be the industry's best: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml. Finally, I recommend that you study Google's own guidelines thoroughly before creating anything in their sphere: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528. These guidelines are still labeled as applying to Google Places, but they also apply to Google+ Local, so definitely, study them.

Hope these tips help!

Miriam

Hi Ricky,

Absolutely, when working with local businesses like dentists, you should be specifying their location in many areas of their website. These might include title and meta description tags, alt tags, link anchor text, on-page content, and schema-encoded NAP (name, address, phone number) on the footer and contact page of the website. Of course, do this in a non-spammy manner - as Wesley mentions - stuffing is neither necessary nor desirable. Your brick-and-mortar clients will typically be hoping for inclusion in Google's local results for the city in which they are physically located. Google will show these results both to searches who are in that city or who are including that city in their search term. For SABs (service area businesses like plumbers and carpet cleaning companies), again, the client should aim for local inclusion for the city where they are physically located, but organic inclusion for their service cities where they aren't physically located. This is how it typically works.

Hi Pegasus,

I think you'll find this tutorial from Local U to be right on the money:

http://localu.org/blog/how-to-segment-local-search-analytics/

I hope it's helpful for you!

Hi SEOSynder!

Good question! Yes, I do think there would be value in having the client respond to any negative press you find, whether on message boards or otherwise, provided he can do so effectively. I see some challenges here, however.

A problem with responding to old negative reviews is that you are unlikely to remember the specific circumstances surrounding a customer's complaint. For example, if you own a hotel and someone you can identify leaves a negative review about their stay that happened last week, you can remember what happened and be really specific about the circumstances and what you did to address them. If the stay happened 5 years ago, who knows what happened? So, if you did respond to those old ones, your replies would have to be kind of generic, so the persuasiveness of your responses will likely be less.

I think it will be important to discuss with the client what the goal is here. If it is to

A) Assess complaints to see if there are frequent ones that have occurred in order to discover if internal fixes have been implemented to remedy a negative situation (improving customer service and then having something to write about, explaining what the client did to fix the problem)

B) To create a good impression of the business' responsiveness to complaints by responding with empathy and a will to improve

...then I think it could be worth the time to respond.

*But, do be sure the client is doing this on his own. Don't post replies to negative feedback on the behalf of the client. You can help him craft caring replies, but let him post them on his own, under his own account.

My only other proviso here would be to weigh whether responding to negative threads on message boards might have the effect of making them appear more recent and relevant than leaving them alone. Something to consider

Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Hi Blair,

One of the inherent tasks of manual citation building is ensuring that verification takes place. There is no way to get around this. It goes with the job. Pre-set your clients' expectations that they will need to be part of the process - forwarding you verification emails that come in, being by the phone at a certain time when phone verification calls come in, being on the lookout for postal mail verification and letting you know when it comes in. Yes, this can be time consuming, but it's what clients pay a professional citation builder for.

In regards to things like security questions, go ahead and make up your own answers to them. Then, at the end of the project, be sure to present the client with a document for their files that lists all of the questions and answers so that they have them on file. This is very important for their future needs - they may need to edit their profiles or may work with other marketers who need to and they must have a record of the work you've done.

I create a simple spreadsheet that tracks all of this information, including listing status, passwords, security questions, etc. Once you've built citations for a few clients, you will become familiar with which sites have which requirements and can build a templated spreadsheet for this so that all you have to do is fill in the blanks as you progress through the work. This will help you with keeping track of your own tasks and the sheet can then be given to the client at the end of the project so that they have a simple document to refer to that contains all of their citation info.

Hope this helps!

Hi IOSC,

Great question, and a really important point from Keri regarding never soliciting Yelp reviews from your customers. Their policies and filters are the most stringent of any review platform; Yelp wants all reviews to happen spontaneously.

When it comes to Google-based reviews, the best policy is to take it slow. Avoid sending out email blasts or running campaigns that will generate a large number of reviews at any one time. Google has also upped the stringency of their review filters of late and too great a velocity of incoming reviews can result in review loss for the business owner. Ask, perhaps, 1-3 happy customers a week if they'd like to review you. Then, if 1 or 2 of them do, this will be a gentle acquisition.

Also, take a look at your competitors' average number of reviews. If most of them in your locale have, say, 20 Google-based reviews, then aim for having 30 or 40 on your profile...don't aim for having 200. This is another area in which it is speculated that Google may become suspicious that reviews are being bought or falsely generated by the business.

A read through Google's Review Posting Guidelines will be very important for you:

https://support.google.com/places/answer/187622?hl=en

Another good step is to, again, look at your direct local competitors and see which 3rd party review sites Google is linking to from their Google+ Local pages in the 'reviews from around the web' section. This way, you may discover that, for your locale and industry, Google seems to be trusting certain sites like citysearch, judysbook or insiderpages most. This will signal to you that it's important for you to have customers review you there.

In actually setting about requesting reviews, a good process would be to obtain the customer's email at the time of service. Follow up 2-3 days after a service is rendered with a brief, friendly, well-crafted email, letting the customer know how much you would appreciate his review. You might list a few places (not including Yelp) where you have review profiles and let the customer know that you would like them to pick their favorite platform. While Google and Yelp reviews are typically the most important for local business owners, review diversity is very healthy insurance against massive review loss, should you ever lose all of your reviews on one site or another. Remember, not everyone is going to have a Google account, so leaving a Google based review could be a pain for them, whereas if they are an active member at TripAdvisor, their review their will be easy for them and good for your business.

I recommend you read Phil Rozek's 2012 post on the local review ecosystem to get a quick education on the way in which data is shared between some of the review platforms (http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/07/06/the-local-business-reviews-ecosystem/). Great piece!

Hope I've pointed out some helpful ideas for you here. Just remember, a slow, diverse and steady acquisition of reviews over time is a much better strategy than trying to make a big splash all at once.

Hi Jimbo,

Ryan has highlighted some good ideas for you. I will add:

1. Yes, it's still forbidden to created Google Places/+Local page for service areas where the business has no physical location. Google's local product hinges on physical location.

2. I would create two sets of pages on the website. One set will contain a page for each of his major services. The other set will contain a city landing page for each of his main service cities. I wrote a pretty well-cited article some months back on the topic of city landing pages that I feel may be of some help to you: The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

3. Then, once you've established the two sets of static pages on the client's site, I would consider following up with any or all of the following:

• Linkbuilding

• Blogging to showcase his projects in different towns

• Social media with a local focus

• Video marketing with a local focus

Provided the playing field isn't too tough, a path like the one I've described will enable most clients to gain quite a bit of visibility.

Greetings, Bede,

So sorry about the line breaks. We've been having a little problem with that, and I hope my response to you isn't one big paragraph

The process you have been using for your Local clients remains a best practice, in my experience. Not only does this separate the information out as best you can for bots, but it is a good practice for human users who will be signaled upon reach such a landing page that they are looking at information about their own geographic location. You are so right that things keep changing in Local, but this is one area in which creating unique, rich content landing pages is still a smart choice.

In regards to Schema vs., for instance, hCard, the benefit is that Google, Yahoo & Bing have all agreed on this markup as standard. However, definitely read this 2011 discussion at Mike Blumenthal's blog in which Mike opines that rushing to switch from hCard to Schema may not be your #1 top priority:

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

Through 2011, I continued to use hCard on my Local clients sites without issue, but it is certainly smart to acquaint yourself with the features of Schema that apply to Local. The tool linked to from that post is a great place to begin.

Hope my feedback is useful!

Miriam

Hi Jayme,

Unfortunately, there is no tool that offers reliable local keyword information. This is due, to my understanding, to the different location of data centers. Even if you are in a major metro location like Los Angeles, the numbers cannot be relied upon.

So, here is the method that I and other Local SEOs I know follow:

1. Do your keyword research without any type of local modifiers. Create a document with a list of your findings. This might look like:

jeweler

jewelry store

diamond engagement rings

fine jewelry

costume jewelry

etc.

2. Now, create a list of your geographic terms. These might include city names, county names, regional names, neighborhood names and zip codes. An interesting tool that can help you turn up geo keywords is here: http://www.localmarketingsource.com/local-keyword-research-tool/ This is solely for looking up the different geo terms - not geo/service/product combinations.

3. Once you've got your 2 lists, combine them. So now, your keyword sheet will look like:

jeweler minneapolis

jeweler minneapolis, mn

jeweler twin cities

jeweler 85342

jewelry store minneapolis

etc.

What you've accomplished by the end of this is a very big list of keywords that you can use. These can be reflected in your title tags, meta description tags, headers, alt tags, link title and anchor text and on-page copy. Off-site, you will, of course, want to know about these kw terms in any linkbuilding you may do.

Some of the terms may be reflected on the core pages of your site, whereas others may be set aside for userful blog posts the jeweler plans to write. I do a ton of professional copywriting for local businesses, and I am always interested in seeing keyword research that turns up terms that can easily be worked up into a Q&A-type blog post. For example, let's say we see a term come up like:

'judging diamond quality'

We can turn this into a blog post entitled:

Judging Diamond Quality 101

or

Judging Diamond Quality While Visiting A Local Jewelry Store

The post will then give tips for beginners who want to be able to tell the quality of the diamonds being offered by jewelers. And, of course, it  can contain information like:

At Village Jewelers in Minneapolis, MN, every diamond we sell comes with a a legal certificate certifying its quality...etc.

So, the point is, you will want to find places for all of your keywords over time. Building a strong, beautifully, locally-optimized website is the cornerstone of any Local SEO campaign. This work includes the optimization of various elements of the website and the crafting of exceptional copy for every page. And, it can include the development of an on-site blog, enabling the business owner or hired copywriter to create great copy on an on-going basis.

Offsite, there will be more work ahead, of course, in your pursuit of high rankings. This will include getting your local business profiles created and claimed, beings sure you don't violate any guidelines, building citations and earning reviews at a steady, but not hurried, pace. Lots to consider!

Jewelry stores are fun clients because their products is so easy to write about and their clientele is generally pretty happy! Good luck!

Hey There,

You might find this LocalU video that references the current state of Yahoo to be helpful in assessing current expert sentiment:

http://localu.org/blog/video-a-tactical-response-to-the-new-google-local-3-pack-yahoos-role-in-local/

Regarding BOTW, our Local Search Ecosystem infographic (https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-us) shows Best of the Web as one of the sources that may influence Google. I still consider them to be a good place to have good, clear NAP. Unless I'm mistaken, you can still get a free basic listing on BOTW here: https://secure.botw.org/secure/Signup.aspx?type=jumpstart&directory=local (somebody correct me if I've overlooked BOTW becoming paid only, please!)

Hope this helps!

Hi Danny,

Seconding what Christy has explained, and also, think you might want to read this post by Mike Blumenthal:

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

I believe you may find some ideas in there that will help you with what is going to be a major strategical planning session. Wishing you the best of luck!

Hi Abe,

Good question. While I believe that the two most important places for most local businesses to earn review are Google+ Local and Yelp (because of their obvious dominance), these are not necessarily the best places for you to request reviews, namely because it's forbidden by Yelp's quality guidelines to solicit reviews, as Keri has mentioned.

When you have the opportunity to steer a customer towards leaving a review, a Google-based review is likely to have the most ranking-oriented impact, if the customer already has a Google+ account. If he doesn't, there's a chance the review may be filtered out.

If the customer is an active Yelp user and leaves you a Yelp review without being asked, then this can have a good impact on conversions. I know many local business owners swear by Yelp as a major driver of phone calls.

Clients in certain industries may see next-best benefit from niche directories, rather than generic ones.

I highly recommend that you read Phil Rozek's extremely awesome post/infographic comparing review sites in 2013.

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/10/24/comparison-of-local-review-sites-where-should-you-focus-now/

I think you'll find it's just what the doctor ordered!

Hi Robert-o,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm sorry I didn't respond to this earlier - your post somehow escaped my notice. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum.

Robert has been giving you some helpful advice. I recommend that you read this 2 part article series on attempting to get a Google Places Label for your business;

http://www.iexposure.com/2011/06/16/how-to-get-a-google-places-label

http://www.iexposure.com/2011/07/26/how-to-get-a-google-places-label-part-2-update

This is the best writeup that I know of on this interesting subject, and while following the steps outlined will not guarantee you a Places Label, at least you can give it a try! Good luck!

Miriam

Hi Greg,

From the ongoing discussion, it looks like you've got to investigate the potential of a penalty on the organic side of things (not my area), but let me take a look from a local perspective.

1. On the client's Google+ Local page (see: https://plus.google.com/105185934363953908565/about?gl=US&hl=en-US), I see a potential problem in the business description, which reads: "Coops Cars has great deals on the best used cars in South River (and the entire East Brunswick area). Affordable financing options and extended warranties available. Coops Buys Cars also - we pay cash for used cars and trucks, even if you don't buy one of ours." I recommend you remove any geo terms from that (take out South River and East Brunswick). Google has never publicly stated that use of geo terms in the description causes a penalty, but for many years, Local SEOs have observed that it can cause one. So, I'd get rid of it. To be on the safe side, I'd take the business name out of description, too.

2. Even more serious problem. Your client appears to have a duplicate Google listing going on. I did a phone number lookup in maps.google.com for (732) 334-1770 and see this: https://plus.google.com/113899383798859891141/about?gl=us&hl=en I found it by clicking the 'see all 2 results' link in maps.google.com for the phone number lookup. So, the business is listing itself as 'Coops Used Cars' and 'Coops Buys Cars'. This could be totally killing their ranking chances, locally speaking.

3. I am not seeing any other duplicates, but you need to discover if there are any. Look up different iterations of the business name, and also any old or alternate phone numbers. As you mentioned that the client was being spammy, you need to be on the lookout for anything else weird they may have done on a local level. For example, purchasing virtual addresses or using P.O. boxes in neighboring towns.

4. Okay, here's another one. The client has a phone number issue going on. The number published on his duplicate Google listing is (201) 334-0570, but the number in the footer of the website is 732-334-1770. Definitely a problem, as the conflicting numbers will erode Google's confidence in the business' NAP

5. Hmm, here's an odd one. I'm not familiar with NJ geography, but why does a phone number lookup for( 201) 334-0570 in the main Google search engine bring up a ton of listings for the business in Hackensack, rather than South River? That needs to be investigated and all citations brought into a consistent NAP format (name, address, phone number).

6. A phone number lookup in maps.google.com of (201) 334-0570 is bringing up a closed business listing with the title We Buy Any Auto. So, clearly, some spamming of the local index has been going on, and a thorough investigation is warranted.

That's about all I have the time for within the scope of Q&A, but I think with this quick glance, I've identified some key issues that are almost certainly affecting your client's ability to rank well locally. A history of spamming can be hard to overcome, but every effort needs to be made to clean up past bad actions. You may even want to hire a professional citation editor to help you. Nyagoslav Zhekov's name springs to mind (ngsmarketing.com) and his rates are quite reasonable. Definitely, this client is going to need a lot of work.

Great topic, AL123al!

I agree with all of the posters who are stating that your client's approach isn't practical. I have a couple of resources I'd recommend you share with the client that should get him up-to-speed on this topic.

1. First, show the client this article on the realities of review spam. It's real, and there are actions you can take. It takes persistence sometimes, but you've got to be hearty in business:

https://moz.com/blog/review-spam

2. Then, show him this second article which details how to handle all types of reviews, from 1-star disasters, to 5-star treasures, to spam:

https://moz.com/blog/mastering-owner-response-quintet-google-my-business-reviews

If you get get the client to sit tight and read through both of those, he should walk away with a completely different (and much better) perspective on dealing with the reality of reviews.

End of the day, attempting to delete a GMB listing is not an answer. The listing could simply come back again, and your client's reputation will follow him wherever he goes. Much better to get the necessary education to deal with all forms of reviews, and move forward confidently.

Excellent discussion going on here, ladies and gents! I am so impressed by the deep questions and answers present here. Our community makes me proud!

Ruben, I'd like to bring up a couple of things to add to this good topic.

1. You might like to read my Moz Post http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide which covers the concept of building out pages for various locations in some depth.

2. Citations are a big part of the picture - absolutely! They serve 2 main functions which are a) to help customers find you on a wide variety of platforms and b) to build a consistent, trustworthy body of information about your business on the web, which is then crawled by search engines, causing them to have confidence in the cluster of data they have about your business which can then increase your chances of being considered a relevant answer for certain queries.

So, it's a 1-2 punch kind of thing, building citations. There are direct benefits in a customer finding your listing on a site like Superpages and indirect benefits in the consistency and prevalence of your citations helping search engines to feel confident about the validity and prominence of your business.

This being said, it's my belief and understanding that it takes time for validity/prominence to actually start affecting rank. Every local business platform has its own schedule for taking a citation from zero to live, and then I have to think about search engine bots picking this up and stirring it around in the bucket in which they've got all my other business data. Then, I have to take into account whether my citation building has, in fact, surpassed what my direct local competitors have done or has simply brought me on par with them, meaning citation building will not be the difference-maker I'd love it to be, because my toughest competitors have done the same thing I have (meaning, I'm going to have to find some other way to distance myself from the field).

In sum, citation building is a must-do for any local business that doesn't want to fall behind in their niche, but it takes time to see the positive effects from it and the level of positivity is going to directly relate to the stiffness of the competition. You are in a tough market - law in major cities, which I would consider one of the most difficult ranking environments. Yes, you've got to get those citations in good shape, but my honest appraisal of this is that you are going to have to go way beyond these basics to surpass what is doubtless a highly active/ heavily marketed competitor base. The usual advice of build excellent content, implement on-page Local SEO, build citations, earn reviews is going to be common to all your competitors', so finding something that they're not all already doing may be necessary to see yourself rise in the SERPs by dint of some extra creative, superior effort.

Hope these thoughts are helpful! Glad you brought up this topic, and I hope once Moz Local has had a few more months to bake in the oven, we'll be able to publish some case studies that prove a correlation between participation and positive results!

Hi Daniel,

So sorry to hear of the trouble you are having! My guess is that your issue may be complex enough to require a professional audit, but I will take a stab here and pointing out a few things and asking a few questions. Let me number these points, as they are sort of all over the map.

1. Normally, when you change the business name in the Google Places for Business dashboard, you will be required to re-verify the listing. Were you prompted to do so? Did you receive a postcard and re-verify? Where are you at in this process?

2. If you had a spammy business name on your Google+ Local page, did you also build citations this way? A ranking drop could certainly result from the new, correct business name not matching other third party listings of your business with the old spammy name. This is important and worth checking! If you find your street address and phone number listed anywhere in conjunction with the spammy name, or with any variant of the business name other than what you've provided in your Google Places for Business dashboard, then you may be dealing with the fallout of citation inconsistency and would need to do a citation cleanup campaign.

3. Second issue - I have seen a number of reports of 404 error pages like the one you are seeing coming into the Google And Your Business Help Forum. Check this search out and see if you see your experience/issue reflected there:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/404|sort:date

4. Next - is this also your business?

http://www.bringyourownlaptop.co.nz/

Could you be having an issue with duplicate content between the two websites? Always important to check on that.

5. Is your physical location at Level 2, 80 Mount Street, Sydney, NSW, 2026 a real physical office wherein you make face-to-face contact with your clients? Is the office shared by any other business? How long have you occupied this address? That's 3 questions to consider, I know, but important ones.

6. Since I can't look at the +Local page, unfortunately, I cannot diagnose if there could have been problems with it. You've been admirably honest about saying it was spammy, so that leaves me wondering if there could have been multiple violations of the Google Places Quality Guidelines that could have led to your being de-listed. I'm not saying this is what happened, but it is something to consider. I'd read through them and make a list of points besides the spammy business name that you may have violated. You should also try hard to remember what you edited on the listing.

7. Because the Google+ Local page is 404d, you can't click the 'Report A Problem' link on it, so that's problematic, but you could try this troubleshooter: https://support.google.com/places/#contact=1 You can select the 'my listing no longer appears on Google Maps option' and see if you can get somewhere with that.

8. Likewise, you could report the problem in the Google And Your Business Forum http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business in hopes of getting feedback from a Top Contributor there. TCs have the ability to escalate an issue like yours to Google staff.

Lots of suggestions. I hope at least some of them give you some ideas of what to begin investigating. Good luck with this!

Hi Nick,

Good question! Unfortunately, you are correct to suspect trouble. Imagine you are a Google bot. You go out to search the web for data about ABC Auto Pros and you find not one, but two, websites containing this identical business name, and also the identical address and phone number. You don't know which is the authoritative website (abcautosales.com or abcautorepairs.com), because the core NAP is identical. NAP may best actually be thought of as NAP+W (website) and this business' decision to have two websites means that they are creating confusion for Google. Also, because organic factors play so big a part in local rankings, this business is essentially splitting the authority they should have in half.

As I see it, there are three possible routes here.

1) The safest route: get the business to combine their two websites into one. Use appropriate 301 redirects so as to maintain as much authority as possible. This method fully remedies the situation and the business can then move forward with a totally clean and powerful approach. This is the approach I would most strongly recommend, despite the fact that it will involve a big change and lots of work. Fixing this now could save years of future headaches.

2) The patch-up: If the business wants to engage in Local Search Marketing and insists on maintaining two websites, only one should be optimized with the business NAP. The second website should contain no crawlable references to the businesses name, address or phone number - not in the masthead, footer, copy or tags. Essentially, this will make the second website something of a dead zone, but this is the only way I can think of to try to prevent Google from associating website #2 with the business. You would need to go through the website with a fine toothed-comb to remove any mention of any part of the NAP and also do a citation cleanup campaign to attempt to remove any references to that second website anywhere on the web. Even with this work , there is a chance that you won't be able to control all references to the complete or partial NAP out there on the web. Google just has to find one mention of ABC Auto Pros referencing website #2 to begin to become confused. So, while you could go this route, it's not sure to work and would involve constant vigilance of the SERPs to be sure that this association hasn't arisen.

3) The iffy idea: Note that I'm calling this iffy. There does exist a precedent in the Google Places Quality Guidelines for a business with multiple departments to be eligible for more than one Google+ Local Page. The language states:

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.

So, here, if the business had a separate phone number for the two departments and separate physical entrances for the sales department vs. the service department, they might be eligible for this approa_ch._ I say 'might' because this approach is most commonly associated with entities like hospitals and educational institutions. Google has long dealt with a history of heavy spamming in the auto sales vertical and, because of this, there is a chance that they would look with suspicion on this approach being taken by an auto-related business. I'm not sure. I would say that if the business does have separate public facing entrances for the two departments and can get a distinct phone number for the second department, then it would be worthwhile to go to the Google and Your Business Forum and ask the TCs there if they feel Google would be suspicious of an auto business taking advantage of this nuance in the guidelines. I would suggest you go by what they tell you there, because they see the problems and takedowns on a daily basis.

If you get an okay from them, then this would resolve your issue, as it would be okay for the business to maintain the two websites, optimize and promote both.

Long answer, whew! But this is one of those complex issues that requires careful thinking and good planning. Hope my thoughts are helpful!

Hi Jonathan,

My best recommendation here is going to be that you advise the client to hire a professional Local SEO to consult with both you and her about Local Search Marketing. Because of the number of violations you have accidentally made in trying to help this client, I am assuming that you were hired in some other capacity (perhaps as her designer or traditional SEO or SM expert?) and that you are finding that you've waded in over your head trying to manage her Local SEO. I would recommend that you tell her so as quickly as possible, and don't let her expect that you can consult with her in areas that are not your specialty. It's just too easy to accidentally violate Google's guidelines and damage a client's ability to rank well if Local isn't your area of expertise. If this client is counting on you for advice, I would take the following steps:

1. Tell her that, while you can help her with certain services you've engaged to provide, you are not a Local SEO.

2. Go with her to https://getlisted.org/static/resources/trustedproviders.html. This is GetListed.org's list of trusted providers in the Local SEO field. Both you and she can visit the websites of the terrific companies listed there and contact a few of them to see what they can offer you. They will quickly be able to discern (like Linda Buquet has on this thread) that there a number of violations going on that are putting your client at risk for penalties and will be able to consult with you on damage control and creating a good local search marketing strategy.

3. If you have interest in Local SEO (which is a totally fascinating field!) and see that you have clients coming in these days who need help with this, you may want to consider studying this area of marketing so that you can eventually add Local SEO to your menu of client services. This is a truly fun and challenging discipline that anyone can dive into and learn a ton about. Here is a list of resources for you of places to learn about Local SEO;

This is my own article on The Rudiments of Local SEO which I share with new clients.

This is the blog of the man I (and most people) consider to be the top Local SEO in the world: Mike Blumenthal

At DavidMihm.com you will find published the annual Local Search Ranking Factors report. This is the premiere industry survey and the 2013 edition will be published within the next few weeks.

And here is Linda Buquet's highly active and educational Local Search Forum where you can learn a ton.

That's a good start. There is always room for another awesome new Local SEO - so many businesses need guidance! In the meantime, though, I do suggest that you get your client connected with an established pro ASAP to help get things under control and point both you and the client in the right direction.

Hi Ruchy,

I believe the resource you're looking for regarding Schema would be this one: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/reviews

On your further questions, to earn local business reviews on Google, you have to have a local business (not a digital/virtual business). You'll need to be eligible for a GMB listing (read these guidelines: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en). If the business in question doesn't meet Google's eligibility guidelines, it can't have a listing and receive these types of reviews.

Hi Cornelius,

According to Phil Rozek's 2013 post on hidden addresses (http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/), yes, Yelp does permit you to hide your address. I haven't seen any news in the past year indicating that this policy has changed in the interim. I have never seen a study, however, documenting what effect on internal Yelp rankings using a hidden address may have, if any - somebody should totally do one! Hope this helps!

Hello C Smith,

Like your avatar.

Okay, so here's the thing: 'web design' is not actually a local query, due to Google's handling of this niche. I believe it was in January of 2010 that they stopped showing true blended/local/pack-type results for web design queries, so your approach to this is basically going to be organic, in terms of SEO, rather than what you'd be doing if you were a shoe store in Birmingham.

If you're located in Birmingham and your goal at this point is to attract Birmingham-based businesses, then I would imagine your whole website (not just a landing page) would make frequent mention of Birmingham and the businesses you serve there.

But, as Owen has rightly pointed out, it is better to use a light hand in this. Don't go overboard. Write titles, tags and text that read naturally. Remember, you don't have to string your phrases together every time. In other words, you don't have to write:

Birmingham Alabama Website Design Services

over and over again.

A paragraph might contain the words 'Birmingham' and 'Website Design' and 'Services' and 'Alabama' within it, of course, but they don't have to be stuck all in a row with glue:)

Between Panda, Penguin and EMD issues over the past year, Google is very clearly moving towards a preference for naturalness. So, using a gentle touch is going to serve you better in the long run, both as far as human users and search engine bots are concerned.

Hej Aleksander! Hvordan går det?

So, here's the straight talk on citations. There are 2 main benefits to building them:

1. The more local business platforms on which you list a business, the better the chances are that customers will find you on their choice of sites. So, for example, customers who really like TripAdvisor will find your business there if you're listed there, and customers who prefer Yelp will find you over there, if you're listed.

2. Citation spread, consistency and authority are all believed to positively impact Google local pack rankings. So, the more citations you have on quality, relevant platforms, the more 'trust' it is believed Google will feel in the validity of your business data.

So far so good, right? But, it's very important to understand that all of the above is tied to you having a unique physical location in a specific place. For example, your business is located at Karl Johans gate in Oslo. You can only build citations for this specific location. You cannot build citations stating that your business is also located in Sweden, for example. But, what you should do is research which directories the search engines return most highly for you core search terms and be sure you are listed there, regardless of where the business data source is. For example, lots of US-based businesses are listed in directory called Hotfrog, which is physically located in Australia. So main takeways are:

1. Build citations on those directories that are popular in Norway for your industry's common searches, regardless of where the citation platform's company is physically located, but ...

2. Only build citations for your actual physical location. Never try to appear as though your business is physically located in any other city or country, unless you have a staffed physical office there.

Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any further questions!

Hi Omid,

I'd love to see some in-depth testing of this topic done, but to my knowledge, I've never seen anyone delve into this deeply. Nevertheless, I've seen lots of people ask about this. Here's the basic premise:

We know Google doesn't like duplicate content, yet, when we publish a business description on a local business listing, there is a high likelihood of that description getting replicated across the web due to the way data is shared within the Local Search Ecosystem. Does Google care about this type of duplication? Can it harm rankings? Can having varied descriptions help?

My personal opinion is that duplication is baked into the local search ecosystem and is largely unavoidable. After all, your business NAP (name, address, phone) is duplicate content when it is published across multiple platforms and logic dictates that Google has no problem with this.

However, as I've said, I don't know of any real studies of this but your question prompted me to have a brief chat with Darren Shaw and Andrew Shotland  and we were in pretty solid agreement about this.

Darren says: I have heard many people suggest that there are benefits to mixing up your description on your citations, but, it's unrealstic to imagine doing this on EVERY citation ... Maybe making 15 different versions and spreading those around.
I have not seen any evidence to support that there are benefits in doing this though ... just speculation

Andrew says: If anything, it's the IYPs that need to worry about it, not the businesses ... basically the same as a bunch of ecommerce sites having the same SKU description

I think Andrew raises an especially valid point! If there were to be ANY penalty associated with duplicate descriptions (which I highly doubt) it would be something for the IYP/directory who is publishing the content to worry about...not the local business owner.

So, my take on this is that it would be very interesting to experiment with whether varying the business descriptions as much as you can had any observable positive effect on rankings, but that I highly doubt duplicate descriptions have any negative effect - certainly not on the business owner.

That being said - you Local SEO researchers out there - if you're looking for a study to do, this would be a fun one! Hope this helps, Omid!

Hi CalicoKitty!

I remember your previous thread that you and I were working on when Possum rolled out and your listing was filtered out by it. Since then, there has been the Hawk update, which was basically Google rolling back some of the stringency of this filter that was affecting you, but it sounds like the set of business at your marina are likely still experiencing filters due to so many being co-located.

Unfortunately, when this is the case, the only thing you can do is become strong enough to be one of the results Google does show instead of being one of the filtered ones. Barring that you have any Google penalties, suspicious links or anything like that keeping you back, basically, what you need to do is a competitive audit. You need to compare a big list of metrics for your business to the metrics of the competitor who isn't being filtered. This blog post of mine from 2017 will give you a spreadsheet for doing just that:

https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit

In every area where your competitor is stronger than you, you need to increase your metrics.

I will add here that since publication of that post, there are two new-ish things I'd be working on that I don't believe are included in the spreadsheet. If I felt I had done all I can to surpass my competitor, based on the spreadsheet metrics, I would create a really good strategy for:

1. Google Posts

2. Google Questions and Answers

I am seeing early days indications that active use of both may increase rankings. So, I'd be sure you are covering all of the basics in the audit sheet and then create strategy around these.

After you've done the audit, if any questions arise, please come back to this thread and ask. I'm happy to hear back from you on this.

Hi GSO,

Good question! Local Search Rankings Factors 2013 cited having an 'Individually Owner-verified Local Plus Page' as the 8th most important ranking factor (see: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors) so this is having the importance of this being real on pretty high authority

That being said, this question does come up from time to time because in less competitive verticals (and sometimes even in competitive ones!) one does see unverified Google+ Local pages ranking well. Who can really say why this is but Google, right, but basic rule of thumb in the Local SEO world is that you should claim all listings pertaining to your business.

That's a very good question, Kathy!

I believe the section of the guide you're referring to is here: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

And what that section  is saying is that, if you're an SEO and you have this client who sells ice cream coming to you, here are some questions you can ask them to start learning about their business. This framing assumes that the client knows their own business from selling their products, serving the public and hearing their FAQs, and, possibly having something like Google Analytics hooked up to their website so that they have some demographic/seasonal information in place to share with the SEO.

For you, if you're doing your own marketing for your own business, this is going to come down to you knowing your own business, its customers' FAQs, etc. If you don't yet have any anayltics set up to track traffic coming into your website, now would be a good time to start gathering such data via Google Analytics which is free.

I would also recommend that you:

• Start formally logging your customers spoken/written FAQs. This would include in-person/phone/form questions you frequently receive that help you understand what customers are looking for and how they word their questions in relationship to your company's goods/services. For example, if you sell clothing, do your customers ask questions about "plus size blouses" or "plus size tops"?

• Do searches directly in Google for your products/services. Then, look on the results page for the section titled "Searches Related to (X)" There, Google is showing you a bunch of terms related to the search you've performed.

• You can also try a similar technique by going to Google and typing in a search phrase slowly, letter by letter, to see what other phrases come up in the search box dropdown as you type. For example, when I type "women's blouses" in slowly, Google also shows me "women's blouses for work", "women's blouses on sale", etc. This lets me know customers are looking for these things.

• Go to AnwerThePublic.com and do searches surrounding your products/services to see how people ask search engines questions about these things.

• Go to Google Trends and type in your products/services to see if there are hot topics surrounding these things. For example, Google is telling me that "women's lace tops" are currently trending in NY.

A combination of efforts like these will help you pull together a lot of keyword phrases of possible value to your business and its clientele. Once you have these, you can then further investigate the value by using more sophisticated tools like Moz Keyword Explorer, so that you can prioritize and organize your research and create a strategy from it.

Hope this helps!

Good morning, Wonderdome!

Great question. Very briefly:

Increasing internal links typically depends on having a vision for how the content on your website is related. Let's say you run a website selling gardening tools. You write an article about the importance of weeding around seedlings when planting a native plant garden. It's natural, in this case, to link from your page about weeding, to your page selling a stirrup hoe, which is a tool for weeding. Look at the total picture of your website content and find the relationships between topics. Linking to highlight these relationships is meant to improve user experience on your website, letting a visitor know that if they are reading the page about weeding in native plant gardens, your stirrup hoe is a really helpful tool for this. By finding the relationships, you will be enriching the navigational architecture of your website.

Increasing links pointing to your site from external sources typically revolves around two things. The first scenario relates to links you earn based on merit, without having to ask for them. Let's say you write the best article on the web about planting native California roses in the garden. You may find that the usefulness of the article earns links on its own, perhaps from garden enthusiast organizations, gardening blogs, native plant societies, and even government sites talking about water conservation through native gardening. Over time, if your article is truly useful, it may earn some very good links from third parties.

The second scenario involves actively asking for links. Let's say you're going to give a talk at a local university about native plant gardening. You could ask the university to link to your website from their upcoming events page. You could ask the local newspaper to do the same. You could ask local gardening clubs to do the same from their websites. In fact, you could create a piece of static content that summarizes your presentation and offer it to third parties and a resource that might be of help to their readers. You could earn some links from that, if what you create is good enough. I'm emphasizing this, because unless you have something of note to publicize, it's not going to be easy to get people to link to you. So, merit is still involved here, but the difference is that you are actively asking people to notice what you are doing, whether that's an event you're participating in, a video you've created, an eBook you've published, an article you've written, a graphic you've created, or what have you.

On a final note, if your business model is local (like a retail store), you'll also be building some links on local business directories like YP.com, Foursquare, Bing, etc. You'll be creating business listings on these platforms that link to your website. But if your business model is virtual (like an e-commerce site), then building links on most directories is typically a waste of your time.

If linkbuilding is new to you, please do check out the section on this exact topic in our Beginner's Guide to SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Hope this helps!

Hi Laura,

I agree with you that there hasn't been a ton of buzz surrounding this. I'd put it down to the fact that when Google makes a decision like this, there's nothing you can really do about it. You can't get the reviews back. What a pain, I know. My suggestions:

1. Be sure you have an active review acquisition strategy in place so that you are continually earning reviews at a moderate pace.

2. Be sure you are earning reviews beyond Google on the other platforms your customers are most likely to use.

These are the best insurance policies I know of in an environment in which Google can make policy changes at the drop of a hat.

Hey There!

This post from Local U might help:

http://localu.org/blog/8-tips-optimize-local-knowledge-panel-google-search/

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

My first impression on hitting your website is that it needs big help, both from a Local SEO standpoint and a human usability standpoint. Most critically, I have no idea when I land on your homepage where you are located or where you serve. 'Wine Country' is too generic a term to help me instantly 'get' your geography. I live in N. California and to me, the phrase 'wine country' means the Napa/Sonoma region - not Atascadero. I realize that this is your business name, and that's fine, but your header, which occupies nearly half of the screen space above the fold of your page should absolutely include your complete address and local area code phone number. This will be the very first signal to visitors that you are local, and you've got to make it super obvious.

You are on the right track creating landing pages for each of the cities in which you serve. This is a standard best practice for on-page Local SEO. I am seeing two areas of improvement you can work towards. Firstly, the decision to bury the links for these important pages down near the footer of the website is not ideal. You should be putting your location and service areas front and center on the website. Put a tab in your top nav for 'where we serve' or something like that and put the links there.

Secondly, as other members have noted, the content on these pages is thin and I also find it to be awkwardly optimized. Yes, it's good to have your keyword phrases in the content, but when you have only a couple of paragraphs on each page and they are so obviously using italics to highlight the phrases, the end user experience is not satisfying. I am not convinced, as the visitor, that real effort was put into showcasing your work in your 4 distinct service cities. I am left feeling that these pages were put together solely for the sake of SEO - not for my benefit as the visitor. I recommend looking at the pages again and asking yourself honestly whether they are displaying real care for the education and engagement of human readers.

Don't get too focused on the percentage of difference between each page. I have a copywriting client who runs a carpet cleaning company and the ONLY thing that is duplicated from page to page on his city landing pages is his linked list of services. Everything else is unique and different. Different text, different photos, different stories to share. This is what you should be shooting for - telling a story that is persuasive.

In addition to things I've briefly mentioned here, your website lacks overall Local optimization. Your contact page has not been optimized - don't let this page be nothing more than a form. Your complete NAP (name address phone number) preferably coded in hCARD or utilizing schema or what have you, and more unique text about your business will take this page from weak to strong. Don't forget hours of operation, a Google MyMap of your location and other good things like that that can be added.

In addition to putting the complete NAP in the header of your website, I would suggest that you put it across the footer, site-wide, and I recommend hCARD for this as well.

I hope my straight-shooting advice is empowering, Alex. All of these problems are actually major opportunities for you to improve. More care put into the design, layout, optimization and copywriting, coupled with your claiming of your local business profiles across the various indexes, is going to make your business a force to be reckoned with, and that's what I'd love to see happen for you!

Miriam

Hi Again, AWC

Thanks for coming back with such complete information. I've re-set this thread as an on-going discussion, so hopefully that will stick and the topic can keep going. I agree, you should get 2nd and 3rd opinions on this, and I'm going to ask one of our traditional SEOs to step in as well with an opinion from that viewpoint of expertise.

My opinion is this: by putting local information on your product pages site-wide, you are sending a very pointed signal to Google that you deem your data to be most relevant to Oklahoma residents. If you're including the city as well as the state in all tags and text, you are sending a further signal that you consider your data to be most relevant to your own community within the state. Now, whether Google abides by the signals you have sent or not is where the grey area lies.

You are selling items out of state, as you say, but you've got them all, in a sense, labeled, as Oklahoma products. A truly national site wouldn't really take that approach with its SEO. And yet, there was real sense in your approach to start out small to get business locally because that cut your competition for product keywords down considerably. What you did makes perfect sense to me.

Now, with your question as to whether so boldly labeling everything on your site with state or city/state labels is going to be a detriment to you attempting to rank beyond state borders for the product, I honestly don't know. My gut feeling can be summed up in my observation that a national SEO campaign would not include those geo terms. That being said, Local and traditional SEO do not cross one another out. If going national is now your focus, you could trim back the heavy usage of city-related terms, and stick to spelling out your city in your footer site wide, on your contact page, about us page, home page and maybe a few other pages that talk about the ability for customers to do business with you in person. And, of course, you can list the local business in Google Places, Bing Local and all of the other relevant local business indexes.

State-related terms (Oklahoma) are not local, so that needs to be treated more as you would traditional SEO. You need to determine whether potentially losing some dominance for phrases that include the 'oklahoma' in them will be worth making the site look more truly national, in terms of its SEO. I haven't done any keyword research, but I'm doubting a ton of people are searching for 'barn kits oklahoma' or similar terms. My feeling is that they would either be trying to find one locally (in which case they would include the city name in their query) or that they would be comparison shopping on-line.

Bottom line: I think the decision rests with you as to whether your main SEO thrust needs to be truly local (city+state), statewide (in which case you'd keep optimizing everything with the state name) or truly national, in which case, you don't really want geographic modifiers all over the tags and text. You know your customer base and can look at your books to see what percentage of your business is coming from where (local vs. state vs. national). In situations like these, that is the best metric I can provide to help someone discern where their main efforts need to be placed.

Let's see what our traditional SEOs have to say! Sit tight.

Greetings Fidelity One!
Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. If am correctly understanding your description of your business as being a virtual one, then this is not a question of rankings but rather one of appropriateness. Virtual businesses are not deemed to be Local by Google.

In order to qualify as local, you must have a real physical street address (not a P.O, box or virtual office, a unique local area code phone number and a legal business name. Clients must either come directly to the street address to do one-on-one business with you or your staff must depart from the physical street address to do business with clients (as in the case of chimney sweeps, carpet cleaners, etc.)

If any of these criteria do not fit your business model, then Local just isn't the right space for you.

Hope this helps!

Hi Taysir,

If they are staffed, physical offices, yes. If they are not, then, no. You'll need to focus on Local SEO for his physical location and organic SEO for his service cities where he isn't physically located.

Hi DVOH!

I know this is a headache. Not a great answer here for you, but no, there probably isn't much you can do to stem the tide of solicitations. When you build citations manually, you will note that some of the platforms have an auto-checked box for "I want to receive updates and offers about important, etc, etc." that you can uncheck, but, in general, you are going to be stuck with companies trying to market themselves to their customers.

Now, regarding Moz Local, if you sign up with us and list all of your clients under your agency's account, we will only contact you, the account holder, with all Moz Local updates. We should not contact any of your clients directly. But, this does not mean your clients may not be contacted at some point by the platforms on which their citations exist, because, as you've said, they are then on the radar of these local business data platforms. I suppose you could have your clients set blocking in their email programs, but that seems like a bit of a stretch. After all, they might miss something important if they did this. And, as for phone calls, there is really no way to reduce this apart from do not call lists.

Kind of a pain, I know, but likely a necessary evil If anyone in the community has a second opinion on this, I hope they will share!

Hello Pharcydeabc,

As Agents of Value has explained so well, you need not be concerned about diluting the relevance of the page with the type of keywords you are listing.

I would not advise putting any misspellings on the page. Remember, the quality of your copy counts. You don't ever want to look like you've got poor writing or sloppy typos in your copy. That being said 'photobooth' is not exactly a misspelling - it's more of a variant.

What I would not do is turn out a sentence like this:

Visit our photo booth San Francisco...

...just because people are searching that way. If it isn't good writing and it isn't the way people talk, don't use it. Remember, Google can pick out scattered keyword phrases from your pages. They don't have to be blocked together. So, a sentence like:

Take home a fun souvenir of your trip to San Francisco by visiting our photo booth....

...is still sending plenty of signals relevant to your keywords.

It's actually, in my opinion, better to mix things up in your copy because this more natural. What you don't want is copy that reads like this:

Visit our San Francisco photo booth because our San Francisco photo booth is the best photo booth of all photo booths in San Francisco.

This won't read well to human users - your target audience - and the needless repetitions won't impress the bots either.

My #1 rule as a professional copywriter reads:

"Write thoroughly and optimization happens naturally."

Keep your keywords in mind and write the most appealing, helpful and interesting page you can and you'll have a much better page than most of your competitors. Good luck!

Miriam

Hi Will,
Unfortunately, I would not recommend getting a virtual office or setting up a Google Place Page for any city in which you do not have a physical address. This practice is forbidden by Google's Places Quality Guidelines:

"Business Location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.

Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. If you operate from a location but receive mail at a mail box there, please list your physical address in Address Line 1, and put your mail box or suite number in Address Line 2."

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

Your desire to rank well in a major city in your state is understandable, but does not meet with Google's guidelines. If ranking in Denver becomes essential for your business, you must rent a real office there - not a virtual office, not a P.O. Box - in order to qualify for inclusion in Places.

Now, if you would like to get a Place Page for your Greenwood address, the criterion you must meet is that you have in-person transactions with clients either at your Greenwood address or at your clients' locations (as in the case of a carpet cleaning company, chimney sweep etc.)

If you do not have in-person transactions with clients, your business is not local, but virtual, and again, not suitable for inclusion in Google Places.

If the latter is the case, then you will need to rely solely on organic SEO to target cities where you would like to gain rankings. Typically, this will not enable you to outrank competitors with physical locations and in-person transactions in said cities, but you may be able to achieve some visibility by a combination of copywriting and linkbuilding.

Hope this set of definitions helps, Will.
Miriam

Hi Alex,

Though the display has changed from Places to +, the work is basically the same. The aspects of Local SEO that have the most impact and over which you have total control are:

• The strength and optimization of your website

• Citation building

• Social Media participation

• Linkbuilding

• Avoiding violations of various guidelines

The important aspect over which you have some control is:

• Review acquisition

Other important ranking aspects over which you have little or no control are:

• Age of domain/citations/links

• Proximity to centroid

• Competitors' efforts

If the goal is to move from #3 to #1, you can work to make a superior effort in the first 2 sections of my above list in comparison to the efforts of competitors and hope that this pays off, but the third section of my list is not something you can control. If competitors are older, closer to centroid or making a greater effort, these aren't things you can control, making outranking them quite difficult.

While these recommendations are more or less the same as I would have given prior to the changeover to Google+, people are blogging about their findings as Local changes and grows. If you want to catch up on some of these issues, there are 3 blogs I would recommend you peruse. Go through the posts on these blogs for the past 3-4 months:

blumenthals.com/blog

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/

http://www.ngsmarketing.com/blog/

These are my top 3 picks for really good coverage of the issues, and the three authors also happen to be Google And Your Business Forum Top Contributors, so they not only have their eyes on the ball, they have a special perspective because of their interactive relationship with Google itself.

Hope this helps!