Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Mike,

I believe you are asking about Google My Business listings, right?

Provided they meet all of Google's guidelines, it's perfectly fine for a company to submit all of its listings for a multi-location business from the same Google account and the same IP address.

What would not be okay would be a marketing agency submitting multiple clients listings via the same Google account. Agencies should always make sure each client has his own Google account so that his listings are controlled via that client's Google My Business dashboard - not via the agency's dashboard. It's always important that each client directly controls his own listings, even if you are helping him with them.

Does this answer your question? If not, please provide further details.

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 Paul!

Phil actually did a piece one year later as a follow-up to that first one you've linked to. I want to be sure you've seen:

https://www.localsearchforum.com/local-business-citations/6050-private-citations-hide-your-address-service-area-businesses.html

I do not know of a more recent list of directories that support hidden addresses. Regarding your question about Apple Maps Connect, the answer to that was not easy to find, so I actually reached out to Phil (given his expertise in this particular area) and he let me know that, no, unfortunately, hidden addresses are not supported by that platform.

Phil's two lists should still be largely accurate. Hope this helps.

Hi Pete,

Quick questions:

1. Does the lawyer share a building with any other lawyers?

2. Does the legal practice have a Google My Business listing for the business + listings for multiple attorneys at the firm?

3. Is it possible to share the name of the business with our community? It's okay if you can't, but looking at a live example would certainly be helpful in taking a stab at identifying what is going on.

Looking forward to your replies!

Hi Pete,

Thank you for the further details. Given that your client shares the same building with other attorneys, your scenario hints at the possibility that what you are experiencing is the effect of Google's Possum update, which influences the local finder results for businesses in the same category/same building. Joy Hawkins does a good job of describing this phenomenon in the #2 point in her article at Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900

If your business appears absent from the map at the automatic zoom level, but then appears in the results if you zoom in on the map, chances are strong it's Possum. As you can't share the identity of the client, please try that experiment and see if it fits. Possum was released in September 2016 and was believed to impact well over half of the Local SERPs.

Hi Matthew,

I agree with Igor that this is a competitive keyword, but I'm assuming that you are talking about local pack rankings, rather than organic (Igor cites competing with Wikipedia and others, which would not be a wise use of time/resources). I think what you are asking about is how to compete with the businesses coming up in the local pack for the search 'web design tyler tx' or for people in Tyler searching for 'web design' alone?

So, first of all, I would start with a small adjustment of your thinking. If you can rank in the top 3 in a free (non-paid) local pack, you are more or less equal with the folks ranking 1 and 2. In my own search for 'web design tyler tx', you are coming up 3rd in the pack and in the local finder view (reached via the more places link at the bottom of the pack).

I'm not sure where you see your own business ranking when you do this search from your office and from locations around your city (it may be quite different from what I see), but going on the premise that you've achieved a #3 ranking (well done!), here's what you'd have to do to try to move up:

1. You need to perform a thorough competitive analysis of the 2 companies outranking you. Are they older? What's their authority like? Their link profile? How many Google-based reviews have they earned compared to you? How strong is their content? What is their geographic position on the map, relative to the 'centroid' of Tyler and relative to you? Etc., etc.

2. You mention you are using Moz Local, so this should mean that your core citations are either in great shape or are on their way to being so. Have you fully filled out your Moz Local listing with images, photos, social links, etc? Images, in particular, impact conversions.

3. How is your review game beyond Google? Narrow and thin or diverse and broad?

4. If, at the end of your competitive analysis, you find that your metrics are quite similar to the two companies outranking you, then my best advice would be to:

• Focus on content development that bests your competitors' efforts

• Earn some really solid mentions from the main publications in your city, preferably with links, but w/o them can be valuable simply as authority citations

• Analyze new linkbuilding opportunities

• And, finally, consider whether what you really need is higher rankings or a better conversion rate. There may not be that much difference between the number of clickthroughs you are getting from the local pack vs your 2 competitors. Let's say you are getting 3 leads a week through the #3 ranking you've earned and the guys at #1 are getting 4 leads. What really matters is whether your website and your sales people are converting 3/3 leads, or 0/3 per week. That's where the money is. If it turns out that what you really need is better conversions, then you must analyze the website for this specific goal, and also, analyze how your sales people are handling calls that come to you through the local pack and other avenues. It can make a big different to your bottom line if you get to where you are converting even 2/3 leads per week instead of 1 or 0/3.

Hope this helps!

Hi Matthew!

My pleasure, and I'm so glad you found my answer helpful. It sounds like you have a game plan for some work ahead. Yes, it's possible that by not being #1, you may be missing some traffic, but it might not be as much as you think, given that you are in the top 3. In your shoes, I'd be counseling myself to focus a little less on rankings and a little more on broadening my company's visibility for secondary terms in the local-organic results. The size of your city (population about 100,000) convinces me that you could really cover the waterfront of things people in Tyler need with the right content strategy and harness some highly targeted/highly converting traffic.

Rand, in particular, has done some amazing Whiteboard Fridays over the past year or so about content, keywords, etc. I hope you'll take full advantage of this section of the Moz Blog:

https://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday

Good luck!

Hey There,

Joy is correct: the primary concern here is that Google will not understand where you are located, leading to ranking problems. On the user side, the customer may be unable to access correct driving directions, and may end up not finding the business at all. Both of these things impact the business' main goals of being visible and experiencing transactions. So, definitely not advisable.

Another good question from you, Blue Corona!

Are GMB listings going away? Not any time soon, but as John mentions, be prepared for increased paid-packs as time goes by, in some industries. Basically, any industry into which Google can position itself as the middle man (leads for home service providers, bookings for hotels, etc.) will be one in which free packs could become obsolete.

If you're trying to take the long view of what's happening, basically, Google is trying to become the platform on which actions occur that would previously have occurred mainly on a company's own website. Google wants to provide directions, facilitate phone calls, govern reputation, show photos, book appointments and arbitrate leads all on their own product instead of on yours (your website). As Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm discuss in this interesting chat transcript, Google is becoming your new homepage: http://streetfightmag.com/2017/03/06/why-google-is-becoming-the-new-homepage-for-smbs/

So, whether we like the idea of Google having a finger in every pie or not, what you want to do as a local business owner is to influence as much as you can the accuracy and persuasiveness of your presence in all of Google's results (and that includes paid results in some industries and tough markets, as well). This is what users will be interacting with - this layer of data that exists on Google about your business, instead of only on your website. Your GMB listing will be a major factor in this for the foreseeable future.

So, that's basically the eagle's eye view, with some unknown quantities like the ultimate impact of voice search (controversial) and future updates to Google's algorithm (unpredictable). Hope this helps!

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 Michael,

I totally get it that you'd love to find a solution for a client like this, and also that you won't find a 'play by the rules' type of reply helpful from the community, given that this is what you've doubtless encountered a number of times as the answer to the question you are asking. So, I won't suggest playing by the rules, but rather just want to stress the importance I've always felt about my role as an educator to local business clients. It's not fun being the bearer of bad news (you're unlikely to rank in the local pack if you lack a physical location in city X and Google could drop the hammer if you put up listings for virtual offices), but if I don't set the client's expectations properly about how local search works, I'm actually doing him a disservice.

Unfortunately, over the years, I've had so many business owners come to me from scenarios in which their previous marketers gave them false expectations and didn't educate them about the limits of Local, and those relationships with their former consultants did not end well. Money was wasted, penalties were incurred, people grumbled about lawsuits... not good stuff. And I've had to decide whether I could get these disenchanted business owners onto a good path again or let them go by as hopelessly blacklisted.

So what can we do when Google limits us in this way, particularly in this historically frustrating scenario of applying a physical location bias to business models to which this shouldn't apply? You get it and I get it and consumers get it that it makes zero difference to us if the plumber we call is in our town or the town 10 minutes away, but Google continues to treat SABs with a lack of genuine consideration, lumping them in with brick-and-mortar businesses and letting the chips fall where they may. So what can we do?

We can educate the client and tell them we're going to go after organic rankings for those service cities, because that's just the way this works. That's the way it works for us, it's the way it works for our client and for his competitors, and unless we want to risk a really negative outcome for our own brand and our client's brand, we're stuck with this. But, at the end of the day, our job matters because we have provided the education and come up with a strategy for gaining maximum visibility for the client within the limits of the situation. To me, that's why what I do matters. I educate, even when it's saying things people would rather not hear

Hi Michael,

No, no typo on my end. For SABs like your client, your best available strategy is to go after organic rankings for his service cities, since you can't typically go after local ones because of Google's bias. A typical local marketing plan for a service area business involves creating a set of really excellent landing pages on the website for each of his main service cities, differentiating them with unique and useful content. You might check out:

https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

These pages take time and resources to develop well, and their goal is to gain organic visibility for local queries.

And, finally, there is PPC - paying for Adwords to show up for specific cities. If being visible for a specific city is vital for an SAB, a combination of city landing pages + PPC can bring in the leads the business is seeking.

Hope this helps!

Hi Michael,

Yes, Google does say "whenever possible", so this is one of those things where you could possibly decide that there isn't a huge risk in the redirecting numbers, but it would make me a bit uneasy. For one thing, there have been numerous documented incidents of Google calling businesses. If the switchboard receptionist answers "Happy Sailboats" or "Happy Sailboats Marina" instead of "Happy Sailboats Shipyard" this can actually trigger a red flag about the accuracy with which you're representing the business name/s on the Google My Business listings. So, just so you know, there is some risk whenever you don't stick to Google stated preferences to the letter. How big a risk? Hard to say. The risk-free way would be for the business to change its phone system if having 3 GMB listings is deemed important enough, so that each department answers its own phone directly.

I'd also build a really strong landing page for each of the 3 departments and link the GMB listings to them.

Or, in the end, the business may decide to simply marketing itself with a single GMB listing, which is also risk-free but could miss out on the opportunity of ranking for the wider variety of categories the department approach can cover.

Hi There!

It will be really helpful to the community if you can share two things with us so that we can look at your actual business:

1. Your website URL

2. The keyword phrase you are trying to rank for

If you can't share these, it's okay, but the community won't be able to provide feedback specific to your business and there are believed to be over 200+ ranking factors in Google's algo, so we'd only be guessing. Thanks!

Hi Setokin,

Glad to know I hit close to the mark in understanding this. Here is my advice:

1. It is essential that no one else use the park's phone number. You will need to let each of the vendors know this. Each entity being listed on Google MUST have its own phone number, whether these are entities you own or entities your vendors own.

2. If all of these businesses are located at the same address (123 Palm Dr.) then I recommend reviewing the following Google guidelines:

• Containment information indicating that your business is located inside another business (whether or not the businesses are part of the same organisation).
  • Not acceptable: "Link ATM (in Tesco)", "Apple Store at Stanford Shopping Centre", "Benefit Brow Bar - John Lewis", "Kwik Fit Tyre & Battery (part of Kwik Fit)", "Costa Coffee (inside Tesco Extra)"
  • Acceptable: "Chase ATM", "Apple Store", "Benefit Brow Bar", "Kwik Fit Tyre & Battery", "Costa Coffee"

Also read Google's sections on Departments and Categories in the guidelines thoroughly to understand how each entity at your park should be listing itself and if it is, indeed, eligible for a GMB listing.

3. For those businesses that you deem eligible for a GMB listing, you are going to have to do a really masterful job with GMB category selection to avoid the effects of the Possum filter as much as possible. If you have 2 Mexican Restaurants in the park, for example, Google is unlikely to show both because of the shared category. So you may have to get creative here in choosing categories for those businesses you control and ALSO, look at the categories each vendor is using to be sure they aren't 'stealing' the main category that the park, itself, most definitely needs.

Wow! A lot to do here. In your shoes, I would honestly hire a really good Local SEO to work out this strategy with you, based on Google's guidelines, but if you need to DIY, I hope my pointers will prove an actionable starting point.

Hi Ben,

Good question. Yes, what you're concerned about here is genuine. The key point to understand is that Local SEO (in particular citation building) is completely tied to physical location, not to brand. So, in your case, you've got two different websites promoting two different aspects of your business, but only one physical location, meaning that you're only eligible for one set of listings representing the location. I'm not totally clear about what the main business model is; you mention a sports site. Is this like a gym or something like that?

The main concern with what you are doing (promoting two websites) would be that if the address and phone number is on both websites, it could potentially feed Google confusing information about which of the two brands is associated with that address and phone number. Is it the sports site, or the camps? This can lead to duplicate listings appearing, which can undermine your efforts to rank the physical location.

So, if I'm understanding correctly that the sports site is something like a gym, or a rock climbing school, or something like that, with a physical location customer come to, here's what I'd do if it's absolutely impossible to consolidate the two websites into one:

1. Build citations for the sports site only. Link all of them to the website for the sports site.

2. Do not build citations for the camp sessions (which are likely ineligible for GMB listings anyway as they sound like an event rather than a place). If these must have their own website, be sure they have a unique phone number that is placed on the camps' website. Do not put the address of the camps in crawlable text on the camps' website. Put it in image text as a safeguard. This is to avoid the NAP of the camps getting mixed up with the NAP of the sports site.

3. Do a really thorough check for duplicate listings that may already have been created. Moz Check Listing would be a good place to start: https://moz.com/local/search. Resolve any duplicates and check for them regularly.

4. Be sure that the content on the two sites is completely unique. Don't duplicate content between the two sites.

And that will be about the best you can do. Ideally, though, I'd try hard to persuade the owner that the above approach is kind of  a workaround to what would be the much better solution: consolidation of the website, which completely resolves the need for all of these provisos and careful steps. Then, you'd simply have a section on the site listing the camp sessions as part of what the sports site offers and there would be far less concern that any duplicates would crop up or that there would be duplicate content or what have you.

Hope this helps, and if I'm in any way misunderstanding the business model, please feel free to provide further details.

Hi Ben,

Another good question. I want to preface what I'm saying here by saying I'm not an expert in linkbuilding and that I see what you're asking about as having some grey area. I'll do my best to describe what I'm talking about.

In an organic SEO scenario with virtual businesses, I agree with Rand's explanation in this WB Friday https://moz.com/blog/backlinks-maximize-benefits-avoid-problems-whiteboard-friday. Please, watch the video and pay special attention to his explanation of linking from mysite.com to myothersite.com, where he's describing cross linking between two domains you control. So, his explanation is good on this and very educational and well-thought-out.

Now, once you've watched that, we need to consider that your business scenario is not virtual - it's local, and you're having to take all of these extra steps to make sure your two websites don't get mixed up with one another in Google's "mind". Again, if you were able to get the client to consolidate, then you and I would be recommending a super internal linking strategy because that would be purely internal and would not look like the business is trying to manipulate anything. But, in the multi-site local business scenario, we're dealing with 3 possible outcomes from cross linking:

1. It could potentially look to Google like the business is trying to artificially elevate the authority of that second site, though Rand's advice could help lessen the chances of that.

2. You're taking all these steps to separate website A from website B (ensuring there is no shared NAP or shared content) to avoid citation confusion, but now, you could potentially be undoing all of that by overtly associating the two sites back together by crosslinking between them. If there's no matching NAP between the two sites, citations may not suffer and duplicate listings are unlikely to result, but you are definitely letting Google know that both sites are related.

3. And, even if you think you're being pretty mild in your cross linking, it's important to know that there have been cases in which the industry has speculated that Google was applying the Possum filter in the local rankings based on a parent company controlling the two entities. See the #2 case in Joy' Hawkin's article about Possum: http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900. I mention this not because you'd be going after local rankings for the two entities (you're only pursuing then for the main business), but simply to illustrate that Google may well understand that the same business is controlling both websites based on something like the same parent company being listed on two business licenses. Google can dive pretty deep, it seems.

Point of all of the above: there really may be little way to hide from Google that a single business owns both entities, so basing the SEO strategy of either on crosslinking between the two may not be that smart. To me, personally, it's a strategy that seems kind of manipulative at face value, and while I've described nuances that could make a gentle approach not too big of a deal, I'd be leery of making it into a "strategy", per se, for the business. That second website, if it must exist, needs to be good enough to earn links on its own and to be a candidate for selective external linkbuilding efforts. If it has to lean heavily on the main site, it's just another argument for why the multi-site approach isn't really recommended.

Whew! Long answer, but this is a complex topic. Hopefully you can read up further on this topic to form your own opinion and help the business make a sound decision.

By coincidence, Nikki, Tim Capper just wrote a great post on this very topic this week. This should answer your question beautifully:

http://onlineownership.com/create-google-page-connected-google-business-page/

Hi There!

Applause from me for trying to do your part to crack down on spam listings. What, specifically, are you hoping to track? Ranking shifts? Something else? Please, share as much as you can. Thanks!

Hi BigChad2!

Great topic. One thing that might be helpful to you would be this year's Local Search Ranking Factors survey of some of the best Local SEOs in the world:

https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

You'll see that quality of inbound links to domain and domain authority of website are both top 10 local pack ranking factors and, if you drill down, you'll also see things like HTML NAP matching GMB NAP, diversity and quantity of inbound links to domain, page authority of GMB landing page URL, topical keyword relevance of domain content, etc. all being cited as top 50 factors. So, these are all organic factors that industry folks believe impact local pack rankings.

That being said, I'm not aware of any recent formal case studies, per se, that have taken screenshots of the correlation between high organic and high local pack rankings, but this would be something you could likely easily pull together if you needed to do so to illustrate/prove a point.

To undertake such a project, I'd do a variety of searches in cities across the country, such as "Dentist Santa Fe", "Dentist Boston", "Dentist San Francisco", etc. I'd do it across several industries, as well. I'd create a spreadsheet and notate the local pack ranking position of the top 3 and then its organic ranking. My bet will be that, at the end of the study, you'll find a high apparent correlation. It won't be the case for every single business appearing in the pack, because some will be there due to spam or other factors that have nothing to do with their website. But, my guess would be there would be a pretty high instance of those businesses with top 3 local rankings also having page 1-2 organic rankings.

For this search "Dentist Santa Fe", I see that the top 3 in the pack are all 1st page organically, and I see this phenomenon for many, many searches, and it offers a good explanation why an annual survey like Local Search Ranking Factors reflects that Local SEOs have noticed this behavior as being common.

I'm sorry I haven't seen a recent article on this, but doing a small study should be relatively easy if you should need to present proof of this phenomenon. Hope this helps, and if anyone in the community has authored or read such a study recently, please share!

Hi Roman,

In addition to Logan's smart tips, I'd add that I wouldn't view schema as a ranking vehicle, per se. I'd view it as a way to make sure that a search engine like Google has received the maximum amount of very clear information about your business and what it offers. Schema brings clarity, and better or broader rankings can come from that clarity in some cases. Additionally, for local businesses, onsite original reviews that are marked up with review schema can sometimes lead to the display of review stars within the organic results, which can improve clickthrough rates.

Excellent point, Joy. Organic authority as Possum defense!

Hey Again, Jason,

Looking at your Moz profile, I believe you're here: https://www.bambrickmedia.com.au/

Please answer these questions:

1. What is the exact search term you're trying to rank for?

2. What is your city of location?

3. Are there any other marketers in your building or on your street?

Hi Bee,

So, yes, this definitely looks like Possum. When I search Google Maps for "Yacht Broker Port Adriano Spain" I see that there are numerous similar business in this location and that when I zoom in on the map, Marlin Marine Services does appear. So, a listing does exist for this business, but it simply isn't being judged by Google to be deserved of showing at a non-zoomed-in level. So, this brings us right back to my earlier comment regarding the need to do competitive research to discover the top competitor's strengths and your client's weaknesses so that you can create a plan for improvement. 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?

Hi Paul,

I'm going to recommend that you contact our Helpsters directly at help@moz.com so that you can privately show them your business info and get one-on-one help with what you're seeing. Please reach out to them, and you should receive excellent help.

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 Edward,

That's a good question, and I can see that the WB Friday you've linked to doesn't really answer it. In a nutshell:

1. Local business listings on sites like Google, Infogroup, Yelp, etc., are meant to represent businesses that meet face-to-face with consumers in the offline world, either at the company's location (like a restaurant) or where the customers are (like a plumber). So, no, your virtual business shouldn't be building these types of "structured" citations.

2. This, however, does not preclude you from getting un-structured citations from entities that are local to you. So, for example, your carpet factory is located in Augusta, Maine. You do not have an offline showroom that sells your carpets directly to customers at the factory. Rather, your carpets are sold on your website, and perhaps at 3 local home improvement stores and also at select national retailers. While you don't sell directly to consumers at your factory, your factory plays an important role in the community. It sponsors a children's crafts program at the Augusta community center, as well as contributing team uniforms to the Augusta Little League. The website for both of these entities might then mention your sponsorship, including linking to your website, as a form of an unstructured, partial citation. Meanwhile, as a major employer in Augusta, your brand might be mentioned on local online news sites or blogs, providing further citations. These citations might feature your complete NAP (name, address, phone), your partial NAP, a link to your site or no link at all, but all of them act as references to your business that Google sees as data that reinforces belief in the existence of your company.

3. For a virtual business, citations are not nearly as important as they are for true local business models, If they contain links from authoritative sources, they definitely will help you SEO-wise, but their purpose in terms of featuring your NAP just isn't the same. For a local business, repeat references to accurate NAP are believed to strongly impact local rankings, but your business won't be going for local rankings, so your mindset in regards to being mentioned by local entities is organic, rather than local.

4. As for online-only directories, they do exist, but I wouldn't focus too much on them. These were a big deal a decade ago, but due to abuses of them, Google has significantly downgraded any impact they may have on actual rankings. So, rather than focusing on directories, you may be better off looking for ways to get press from local or industry publications that would enhance awareness of your brand and be a credit to it.

Hope this helps!

Hi Nigel!

That is a really good list from Whitespark, but it's applicable to truly local business models. I think, in Edward's case, we're talking about a virtual business, which changes our outlook considerably on best marketing strategies.

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 Tyler,

I second Nigel's vote for the single domain approach. In a nutshell, it's nearly always better to build your brand on a single website than to try to spread your efforts across multiple websites. Local SEO best practice is to stick with a single domain on which you build out the necessary pages to reflect your various branches, linking to them from a high level menu or a combination of a store locator widget + an accessible html menu somewhere on the site so that you can be sure these pages get indexed.

Hi Donald!

Thanks for sharing these anecdotes with us all. Good ones!

Hey Slumberjac!

Whew ... that was an alarming experience you helped the client through. Well done! Thanks for sharing your story.

Hey There,

Please check out this recent Moz blog post: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing

It gives thorough advice for google listing issues like the one you're describing. If you don't find an answer to your specific scenario there, please let me know, but I'm hoping you will!

Hi Neil,

Good question, and unfortunately, the answer is no. The children's club wouldn't be eligible for a GMB listing, according to Google's guidelines, which state:

Ineligible businesses

The following businesses aren’t eligible for a business listing:

• Businesses that are under construction or that have not yet opened to the public.
• Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes, model homes or vacant apartments. Sales or leasing offices, however, are eligible for verification.
• An ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don't own or have the authority to represent.

The description of the club you've provided would fall under that guidelines of an ongoing class at a location that isn't owned by the club. The club can ask the school to mention its existence in the school's description of its own GMB listing, but doing so is actually kind of pointless because Google doesn't publicly display the description.

So, lacking an address of its own that it has the authority to represent, the club's business model isn't truly local. And, should the club attempt to build citations, this could actually interfere with whatever Local SEO efforts the school is trying to make. So, complete local outreach is going to be limited here for your client, and they may need to rely more on organic optimization, PPC and social.

Hope this helps!

You're welcome, Neil. Glad to have you here!

Hi Flynn,

Unfortunately, what Google determines to display is up to them, and not something you can choose. You can influence what Google displays by the excellence of the local search marketing for each of your locations, but if Google chooses to display a single result nearest you, rather than a pack of several results, that's their call.

Hi Neil,

I'm so sorry for the delayed reply. For some reason, I didn't receive a notification that you'd responded. So sorry about that!

Okay, so there are some guidelines you need to refer to here. It does sound like your business may qualify as a department of the train station. Google's guidelines on this state:

Public-facing departments that operate as distinct entities should have their own page. The exact name of each department must be different from that of the main business and that of other departments. Typically such departments have a separate customer entrance and should each have distinct categories. Their hours may sometimes differ from those of the main business.

• Acceptable (as distinct listings):
  • "Spring Gardens Optical Centre"
  • "Cafe Nero"
  • "Manchester General Hospital Department of Dermatology"
• Not acceptable (as distinct listings):
  • The Apple products section of PC World
  • The hot food bar inside Meadowhall

For each department, the category that is the most representative of that department must be different from that of the main business and that of other departments.

• The main business "Barclays" has the category "Bank" whereas the department "Barclays Advisors" has the category "Financial Consultant"
• The main business "Southend Toyota" has the category "Toyota Dealer" whereas "Southend Toyota Service & Parts" has the category "Auto Repair Shop" (plus the category "Auto Parts Shop")
• The main business "GetGo" has the category "Convenience Store" (plus the category "Sandwich Shop") whereas the department "GetGo Fuel" has the category "Petrol Station", and the department "WetGo" has the category "Car Wash"

So, from reading the guidelines, and given that you have a distinct name, the above should clarify your eligibility for a GMB listing for each of your branches.

However, regarding your phone number, that does concern me a bit. Google states:

• Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.

  • Use a local phone number instead of central, call centre helpline number whenever possible.
  • The phone number must be under the direct control of the business.

To be totally safe, you should have a unique phone number for each branch that is being answered at each branch. Any other route can lead to NAP confusion, ranking issues and other problems. So, before you start listing your branches, I would recommend resolving the phone number issue.

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

Hi Jason!

Thanks so much for coming back on this one. I'm really glad it helped. Since I responded, one of my Moz Blog posts was published which might offer additional help. It walks you through doing a full competitive audit, with a free downloadable spreadsheet to help you: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit

Going through the formal process of the audit could help you turn up some more things for your to-do list. Good luck to you!

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.

Hey Ben!

Please check out my 2016 article on this topic: https://moz.com/blog/are-coworking-offices-eligible-for-google-my-business-listings

Let me know if any further questions arise after reading it

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

Hey Matt,

A tough subject. I'm guessing you've read all the general advice on ensuring that you've added plenty of your own guideline-compliant photos on behalf of your clients so that Google has good stuff to choose from, and it sounds like you know how to flag photos or report them like this: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Basics-for-Business-Owners/Remove-Photo-From-Location-Listing/td-p/1131795

But as to doing this at scale, I'm not aware of a solution that gives you any additional control over GMB images than you have with manual management. I think I once asked Local SEO Guide if their Locadium product alerts customers to new images being uploaded to their GMB listings, but I don't believe they ever replied. You might investigate that product further to see if you can get an answer. My question to them may simply have gotten lost - it's the one thing I wondered about when the product debuted. But, even if a product were to alert you to photos being added (which would be half the battle) the other half of the battle would be that it's up to Google to plunk photos into your listing - it's their choice. You can report unwanted images, but you can't proactively prevent Google from accepting them or displaying them. Definitely a pain point, and one of the impactful outcomes of Googles crowd-sourcing approach to location data.

Hey Ben,

I happen to love philosophical Local SEO discussions - they are too few and far between, IMO.

You've pretty much answered your good question by understanding that paying for placement allows you to "cut in line" (I like that analogy). Traditional Adwords have never had anything to do with organic authority, which is why Adwords can be used by scammers to fool consumers (want a great but scary read: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16309752/google-rehabs-near-me-search-adwords-crackdown). So, it's not just that businesses with low organic rankings can dominate PPC, but that totally unethical business models can use it to scam the consumer public. This is in no way confined to Google's program, but they do get the lion's share of visibility.

Now, here's what I'm finding interesting. Google's growing Local Service Ads (formerly Home Service Ads) is a bit different, in that it has a quite serious vetting process AND that Google is obliging itself to guarantee work being done up to $2,000. This means that if Google allows a scammer to slip past them into the program, Google will end up paying for it.

While this doesn't directly relate to organic rankings, there is an indirect tie. I would theorize that a local business which has the credentials to pass Google's vetting process for LSA inclusion will also be working hard at building the real-world reputation that can lead to organic authority and high organic rankings. They will be earning good press, good links. So, in a way, LSA could reduce the disconnect between ads and business quality. Interesting to think about, right?

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!