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Hi Danny!
If you're are saying you are listing this in Moz Local as 2 distinct listings, then they can each have their own hours of operation, but if you are saying there is only 1 Moz Local listing representing both the lobby and the drive-thru, Moz Local can only accept and push out one set of hours per listing. How are you handing this on your Google My Business listing?
Hi There!
So, local rankings are mainly based on the physical location of your business. Are you talking about a local business or are you maybe talking about a virtual directory? If the former, then it is important to use your city terms in your optimization, whether this is items in a navigation menu, wording in a URL, title tags or main body copy. But, if the latter, and the business is a directory without a physical location, then it will not be eligible to rank in the local results.
Please, feel free to provide further details if I'm not quite catching your meaning here. Glad to keep chatting!
Good morning!
Please reach out directly to our Moz Local support staff at help@moz.com
They'll be able to look at your account and offer you customized assistance 
Google prefers local phone numbers that connect directly to the place of business, but in recent times, they have allowed toll free numbers into their system. You can read the guidelines here:
@jgoethert That is a huge change for your business, if you are not only rebranding but also losing your website. Sterling Sky has a good checklist for rebrands here: https://www.sterlingsky.ca/rebranding-your-business-checklist/
I am curious regarding the role of the website in this. If the GBP (formerly GMB) listing is going to be pointed to the new owner's website, it will be their domain authority which underpins the listing's rankings. If, however they are going to continue pointing the listing toward the downgraded old website, that's a big problem. If that's the case, you will want to be sure that permanent redirects are being put in place to pass as much ranking power as possible from the old pages to the remaining home page. The company should definitely be investigating all of their SEO options to protect the strength of the brand they've acquired, insomuch as it can support the visibility of the overall new brand.
Hi Catherine,
Please don't worry that you seemed over-anxious. Being safe is so important, and I'm so glad if I was able to help a little. Wishing you well!
Nice feedback here. The one thing you've asked about that I don't believe I've seen addressed is your question regarding having geographic modifiers in your business name. You are correct - Google does not want these, unless they are part of your legal business name or DBA.
This was a bit of a goofy situation. Originally, Google's guidelines expressly forbid the use of anything but the legal business name or DBA in the business title. Then, in the fall of 2013, they suddenly changed their policy on this, permitting business owners to add descriptors. So, at that point, lots of business owners jumped on this and added city names and other descriptors. A little over a year later, Google reversed their policy, returning to their original stance on this in which they do not want city names, state names, etc. in the business title unless they are part of the real-world business name.
You can read the guidelines here, under Name: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en
Hi Scott,
I have seen a similar, but not identical, issue reported numerous times in the Google Places Help Forum, in which a branch office is outranking the main headquarters of the business in Google. See threads like this one:
Basically, when this comes up, the advice typically given is that there is no way to force the search engine to choose one location over another, and that the only thing the owner can do is to work on building the authority of the main location in hopes that Google will catch on.
Your situation is different in 3 important ways:
1. You're talking about Bing, not Google.
2. You're dealing with a broken contract and apparently don't have control over the branch office.
3. Your assessment is that the authority of the main office already far surpasses that of the branch office.
Unfortunately, I don't have an easy answer for you here, but I do have a suggestion. I recommend that you try Bing's support chat to see if you can talk to a live person about the issue:
You need to be able to share the actual details of the business - not use stand-ins - of course. Without the real data, no one will be able to assess what is going on, so hopefully, you have the permission of the client to share their info with something like a live chat. I'd be very interested to hear what the rep tells you.
If you don't get anywhere with this, I would recommend hiring a heavy hitting SEO, with whom you can share full details, to help you audit the situation. Someone who is highly experienced with Bing and Local would be my pick, but this may not be easy to find, as Local is so Google-centric, because of Google's dominance.
I hope I've given you at least a starting point here.
Hi Again,
I showed your image to a few very good Local SEOs and no one had ever seen anything like it before. Maybe some type of radius function. Maybe Google is testing something.
Update: I stand corrected. Someone I spoke to says they have seen this in the Google My Business dashboard and that it was called 'hit radius'. It might have been something showing where most calls or traffic were coming from. I guess it's not a well-known feature whatever it is! Might be worth it to take it to the Google and Your Business Forum and see if you can get more info on this from a TC there.
Hi DentalDesign,
Can you provide further clarification as to what you mean by 'struggling for rankings'? Does this mean the client has lost rankings or is struggling to achieve the high rankings they would like to earn?
As a rule of thumb, high local rankings hinge on -
1. Physical location in city of search
2. A lack of violations of Google's guidelines
3. Consistency of NAP (name, address, phone) across all citations
4. A perfectly optimized website
5. Quality and authority of that site
6. Review acquisition
7. Traditional SEO factors
8. Activities of competitors
Local Search Ranking factors 2013 goes into awesome detail regarding the most important positive and negative ranking factors. It's an amazing resource: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
Hi Andre!
I wish I knew more about Local SEO in Germany, but your screenshot looks like the new-ish 3-Pack that Google rolled out in the US last winter to replace their Carousel results. See coverage of this here:
http://searchengineland.com/google-axes-carousel-new-local-3-pack-208710
For hotels, restaurants and other hospitality/entertainment searches, Google had rolled out the Carousel in the summer of 2013, but this has been replaced by these results. Naming conventions have been kind of scattered. You'll hear terms like 3-pack, snack pack, local stack, hamburger pack. I think it's just easiest to call it a 3-pack. I'm not sure when these 3-packs rolled out in Germany, but this is likely what you are seeing. The upshot is that it has just become harder than ever to compete when Google is only awarding pack status to only 3 businesses!
Hi Oren,
Thanks for the great explanation. So, let me try to sum up the options I see.
Option 1: Legal firm with physical offices in Delaware and California
In this case, the firm can have a Google+ Local page for each physical office, linking to a website landing page for each physical office. Be sure, of course, that each physical office has a unique local phone number. In this scenario, the client has good hope of showing up in the local results for the cities in California and Delaware in which they are are physically located.
Option 2: Legal firm in with an office California that will send attorneys to Delaware to serve clients
In this case, the legal firm can have a Google+ Local page for their California, but not one for Delaware if they don't have a physical office in the latter state. They can, however, build content on their website to reflect the work they do in Delaware cities. In this scenario, the firm has a good chance of showing up in the local results for their California city, but not their Delaware ones. Instead, they must aim for organic visibility for their work in Delaware, and if we're dealing with the legal practice, this can be tough because there are likely to be a ton of lawyer in almost any major city. So, it's possible but very difficult to achieve good organic visibility with this content.
Hopefully, I've covered the two scenarios that might apply to your client. It pretty much all comes down to the cities in which one is physically located dictating in which cities one ranks locally.
Hi Nathan,
I recommend going with USPS version. I use SmartyStreets.com to look these up. Also, recommend you check out Nyagoslav Zhekov's recent post on acceptable NAP:
http://www.whitespark.ca/acceptable-google-maps-nap-abbreviations-and-variations
Hi Patrick,
I'll just reel off some suggestions here for best practices.
Yes, do be sure there is a unique landing page for each practice
Link to them visibly from the top level menu as well as from the text of the home page
Be sure the first thing on these 3 landing pages is the complete business NAP, encoded in Schema
Be sure the content on these pages is unique and make it as helpful and awesome as you can
Build a unique Google+ Local page for each of the 3 physical locations
Build a set of citations for each of the 3 physical locations
Create a content development strategy so that the doctors, or a designated company blogger, can continue to publish local-specific copy over time
Implement a review acquisition strategy so that all 3 locations are earning reviews
All of these are sound techniques for establishing good local rankings for the client. Hope this helps!
Hi Bob,
I think Patrick is on the right track with this. If you have a legitimate connection to these other companies, it won't hurt you to be internationally listed. What I can't say is whether it will help you, but I don't feel that it will hurt you in any way.
Great to hear, Patrick! Good luck at your next meeting with the client. You might want to check out Get5Stars as this makes review acquisition easier and actually kind of exciting for the business owner!
Hi Vernon!
Good questions! There are 2 really important facts to understand regarding marketing service area businesses (SABs):
Google is highly biased toward physical location and sees each business as most relevant to its physical location. Unfortunately, this puts SABs in kind of a weird position because, in the real world, they are equally relevant to every city they travel to in order to serve customers ... but Google doesn't see it this way. When we want to be visible in Google's local and organic results, we must perforce play by Google's rules. (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en)
Representing your location data accurately is a must. Do not ever attempt to be appear to be physically located any place that you aren't. Per Google's rules, you should only build 1 Google+ Local page per physical location and whatever town that office is located in will be the one for which you have the best hope of ranking in the local pack results. With few exceptions, for any city you serve but for which you lack a physical address, your best hopes will be to gain organic, rather than local, rankings. Unless you are in a rural area or a very niche profession, you are unlikely to rank in the local packs for any city in which you lack a physical location. This is the reality for all SABs.
So, the local search marketing strategy for SABs generally looks like this:
Create a unique landing page on your website for each of the major cities you serve. Make these pages of the highest possible quality you can. The goal here is to hope for some organic visibility for these pages. You can read all about city landing pages here: https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
Create a Google+ Local page for each city in which you have a legitimate physical office. Be sure your Google+ Local pages are in complete compliance with the Google guidelines linked to above. The goal here is to gain local pack visibility for your physical location cities.
If the combination of efforts in steps 1 and 2 fail to get you good visibility for any city that's really important to you, the only alternative is to pay for advertising via Google's Adwords program, creating a campaign that helps your ad to show up for chosen cities.
Regarding Moz Local, our service will help push out your physical location data to our partner network, helping you get your data consistent on the 5 major local business data aggregators and 2 other important sites. We draw from and validate against the data we find on your Google+ Local pages and Facebook Place listings. Having consistent citations is a major component of achieving high local rankings, but this will all fall under the same heading as Google's guidelines: local rankings for physical locations only.
Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions about this!
Hi Chris,
It's really important to understand that Local Search is city-based, not state-based. Local SEO revolves around optimizing core pages of the website and the footer with your complete NAP (name, address, phone number) of your physical location, building a Google+ Local page for that city of location, building citations on various directories for that city of location and earning reviews on them, plus any links and social mentions you can earn.
For any city in which you serve but are not physically located, it's a best practice to build city landing pages on the website with totally unique content on them. These will not typically achieve local pack rankings, because there is no physical address tied to them, but they can achieve organic rankings for searches pertaining to these other cities.
So, if you are taking a Local SEO approach to your marketing, and let's say you're physically located in Denver, then your core pages and NAP and citations and reviews will all need to reflect the Denver location. Your title tags and content on these pages will be most geared toward Denver. Your city landings pages for cities where you aren't physically located can then reflect other cities like Boulder, Aspen, Colorado Springs, etc.
Typically, even if you serve statewide, you're not going to build a landing page for every single city in the state. I mean ... technically, you could do this, but it would be vast project. So, in general, what you'd want to do is to identify maybe 10 major cities in which you serve and build a unique landing page for each.
Then, I would recommend setting up a blog on your website and when you build a barn in another city, writing a blog post about this. If you build 50 barns a year, that's 50 blog posts and 50 chances for Google to see that you've got unique content on the website featuring your work in this variety of cities. You can add to the static city landing pages over time, too, and you can be sure that the homepage and contact page of the website reflects that you will travel anywhere within the state of Colorado to serve, but tackling the whole state at once is likely to be too big of an SEO project for any business. Taking the work in steps and stages will enable you to build great content that is highly relevant to people searching from the various cities in Colorado for the services you provide.
Hope this helps!
Hi There -
Here's what I see when I do your 2 main searches, "nail salon pigeon forge tn" and "nail salon sevierville tn". You are ranking organically on the 1st page of Google for both terms but are excluded from the 7-pack. From what you've described, it sound like you may have violated Google's guidelines by having more than one verified Google+ Local page for each location. If you local rankings disappeared after you claimed more than 1 listing for each location, then this is likely what has caused you to disappear from the packs. This is sometimes referred to as a 'disconnected' listing - when you rank well organically but not in the packs.
What steps have you taken since then? Do you still have multiple listings for the same location in your Google My Business dashboard? Have you taken steps to close them, as described here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/4569146?hl=en . Have you tried contacting Google directly to ask about this? You can do so via the Contact Us link here: https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639
Hi William,
I'll start by linking to my troubleshooting post from last week here on Moz, in case you've not seen it:
http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures
It sounds like you have already done a ton of investigation, but it might be a good idea to go through that post to be certain that you've not overlooked something.
My bet is that there is a nagging issue underlying this. Without actually seeing the listing, it's not possible for me to diagnose what is going on, but I've run into situations like this before where there was an explanation just barely hidden from plain view. Something like a hidden merged dupe or a business centroid issue. Takes digging, but if you can find it, you can fix it.
That's really interesting regarding your client, William. Too early to say if there's a connection there, but it would be cool if you could find other similar examples in your client pool. Now, common sense would say that if Google is downgrading the visibility of third party reviews, this could indicated that they are placing less trust in them, and perhaps, relying more on a Google-centric representation of user sentiment, but there is nothing to confirm this, at this point. Third party reviews have long been considered an important ranking factor, so it would surprise me to see their value totally vanish in that regard. And, of course, review diversity is important for more than just rankings. I think it will be some time before we understand the shakedown from this small but significant move on Google's part.
I'd be glad to hear any theories about this from the community!
Hi Christian,
Thanks for the clarification. Without actually being able to review the specific site, my bet would be that you're dealing with a basic issue of keyword prominence. How your website is optimized and how links/citations pointing to it reference the business is likely the cause of what you're experiencing. Google feels your business is more relevant to 'city + service' than to 'service + city' because of how the business is being presented and referenced. You might want to go through the website and evaluate how things like your title tags and internal linking are optimized, as well as looking at the anchor text of inbound links pointing to the website. Chances are, this has something to do with it, and it's not at all uncommon for a business to rank differently for different variations of their keywords. Hope this helps!
Hi Neil!
Not a silly question at all. In the past couple of years, what has become a dominant force in local results is typically referred to as the user-as-centroid. What this means is that results vary based on the physical location of the searcher at the moment he makes his search. The affects both desktop and mobile local results, and is especially sensitive on mobile, wherein a searcher at one end of town looking for a pizza is going to see different results than if he drives across town and searches again.
So, the user-as-centroid phenomenon is playing a major role in results being personalized to the searcher, and beyond this, things like past search behavior contribute as well to my results being different than the results my clients see when they do the same searches.
Hi Alex,
Regarding testimonials - no, I am not referencing testimonials from websites. I'm talking about getting written testimonials from your customers (either on paper or via email) and uploading them yourself using Schema review markup to the respective city landing page on your own website. These on-page testimonials can be a powerful way to add unique content to your city landings pages, and they also sometimes show up in the SERPs with stars (though Google's display of this keeps changing).
As to why Google is showing you results for a city 30 miles away when you're not adding a geo-modifier, I'm not sure. Could it be that there is something about that city that is particularly relevant, or, could your location possibly be set to this city in Google, causing Google to show you results for that city? Have you tried checking from other computers located in your town? Clearly, you're doing pretty well for your own local city, and this is where you can expect to rank in the local pack (not in a city where you're not physically located) so if pursuing rankings in other cities is important, they will almost certainly have to be organic rankings, not local ones.
Hi J.P.
As Dennis and Donna have suggested, sharing further details of this will help the community look further into your question. If you are unable to share the client's details, that perfectly fine, but it will limit the amount of support the community can give.
Hi Christian,
You're receiving some great feedback here. I'll add my 2 cents.
If the businesses are operating out of the same physical location and share a phone number, than presenting this as a single business would be most appropriate. Once you've merged all of the content onto a single URL, do citation cleanup to be sure that your name, address, phone and website are all consistent across all mentions on the web.
The alternative is to get completely separate addresses and phone numbers for each business and run them without any connection between the two. Whether you go this route depends on whether you feel the market warrants it. Just remember, if you this way, there must be nothing shared between the 2 businesses - not contact data, content, links, etc. And, you'll want to be building out two totally separate sets of citations for each business, being sure the data isn't mixed up anywhere.
Hope this helps!
Sure, Pete. One thing ... obviously, we've had a shift in emphasis toward the user-as-centroid vs. the industry centroids mentioned in the above blog post. Thought I should mention.
Hi Christian,
If you're going with separate branding - no. Absolutely every asset must be separate to avoid confusion. You must approach this as two unrelated companies if you choose to run two companies instead of one.
Hi J.P.,
You are correct that city centroids were once considered a strong ranking factor. This was then edged out by the concept of industry centroids, but this in turn has given way largely to the concept of user centroids. Recommend you read the history of the centroid here:
https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid
My answer beyond this is in two parts:
To discover whether your client can move up in the local pack rankings you must a) audit her business and b) do competitive analysis to discover if any competitors can be surpassed. Your audit of your client's marketing should include an assessment of their website, citations, reviews and social engagement.
Whether this will lead to your client appearing in black text at a lower resolution of the map is not known. I have never seen a thorough study of how Google determines which locations show at the lowest resolutions there, so this would be something you'd want to be sure you weren't promising to the client. In our sample 'newport beach plastic surgeon' the only 2 businesses receiving this treatment at the automatic zoom level are those ranking top 2 in the maps pack, but whether this is the case for every such search, I honestly don't know. If you could get your client to be #1 or #2, perhaps this would lead to them replacing one of the 2 businesses in black text, but I am not 100% sure of that and would need to look at a larger data set to begin drawing such a conclusion. Interesting topic!
Of course, the ideal is always to get the client as high in the local pack rankings/maps pack rankings as possible, but the difficulty in achieving this relates directly to how tough/strong his unique competitors are and how much motivation/funding your client has to make efforts to move up. And, these days, it's really important to bring into the discussion the fact that your client's customers are not likely to see the same rankings that he does or that you do, given the user-as-centroid phenomenon. Sometimes, in a really competitive field, going after hyperlocal or long tail keywords may enable them to earn traffic that they simply can't get from the main searches because the field is already too crowded with strong competitors.
Hope these are helpful thoughts.
This is a real toughie! If this is a local business, then I'm guessing that you are concerned about the ramifications of getting a new phone number and then having two numbers associated with your core business NAP (name, address, phone). You would be right to be concerned about this, as no local business should have more than one local phone number floating around the citation ecosystem. This is just Local SEO 101. Horse sense would indicate keeping your original number ... but ... I do feel concerned about the negative effects of having that number on a hacked website that may/may not also contain other references to parts of your business NAP, too.
I'm trying to weigh this on a risk/benefit scale. Without fully understanding all of the details of what is present on the hacked site, it's hard to give good advice here. What I will do is call on one of our traditional SEO experts to chime in here regarding the negative impact of your number being listed on a hacked site that used to belong to you. If this was some third party site, like a business directory, and it got hacked, I don't believe Google would fault you for having been listed there, provided all of your other citations were in good, consistent shape. But we're not talking about a third party site; we're talking about a website which I'm guessing features content about your business on it, right? So, things become grey here.
And, the confusion also stretches into the alternative solution of starting with a completely new number and cleaning up all of your citations to reflect this new number. If there is content about your business, your business name, phone number or address on the hacked website, and you can't clean it up, then this means that it will be acting as a bad citation for whatever new you're trying to build. Again, if this was a single third party directory you just couldn't clean up, I wouldn't be that worried. Provided most of your citations are consistent, you're generally okay. But this is a website that belonged to you - presumably perceived as being authoritative about your business.
So, I guess I'm a bit stumped. Let's see what one of our traditional SEOs will say!
Hi Jag,
Are you able to share the URLs for the 2 Google+ Local pages here? It would help to be able to to see them directly.
Hi Everworld,
I'm going to address this purely from a Local SEO perspective. The main issue here is that having more than one website for the same business can lead to NAP+W consistency issues and big confusion for Google. I'll explain this.
As Google crawls the web, what they 'want' to find, in order to be clear about the data they have about your business, is multiple references to your business' name, address, phone number and website address. If we put ourselves in the bots' shoes, let's say we find a listing for your business at YP.com with your name, address and phone number being associated with domain number one. A-okay. But then we go to Yelp and find your name, address and phone number being associated with domain number two. Which of these two references are we, as the bots, supposed to believe?
So, the problem is that you are creating confusion for Google, and, it's vital to mention, probably for your customers, too. You are also creating confusion for any of the major players in the Local Search Ecosystem which draw data from various sources and distribute it to other sources. The fact that the two domains are so similar may even be adding further murkiness to the scenario for the various entities.
When Google becomes confused about your NAP, it is believed that various problems can result, including ranking failures, because of Google's lack of trust in the data they've gathered about your business.
Because of this, I almost never recommend a multi-site approach to any local business. With a few exceptions, it's simply a better idea to build a single, authoritative website for your brand and link all of your various assets to it. If you find it absolutely necessary to keep two websites, my advice is as follows:
Do not put any part of your NAP in crawlable text on the second domain. No name, address or phone number.
Do not link to this second domain from any other property, including your own website, your citations, offsite content or anything else in any way that associates this second website with any part of your business NAP
Do not duplicate any content of any kind between the two websites.
When you look at this list of provisos, it may become even clearer why having two websites just isn't of much benefit. I'm not sure I'm understanding what you've explained about having one of the websites due to considerations about Google+. Could you not just own that second domain and 301 redirect it to your authoritative domain, without having a second website? Just a thought. I hope this is helpful!
Hi Jolie!
Thanks for posting a good question. Moz Local guarantees your data on 7 specific platforms, which represent the 5 major US aggregators, plus 2 other important sites. These 7 partners are:
Infogroup
Acxiom
Best of the Web
Localeze
Factual
Foursquare
Superpages
We do not control the push beyond these 7 partners. That being said, it is typical for our partners to then push to their own partners. You can see an illustration of how data is typically shared in the link Patrick included in his reply. But, again, it's important for me to clarify that the movement of your data beyond the 7 partners is not part of our service.
So, if there are specific non-partner platforms (like Yelp or TripAdvisor) that you want to advise your client to claim, you are free to do so.
Hi Gilson,
As a test, I would suggest that you monitor the entire first page of Google for your core keyword over the next week and see if your competitors are also experiencing this fluctuation, or if it is only your website. One way to do this might be to take screenshots each day in the morning and the evening and then you can line them up after a week and compare them to see if the fluctuation is specific to you or if Google is changing up the whole result set.
Hey There!
In cases like these where you're in doubt about a given practice, your first stop should always be Google's own guidelines: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en
Check out the section on the business name, which reads:
Your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers.
And be sure to read the whole section on this so that you can explain these types of policies to clients. Thank goodness for guidelines!
I'm not 100% sure what your other question is about accounts. Please feel free to clarify that. Thanks and good luck with your client!
Sounds like a plan, Gilson!
Hey Ricky,
Good answer from Travis, and the guidelines he links to exactly describe Google's preferences regarding naming conventions for multi-practitioners, etc. Things to be aware of:
Because doctors do leave practices on a regular basis, you need to be aware of the closed listing phenomenon: http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/27109-can-closed-google-local-listings-kill-ranking-important-new-troubleshooting-tip.html
Google does not delete duplicates for doctors: http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-duplicates-doctor-dentist-lawyer.html (recommend further research of Linda Buquet's work of doctor/dentist duplicates
If you're going to do a unique Google+ Local page for each doctor, be sure it links to a landing page on the site for the doctor ... not to the homepage for the practice.
I'm not saying you shouldn't create a unique Google+ Local page for each doctor, but if you decide to recommend this strategy, do fully research the issues of dr/dentist duplicates and closed listings before you make an official recommendation to the client. Hope this helps!
Hi Pete,
If you are physically located in Sheboygan, then you should be reflecting this in your:
Titles, meta description tags, content
The footer of your website that should list your complete NAP (name, address, phone)
The Contact Us page of the site, which should again feature your complete NAP
So, yes, if you're in Sheboygan, do optimize the site so that it makes this clear, in a natural, non-spammy manner.
If you don't have a staffed, physical office in Sheboygan, that's another story.
Hope this helps!
Hey Sam,
I started a thread on this over here: https://moz.com/community/q/the-local-stack-rollout-a-new-day-in-local
Please, pop over.
Hi Peter,
Thank you so much for providing additional clarification about your business model. This has made offering guidance a much clearer task! I'll break my reply into two parts:
Google's rule is one listing per business, per location. So, it doesn't matter how many additional websites you may have for a single location. You are only allowed to have 1 Google+ Local listing per business, per location. Do not build more than one listing for any physical location you have. This would be forbidden.
You should be publishing your business NAP (business name, address, phone number) on only one website per location in order to avoid the woes of NAP inconsistency which can tank your local rankings. So, just for example, your main website sells lawnmowers, garden seeds and compost to walk-in customers in Phoenix, Arizona. You've got your complete NAP on this website, letting Google know that your NAP is associated with these products and phoenixgardencenter.com
What happens, then, if Google then finds your complete or partial NAP on your microsite specializing in just compost, compostcity.com? Google pauses and says, "Wait a minute! I thought this phone number and street address belonged to phoenixgardencenter.com. What the heck is this compostcity thing?" The result: confusion on the part of Google about the trustworthiness of the data they have in their cluster about your business. The possible outcome: merged listings, duplicate listings and ranking failures.
So - in sum - only 1 Google+ Local page for any physical location you have and no shared NAP between websites. If you want to run microsites, better get 800 numbers for them or something like that in an attempt to differentiate them from your true local sites, and do be sure, of course, that you are not duplicating content or anything else between more than one site:)
Hope this helps!
Hey Donna,
Agree with you. So much white space on so many SERPs, it looks like a blizzard. One thing I've been thinking about regarding this, as many Local SEOs are speculating that this could be a step on the path to monetized packs and also considering Google's move into the home service fulfillment arena - what if we will see an iteration of this in future where you have to pay to get your address/phone to show? And on mobile, what if Google started charging for clicks on the phone icons? I wonder...
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this!
Good Morning!
Ah, I think I see what you were explaining now. So, this is how I find it most helpful to think of this.
If I am located in Topeka, Kansas (or have my location set there) and I search for 'hotels', Google assumes that I am looking for a hotel near me.
But, if I am located in Topeka, Kansas (or have my location set there) and I search for 'hotels Dallas, TX' I'm making it very clear to Google that I am looking for lodgings elsewhere.
In other words, if I don't tell Google to be specific to some region other than my own, Google assumes I want the results nearest me. But if I am specific that I want results from somewhere else by including that location in my query, Google shows me the local results for that location.
Hey Richard,
I'm sorry I didn't see this until today. Yes, Google definitely seems to be demoting Google+ in a big way. Recommended reading:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/08/07/thoughts-about-the-new-local-stack-display/
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/08/06/7-pack-becoming-3-pack-with-mobile-like-snak-pack-rollout/
I'm not sure I'm totally following your last paragraph about the national agencies. Are you saying they no longer seem to feel G+ is as important as they used to? Sorry, not quite sure that's what you're explaining, but I can see why people would feel that way, given that G+ links have become so invisible. Nevertheless, the Google My Business dash remains as important as ever as the main source for the data now featured in the new Local Stacks/Local Finder and the other types of Snack-Pack style results. So, the dashboard is still important, but the front-end display represents a genuine departure from what we'd grown accustomed to. Many Local SEOs feel the Local Stack is a step toward a paid inclusion model and this could certainly be true.
Glad you used my favorite little trick - looking up the business on Moz Local to get to the Google+ page. Works like a charm every time
Thanks for starting a good discussion!
Hi There!
Good questions! My choice would be to have a unique landing page on the website for each physical store. Content on this page would start with the complete contact information for the location, preferably encoded in Schema, and followed by a description of the services provided by that store and any other info that visitors would find helpful. Additionally, if some of the services are complex, you could link from these pages to a set of service (not geographic) pages offering fuller service descriptions. This method will greatly simplify your URL structure as well, so that your urls for the location pages would be:
etc.
And your service pages would look like:
etc.
There are instances in which a company will build a unique page for every possible combo of service+city, but I would only advise taking that route if you have considerable resources to devote to making the pages absolutely unique and of a very high quality. If you'd be forced to go with thin or duplicate pages taking this route, I wouldn't advise this course of action.
For more ideas, you might like to check out:
http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
Hope this helps!
Hi Joao!
This is a really good topic and you've received some very important advice from both Matt & Bryan.
Your situation is exactly why my ultimate preference is to have local businesses choose a domain name that reflects their real-world brand rather than focusing only on keywords. Your business could eventually expand to include, lawn care, yard maintenance, landscaping, snow removal, tree trimming, controlled burning and who knows what all if you are growing! You can't fit all of that into a domain name. But, if a business name is TidyYards and the domain name is simply TidyYards.com, then the business will have to focus on the strength of things like its content rather than hoping that an EMD will do the trick. I definitely understand that Google is still rewarding keyword-focused domains, but to me, this is a holdover from their less-sophisticated past that I believe will recede over time. In sum, I think building a strong real-world brand is more important than keywords in your domain. If you're considering starting from scratch, you might want to throw that idea into the mix.
Hi Alan!
I'm with Egol on this - if you're going to go to the trouble of changing to a new domain (and all of the redirect, branding and citation cleanup this would involve) I would only suggest doing so for a better domain than the one you're mentioning. Other community members may have differing opinions on this, but the hyphenated domain doesn't strike me as strong enough to make all the work involved in switching domains seem like a good tradeoff.
Hi Derek,
You're totally fine using Schema any place you have your complete NAP. For the rest of your questions, I think you're going to absolutely love this Phil Rozek post, which digs deep into which elements to use:
Hope that hits the spot!
Hi Pete,
I'm sorry, but I'm not aware of a way to detect which version of Maps a user is using. Perhaps one of our community members will have experimented with this? If you don't get feedback on this here, I would recommend taking this conundrum to the Google Mapmaker forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/map-maker
But I do hope you'll get further feedback from the community here.