Hi Peter,

This may be one of those things where you'll need to hire a Local SEO to do an audit, but very generally, this sounds to me like you may have citation consistency issues that are causing Google to make edits to your data based on bad data they are finding on third party sources. So, if for example, your client is located at 23 Hello Street, and for some reason, Google keeps changing this to 21 Hello Street, chances are strong that there are bad references out there to your business being at 21 Hello Street. So, the first step I'd suggest is a complete citation audit to discover if there are existing references to the bad data and then correcting these at the source so that the good data supports Google's correct understanding of your location.

Hi Doug,

You are quite correct that Service Area Businesses (SABs) fall into their own category in many ways when it comes to local search. I'll try to provide some helpful tips here.

Tip #1 - The most important thing for SABs to understand is that Google is heavily biased toward physical location. SABs must have at least one physical location in order to seek inclusion in Google's local index. This can be a home address - that's just fine! But it cannot be a virtual address, P.O. box, etc. And it should not be shared by any other business.

Tip #2 - Because of  Google's bias towards physical location, the SAB should set the goal of ranking well in the local pack of results for the city in which they are physically located, but not in the surrounding cities they may serve. There are some exceptions to this, as in the case of highly niche business models or in rural areas wherein one business is the only one or one of very few serving a number of towns. In such instances, you might see these businesses surfacing in the local pack of results for more than one town, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

Tip #3 - Once the business has set its goal of ranking well in the local pack of results for its city of location, there are a number of steps that can be taken. The most important is to build a really strong website with the main pages optimized for this city of location geo term. If possible, complete NAP (name, address, phone) should be included in the footer and on the contact page, preferably in Schema markup. Content should be strong and be optimized in a natural manner for the service + geo terms. You will follow this up by creating a Google+ Local page in which you will enter but hide the address to comply with Google's guidelines for SABs. Then, citations should be built in a variety of places that highlight the business.

If, for reasons of privacy, you need to hide the NAP, then you can build citations only on those directories which allow you enter but hide the address. See Phil Rozek's article on this: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/ There is more you can do in this vein, such as earning reviews and links, video marketing, social outreach etc. All steps serve to build the authority of the business on the web.

Tip #4 - Do not put a list of cities served on the website in the manner you've observed. Google updated their webmaster guidelines in 2012 to specifically denounce this practice. They consider this keyword stuffing, and you can read about it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

Tip #5 - Next, the business owner will want to make every effort he can to rank well for all of his service cities. Remember, the goal here is not to get local pack rankings, because he typically won't. Instead, he can go after organic rankings by the process of creating city landing pages on his website for each city he serves. The article I've linked to describes all of the ins and outs of this. Basic rules: you must have unique, strong content on each page you create. No thin or duplicate content. The authority of these city landing pages can be built up via the usual methods (earning links, social outreach, video marketing, etc.). Your chances of outranking competitors who have physical locations in your service cities are very slim, but you can frequently earn some visibility organically and some is way better than none!

Tip #6 - You will not be building citations for your service cities, because you lack a physical location. But, you can create a content development plan via which you will be adding to the geo-specific content of your website on an on-going basis. A blog is a great way to do this, continuing to build content on your website that showcases your work in your non-physical-location service cities, as well as in your city of location.

Hope these tips set you on a good path!

Hey There!

Google removed Google-based review stars last from their organic SERPs in 2019, unfortunately.  However, Facebook and Yelp stars still commonly display for some queries.

Hi Jeremy,

You might want to take this up with Joy Hawkins at Imprezzio Marketing as she has been doing a close study of the nuances of this scenario recently. What would you be changing the phone number to? Not quite sure I am following what you're describing.

Hi Ruben,

Thanks for the screenshot! Okay, so GetListed.org has been able to surface this as a possible duplicate because of the identical phone number. What you need to do is:

1. Go to this troubleshooter: https://support.google.com/places/

2. Click the red 'contact us' button

3. Choose 'my listing has incorrect information'

4. Choose the option mentioning duplicates

5. Then provide all of the information regarding the correct Google+ Local page and the duplicate one, being as clear as possible.

6. In addition to this, you need to find any other instances on the web where your phone number is connected to this other business name and/or address and have them edited or removed. If you skip this step, Google will continue to find information about your business that is incorrect and will not have sufficient trust in the good information. Given the spammy title of one of the listings shown in your screenshot (the keyword stuffed one), you may already have some trust issues with Google, so the road ahead may be a little long. Citation cleanup will be an important part of improving things.

7. If, after reporting the duplicate via the troubleshooter and cleaning up your citations, you continue to see that there is a duplicate listing (I'd give it at least 4 weeks) then I would post your issues in the Google And Your Business Forum at http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business, giving a full description of exactly what you've done and when you've done it. To that end, I recommend you keep a personal log of the actions you take so that you can track your progress and report your efforts to Google, if needed.

Hope this helps!

@jonathanleplang Hi Jonathan, sorry to hear about your client's predicament. Review loss of this kind typically happens for two reasons.

One, there's a bug in Google. Check the Google Business Profile help community and Sterling Sky's Local Search Forum when review loss happens to see if others are reporting a similar experience. There have been historic periods in which Google has accidentally made reviews disappear and then reinstated them.

The second cause is that Google has removed the reviews because they became suspicious about the profile, for some reason. For example, here's a recent article about a business losing the majority of its reviews because of review gating: https://www.sterlingsky.ca/google-removes-hundreds-of-reviews/ and another about why new reviews might not be publishing: https://www.sterlingsky.ca/google-reviews-not-publishing/. Read those with the client and try to root out whether they might unknowingly be violating Google's guidelines (see: https://support.google.com/local-guides/answer/7400114?hl=en#zippy=%2Cadvertising-solicitation%2Cfake-engagement)

If you are unable to discover the cause of what is happening, it's time to contact Google about the case. Good luck!

Hey there!

If you discover that your images already meet Google's requirements, this is one I'd take to the Mapmaker forum:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/map-maker

You'll need to be able to reveal the actual account details there, of course, so that the RERs can take a look at what you're seeing. Without being able to see the result, this may be hard to diagnose.

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for referencing your October thread. As I recall, your client was experiencing multiple issues with citation/NAP inconsistency and you had not yet engaged at that point in cleanup or forward-going citation building. You had also yet to implement a content strategy (separate pages for the 2 physical locations) If you have done so in the intervening weeks, you are on the right track, but it will take time to see results from this work. Check out his infographic:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/26/infographic-citations-time-to-live/

As you will see, some changes take many months to go into effect, so patience is important here. However, if you suspect you may have outstanding issues that are preventing you from ranking, I would look into the following:

• Have all previous citations been discovered and cleaned up?

• Are citations being built appropriately for each location?

• Is the Google+ Local page for each of the 2 locations violation free?

• Could there be duplicate Google+ Local listings or merged listings?

• Does the website appropriately reflect the 2 locations, or could there be anything on it that is confusing the bots as to the accuracy of distinct NAP for each location?

• Is robots.txt setup correctly on the site, ensuring that it is fully crawlable?

• Has the site been submitted to Google Webmaster Tools?

• Has their been a previous issue with spammy linkbuilding that could be harming the site?

• Is there a duplicate content issue on the website?

These are some of the things a professional audit would cover. All points are worthy of investigating, for sure.

I would not be concerned about E. Kentucky vs. East Kentucky. This does not represent a NAP inconsistency - just an unimportant difference of abbreviation.

Hope this helps, and glad you are following up.

Hi Ruben,

I'm assigning your question to the help team in hopes that you'll get a helpful answer regarding the language you're seeing on the Moz Local reporting.

Hi David!

Good topic. First of all, you should remove the modifiers from your business title on your Google+ Local page (and elsewhere). Google was briefly supporting these types of modifiers, but the most recent iteration of their guidelines states that this is not acceptable

• Location information, such as neighborhood, city, or street name, unless it is part of the real-world representation of the business. Your name must not include street address or direction information.
  • Not acceptable: "Starbucks Downtown", "Macy’s Union Square", "Holiday Inn (I-93 at Exit 2)", "U.S. Bank ATM - 7th & Pike - Parking Garage Lobby near Elevator"
  • Acceptable: "Starbucks", "Macy’s", "Holiday Inn Salem", "U.S. Bank ATM", "University of California Berkeley"

So, do get rid of the modifiers.

But ... I do not recommend linking both locations to the same page. If one is the corporate headquarters, then linking it to the homepage would be fine, but in a multi-location scenario, linking to a specific landing page of the website for each shop would be a more typical way to ensure that you are keeping your locations distinct and separate. And yes, the authority of these pages very likely does impact rankings.

Be sure the first thing on these pages is the complete name, address and phone number of the specific location. Be sure you are creating good, unique content for each of the pages, too.

The challenge you are up against with more than one business in the same city is that Google is unlikely to show more than one of the same business in a keyword search. A brand search is different. If someone just searches for 'Crescent City Vape', Google may well show both businesses in a 3 or 7 pack, but if the search is just for 'e-cigarettes in Crescent City' then Google is less likely to show any business more than once in a pack.

So, where this leaves you then is pinning your hopes on the fact that Google is getting more and more sensitive to the user as the centroid of search - meaning that Google is likely to show users (especially mobile users) the location of your business that is physically closest to them at the time they make their search. So, a user searching from his cell while in Uptown will be more likely to see the Uptown location on his phone (and possibly his desktop) while if he goes over to the lower garden district, Google is likely to show him that shop instead.

What this boils down to is that you need to optimize and promote both locations equally, and leave it up to Google to parse which user group gets shown which result. This is about as good as you can do. I would not make the locations part of the business name on the website - instead, I would include this in:

1. The content of the page

2. The description on your citations

3. Blog posts

4. Social outreach

5. Menu links pointing to these pages on your website, as in 'Visit our Uptown Location', 'Visit our Lower Garden District Location'.

Hope this helps!

Hi Jonathan,

The best way to start looking for duplicates is to go to Google Maps and type in current phone numbers and any past phone numbers to see if more than one listing surfaces for them.

It sounds like you are making major right steps in many areas. Bringing us back to the concept that these things take time. Once all potential negatives can be resolved, then there is only going forward with positives including content development, review acquisition, social outreach, link earning, etc. Your original thread from October dates the start of your cleanup to about 2 months ago. While everything is dependent on the competitiveness of a business' local market, you should begin to see positive outcomes at some point, but when that will be can't really be estimated. So basically, your path to success will look like this:

1. Resolve negatives

2. Build on-going postives

3. See results once Google catches onto the fact that there are no negatives and that a positive effort is being made on an on-going basis that is superior to the efforts of local competitors.

Pretty much all Local SEO campaigns follow this general pattern and, from your description of your efforts, it sounds like you are on the right track and just need to give things time.

*I will make one proviso to this. Let's say 6 months go by and you are still not seeing the client become a chief player in the results for their local market. If this was happening to me, I'd try to find someone more expert than myself to audit the site in case I've overlooked something I'm not trained to spot.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

You're welcome, Ruben. I hope the Help Team can help you get this sorted out.

Hey Tom,

Hope you're feeling better! Sadly, I was not at LocalU. Hope you have fun at the upcoming events.

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for your patience. I did get a chance to speak with my colleague - Nyagoslav Zhekov of NGSMarketing.com, and he feels that Google will be sophisticated enough to handle this issue, especially given that this is par for the course in your country. Likely Google handles this the way they do shopping malls here in the U.S. Just be sure your business name and phone number are unique to you, and cross your fingers that no problems arise.

Hi Dragonsearch,

Unfortunately, no. Moz Local has to be able to validate the business info you provide us with the business info we find either on the Google+ Local or Facebook local business page. If the pages can't be found or the name, address, phone and website on them don't identically match what you've entered in the Moz Local dashboard, we can't validate. You would need to access the Google+ Local or Facebook local business page, edit the data to match, see that your edits go live and then try to validate through our system.

Hope this clarifies how this works!

Hi Ron!

Thanks for letting me know you have some additional questions. Moz Local will help you get your data correct on these 7 partners:

Infogroup

Best of the Web

Localeze

Factual

Foursquare

Superpages

Acxiom

Any other platforms, you will need to manage manually.

Yes, you can absolutely use the city landing for each listing - you do not have to use the homepage. Hope this helps!

Hi Eric,

You are right to be wary of this tactic. Not only would you be creating duplicate content by replicating this statement from page to page, but you would also be going against Google's webmaster guidelines which state:

Keyword stuffing

"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

Examples of keyword stuffing include:

• Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
• Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for

(Bolded emphasis mine) See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

Unfortunately, if your client lacks the funding to develop unique content for each of his service cities, then he should not expect to rank for them. In days gone by, the client would have needed to pay for phone book ads that highlighted his service cities. Lacking funding, he would have been out of the running. These days, because of Google's bias towards unique, useful content, funding comes into play when it comes to content development.

Perhaps you can find a good solution for this client in the form of an on-going contract in which you develop 1-2 new pages or posts for him per month at a reasonable rate. By then end of 2014, he would have added 12-24 new pages of content to his website, covering his cities and many of his services. He needs to be convinced of the value of this investment, and if you start with just a few of the cities and he begins getting more phone calls, it's likely he will see that this is an essential investment that is going to pay for itself over time.

Hi Ruben,

That's right. Just sit back. You should expect fully updated status in about 8 weeks from your purchase date. Thanks for asking!

Thanks so much for saying so, Tom, and glad to hear you're feeling better. I don't travel much, so I don't have anything scheduled, but thanks for asking. Have a good weekend!

Hi Eric,

First, I need to make a small correction to my earlier statement. I meant to state that duplicating text across PAGES would = duplicate content. Footer content is excluded from this. Most websites have the same content in their footer from page to page. Sorry if what I wrote was misleading. So, duplicate content isn't the issue here, but...

While I agree that your devil's advocate argument contains horse sense in some ways, the footer is probably one of the most obvious places Google would look for spam. If Google goes out of their way to state that they don't want blocks of city names on a website, I think it's wise to take this at face value. And I think that, because footers are historic candidates for spamming, Google would be especially down on this type of content being placed there.

I may be a little bewildered by your client's goals. If they don't want to rank for their service cities, why include them anywhere on the website? And if the goal is to let visitors know the areas they serve, why not at least put that on the homepage of the website, shine a spotlight on it so it's totally clear? Make a custom map. Write a full description. Create unique pages and link to them from a top level menu.

Relegating this vital information to the footer, which many people won't even see, just doesn't make sense to me. The areas an SAB serves are critical data and should be highlighted in every way possible. When I develop websites for SABs, I create two main types of pages beyond the typical homepage, contact, about, etc.:

1. Service description pages (one for each service)

2. City landing pages (one for each major city served)

To me, these are the basics of any local business website, and I would be puzzled by a client who didn't 'get' this. I work primarily with small-to-medium local businesses, and I totally understand budget constraints, This is why creating a protracted timeline for getting all the necessary pages developed is often a good solution. To me, from what you've written, it sounds like your client may not have clear goals in mind in regards to how their website will serve them and their customers. Hopefully, as their marketer, you can help them create a plan that will take their website forward to becoming a true sales-generating asset. I hope these thoughts are helpful.

Hi Ruben,

So glad you've asked! Often, it's best to bring a concern like this to https://moz.com/help/contact but I'd like to answer this here in Q&A because its and FAQ for sure. There are typically 4 reasons why you may see fluctuations in the Check Listing tool:

1. One of the platforms has a bug on their side. For example, Localeze had a bug where searching for any names with multiple words turned up no results. It took them days to fix.

2. Some of our platforms change the layout of their page without proactively telling us, so we need to react to customer complaints to fix them. I believe Bing was an example here in the past.

3. It's also possible that the data we’re in the process of pushing from your paid Moz Local publishing dashboard has updated the listing, but somehow, one of the 7 supported partner sites is making it difficult to search for in their system. We are working with our partners to understand what's going on and making it more reliable. So, for example, you might see in the Moz Local publishing dash that a listing has officially updated, but Check Listing (which is a completely separate tool) may not yet show that update either because a platform has not yet pushed the data out or is making it difficult to find.

4. We do these queries in real time. Sometimes, engines can be slow and time out, and we're out of luck grabbing any data, so we assume it does not exist (thereby lowering the score).  We're making a change to differentiate between a missing listing and an API that's unavailable. We'll put as asterisk by the score and explain somewhere that the score is being impacted by unavailable partners.

We're really hoping that, in cases where an engine times out or an API is temporarily unavailable, the improvements we're working on making to the messaging customers receive will help reduce unnecessary worry. In most cases, your listings will simply reappear on their own, but if you suspect a bug because a listing stays incomplete for a long period, please do contact the Help Team,

Hope this helps!

Hi Ron!

While I won't try to sell you on Moz Local (hee hee) I will provide answers to two important questions you've asked.

1. Moz Local is used by both single location and multi-location businesses. We have lots of both types of customers using our product effectively. You can have just one Moz Local listing or hundreds of them - whatever your business needs.

2. Moz Local is not a ranking service. The main benefits of using Moz Local are:

• We help ensure that your data is correct on the 5 major US aggregators + 2 other important platforms. The concept here is that correct data upstream should help to generate correct data downstream, as illustrated by this infographic: http://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-us

• Moz Local will also help you close out duplicate listings on the 7 partners in our network.

• Finally, Moz Local will show you some data about your listings on 8 additional non-partner sites so that you can take manual action on inconsistent, incomplete or duplicate listings.

Now, granted, getting your listings complete and consistent should help with your local search rankings, but it's important for me to be clear that we do not monitor or guarantee search engine rankings in any way.

Hope this helps! Please, feel free to let me know if you have any further questions.

Hi Trevogre,

So glad to have you here in the forum. I'm not 100% sure I'm understand your initial question. You write:

So if I create a services areas page, with links to landing pages for each county/city that is serviced. And then I create the pages for each area, and leave the content blank but then pursue filling out the content. Is the absence of the content considered duplicate content? Would you get penalized for the essentially blank pages.

Why would you take the approach of creating blank pages to be filled out later? There is no benefit I can see in publishing blank pages. Don't create a page until you've got something to put on it. While I don't believe Google would see blank pages a duplicate content (simply because there would be no content on them), I do not recommend creating links in your navigation or pages to pages that don't yet exist. That could look spammy - like you're just putting up blank pages so that they can have service/city URLs/titles, but haven't bothered to put anything on them. So, I don't see why one would do this. Have I misunderstood what you're asking?

Regarding this:

Ultimately I think this leads to poor organic search results, because the ability to determine the quality of a small business has nothing to do with its location

It's important to understand that the local and organic algorithms are separate. Local rankings are those that appear in the local packs of results. They are determined by a combination of factors including geography and authority. Location, as a ranking factor, is only relevant to local businesses...not virtual businesses. I totally agree with you that location has nothing to do with quality, but this should only concern true local business models - not businesses that aren't physically based.

I feel like I may be failing to comprehend your exact concerns here ... do you feel that local businesses located outside the borders of neighboring cities are being dealt an unfair hand? Or is it something else? Please, feel free to provide further clarification!

Hi SEOSarah!

If you sign up for Moz Local, we will push your data out to these 7 supported partner sites:

Infogroup

Best of the Web

Factual

Foursquare

Superpages

Acxiom

Neustar/Localeze

Any platform not on the above list, you would need to manage manually. Moz Local will either create or update your existing listings on any of the above so that they are consistent and fully filled out. We will not create duplicate listings.You cannot pick and choose which of the above 7 we would push to, but as we don't create duplicates, this shouldn't cause any problems for you.

The one exception I should mention is that if your are already having a listing managed elsewhere (such as with Localeze) we cannot take over management of it. In some cases, customers close out such listings so that we can bring them into the convenient one-stop management of the Moz Local publishing dashboard, but if you'd prefer to leave management as-is for these pre-managed listings, that's totally fine, too!

In order for us to validate your listings, you will need to have a verified, accurate Google+ Local page or Facebook local business page for each of your unique locations that you'd like to list.

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

Hi Ron,

It's perfectly fine to run your business out of your home. No danger of being banned for this. Just be sure you are obeying Google's guidelines regarding how your address is displayed based on your business model:

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

The local community involvement is an excellent jumping off point for this. Totally agree!

Regarding evergreen vs. fresh content ... as we know, Google does love frequently updated pages, so where possible, that's a great way to go, but having a static, unique page is definitely an excellent start! Go for it!

Hi SEOSarah,

There are no limits! Add as many locations as you like - and the nice thing is that you can enter them all in one .CSV file and you'll be able to manage them all from a single dashboard. Pretty nifty:)

Hey Scott,

That's a tough problem, but removing the phone number would not be a good solution as it is one of the 4 core pieces of NAP+W data that Google and customers need to see about any local business. I wouldn't trust a business with no listed phone number and expect most customers would feel the same about this.

I like Bryan's common sense suggestions on this. What I would like to add is that your thread has made me curious as to what it is about the client's business that is making it so confusing to customers that they need a 15 minute explanation before they understand the business model. Maybe the very best thing to do here would be for you to coach the client into whittling that down to a 4-5 sentence explanation that takes less than 1 minute to explain. Think along the lines of an elevator pitch. No business should require a 15 minute explanation, if we're just covering the basics.

Likely, what the client is experiencing is that it's necessary to then move forward from the basic explanation to the conversation that leads to discovering the fitness of a prospect and then closing a deal. While there is no way to avoid putting in this time, again, it comes down how the conversation is managed. I am thinking back to my own early days when I found it frustrating that I would spend a great deal of time listening to customer's issues and explaining my service, only to discover many minutes into the conversation that their budget did not match my fees. What I eventually learned from this was to mention my rates within the first couple minutes of the conversation. At that point, I would either hear,

"Oh, I can't afford that."

or

"That sounds reasonable."

This helped me determine whether a further investment of my time in the discussion was appropriate. It may be that your client is struggling with something like this and needs to refine her communications so that she can tell the difference between a good match and a poor one within a couple of minutes of answering her phone.

One other suggestion ... have the client answer the phone and then put the customer on hold for 30 seconds. In that 30 seconds, run an automated on-hold message with music and voice disclosing the key components of the pitch. By the time the owner then takes the customer off hold, they will have heard the basics.

Hi Trevogre,

Thanks for the further details. My advice is not to create blank pages on your website, regardless of nofollow. Similarly, my advice is not to create pages with nothing more than a form and call to action on them. If I saw a website with 10 pages on it consisting of nothing but a form and a call to action, I would consider that to be of low quality, regardless of nofollow.

Regarding Google's search results, unfortunately, our personal beliefs about what makes a high quality result do not always match Google's beliefs. I get what you are saying about making queries with the hope of being returned the highest quality page, regardless of location. The problem is, if Google doesn't understand your intent, they will show you things you weren't looking for. There isn't really any way for you, on your own, to influence Google's  take on quality and relevance, apart from the fact that Google may personalize results for you based on your past search habits. So, I do get where you're coming from on this. There just isn't really anything I know of that you can do about it. Hope this helps!

Hi RustMedia!

When you submit your listing, Moz Local attempts to validate it against both the Google+ Local page and Facebook Place page. If we can only find one of these, then that it the only one we will reference if errors/issues occur. If, in the present instance, you know that your Google+ Local listing is wrong and we are not referencing that we are finding a Facebook Place page, then this may be caused by a variety of issues, including:

1. The Facebook listing is of the wrong type. It must be a Facebook Place (not a social page).

2. There may be some setting on the Facebook page that is preventing us from seeing it, like an age restriction setting or something along those lines.

3. The Facebook page is too new for us to see it.

Those are some common reasons. If you would like private troubleshooting of your issue, please start a Help ticket at:

https://moz.com/help/contact

Choose 'Account' as your topic.

Hope this helps!

Hi Kanya!

Local SEO and local rankings are meant for businesses that make in-person contact with their customers. This generally does not apply to e-commerce companies, most of which operate virtually. So, whether you use a P.O. box or not may be a bit of a moot point here. If the customer DOES make face-to-face contact and does want to rank locally, he cannot use a P.O. box on most citation platforms - it won't be accepted. He would need a real physical address.

Regarding adding cities and states to the site, of course, he should explain which places he ships to, but if like most businesses he ships to the 48 states or something like that, then this really isn't a reason to create unique content, as presumably the shipping process is the same for all customers. Don't just add a list of states or cities for the sake of SEO. Google frowns on such practices.

Likely, if the client makes no personal contact with his customers, organic SEO is going to be where you need to put focus - not Local SEO. Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Hi Dave,

Unfortunately, I find Google's KP tool to be next to useless unless the client is in a really major city. Basically, we're back to the old advice of researching keywords and adding geography through common sense. If anyone has a different take on this, please let me know, but local keyword research has never been very satisfactory and Google seems to return zeros or unbelievably low numbers for most US towns.

Hey There!

I'm glad you've asked about this. From your description, it sounds to me like you may not actually be running the 'right' type of Facebook page for the businesses in question. Moz Local validates against Facebook Place pages only - not social/brand-type pages. In order for validation to succeed, you would need to have a unique Facebook Place for each of business locations. Facebook Place pages can typically be identified by the fact that they have:

• Reviews

• A map

• Complete name, address, phone number, website

• Visits (not just likes)

If you discover that you need to change the type of Facebook page for a business, you can investigate this directly with Facebook by going to:

https://www.facebook.com/help/343548832389235/

Click on the heading ‘How do I add a map or address to my page?’ to see Facebook’s guidelines for changing the type of page.

Alternatively, we can validate against a Google+ Local/Google My Business page, instead of Facebook, but likewise, each location will need to have a unique page, and the pages must be postcard-verified with Google in order for us to see them.

Hope this helps. If you need further assistance, please don't hesitate to ask. If you need to show me the Facebook page in question, and don't want to post it publicly, you can PM me. You can also start a ticket at our Help Hub for private assistance.

Hi Ruben,

Back in the mid-2000s, I knew of 4-5 sites like this. I haven't thought of this in a bit and when I went to look for them, most of them no longer exist. Outside.in still seems to exist, but I'm trying city and state searches in it (which used to work) and am coming up with 404 errors. You might try playing around with it a bit, though. Actually, it looks like the site may have been taken over by http://patch.com/

I also know of this network of bloggers located in the South (http://southernblogsociety.com/) but I believe the topics are confined to lifestyle blogging, so I'm not sure if that's relevant to your industry.

Hi Corey,

For SABs like your client, a typical marketing strategy is going to involve:

1. Citation building for their physical location (whether manually or more conveniently through a product like Moz Local

2. Other efforts (like content development) for their service cities where they have no physical presence.

So, you'll want to do both. Moz Local will help your client get solid citations built for their physical location (which is really important, of course!) but you'll need to then employ other strategies to earn visibility for their non-physical-location cities.

Hope that makes sense!

Hi Kanya,

That's right - if the company is not local, having a P.O. box where they receive mail is totally fine. No worries about that.

You're welcome!  I think the most influential resource you can share with the client will be the 2014 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, which is based on data provided by some of the top Local SEOs in the world.

The #1 negative ranking factor in the most recent survey is:

Listing detected at false business location.

See: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

By intentionally falsifying part of their location information, your client is putting their business at the #1 risk - if this statistic doesn't convince them, they may be a client you'll want to part company with.

The other piece of data I would give this client is that, because many of the major local business aggregators rely on USPS to standardize addresses, the use of a false zip code is likely to be auto-corrected by some or all of them at some point, creating NAP inconsistency. Google will then pool knowledge about this NAP confusion around the web, and this takes us to negative ranking factors 3, 4 and 5 in LSRF 2014. So - uh-oh, the business is running the risks inherent in 4 of 5 top negative ranking factors. That's about as drastic as it gets.

Moreover, messing up their zip code could be driving their legitimate clients away. If I'm looking for tacos in zip code 32201 and this is the location of your client's taco shop, but Google no longer trusts that it's located in that zip code, I'll be going to a competitor's taco shop with correct NAP because consistency has allowed it to outrank the business with the mismatching NAP. There's just no good reason for a brick-and-mortar business to do this to themselves. Hope you can help him see the light on this one. If not, I'd personally walk away.

Hi Calico:)

Of the 7 partners in our network, Foursquare is the one that requires that you take an extra step, via the Moz Local dashboard, of authenticating the listing. You would do so by clicking the 'Foursquare Authentication' tab in the left navigation menu of the Moz Local dashboard and the following the steps from there. Is this what you did, or are you saying that you did something else? Please let me know!

Hey Brett!

There are some nuances to this I want to be sure I'm understanding.

1. How many physical locations do you have? Are you saying that you have 1 physical location from which you are serving all of those states, or do you have physical locations in each of the states?

2. Are you meeting face-to-face with your customers in each of these states, either at your office or at their homes/businesses?

Please, answer these 2 questions as fully as possible.

Regarding instances in which Google does not show local results for a given query, this is based on their internal interpretation of what is most relevant. Google makes a decision about whether a searcher's intent is local or not, and also, they determine whether there is enough relevant local data to show on a given query. No one (but Google) knows all of the ins and outs of these decisions, but it's not something you can really influence. The important thing is to recognize whether Google is showing local or organic results for your core queries and then do everything you can to become dominant in those results, either via local or traditional marketing methods. Remember, too, that results are personalized - so you searching from Hawaii are not seeing the same results that your customer is searching from California

I'll look forward to your replies on questions 1 & 2.

Hi There!

I just responded over on your other thread, but wanted to include think link for you to a thread I started when Google announced their doorway pages update:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-google-s-doorway-pages-update-affects-local-seo

I hope you'll find that helpful!

Hi Scott!

The best way to differentiate practitioners in the multi-practitioner scenario is to aim for as many of these as you can:

1. Put only the doctor's name in the business title. So, Dr. John Johnson - not Dr. John Johnson, Greentree Dental

2. If possible, list a unique phone number for each doctor/dentist at which he/she is directly contactable. I know this isn't always possible, but if it is, it can reduce the risk of merging.

3. Do not share Google My Business categories between the practitioners. If possible, divide the chosen categories between the practitioners.

4. Set up a unique landing page on the website for each practitioner and point the Google+ Local page to it, instead of pointing them all to the homepage. Be sure the complete contact info for the practitioner is on this page and the content is unique.

5. Write a unique Google+ Local description for each practitioner.

All of these precautions can help reduce the chances of accidental merges and duplications.

Hope this helps!

Hi Nick,

Your citations should all list the same URL if you are dealing with a single physical address. Citations may or may not act as followed links for your business, so in building them, earning links is not really the primary goal. Rather, you are building citations to be sure your local business' name, address, phone number and website are consistently distributed across a wide variety of local business platforms.

Hi Kris!

Moz Local pushes to the 5 major US aggregators + 2 other important platforms. The complete list of our 7 partners is:

Infogroup

Localeze

Best of the Web

Superpages

Factual

Foursquare

Acxiom

As others have mentioned, Yelp is not currently one of our partners, so that would be a listing you'd want to manage manually.

Moz Local provides a little bit of a different service than Yext, by updating the core data aggregators that the primary local search engines rely on for their baseline data.

Please, let me know if I can answer any further questions for you!

Hi Thomas!

The key here is to separate your brand from your locations in your mind. Your brand is the same, regardless of how many locations you have (just Whole Foods - not Whole Foods Chicago, Whole Foods Boston, right?). So, you'll want to:

1. Use just the brand name on all citations with no extra geographic descriptors in it

2. Have a unique page on the site for each physical location you own

3. Link your citations to their respective page on the site

Regarding Google brand and local pages, if you only have a single location, Google lets you do this: http://localu.org/blog/google-now-allows-brand-pages-become-local-pages/ but not if you have multiple locations.

This article will be the best to read on this topic:

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

Not sure what you mean about the publisher tag.

Hi There!

We'd likely need to see your exact example to make guesses on this one. Happy to take a look if you're able to share your brand name and location keyword.

Hi Muskrat & Tiffeny,

Thanks for bringing this up. Our category recommendations should be taken as a general guide, particularly in regards to Google. Google's guidelines specifically state that they want you to use the fewest possible categories (see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en). So, important to remember here that the Moz Local score is not as important as the accuracy and guideline compliance of your actual business listings. Right now, we have a category minimum of just 3 categories set for Google, so if you've added that many, it's just a matter of waiting for Google to push that data out so that our tool can pick it up and reflect it, improving your score.

Hope this helps!

Good discussion going on here, and agree with Ryan 100% about informing the business owner of the risks he is taking and, if you choose to continue serving this business, structuring the contract so that you are not responsible for negative outcomes.

One of the major risks I would discuss with the client is this, at least the way I am understanding what you've described.

1. The business had a site and built citations for it at location A.

2. The business then had you build a second site covering locations A and B and wants you to build citations for business B.

If this is correct, the trouble is that the business now has TWO websites representing the location of Business A and this is pretty much guaranteed to cause holy heck on Google's end. Google wants to find a single authoritative website representing each physical location (each Google+ Local page). Finding 2 authoritative websites representing location A is going to cause confusion and could water down the authority this client has built for business A, decreasing the benefits he's earned. The client needs to hear this.

Ideally what should be happening here is that:

A) The customer fully separates out his two businesses, legally. He runs 2 different companies out of 2 different offices with no connection between them. He runs 2 different websites and supports them with 2 unique citation sets. This would be the above-board, risk-free approach.

B) If the customer will not do this, then I agree that he is making a poor choice in trying to make a single company seem like 2 different businesses, doubtless for SEO purposes. I see trouble ahead for the business if this is their approach to marketing. It's possible that you could continue to work on the site you built, removing ALL references to the location of business A and only building citations for location B, but without knowing all of the nuances of this, it seems pretty iffy to me.

I totally sympathize with the pickle you're in on this, not having realized what the company was doing before you developed their new website. You could choose to walk away from the contract if you are not comfortable moving forward. I'd personally be tempted to do so, if the client refused to act on my marketing advice regarding this. At the very least, the one thing you have learned from this is to structure into your initial client discovery form questions regarding all sites they currently own. This is a hard way to learn this - but an important lesson, for sure.

Hi C2G,

Is the legal business name, street address and local area code phone number for the law firm COMPLETELY distinct from that of the insurance business? I ask this question because Google does not permit the creation of additional Place Pages for specialties within a given business. For example, a company that washes windows cannot have a separate Place Page for their gutter cleaning services. This is only allowed if the 2 things are separate legal business with separate offices and phone numbers. I thought it was important to jump in here and ask this vital question.