Pete, you crack me up:)

Hi David,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your excellent question. I'm going to respectfully disagree with the conclusion that you should advise the client to keep going forward with the shared address. Clearly, this has worked relatively well so far, and that's the way things are with Places...you can go along with things that don't fit the guidelines for months or years...but if a penalization or merge happens, getting it fixed is truly daunting. Having a unique street address is part of the magic NAP combination that should be the basis of every Places record.

I think the client's greatest possible peril here is a merged record with the other businesses that share the office. His details, reviews and citations may get mashed up with those of the other businesses and the strength of his record may be a) sapped or b) disqualified.

My advice is to have the client set up a suite number with the post office or whatever authority is in place in his community. Definitely understand that this will involve a great deal of work in getting all of his citations/listings corrected, but it is work that will almost certainly have to be done at some point and putting it off only means more work later after more citations have accrued. And, I would much rather engage in this work now, before a negative action happens to the Place Page than after something bad has already happened.

What I am curious about is this: you state that the client has no suite number but that Google is listing one (400). Where is this coming from? Was there ever a suite number associated with the business? Could this be evidence that merging is already going on and that one of the other businesses has submitted a suite number but that it has become attached to your client's record as a result of conflation? I'm a little concerned about that.

At any rate, I would recommend that your client follow the standard procedure in this situation of getting a legal suite number assigned to him in the building to which he can receive mail. It may seem counter-intuitive to do this while things are going relatively well, but the client should be told that the happiness could end suddenly and drastically if Google takes any special notice of the situation going on in the building.

Hope these thoughts are helpful. Good luck!

Miriam

Hey Ed,

I know just how you're feeling about this, and sometimes, you can be so deep in the weeds of a project, you can begin to feel a bit lost. I think this happens to everybody now and again.

Yes, remove that review schema from the homepage. It could possibly be a spam signal. Not 100% positive about that, but I think it may be so.

Another suggestion: I know that rankings are important. I get that. But I've had clients in the past who overemphasized this beyond what was reasonable, narrowing their focus so that they lost sight of the bottom line: conversions. Yes, you have to have visibility to earn conversions, but it could be that you need to turn down the dial on the rankings focus for a bit and see how well the current rankings you have are converting to appointment bookings, or some other valued metric. Could there be usability improvements made that could take the same amount of traffic you're getting right now and increase the phone calls it is yielding, or the time spent on the site, or the links your content is earning? Maybe focus on that for a bit, and then come back to the rankings picture.

Hiring an expert for some consulting might also be a bright idea, if you hire someone truly qualified. I'm thinking along the lines of a Joy Hawkins, here ... not just a run-of-the-mill Local SEO. A true expert will often notice things a brand is overlooking, and from what they notice, a picture emerges of what is and isn't possible for the business. That can be very valuable.

Wishing you best of luck!

Hi ThinkCreativeGroup,

If the restaurants have different names (i.e. Bob's Pancake House vs. Bill's Burgers) then you should keep them on separate domains and do all marketing completely separately without making any effort to link the two to one another.

If there is some shared history, you could put it in a non-indexable infographic along the lines of "The Jones family opened Bob's Pancake House in 1938. In 1950, they invented their famous buckwheat cake stack. In 2012, son Bill opened Bill's Burgers across town". If, for reasons of pride, the owner wants to highlight something like this, that's fine, but I wouldn't do it in indexable text.

If the restaurants are two branches of the same brand (i.e. both of them are Bob's Pancake House) then, yes, you could develop a single website with a landing page for each physical location. You would then be linking to each of these landing pages from the citation building campaign for each location.

Hope this helps!

Hi There!

Your first link is taking me to a page not found page.

While I'm not certain why your Hyberbad page isn't showing up, I do want to mention that the page is striking me as over-optimized. In a very limited amount of text, the word Hyberbad is appearing more 15 or so times. Some work is ahead of this business in improving the quality of their content, ensuring there is no duplicate content, being sure the pages are seen as purposeful instead of as doorway pages. I would suggest improving the quality of the pages, toning down optimization and linking to both service locations from your top level menu.

Hope this helps!

Hi KS!

Unfortunately, that's not really a practice I would recommend to my clients at this point. There's been some indication in recent times that while Google is completely fine with a single-location home-based business, it's very easy for them these days to see that a string of houses is being used to indicate locations in more than one place. It's my gut feeling that they don't approve of this practice and that they would take action against Google+ Local listings created in this scenario. But, in any case, your lack of in-person contact with customers means that the business does not qualify for Google+ Local listings or local pack rankings, regardless of whether you have legitimate business offices or are using the addresses of your friends. So, this may be kind of a moot point. Virtual businesses need to compete organically and utilize PPC, social media, video marketing, etc. to earn visibility - but Local SEO is not the right marketing discipline for them.

Hope this helps!

Hi Alex,

I agree with Dana. It will be important for the new dentist with the separate business name to establish his own suite and local phone number for a variety of reasons.

• He needs to be able to get his own phone calls

• He needs to be able to get his own postal mail

• Were he to market himself at the same address and phone as the other practice sharing the office, he would likely end up harming the other dentist and precluding himself from being able to develop his own business on the web.

The new dentist needs to set up his own website, of course, and be sure that all of his citations reflect his own name, address, phone and website.

The only alternative to this would be for the 2 dentists to combine their practices under a single name, but it doesn't sound like this reflects their real-world situation.

Hey Ruben,

What I would consider these types of sites to be would be industry-oriented citations. And you definitely want those. Do you want to pay for citations there? It depends on how they perform. Pay for links ... no! Earn links ... yes, probably. You might like to check out this recent video over at LocalU that is talking about the value of links:

http://localu.org/blog/video-deep-dive-on-links-and-local-marketing/

I think it presents a really no-nonsense approach to judging the value of links for local businesses.