Hi Taylor,

Good topic! While it's true that a town of that size is unlikely to have a lot of geo-specific directories, all of the normal structured citations sources are still available (the ones that serve all businesses across the country), so you'll still be building citations.

If the business needs to earn local mentions, how about these options:

1. Sponsorships of local businesses, events and organizations

2. Cross-promotions with related local companies

3. Local blog mentions.

4. If the town has an online newspaper, that would be good, too.

When the town is small, you can only go so far with getting geo-specific references. Once you've explored this to its limit, you may need to focus more effort on industry-specific references, instead. Does this help?

Hi Brett!

Good question. The People Also Search For results are algorithmic, and like Ria, I've not seen a definitive study on this area of the knowledge graph. What you could do if a client is desirous of making it into that area of the display would be to do competitive analysis of the top businesses currently coming up in this type of result and see if you can find commonalities. For example:

• What are the local and local-organic rankings for those businesses?

• What is their proximity to you when you search?

• What is their proximity to the main business in the knowledge graph?

• What do their review and link profiles look like?

That's just a start, but it would be how you would need to begin exploring the results of a particular knowledge panel. How much effort you put into this should be dictated by how valuable it would actually be for the client to appear in this feature.

Hi Taylor,

When speaking of local businesses,  the term 'directories' typically refers to local business directories (like online Yellow Pages) rather than those old-school, low quality directories from days gone by. As a local business owner, you want to get your business listed on the major local business data platforms. Have you considered Moz Local for this, by any chance? Our product pushes out your correct location data to the majors and has become a popular choice for this type of work, as it saves a great deal of time. However, if you want to list your business manually, you'll want to be sure to get listed on Google My Business, Facebook, Foursquare, Factual, Yelp, Best of the Web, Infogroup, Citysearch, Superpages, YP, Acxiom and a handful of other major sources. These local business data platforms are applicable to all local business types, and so many local business owners these days use tools like Moz Local to get listed, instead of slogging through the work manually.

As for the older concept of low quality directory listings, yes, that's an antiquated SEO strategy from a decade ago and should not be pursued. Hope this helps. And, if you'd like to learn more about Moz Local, here's a handy list of features: https://moz.com/local/features

Hi Brett,

This might be of some help https://moz.com/blog/eye-tracking-2016-how-searchers-interact-mobile-serps-desktop but I haven't seen one that focused only on the knowledge panel. I'd love to see one.

Hi Joy!

Here's how you can change your PM settings:

1. Click on your avatar in the upper right hand corner of Moz.com (it could be your photo or just the first letter of your name)

2. Select "private messages" from the dropdown that will appear

3. Check the box for "accept private messages" and your done! Easy as pie

Our community manager would also recommend that you accept emails from Moz - they'll go to whatever email you've listed in your community profile. This can be helpful in communicating with other community members.

Hope this helps!

Hi Paul,

Good question. Google's guidelines make it clear that they want your business name on your GMB listings to identically match what consumers see in the real world. So, the name on your street level signage, your print marketing, your website logo and content, and your telephone greetings should be what you put on your GMB listing. And then, for the sake of consistency, as Sean mentions, you'll want all of your other local business listings to match this. So, short answer - no, don't shorten your name, unless you wish to formally change it and update all off and online marketing to reflect it.

I'm curious as to why you'd need to shorten the name. Is it super long?

Hey Paul,

So, if your street-level and website-level marketing is all Evowrap rather than your full legal business name, then its Evowrap Google would want. It's the real-world consumer experience that Google wants reflected in their product.

Hi Gavo!

Alick300 has provided a good link for the 2nd part of your question. For the first part, we just had a good discussion on this right here: https://moz.com/community/q/local-search-can-i-use-a-shortened-company-name

Hope it helps, but if you have any further questions after reading that, please feel free to ask!

Hi SSDigital,

Ooof...listing hijacking is truly awful. I'm so sorry for the trouble you're experiencing, and even sorrier to have to mention that it's not uncommon. Here's a phone number for Yext: 888-444-2988. Hope it helps!

Good luck, Mike, and that would be great if you would share anything you learn with our community. Thank you!

Hi Patrick!

Ooh - these can be tough! Thanks for providing such thorough details.

The good news is, the majority of your patients are unlikely to look you up via a street address. So long as their search for "Chalco Clinic" is getting them to a Knowledge Panel and a map that showing your accurate location, you're likely getting found by most of your patients. You'd also want to check to be sure that a non-branded search (like "health clinic omaha" is also rendering a listing that sends your patients to the right place from the local pack/local finder view).

When I do the searches you've listed out, it's clear that Google thinks of this geography as 168th St ... not 168th Ave. You can see that right on the map - it's being designated a street not an avenue. I want to be sure I understand ... there is just one 168th in your town, right? Or, are you saying that Omaha has both a 168th St. and a 168th Avenue? Please, let me know on that. I'll pop back by as soon as I can to read your answer.

Hi MrSem,

Yes, the limitations you've pointed out are, unfortunately, baked into the environment. There's no way to prove impact in a vacuum. You can't stop competitors from making changes on their end that could be positive or negatively impacting the rank of your business at the same time that you are cleaning up your citations. Search results are so dynamic, it's rarely possible to be 100% positive in stating causation, with no margin for error, because even if you can control what your company is doing, you can't control what competitors are doing in the same time frame, or as you mention, a Google update occurring in that time frame, or even a bug. So, basically what you have is industry practitioners over time noticing apparent cause and effect. When practitioners state that citation cleanup appears to impact search visibility, it's based on more formal studies like Andrew's (above) and on what they notice across the board with clients, over time.

As for what is actually being cleaned up, that's easier to define. It's going to be resolving inconsistent NAP+W, hours of operation, categories and duplicates, much of the time. It can also include remedying incompletions.

I understand your skepticism. Toothpaste manufacturers have a vested interest in telling you their product will make your teeth whiter. But there's an important difference here that shouldn't be overlooked: the things we've come to think of as local search ranking factors originate in the early study of local search results being performed in the trenches by very small agencies. Going back more than a decade, you can read through the blogs of folks like Mike Blumenthal, sharing what they are discovering moves the needle, client by client. That's not quite the same as the toothpaste company, because the scale was very small at the dawn of Local. You could chalk the corpus of local-related blog posts over the past 12 or so years up to being mere sales pitches, but I think if you start reading backward from 2017, you'll see it really wasn't that way. Just as in organic SEO, it's been a voyage of discovery

Jen, thank you so much for contributing your findings to this thread. I'm so happy you have a resource you've linked to. Fantastic!