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!

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 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

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.

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 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.

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/

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.