Hi There,

Very good question! While you can use any address you like on your own website, virtual offices are expressly forbidden by Google's guidelines. See: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en  The guidelines state:

Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location. PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable.

While Umar is correct that many companies are violating Google's guidelines, (and, yes, getting away with it!) the problem with doing something you know Google doesn't want is that you never know when consequences may arise. If this were your own business and you were willing to take the risk of a possible takedown of the listing, then it would be a risk/benefit question you would need to carefully consider. It's different when it comes to advising a client. Most good Local SEOs will agree that advising a client to violate a Google guideline isn't the right thing to do. Some folks will argue that they can profit short-term from a guideline violation, and that's likely true, but most clients care so much about their businesses that they are looking for advice that will help them both now and in the future - they want a sustainable marketing strategy.

Highly recommended reading on virtual office takedowns: http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/26844-busted-warning-attorneys-regus-non-compliant-offices.html

You've asked an important question. It's these types of questions that can help us to be so useful to our clients!

Hey Umar!

Really appreciate you taking the time to respond to this thread, but I'd urge you to consider that just because businesses may be getting away with the violation today, doesn't mean that they'll continue to do so tomorrow. Bending Google's rules to suit one's circumstances may not be a sustainable approach to local search marketing, given the numerous crackdowns we've seen over the years. They happen quickly and can sometimes be all but impossible to recover from.

Hi Jonas!

I haven't had to deal with special characters much, personally, but here's how I look at this. It's going to be most important that your website and your Google My Business page match up - so, it sounds like Google is supporting your special character, so be sure your website is branded that way, too. As for your other citations, I do feel some concerns. You may need to stick to building citations only on those directories that support your special character, or what you will end up with is a bunch of citations that are sharing your phone number, address and website URL, but not your name.

Unfortunately, even if you do stick to building citations only on platforms which support the special character, you are likely to run into a problem because of the way data is shared around the local ecosystem. For example, if you create a citation on golocal and they do accept your character, but they then push that data to das ortliche, and this platform doesn't support the character, it could automatically change the N°1 to No1, meaning that citation inconsistency could end up being auto-generated around the web for the business, simply because of the way data is shared (see: https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-europe). So, basically, I think you're going to have NAP inconsistencies no matter what you do here.

Is it a big enough problem for the business to consider re-branding? That really depends on how well their business is already known. If they aren't well-known, a re-brand might make sense.

Hey There,

No I wouldn't worry about that. Most optimized local business sites have complete NAP in schema in the footer and then that is repeated on the Contact Page. I really doubt there's any problem with this.

Hi Dominick,

So, is the new owner going to rename this old branch of yours to be something different? Have you discussed with the owner what their plans are, in terms of website and Local SEO efforts for the newly acquired branch?

Hey Dominick,

You know - honestly what I'd do here is comment on Joy's post with your question! I bet she'll reply and because it appears she has dealt with your exact situation before, she might be able to offer some additional suggestions like that. Why not go right to the source?

Hey Neil,

The problem here is that Google has rolled out both a new local and a new maps interface in the past couple of months, and I'm not sure what this has done to photo requirements. Here are the most recent things I could find for you, but I am not positive the numbers are still accurate. You might need to experiment a bit:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/02/24/google-my-business-upgrades-business-photos/

http://localu.org/blog/your-google-my-business-profile-image-your-most-important-image/

Hope this helps a bit!

Hi Rosemary,

Oooh, this is a toughie. I have no experience with Local SEO in China. I know Baidu Maps outside of China used to be powered by Nokia Here, but since they sold their mapping unit to German car manufacturers, I'm not sure what happened with that. I believe Baidu Maps inside of China is powered by NavInfo, but I don't know anything beyond this.

So, my suggestions here, lacking concrete knowledge to share with you about this would be:

1. Go directly to the blogger who wrote that article you linked to and try leaving a blog comment asking this. If the blogger doesn't reply or is no longer there, contact the company and ask if you can book an hour of their consulting time to be brought up to speed on the regulations regarding local business submission in China.

2. If that doesn't work, see if you can track down Nyagoslav Zhekov of Whitespark. He has done more International Local SEO than anyone else I know, and as he was living in Asia for a time, might know more about Baidu Maps than the average Local SEO.

3. And, if that doesn't work, you might scroll through our recommend list to see if any companies there specialize in International SEO: https://moz.com/rand/recommended-list-seo-consultants/ Maybe get some consulting from there.

Clearly, this is important if you've got a client in China, but resources in the U.S. may be hard to come by for this, as finding an International SEO who does Local in China may be a rare flower

So glad it helped, Rich, and hope no one drowned in that sea of words

Hi Richard,

Sounds like good old spam to me, from your description. Definitely report it. This should help:

http://imprezziomarketing.com/seo-blog/google-maps/new-way-to-report-issues-on-google-my-business/

Hey Chris,

Multi-practitioner business models have the option to either:

1. Promote the practice + promote the practitioners, or

2. Just promote the practice

If you go with the first, the main thing is to be sure that each practitioner has a unique landing page on the website (to which his/her citations link) and that each has his or her own phone number (separate from the practice's main phone number). Taking these precautions should normally prevent any issues with merging, but I am not quite sure what you mean about duplicate reviews. Are you saying that the patients are posting a review for the practice and then posting the same review again for a specific doctor? A little clarification on that might help.

If you go with the second option, then, yes, you can attempt to get rid of citations for the practitioners, but, because you are talking about a medical practice, it's very important to dig into Google's history with not closing doctor/dentist duplicates. It may be that the Yext rep with whom you're communicating is unaware of this. Note Linda Buquet's remarks on this previous Moz thread regarding this: https://moz.com/community/q/dental-practice-google-and-dentist-personal-google

Hope this give some good food for thought.

Hi Kristen!

Wow - yes! That's exactly the type of case I find interesting, too. Sadly, as you point out, the old keyword-stuffed business title can still boost a business, despite the guidelines (and, is, of course, something one could report to Google!). I like that you've noticed those authoritative links. Could be a real factor there. It would be interesting to know what would happen to these results if the naming violation were reported and acted upon. You could actually track that and see, then, if that had been the main factor, or if the authoritative links were still enough to keep the business ranking highly.

I'm very appreciative of you contributing what you've noticed, and hope we'll hear more from others

Hey There!

Important question ... why does the company have 80 websites? Are they being individually managed by the owner of each store, or are they all in the control of the central company?

If the latter, what you are describing is a strong illustration supporting the typical advice that it is generally better to build 1 powerhouse website for your brand than a large number of thin, weak, duplicative sites.

If this company was my client, I would be earnestly urging them to consolidate everything into a single site. If they are currently investing in maintaining 80 website, there's reason to hope that they've got the funding to develop a strong, unique landing page for each of the 80 locations on their main corporate website, and redirect the old sites to the central one. Check out how REI.com surfaces unique pages for all of their locations. It's inspiring how they've made each page unique. If your client could take a similar approach, they'd be on a better road for the future.

You would, of course, need to update all citations to point to the landing pages once you had developed them.

If, however, the 80 websites are being controlled by 80 different franchise location managers, what needs to be developed here is a policy that prevents these managers from taking the content of the corporation. If they want to each run a separate website, they need to take on the responsibility of creating their own content. And, of course, the corporate website needs to be sure it doesn't have internal duplicate content and is not taking content from its franchise managers, either. 80 separate websites should = 80 totally separate efforts. That's a lot to have going on, pointing back to the preferred method of consolidation wherever possible.

Hope this helps!

Hi Bob!

Thanks so much for joining the discussion. Are you saying you added keywords to the business titles of Google My Business listings and saw a rise in rank/visibility? Or are you saying you removed keywords? Just want to be sure I'm understanding.

Was the chat with Google support desk some months ago? Google has disconnected Plus from Local, so I'm concerned you may have received outdated advice from Google's support, if it's the case that they are still telling people to post on Plus.

I'd love to hear more, on both points.

Hey Jason!

So glad those tips helped you identify an industry centroid that may be a contributing factor. Way to go! Some thoughts on this:

1. Go into this knowing that it can be VERY difficult to overcome something like this and that your best bet here is likely to be a full, professional audit by a skilled Local SEO consultant. A good place to look for one is the Contributors box on the right side of last year's Moz Local Search Ranking Factors. Here are some questions for you to ask yourself, either for your own purposes, or to share with a consultant.

2. Are you 100% certain that you are located inside of the official city limits? As I mentioned on your other thread, do the Maps lookup of your city name and be sure you are inside of the pink city border instead of outside of it. If you're outside, then the goal of ranking in the Local pack for that city/keyword combo is likely out.

3. If you are inside the city borders, how far are you from the industry centroid? Are any other players as far away as you are and still ranking in the top 10 or so results?

4. If so, do an audit of any competitor that is as far away as you are, but is managing to rank in the top 10 on the Map. Identify every piece of information you can that might be contributing to their rank (age, domain authority, reviews, vibrant content, citations, etc.). Mine this data to see if there is a pattern or a weakness you can identify that you would be able to use to your advantage, with the goal of helping you get into the pack.

5. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the industry centroid is the sole cause of what you are experiencing. If you're outside the city borders, then, yes, that's probably the main cause, but if you're inside the borders, a business which is supremely strong enough should have hope of overcoming an industry centroid bias. But, remember, there may be multiple causes contributing to low rankings.

6. Finally, don't forget that user-as-centroid is likely to overcome industry-centroid bias, in that your customers who are physically closest to you on their phones may be seeing a different set of results, which do include you.

Just some quick thoughts. Hope they help!