Welcome to the Q&A Forum

My pleasure, and I hope it was helpful. Regarding developing separate landing pages, that's a decision you'll need to make, of course, but as you've raised a concern about Google not properly showing both locations, what I'm explaining to you is something that could possibly help with this. It's totally fine that the cities are close to one another. That's common for many businesses. But if you want each office you have to be treated as separate and equal, unique landing pages and unique citation sets will be the common best practice advice you'll see for this scenario.

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!

Hi Tomer!

I'd advise creating all of your listings under the same account so that you can manage them all from a single Google My Business dashboard.

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.

Hi Anthony,

Normally, my answer would be the same as the one given by Bryan. The simplest path in most multi-location business scenarios is to have 1 page per city and 1 page per service, rather than trying to cover every possible geo/keyword combo. However, most people ask about this before they have invested so much time and money in the development of the site and its content.

Because you've already made the investment, this is what I would suggest you evaluate with the decision makers at the practice:

Is the content simply mediocre or is it actually duplicate content?

If the former, can you envision a way to take these pages to a new level of usefulness? For example, what if, on these pages you currently have, you showcased all of the free or inexpensive auxiliary local resources for mental health? I'm thinking of group therapy, mental health department, serene places to walk for meditation, free yoga or tai chi resources, elder advocacy groups, healthy and fun things for children, lectures, seminars, outdoor concerts, community gardens, pet shelters and anything else you could think of that could make a meaningful difference in patients' mind and body health. Because you would be doing this based on the symptoms of certain conditions and the resources of a given city, each page would, by its very nature, be unique and helpful. You would have, in fact, greatly enhanced the hyperlocal value of each page.

But, if the content is duplicative, that's another matter as it could really be hurting the business and not doing much for the practice's clients. You might, in this case, decide to dismantle a structure that probably shouldn't have been built in the first place and go with the 1 page per city/ 1 page per service model, perhaps even implementing some of the hyperlocal suggestions I've brainstormed to improve the city pages, the health condition pages or both. You could cull the duplicate pages for their best work, build fewer, much better pages instead using some of the old work and greatly adding to it and end up with a very strong but slimmer site.

I think either path is viable, depending on the resources available to you. Hope this helps!

Hey There!

The word here wouldn't be 'duplicates' but, rather, 'discrepancies'. While Google may be able to recognize some of these as similar enough, why take a chance? NAP consistency has been considered a Top 10 ranking factor for many years going, so yes, I'd definitely suggest getting the business name consistent across the ecosystem. It will be a load off your mind!

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?

Hi Chad!

I see. If you have just one physical location, I recommend the following structure:

1. Include your city of location on your main pages (home, about, contact and the landing page for that city).

2. Create a unique landing page for each service city. Be sure the content is of very high quality on these pages.

3. Create a set of services pages, describing each of your company's services. Optimize these for the service keywords.

#3 has some grey area. If it is most important for you to rank for your city of location, then include that city in the optimization of these pages. If the service cities are of equal importance to the city of location, then do not optimize these for the cities - just optimize them for the services.

And, of course, be sure you are not duplicating content on any page

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?

Hi David,

This is not an uncommon issue. See:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/lYNM9SSJOso

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local/20149-knowledge-panel-shows-wrong-name-but-g-page-correct.html

and also

http://localu.org/blog/8-tips-optimize-local-knowledge-panel-google-search/

I recommend you create a thread in the Google forum (above) and if that doesn't work, that you get on the phone with Google via the contact button here: https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639

Hope this helps!

Hey Scott,

What Ioganr has mentioned is correct. Google+ pages, per se, are no longer really the core URLs of your local data on Google. Rather, what happens these days is that your Google My Business dashboard data is being displayed in a variety of ways, and that the URL you'd be most likely to link to these days for any purpose would be the Maps-based URL, like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Whole+Foods+Market/@38.596632,-121.364044,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x5f6895a3853012bc

But, linking to this on a RFQ page is probably going to be a distraction from what you'd like users to do there, yes.

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

You're welcome!

If you currently have internal links in your website or inbound links from 3rd party sources linking to the original URLs, you'll want to:

a) be sure all menus, references, etc. inside the website get updated to the new links

b) reach out to any 3rd party sites linking to these original URLs to ask if they can update the links they have to the new URLs

Hope this helps!

Thank you, Sarah!

So, reviews are sentiments left by a third party who has done business with your company. In other words, I eat at your restaurant and then I go to Google, Yelp or some other review platform to leave a review of my dining experience. Google-based reviews are considered to have the most impact on Google pack rankings, but perhaps not the most impact on conversions. In the U.S., for example, Yelp profiles are often particularly influential, if they have great reviews or really bad ones. Reviews can also exist on a company's own website, using a review app of some kind that allows customers to review a product or service. Think Amazon.com.

If you are being outranked in the local packs by a competitor, reviews are one thing to evaluate as they are one of the signals (though only one) which can cause a competitor to outrank you.

Citations are partial or complete mentions of your business NAP+W (name, address, phone + website) on any third party platform, whether that's a business directory, a blog, a news site or what have you. Any time your partial or complete NAP+W is mentioned anywhere on the web (except your own website), that is a citation. It's a vital part of Local SEO to be sure that all citations feature consistent data (NAP+W is identical across the board). Like reviews, the number, consistency and authority of your citations are believed to impact local pack rankings. So, if a competitor has more citations, better consistency, or citations on more authoritative sites than you do, it can contribute to them outranking you. So, again, this is something to evaluate in doing competitive analysis.

Hope this helps clarify, and you might like to check out our free Local Learning Center for more definitions of the elements of a Local Search Marketing campaign: <cite class="_Rm">https://moz.com/learn/local</cite>

Hi Azael,

Matt has given you some great resources to explore to evaluate the strength of any page. Just to add to this, I find it can be helpful to think of your website as a book, with a new topic on each page. You want to make every page of your book worth reading, so it is worth it to devote the necessary time and resources to creating the best possible content you can on each and every page of the website. Once you've accomplished this, you can start thinking from the outside-in, regarding things like people linking to your pages. But first, you've got to develop really great pages that will merit things like time on site, links, social mentions and more.

Hi Michael,

Citations are based on physical location. Are you saying that there is a single physical location being represented by 3 different websites and that your customer does not own the website that accurately represents the real brand (Acme Print.com)?

Hey Pete,

I can see how this is confusing, and honestly, the amount of time it would take to come up with a totally ideal strategy here is likely more than you will be able to attain in a forum discussion like this one. However, there are 2 typical approaches in your scenario.

Approach 1:

You have a page for each service (which is what I think you are calling 'categories') and a page for each city you serve. This is the simplest method, relying on having a totally awesome page for each service and each city. The site tends to be smaller with this approach, but it can work if the pages are good enough, have enough internal and 3rd party links, age, use, etc.

Approach 2:

In this approach, you build a page for every possible service/city keyword combo. Most of the time, what I see when businesses take this approach is that they end up with a great number of low quality pages, and duplicate content often becomes a part of the scene. The only time I would recommend this approach would be if there is a) truly unique content to offer one each page, b) adequate funding to ensure excellent copywriting, and c) a reason this will be more helpful to the users that Approach 1.

If you're using a location finder for your customers, be sure the links can also be accessed some other way (like in a menu or sitemap). And be sure no steps have been taken to attempt to represent service locations as physical ones. This could include putting up weird or false NAP on website pages, or building citations for non-physical locations.

So, those are the basic approaches, and after you've figured out which strategy you're using, I would recommend doing a formal Local SEO audit to see if you can dig up an explanation for your missing local pack rankings. https://www.google.com/search?q=ultimate+local+seo+audit&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

I really hope you'll get more feedback from the community, but I do think the complexity of your website and your dilemma is likely going to require a deep dig, which may be beyond the scope of what community members can offer.

Hey There!

First step here is to read Google's guidelines for Departments Within Other Business:

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

Be sure that you actually have 2 businesses that qualify as separate, in Google's eyes, before you make a decision about how to represent these to the public on your website, citations, etc. Hopefully a read-through will help with this.

Hi Eric!

Here are some resources that should get you off to a good start:

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

https://moz.com/learn/local

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

As you're in a small town, your chances are very good of competing with the right efforts. I would advise focusing first on content, citations, reviews and links. Then, consider video, social and offline networking. That's very broad advice, of course, but it's a general outline of how it's likely to be best to approach strengthening your business, building your brand and then looking for things you can do that your competitors haven't yet done, or which you can do better.

Hope this helps!

Good Morning, Peter!

Thanks so much for sharing your experience, and that's a great example from the Webmaster Help Forum. I agree with you that the voluntary support in Google's forum is kind of an extraordinary thing. On the one hand, it has proved an excellent training ground for Local SEOs who have become TCs and have gained extra knowledge of common problems with the local products. On the other hand, it sort of abets Google in not having to staff Local as they probably should.

It will be nice if someone give the Twitter option a try and shares with us how it went!

I like and agree with your above conclusions and ideas, Pete. And it won't hurt to do a limited experiment with a few pages, and just see how it goes. Something else to consider - if you don't want to get back to the point where the site is feeling watered down, you might consider video marketing, instead, for some of those keyword combos. How affordable and reasonable that is would be based on your particular resources Wishing you good luck!

P.S. I just noticed my link was funny in the original reply. Meant to link directly to: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit. So sorry - I hope that wasn't confusing.

Hey Peter,

Unfortunately, I have seen multiple cases in which high quality results are outranked by those that don't even have a website, let alone a good website. Often, this comes down to geographic factors, but it can sometimes be the result of spam. If you'd like to share an example, I'd be happy to take a look!

Hi Rosemary,

Tim is right - Schema.org's own documentation is likely the most thorough you will find. I've not heard of anyone teaching a course in this, I'm afraid. May be you'll need to create your own little help doc, linking to the various Schema tutorials and interesting 3rd party blog posts for your team to reference as needed. I'm a big believer in building these types of internal help docs for teams

Hey Peter,

Ah, a web design company. So, not having an address is really not that abnormal. It's certainly not ideal, though. They've got an address listed on their GMB listing, but perhaps they've intentionally left if off the website because they don't want walk-in traffic. On the other hand, it could be a lack of Local SEO.

In terms of geography, it doesn't look like it's playing a role here. The location is well beyond the city center and does not appear to be part of close-set radius. It's not reviews that are doing it - they have none. So, what I'd recommend here is doing a full competitive analysis to see if you can track down whether some organic metric is contributing to that high ranking. It's an interesting case.

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

Hi Jason,

Would it be this: http://www.localsearchforum.com/local-search-news/39251-huge-ranking-algorithm-change-jan-10-2016-a.html

Or is that too early?

Hey Dave,

I totally know where you are coming from, and what you are describing is something I was also suggesting to clients not very long ago. It seemed like a rational solution. But a few things made me change my own position on this:

1. Google has gotten MUCH better at separating businesses at a shared location than they used to be just a couple of years ago. They used to be really poor at doing this and merged listings were a common phenomenon. They are much less common now, and I attribute this to Google's growing sophistication.

2. Google has always been really clear about wanting the real world address, and while in the past, I might have felt I had to 'help' them with suite numbers because of their known merging fiasco, I don't feel this is necessary any longer, and it's always safer to abide by the letter to the guidelines, right?

3. Google has definitely become more sophisticated at reading real-world signage. Their team can look at a streetview-type image of any business, and if they see a discrepancy in what you've listed with what's on the building, they can act on that information.

So, that's my evolution of thinking on this over the past couple of years, in a nutshell. The only grey area I personally still have about this is when the businesses are similar. For example, a muffler shop and an oil change place might legitimately be two different businesses in the real world, but could possibly be mistaken for a single business owner trying to spam Google by making categories of a business appear to be separate businesses. So I'm not 100% confident as to where we and Google are at with that scenario these days.

Hey There!

I really appreciate you coming back to update this thread with your experience. So, that's really good to note that someone noticed your company Twitter. Good to know! And sure, you don't want to abuse the account, but it sounds like you've now got a new resource that could be handy in a variety of situations. Neat development!

Hi Meier,

I so urge you to take EGOL's advice as gold - he is legendary in his knowledge. The scenario you are describing with the PBN is not something that sounds safe or natural to either of us - so, this is your Moz squad talking here

It might help you to put yourself in a user's shoes. Does it actually benefit you, if you're looking for key grinding or to get let into your locked car to be thinking about pressure washing at that moment? No. There is no natural relationship there. Do you want to go, via a link, from a pressure washing site to a locksmith site or vice versa? No. There is simply no relationship there.

I also want to raise the issue here that the locksmith industry is one of the most notorious for its history of spam problems in the localsphere. Anything you do for clients in this industry is going to be in an atmosphere of heightened scrutiny (particularly at Google) and so a profile of unrelated, unnatural links would be just the sort of thing they'd be looking for to bring down the hammer.

So, please exercise caution here!

Hi Will!
I'm glad you've opened this up for discussion, as it's always a good thing when the question of business ethics arises for there to be a chance to think out loud about what the right thing is to do. There are really 2 parts to this:

1. Your client needs to run his business ethically. It sounds like the facts here are that your client actually has only 1 real physical shop but that, for ranking purposes, he's wanting to convince his customers and the search engines that he has 3. When you put it this way, it's really easy to see that the truth isn't being told, which automatically makes this a question of ethics. Who would want to do business with a company that operates by tricking its customers, right?

And as far as the search engines go, I totally get it that their guidelines for service area businesses may sometimes seem like unfair restrictions. Google has never given SABs quite the same treatment that they have accorded B&Ms. But, if we're using a Google product, they are asking us to abide by their rules, and doing so is only playing fair. Your client would not appreciate his competitors being untruthful about their business models in order to surpass him, and he might, in fact, want to report them to Google for doing so. If your client can put himself in the shoes of his customers, search engines and competitors, hopefully his sense of fairness will be a guiding light here. And, if not, he is likely to learn the hard way. Competitors will report him or Google will see a red flag in looking at their street-level imagery and the client may find not only his 2 fictitious locations removed, but also, his genuine location flagged as spam, too. No one can predict when these things may happen, so it's a very anxious situation.

If ethics don't work, and concern for the lifetime success of the business doesn't work, then this may not be a client you want to keep.

2. Now, let's take a look at why Bryan is advising you never to suggest that a client "play the system". Just like for the client, ethics really matter in the way you run your own business. Good marketing relies on knowledge, skill and experience - not tricks. And, for the long term success of your business, you need successful clients whose brands you are building to last. This is how you build your own, priceless brand. The polar opposite of this is going to be clients whose businesses may benefit from loopholes temporarily but who may then come crashing down, leading to a serious impact on their bottom line and, possibly, litigation against your company if they blame you for the advice you've given and your contracts don't protect you from this.

I sense from your honest question that you are standing at very important crossroad for your company. It's really good that you're thinking about this and wanting to discuss it. The Internet is still literally crammed with those crummy SEO companies that don't know what they're doing and make a strange living off of bad practices that hurt the businesses that engage them, but it's the agencies that commit to taking the high road that are standing the test of time. Companies like these ones: https://moz.com/rand/recommended-list-seo-consultants/

My best advice here is to imagine the respect you want to win for the brand you are trying to build and act accordingly.

Closing up: practical advice here for your client if he is willing to walk a better walk on this, organic optimization is the option open for the non-physical cities the company serves. If the business needs calls right now, invest in some PPC for these cities while you work to build organic authority for these target cities.

Good luck, and thanks for starting an important discussion!

Hi Scott!
Good question! Your specific industry is likely to dictate whether a widget will be useful, but I don't really know of a general widget that would directly impact local or localized organic rank. One might indirectly impact rankings if the presence of it enticed users to stay on a page longer, but I think it really depends on whether users found it highly useful and different than some app they already have on their cell phone (like weather!).

I do recommend that you check out this 2015 post from Phil Rozek about building location landing pages. It's a good one:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/04/06/25-principles-of-building-effective-city-pages-for-local-seo/

Hope it helps!

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 There!

Important question here: is your staff actually meeting face-to-face with customers, and, if so, where is that happening? At physical offices from which you operate? At customers' homes or businesses?

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.

Thanks for that important answer. Honestly, without a face-to-face interaction, this really takes this out of the realm of local optimization to be a purely organic context. If the products are the same for customers in each of the 3 cities in 5 states, are you confident that you have the strength on your team to find 15 really awesome topics for these pages that will make them not just filler but something amazing for your customers? This might depend on your product, if its application in one city would be somehow quite different from its application in another city ... I can't think of a ready example.

Without knowing what the product is, it's hard to evaluate whether the approach you're considering has a good-sense foundation or could end up being a waste of your resources. It may be that you'd be better off sticking with PPC so that you're getting in front of your customers in various cities, as the true local component seems like it may be missing from this scenario. Hard to say without really knowing a lot about your business, the talent on your team and your customers' needs. Hope that makes sense.

Hey Doug!

In fairness, I have to say that this situation requires a full audit and competitive analysis ;), but let's take a cursory look together, anyway.  Have you checked out Mary Bowling's competitive analysis slidedeck from the recent MozCon Local? It is amazingly thorough and just super: http://localu.org/blog/how-to-do-competitive-analysis-for-local-search/. All of those things are ones you want to investigate for this client to get a really clear picture of exactly why they are being outranked. It's a very substantial task and one the client needs to budget for.

Now, let's take a first-glance look:

1. Site is visually handsome. Nice job.

2. Complete NAP is absent from the top of the contact page. Put it there, preferably encoded in Schema.

3. Some title tags contain 'Southern California' instead of 'Santa Barabara'. Santa Barbara is your true local term and deserves most attention.

4. Have you checked thoroughly for duplicate content? I did a random search for some text on your Auto Accident page and it is bringing up this page on Geico: https://www.geico.com/claims/after-an-accident/. Some text is identical. Some is different.

5. I'd rate the content fair on this website. It's not the worst or the best I've seen. The pages describing the services are on the generic side, with nothing that would make them stand out from a competitors' pages as being more useful or informative.There is room for improvement here. Beware of awkward keyword usage. It does stick out on some of these pages.

6. Do you have 2 offices: http://www.maho-prentice.com/ventura-county/? Both physical and forward-facing? If so, this second one isn't in your footer and is not referenced on the Contact page. There does not appear to be a distinct phone number (or any number) associated with the Ventura office.

7. Duplicate cleanup is really important here: https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMk1haG8lMjUyMFByZW50aWNlJTI1MkMlMjUyMExMUCUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjkzMTAxJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyTWFobyUyNTIwUHJlbnRpY2UlMjUyQyUyNTIwTExQJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyNjI5JTI1MjBTdGF0ZSUyNTIwU3RyZWV0JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyOTMxMDElMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjI4MDU5NjIxOTMwJTI1MjIlMjU1RA==

Especially pay attention to the first duplicate that search surfaces. It's the duplicate Google My Business listing, which appears to be sharing the phone number of the Santa Barbara office: https://www.google.com/maps?cid=9808975411924782492. Bingo! This is an extremely important find and could be negatively impacting the chance of either office ranking well in the packs. Explain to client that they must have a unique number for each location. *And do be sure that the Oxnard location is, indeed, a legitimate location (not a Regus office, etc.).

8. Be very sure that, if citations have been created for the attorneys at the practice, they are not sharing phone numbers with one another or with the practice. I am concerned about this, seeing the shared number between the 2 offices. Also, be aware that the attorney's citations can't contain the business name, and should not share categories in Google.

9. I'm going to take a look at just 1 of the 4 terms, and you can follow these steps with the others: injury attorney Santa Barbara. Remember, due to personalization and user-as-centroid, what I see will be different from what you see and what the client's clients see. Okay, this is some good news. On the map, https://www.google.com/search?q=injury+attorney+Santa+Barbara&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=injury attorney Santa Barbara&rflfq=1&rlha=0&tbm=lcl&tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:2&oll=34.42400809465862,-119.70669439999995&ospn=0.014301546346509042,0.025963783264160156&oz=15&fll=34.423087693043946,-119.70426968305048&fspn=0.03228503412244521,0.061626434326171875&fz=14&qop=1&rlfi=hd:;si: there does not appear to be any geographic inhibtor to your client doing well. They are located close enough to their competitors to avoid suffering from any geographic limitations.

In fact, your client is ranking #4 for the term I've searched, which is really good news. They are just outside of the pack for me, meaning that they may very well be inside of it when someone is actually in Santa Barbara looking for them (no guarantee there, but could be).

Top 2 competitors in this pack exceed your client in number of reviews. Competitors 3 has less. Go for 20 over the next few months with a good review acquisition program.

10. Finally, there is a strong clue here in the organic search for 'injury attorney santa barbara'. Unlike some SERPs, these are made up mainly of business websites vs. directories. Harris and Crane are at 1 & 3 organically and 1 & 2 in the local pack. What this all hints at is that it is organic strength that is driving hard in this pack and that an improvement in your client's organic strength may be critical to pack improvement. For more on this, watch this really fascinating Local U video: http://localu.org/blog/penguin-local/. Pay particular attention to Mike Blumenthal's explanation about what drives packs. And don't forget the importance of industry/geography-specific citations that go beyond getting data right with the major aggregators updated by a service like Moz Local. And remember that age matters here. The age of your competitors' efforts can be a strength it will take time to overcome, if they have been at this longer than your client, and your own efforts will take time to go into effect.

So, that's a first glance. The phone number issue is extremely important, and a real audit will be necessary here to see if there are serious issues with practitioner duplicates. Do a full assessment of the content to apprise yourself of any duplicate content issues and work on both the content and organic strength of the website. Good inspiration for that here: https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday. Work on review acquisition.

And, finally, do all you can to stress to clients like this one that there are no static local rankings. Personalization and user-as-centroid in a city like theirs almost guarantees that results are varying from user to user, so it is a far wiser investment to focus on conversions rather than rankings. I totally know that this can be a hard point to get across, but it is so important to try to communicate this lesson to our clients.

I hope you'll receive other feedback!

Hi Brian!

Why not use:

samhillbands.com/wedding-bands-charlottesville-va

It's very simple. Is there a reason for using sub-folders?

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

Thank you so much for popping by, Dr. Pete. Jaclyn, it was Dr. Pete's second opinion I asked for

Hi Cristina,

I can't say with 100% certainty, but it could be that Google is not looking at 'excellence furniture and office supplies' as a local search. Instead, they may think that's a generic search for 'excellent' furniture and office supplies. I have seen instances of this before, where the name of a business was worded in such a way that Google was perceiving a user's search for it as being a generic keyword search rather than a search for a brand. Another example of this might be if you owned a restaurant named 'Antique China'. If a user were to type that into Google, Google might perceive this as a search for old china dishes, rather than a search for a business brand.

The good news on this is that brands that become popular enough can overcome this issue, eventually convincing Google that a search for something like 'Whole Foods' here in the US has the intent of locating this popular grocery store chain, rather than, perhaps, an explanation of whole vs. refined food products. Prior to the emergence of this grocery chain, such a search might have yielded explanations of brown rice vs. white rice, wheat flour vs. white flour, etc.

Again, without fully auditing your business, I can't be absolutely certain that this is the phenomenon you are witnessing with your furniture company, but I think it's a very strong clue that when you add the city name, Google gets it that you're looking for a branded business in that city, rather than a list of various stores selling office furniture. Your business, your website and your citation building are all brand new. My advice is that if you want to keep the brand, rather than changing it, you should do all you can to market that brand in the coming months and years in hopes that it will become well-known and popular enough with online searchers that Google will begin to get it that people are looking for YOU when they do that search, and not for something more generic. Impossible to predict how long this may take, but your marketing really matters.

The alternative would be to consider re-branding to something that is unmistakably a brand name, like 'Basmayor Office Furniture'. With a brand like that, there is really no room for Google to confuse a search for the brand with a search for something generic.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

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 There!

I recommend that you get the landing pages straightened out before building citations. You don't want redirecting URLs on them and you don't want to have to do the work twice. Hope this helps

Hi Jim,

While it won't hurt you, are you sure it would be useful for your clients in City A  to click over to your City B page, or might that just add unnecessary clutter and confusion to the page?

Hi Thomas!

I see what you mean regarding the homepage rather than the landing page coming up, though the knowledge panel to the right is correct for this location. 3 Quick Questions:

1. Are you sharing phone numbers between any of the locations

2. Is the text on all of your landing pages unique, or is any of it duplicate text?

3. I am not finding an obvious option in your menu to see all of your locations on the website. Something like 'Cities We Serve' in the top menu. What's going on with that?

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!

Hey Thomas!

1. Perfectly fine that they kept the number as long as you are working on getting every possible old citation cleaned up to reflect the new address/new number. Moz Local will help with this, but you may need to do some manual work as well. Good to know that no locations are sharing phone numbers. That can be a disaster!

2. Regarding duplicate content, you might want to check out this post, https://moz.com/blog/how-to-defeat-duplicate-content-next-level but if you've only got 6 locations, I would honestly recommend also doing a manual read-through of each of the 6 landing pages to be sure they are actually unique and helpful (i.e. not just swapping out city names or making a minimum effort in some way).

3. Good idea to make the Locations its own link in the menu. That could help!

4. Getting duplicates like these resolved is going to be very important: https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMk5leHQlMjUyMERheSUyNTIwRmxvb3JzJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyMjEwNDUlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjJOZXh0JTI1MjBEYXklMjUyMEZsb29ycyUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjY1MDUlMjUyMERvYmJpbiUyNTIwUm9hZCUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjIxMDQ1JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyNDEwNzQ0ODk1MCUyNTIyJTI1NUQ=

The shared phone number between your business and a business called Bill's Carpet Fair is concerning. I don't know if this stems from re-branding or something else, but this would be worth doing a full citation audit for to be sure Google is convinced that your business ... and not Bill's ... is located at that phone number.

5. On these pages, I recommend that you put the business name with the rest of the NAP. Right now, it looks like the name of this business is Columbia, MD Flooring Showroom and you have the address separate below with no name.

6. You might also want to consider putting the 6 locations in the footer.

7. Finally, the content on the landing pages is a decent start, but there's room for improvement, and if you want to convince Google that a landing page is more worthy of top billing than a homepage, assessing and improving the content could be an important step!