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!

You're welcome, Patrick. So, I have 2 suggestions:

1. Short-term, change the email being sent out so that it links to a correct, custom map on your website instead of G Maps.

2. Long-term, go to your town on G Maps, and in the lower right, click the tiny "send feedback" link to report the missing street issue. It will likely take a month, but hopefully Google will act on this. Only then should you re-include the link to your G Maps map in the email.

Hope this helps!

Hi Gary,

Great question. The answer is, no, I don't believe that is a "known" quantity, because it would vary for each scenario, each search. How frequently one of your clients appears in the results is going to be based on a) it's strength, b) the strength and number of nearby competitors it has and c) the location of the searcher. So, as you can imagine, that varies, search by search, user by user.

A given in any scenario is that a business is only likely to rank for both truly local and remote searchers for the city in which it is physically located. So, let's say you have a dealership in Dallas. Someone in Dallas searches for "auto dealership" and your client has a good chance to rank for that. Someone in Sugar Land searches for "auto dealership Dallas", and, again, your client can rank for that. But, if someone in Sugar Land searches just for "auto dealership", Google is going to show him Sugar Land results, and your client won't be included in those because they are located in Dallas.

The variables in the scenario relate to the exact proximity of a user to your business at the time of search. A searcher in a Central Dallas neighborhood looks for "auto dealership" on his device, and Google is most likely to show him dealerships that are closest to him. If he then drives over to the Park Cities neighborhood and performs the same search, his results are likely to change to that geographic area of the city. But, if the searcher is, say, 10 miles outside of Dallas, searching for "auto dealerships Dallas", Google defaults to a different type of result for him, which appears to be based more on authority than proximity.

So, those are basically the elements that you have to take into consideration in trying to understand the reach of a given business. You have to consider the location of the searcher, as well as the level of competition both right next to the business, and within its entire city or zip code.

Not a simple answer, I know! But, I hope it helps.

Hey Michael,

Nice to know my name is one your cherished family members had (may they rest in peace), and thanks for the kind words in your reply. I'm sorry if what I was describing was a bit basic - stuff you already knew, but it does sound like that city-specific ranking bias of Google's is the cause of what your clients are experiencing in the more populous area you've described. One thing I am curious about, and would like to ask you as you've been looking so much at the results in this tri-city area. Let's say your client is in city X in the XYZ of this triangulation. Do you ever see competitors in city Y ranking in the local packs for cities X and Z, or competitors in city Z ranking in the local packs for X and Y? Just curious.

I know what you mean about spurious agencies offering your client the impossible, and yikes, the client taking the bait. So frustrating when that happens. Likely, the best thing to recommend to the client in city X is to invest in Adwords so that they can show up in the paid results for cities Y and Z.

Enjoyed your reply very much!

Hi Steven!

So, basically, the answer is: you can't. I know that's not what you want to hear, but it is the reality for nearly all single location businesses that serve multiple cities. Google's bias toward physical location affects all service business models this way. Unless you can get a staffed, physical office in the second city, it will be a waste of your time to make it your goal to rank in the local results for that city. Instead, your options are:

1. Go after organic rankings for that city via the authority you build surrounding website content+links for that city.

2. Pay for visibility with locally-targeted PPC.

3. Use social media to try to build brand awareness for your work in that city.

4. Do everything you can to encourage word-of-mouth among existing customers. Customers in City A have friends and family in city B. Make a superior effort to offer the type of superior service that would cause the A group to recommend your services to the B group. Consider how loyalty programs might assist with this. Perhaps every customer who brings you a new customer gets a voucher for a free dinner, free massage, etc.

5. Explore building relationships with related businesses in City B. Perhaps your company does everything but bake the cake for weddings. Find the best bakers in City B and see how you can help one another in terms of lead gen.

A combination of all these efforts could begin generating some leads for you that are not dependent on the unrealistic goal of ranking locally where you aren't locally located. Hope this helps!

Hey Mike,

I hope you'll take a peek at my Monday blog post which Paul has linked to in his reply to you. It deals with precisely this topic. Your dilemma is a really common one, and so frustrating, I know! Basically:

1. Yes, you should remove the keyword stuffing. It's a guideline violation, and therefore, a risk.

2. Yes, this may cause rankings to drop - you will have to build authority in a Google-approved way to get it back.

3. Yes, Google can "soft supsend" the listing if you don't remove the kw stuffing, which will likely cause your listing to become unverified and your reviews may get lost because they aren't associated with a GMB account anymore. You'll have to re-claim the listing if you get caught, but I can't guarantee the reviews will come back (this is scary).

4. Yes, Google is doing an awful job catching this type of spam, so help them out. Once you've cleaned up your own listing, start reporting every single competitor for spam. It would help if you could achieve Local Guide status in Google, as it will give your spam reports a bit more oomph...better still if you can get to know a few other Local Guides and team up to repeatedly flag a business for spam. You have to be on the lookout after you report a business for business title spam - very often, they reappear with the spammy name intact! Arggh - so annoying. But be persistent.

Again, hope you'll read the article, and thanks for asking an important question.

Thanks for the further details, and shalom to your wife and family.

Hi There,

Normally, no, having a local presence should not harm your national marketing efforts. However, it is important that any Google My Business listing you build is guideline-compliant. Are the GMB listings you built representing real, physical addresses and do you have face-to-face interactions with your customers? If the answer to either of those is "no" then you shouldn't be building GMB listings.

If my answer hasn't quite cleared this up for you, please feel free to provide further details about your business model.

Hi Sociable!

Yes, Google will show a 2-pack for a branded search (like Me Gusta Tacos) if the business only has 2 locations in a given city. From looking at your website, it looks like you have two locations about 20 miles apart, so that might be a bit of a stretch for Google to include both in the same pack. But, here are three things to consider:

1. When you perform your search, are you physically at or next to one of the restaurants? Because of the searcher-proximity factor, this could affect the results you see. If you go to the other restaurant, do you then see a different result? How about if you search from 20 or 50 miles away from both?

2. Have you built up enough authority for BOTH locations to convince Google that they should show both in a pack when someone in your area does a branded search. If not, this is something to work on that could eventually influence Google to give you that 2-pack you want. Can't promise that, but this would be a way to work towards that goal.

3. Unfortunately, your business name is of a type that may have intent problems. When someone searches for "me gusta tacos" how does Google parse their intent? This could be someone speaking Spanish declaring their enjoyment of tacos, it could be a non-Spanish speaker asking for a translation, it could be someone looking for your restaurant, or it could be something else. This being the case, you may need to build brand authority over time. Google gets it that when someone searches for "Taco Bell" there's really no question of intent and they are likely to show them a local pack with multiple Taco Bells in a city or multiple Taco Bells in nearby towns. No one typing that it is looking for a bell shaped like a taco, or a taco shaped like a bell, or what have you. The brand is so known, the intent is a given. So, with your smaller brand, you'll be hoping to build that kind of authority that signals to Google that anyone searching for "Me Gusta Tacos" means your company. Right now, you need to focus on building local authority so that local searches are shown your business. In the future, if your chain expands, you will need to build regional and then national brand recognition, so that you can get that "Taco Bell treatment" in any local pack where you have branches.

Hope this helps! It's a good question you asked.

Hi Paul,

Okay, glad to know you were at least able to determine that GMB listings aren't right for the business model. Sounds like you will need to rely on other forms of outreach (organic, paid, social). Good luck!

Hey Mike,

Great discussion going on here. I want to clarify - when you say "apartments" you are talking about apartment complexes, right, not individual apartment units within a development? In other words, Tan Apartment Community, Green Apartment Community, Blue Apartment Community; not Apartment 3, 20, and 35 within communities?

I thought you raised some really thoughtful points, Kane. This particular situation isn't one of those black-and-white ones with a super obvious call - it's nuanced. So, I thought the points you brought up were very valid in an "it depends" kind of scenario. Thanks for the very kind words.

Just a thank-you for sharing your experience and tips with the community, Arowland! Much appreciated! Very creative workaround you've come up with. Neat.

Hey There,

I recommend you reach out to GMB support on Twitter with a link to the listing, explaining that it's a stand-alone location, not located within another business.

Sure thing! If for any reason, that doesn't work out for you, please feel free to come back here.

Hi there!

Yes, your sense that MapQuest has decreased in importance is correct. They were a very early mapping product and enjoyed some years as an early adopter. I believe MQ is still pulling data from Infogroup, but basically, they handed over the keys to Yext and their help documentation is all about using Yext instead of using MapQuest. Kind of sad, honestly. There was a time before Google Maps was the be-all-end-all in mapping.

Hi Matt!

Glad you've asked, and you're right - you definitely don't want to mark your business as closed. Instructions for this are found in the Guidelines for Representing your Business on Google, which read:

Seasonal hours

​If your business has seasonal hours, use the following guidelines:

• During the season in which you’re open, set hours that reflect the current season's opening hours. You may set special hours for holidays, temporary closures, or other events.
• When your business is out of season, remove all opening hours, so they appear as unset. Set your opening hours again at the beginning of your next open season.

Hope this helps and that you have a good open season!

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for coming back to this thread. The permanently closed listing for an unrelated business at your address should not affect you in any way. If it were your business that was marked permanently closed, that would be a problem for you. But as it's the former tenant's business marked that way, it's only a problem for them. I would not worry about this.

Good Morning, Bek!

I hope you will receive a variety of responses from our community on this, as citation management is often a case of horses for courses. What you choose should be based on factors including the scale of your business model, your funding, your expectations of control/management, etc.  Basically, you have 3 options when it comes to citation management:

1. Do it all manually. The plus side of this is that you have as much direct control as possible. The minus side is that it is time-consuming and can't be scaled easily for companies with multiple locations. It's all but impossible to efficiently, manually manage local business listings for dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations. And, manual on-going monitoring of citation quality is a huge chore even if you only have a single location business.

2. Hire a company to do it for you manually. Whitespark is one of the more popular companies that builds a la carte citations manually. The plus side of this is that you pay once and the citations are built well with good data that you've approved, without you having to invest a lot of time. The minus side is that citations typically need to be managed on an ongoing basis, which companies like Whitespark don't do. They are an excellent service for a one-time manual build, but because of the way data can degrade over time, may not be the right match for a business that wants to monitor and manage their listings on an on-going basis.

3. Automate it. This is what companies like Moz Local, Uberall and Yext do. Moz Local, for example, distributes your data to the major citation platforms (including the major aggregators) and then offers you a dashboard for ongoing monitoring. The plus side of this is that the work on your end is nominal and, at least with Moz Local, you'll be alerted to ongoing issues with your data, including inconsistent and duplicate listings, as they arise. A solution like this scales to dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations. The main minus side is a lack of direct control, plus cost can be a factor, and one of the key complaints about Yext is that (unlike Moz Local) they charge for your distribution to low-quality directories that few people actually use.

So, those are your 3 options, and what might work best for a single location boutique may not be the right match for a multi-location restaurant chain. Some businesses do like Yext, but if you do a bit of searching, you will also find genuine complaints, as you will about most providers. Other people are big fans of Moz Local, BrightLocal, Uberall and other providers. So, as I said, I'm hoping you'll get multiple points of view on this thread, do some investigative work, and discover the right match for your brand's scenario. In the end, that's what matters most!

I'll just finish up by letting you know that if you have any questions about how Moz Local could help you business, please email our customer service support at help@moz.com. You'll receive a friendly and helpful reply.

Good morning!

So sorry to hear you've encountered some trouble. Can you answer some questions for me about your scenario, please?

1. Did your re-design of the website keep the exact same domain and URLs, or did you have to do any re-directs?

2. Am I right that your concern is that, when you search for things like "austin plumbers" while you are physically located in Dallas, you are seeing your client on the first page of the organic results, but when you search from a physical location in Austin, your client is coming up on the 9th page of the organic results? Is that right?

3. You mention local results, as well. What were your client's local pack rankings prior to the re-design and how, exactly, have they changed?

4. How long ago did you launch the re-design?