My pleasure, Nails. Good luck!

Hi There,

I really like Donna's answer, and I think, on an even more basic level, the fact that you are feeling overwhelmed and oppressed by the workload is a clear indicator that the agency has bit off more than it can chew.

Unless the business was doing consulting ONLY (in which case 3 hours per month of consulting for each client might be tenable), it does sound to me like your agency has enlarged its client stable without making the necessary hires to enlarge the staff. A larger agency could certainly be handling 50 clients, but your company is small. The business sounds like it is at an important turning point at which it should consider:

• Reducing the client list

• Determining to take fewer but more lucrative clients

• Determining to continue to grow the client stable, but only after making the necessary hires to grow the agency

I'd be completely frank about this with your agency - let them know it's causing you genuine stress because you don't feel you can deliver quality because the staff is being over-tasked. If the agency is committed to building a respected brand and lasting success, wise decisions are necessary here, and you could be instrumental in helping to protect the brand from earning a reputation for poor quality work. Good luck!

Yeah, I'm sorry I'm not seeing a really good resource for you, Kevin. It's early days. The person who takes on the task of writing that resource will have valuable information to share. I would say your best hope is in experimentation with this, but I don't see that anyone has figured out a solution to the important questions you've asked.

Hi There!

If the client is running 2 distinct legal businesses (like a landscaping company and an accounting firm) from a single address, then he should get a unique phone number for the 2nd business, be sure the websites feature completely unique content, and then he will be eligible for a Google My Business listing for each.

If, however, the client is actually running one business but is attempting to make it look like two companies (like an HVAC company trying to sell its heating services as though they are a separate business from its cooling services), then he is only eligible for 1 GMB listing, regardless of the number of websites he builds.

In fact, in the latter scenario, having a second website for the company is not normally advisable, because what you are then doing is putting partial duplicate NAP (name, address, phone) on two websites, instead of one, possibly leading to a loss of trust on Google's part about the authoritative data for the business. In most cases, Local SEOs will recommend that a single business at a single address should go with a single, powerful website.

But, if the businesses are legally distinct, it''s normally okay that they share the same address, so long as the phone numbers and websites are unique.

Hope this help, and definitely do share Google's guidelines with the client. They help answer many questions like these.

Hey Brian!

Thank you so much for clarifying that you were seeing this as part of a tool's terminology, as well as some references elsewhere. Sometimes, different folks have different names for things. Here at Moz, I think we'd be more inclined to refer to this as "Evergreen Content" or even "10x Content" (see: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday). While I'm not sure I agree with the Yoast quote Roman found about needing to build another website if you have more than 10 superlative pages (if you are a local business, creating multi-sites is generally a BIG no-no), I think the main idea here is that every website should have a set of pages that are:

1. Frequently linked to internally because they provide the most authoritative answer to a question

2. Way better pages than your competitors have created

3. Perennially useful

If this can be used as a a definition of "cornerstone" or "evergreen" content, then I wouldn't limit this to having to be a landing page. It could be a core page (like an about page). It could also be a video or an infographic. It could be a landing page, or it could be a blog post.

I think the key here is not confining this to a specific format of content, but, instead, identifying your best and most useful pages and remembering to internally link to them so that they are easily discovered by consumers. Looking at your analytics, the findings of tools like Moz Pro, and listening to your customers is going to help you identify which pieces of content are your best. And, typically, best is going to equal the content that specifically supports the various stages of the user journey, be that awareness, consideration, decision, or conversion. Conversion is almost always the end goal of content, but each stage has to be supported, and evergreen content can play a role at each stage of the journey.

So, summing up, I wouldn't confine the definition of this type of content to a single format (it could be any type of page or form of media), and I also wouldn't state that you can only have X number of cornerstone pieces on a given website. A small site might only have 3-5 of these, but a larger site could have 20, 30, 100. Identify the most important topics for supporting the consumer journey, and then be sure that your resources are better than your competitors. Finally, be sure you are intelligently linking to these cornerstone pieces internally, so that they are ideally accessible.

Hope this helps, Brian!

Hey Roman!

Thank you so much for joining this conversation. For my own clarification, is this your advice, or Yoast's:

Websites should have a minimum of one or two cornerstone articles and a maximum of eight to ten. If you want to write more than ten cornerstone articles, you should probably start a second website.

Hi Aquib,

Great question, with a somewhat complex answer. If your business is local, then, yes, you want to create a unique, researched and optimized page for each of your services. Write fully about each service, including its value proposition, pricing, photos, videos, reviews, etc. And, if you've got a multi-location local business, you also want to create a unique, research and optimized page for each of your physical locations. These types of pages are table stakes for nearly all local businesses.

But, once you've got these basic pages published, our thinking has to shift a bit. It's not that more pages = good for SEO. In the past, much of SEO hinged on the idea that you wanted to create a unique page for each core keyword phrase that research indicated would be a top performer for you. Sometimes this led to some kind of foolish structures, like a website having a page optimized for "car repairs" and another page for "auto repairs", and sites would end up with huge numbers of rather weak pages as a result.

Now, post-Hummingbird and in a RankBrain environment, we have to think differently, because these have signaled to us that Google is now capable of understanding the shared intent behind similar phrases. Google knows that searches for "auto repairs" and "car repairs" have the same intent, and optimized content development has shifted to think of keywords in terms of topics instead of as standalone phrases. What smart businesses are doing is identifying the most important topics to their companies and their consumers, and then mapping all of the keywords that fit within that topic to a really strong, thorough page that covers the topic.

So, let's say you own an auto garage, and one of the things you offer is repair of the new Tesla cars. You plug "tesla auto repairs" into a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, or the Google Adwords KW tool and you see a whole bunch of keyword phrases that relate to this topic, like "tesla auto repair cost", "tesla engine replacement cost", "tesla repair center", "tesla body work", etc. In the past, you might have created a unique page for each of these terms, but modern SEO would typically advocate combining all of these related phrases into a single authoritative article that covers everything a consumer could possibly want to know about getting their Tesla worked on in your shop. The goal of this page is to establish your authority and guide the user toward a conversion. We believe that Google is now identifying domain names with authority on specific topics, so if this were your business, you'd want to establish authority on this topic with a best-in-geo/industry page on this topic.

To dive deeper into Hummingbird and RankBrain, definitely look at the two links, above. If your competitors are stuck in the old ways of creating large numbers of weak pages, your understanding of how Google is evolving could be a competitive difference maker for your brand. Hope this helps!

Hi Bridget!

I'll respond to your important question with numbers, for easier reading:

1. Moz Local will surface any listing we discover that strongly matches your Moz Local listing. We're making you aware of the existence of these listings, but this does not necessarily mean that they are, in fact, duplicates. It's up to the customer to decide whether a listing is a duplicate or not.

2. It's very important that your law firm study the Guidelines for Representing Your Business On Google. Read the entire document and pay particular attention to the sections on naming and practitioners.

3. Google does allow multi-practitioner firms to build a listing for the business and one for each practitioner. If there is only one lawyer at the practice, Google doesn't want him to build a separate listing, but if there are multiple lawyers, then it's allowed to build a listing for each of them, in addition to the listing for the practice. This is all laid out in the guidelines

4. If there are multiple practitioners, it is highly advised that each one has his own, unique phone number, not shared by any other practitioner or by the business. He should be directly contactable via the number. And, it is also advised that you create a landing page on the website for each of the practitioners and link their listings you build to these pages. All of this serves to differentiate one practitioner from another and one practitioner from the business, itself, hopefully securing you against ranking problems, accidental merges, customer misdirection, etc.

So, in sum, practitioner listings are not true duplicates, but you must follow guidelines for creating them and be sure that the practitioners are being properly differentiated from one another and from the business. And, finally, if you judge that a listing Moz Local surfaces for you is not a true duplicate, you can use the 'ignore' button to have it removed from the list.

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

Thanks, Wendy!

I'm looking at the result you've shared, and in the knowledge panel (on the right) I do see the box labeled Website, linking to the website. Also, clicking on the map to get to your GMB listing, I also see a good, working link to your website:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Maybelle+Center+for+Community+(formerly+Macdonald+Center)/@45.524164,-122.676669,15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0xfbc0ab862da909a4!8m2!3d45.524164!4d-122.676669

Are you still not seeing the website button next to the directions button in the panel? If not, that's very curious, indeed, and I'd recommend checking from a different computer to see what you see.

Recommended reading, Gal, from start to finish: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/

I hope it's muy helpful!