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Hello Again,

Looking at this again after reading the reply you received from Google. The trouble is, when I zoom in enough on the map, Google's borders disappear, so I was having to approximate location. To confirm, can you let me know if this image is correct:

https://imgur.com/NhaXUj3

Thanks!

Arggh! Definitely a frustrating and unusual case. Literally one of the best illustrations I've ever seen of how being on the border of a big city can create such a hurdle to rankings. Sorry this worked out this way, but yes, your options are:

1. Create content surrounding Racine. I would suggest that the dentist find some opportunities to interact with/contribute to the Racine community that you can then create content surrounding. There has to be something more to write about than just a "our patients come to us from Racine" reason to write about Racine. That's not interesting. But, if the dentist sponsors Racine groups/teams/events, if he speaks at schools, belongs to business associations, contributes to online news, etc. all in Racine, this is something to showcase on the website to highlight his community involvement in that city. It will also be the best kind of way to get linktations (see: https://moz.com/blog/linked-unstructured-citations) to support organic rankings for implicit and explicit Racine-related searches.

2. Invest in social outreach hinging on the Racine community.

3. Invest in PPC targeting Racine

4. Invest in offline advertising targeting Racine.

5. Run campaigns at your practice that in some way reward customers who refer Racine neighbors to you.

6. Use all available GMB fields to mention Racine. This includes Google Posts, Q&A, description, photos, review responses, etc.

7. Bear in mind that while it's not likely for a business to rank outside it's city of location where there is a fair level of competition, it's also not absolutely impossible. Don't make any promises to the client about this, but on the back burner of your marketing plan, keep in mind that you are trying to see if any amount of organic signalling can overcome that border bias. I'd track everything closely. If you manage to surmount this issue, you'll have a fascinating case study on your hands.

Honestly, the scenario of having the parking lot in Racine and the dental office in Mount Pleasant is so odd, I'm half-tempted to recommend you find some clever and funny marketing angle in it, but that could just be the local SEO in me who finds this scenario weird and exasperating. Maybe a goofy idea, but I've seen such things take on a viral life of their own for other local businesses. Good luck!

Hi VELV,

I agree with AL123Al on this, for the present. Should your business grow to the point when you can legitimately run two separate, staffed offices, it might be time to revisit legally setting up two separate companies. But, for now, with a single address, you're likely better off sticking with a single site approach.

Hi Tim!

As Alex says, you can add multiple phone numbers to your GMB dashboard, but getting Google to associate the numbers as in your screenshot might not be possible. I'm wondering if Schema could influence this, but I don't know for sure on that.

However, I do want to raise the point that large companies with multiple departments are often eligible for multiple listings, and if the business is big enough, Google will display links to the department listings within the main listing. Adding an attachment to show what this looks like. https://imgur.com/a/7FGNPpw

I am not sure if your company is big enough for this treatment, but the fact that you have different phone numbers for different departments is a start. Read Google's Guidelines pertaining to "Departments within other Businesses" to see if you're eligible: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Hi Agrier,

The question I asked you, above, was in hopes of understanding whether the parent company needs to rank for purposes of its own or is expendable. If you can let me know the answer to this, I'd be very glad to discuss further!

Hi Agrier,

Is it necessary for the parent company to come up at all in search? Is there any benefit to it ranking highly?

Good morning, Simon!

Thank you so much for providing these key details. So, on the face of it, yes, Google has likely acted with suspension because the two listings share the same general category, address and phone number. They likely believe this is a single business attempting to create spam listings for its different services, which is not allowed. In other words, they think your client is one business which offers both flat and thatched roofs, and while the roofing types are quite different, the business has signaled to Google that it really may just be one entity offering a variety of roofing.

The only surefire way to resolve this would be for the company to operate out of separate staffed offices with separate phone numbers, as well as separate websites. I would not be confident that you can convince Google to reconsider the suspension without this. This is actually a very interesting case, because roof thatching IS such a specialty business. Google could well have let this slide had the phone numbers been unique, but, given that the business didn't take this approach, they are in a pickle now.

So, your path at this point, as a marketer, is to see if the business has the resources to open a second, totally distinct business. If so, then you can start over again with the citation building process for them. If not, you may be better off telling them to combine the two websites into one, representing a single business with multiple roofing styles represented by a single Google Business Profile with multiple categories and good service menus.

My pleasure, Simon! So glad I could help.

Hello!

Thank you for bringing your question to the community. Unfortunately, holiday rental properties are not eligible for Google My Business listings. You can read the guidelines regarding this here. They read:

"Ineligible businesses

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

• Rental or for-sale properties such as vacation homes, model homes, or vacant apartments. Sales or leasing offices, however, are eligible for verification."

So, while the office from which you rent out these properties is eligible for a GMB listing, the chalets are not.

Please let me know if I've misunderstood anything about your business model or question.

Hi Bryan!

Sorry for the delayed reply. I believe this thread in the GMB forum should be relevant to your scenario, but please let me know if you have any further questions after reading it:

https://support.google.com/business/thread/1859764?hl=en

Good morning!

Did your images appear? If not, answering EffectDigital's questions could help the community troubleshooting this with you. Also, if you can provide a link to the actual listing, that would be really helpful, if you have permission to do so.

Hi Daniel!

If you're able to share the client and search term so that the community can actually take a look, that would definitely help narrow down feedback to what is most relevant to your scenario. If you don't have permission to do that, though, it's okay. Advice will have to be a bit more general, in that case.

I have some questions:

1. I want to just confirm that you are talking about the image showing up WITHIN the 3 pack in organic search ... not something you are seeing in Google Maps, and not just the image you see on your solo Google Business Profile. Is that right? We're definitely talking about the 3 pack image here?

2. What is showing up as the cover photo on your Google Business Profile when you do a brand name search for your business? Is it the logo or is it one of your actual photos?

3. Have you uploaded the logo in your Google My Business dashboard, or are you saying it's not in the dashboard and Google is pulling it from elsewhere?

4. Are the photos that you have uploaded for this location of high quality and in alignment with Google's guidelines?

5. Has the logo always been what you've noticed on this listing, or was it previously showing a photo and then suddenly started showing the logo?

Please, let me know!

Very helpful, Daniel, and congrats on the good ranking!

Here is what I would do to try to jog Google:

1. Remove the logo image from the dashboard

2. Upload 5 new high quality images to the dashboard, choosing one as the profile image.

Google just wasn't showing me very many photos for this business and I think you should take away what you don't want and give them more to choose from among photos that you do want. Give that a shot. The change could be immediate or could take a few days. If you try this experiment, please follow up here if you can to let me know what happens.

Hi Lee,

I want to be sure I've understood your business model. E-commerce businesses are not typically eligible for GMB listings.

Google's guidelines state:

In order to qualify for a Google My Business listing, a business must make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours.

At your offices, are you making face-to-face contact with customers? If so, you are eligible. If not, then you aren't.

Hi Lee!

Thanks for clarifying this. Yes, then, if your offices are staffed during stated business hours by your own staff, have unique phone numbers for each office, and are meeting face-to-face with customers you are:

• Eligible to have 2 listings

• Free to link those listings to whatever page on your website you want to.

But, now, let's get into the nuances of this. Which page/pages is it best to link to from GMB listings? This is a subject of long debate in the local SEO industry. The two schools of thought  go something like this:

1. You should link all of your listings for a multi-location business to your homepage, because homepages typically have the strongest DA and this can then boost the local pack rankings of all locations.

-or-

2. You should link each location's listing to that location's landing page on the website, because it's better Usability. UX would suggest that the local customer clicking on the GMB listing wants to be taken to the page for that listing's location - not taken to a homepage and then having to click around to find the address/phone number/other details for the location they want to visit.

Option 1 might work best for you, because if you've only got 2 locations, you can likely display their complete NAP on your homepage without it being burdensome. But, it's a decision you'll need to make based on whether you believe rankings or UX  need greatest emphasis  for your customers and your business.

Hope this helps!

Hi DylMar,

You are right to guess that, yes, it's up to Google to decide if they want to show a two-pack like that for a branded search. If your geographic scenario is similar, in terms of distance and terrain,  there's definitely hope that you could see this same treatment of your client. Your best shot is building up the authority of both of the locations so that Google feels confident about listing them both for users when a branded search is done.

However, it's definitely not something I would set as a client goal or make promises about. There could be reasons why Google is treating your client differently that have to do with Google's understanding of user intent in that specific region. If, for example, Google felt that users near to local A definitely want location A, a calculation could be going on just to show A instead of showing both A & B. Another scenario could be that your locations are being considered too close together by Google, and one of them is being filtered out, because of that. But, as with most things, if you can drive up the overall authority of both locations, it's your best bet to see what you can squeeze out of the SERPs.

Some things to work on:

• Earn reviews for both locations

• Be sure you've got strong landing pages for each location

• Be sure no guidelines are being violated by either location

• Earn some good local links for both locations

Likely you're already working on these things, but without being able to see your actual client, the best I can do is offer general advice. Good luck!

Thanks for bringing your question to the forum.

While this is a common scenario you are describing, the best I can do is offer general advice without seeing the actual client's results.

1. Are you duplicating GMB categories between the law firm and the practice? Try to avoid this, if possible.

2. Are you sharing phone numbers between the law firm and the practice? Don't do this.

3. Are there unique landing pages linked to from GMB for each practitioner? If so, are you optimizing these pages for the same terms as the overall practice is targeting? If so, diversify the practitioner pages so that they target longer tail terms while the main website pages for the practice target more head terms.

4. Are you doing anything with the brand's presence in GMB that could be causing Google to trust the practitioners more than the practice. For example, are you adhering to naming guidelines for both practice and practitioner? Have you resolved duplicate listings? Has the practice received any penalties, suspensions, or engaged in any forbidden practices like setting up listings for ineligible locations or acquiring fake reviews?

Evaluate all of the above and make any necessary adjustments. If, after a waiting period, you don't see the desired outcomes, the practice will need to determine whether:

1. It's a big deal, or not really a big deal, to have the lawyers outranking the practice for some terms.

2. If a big deal, the practice may need to decide to de-optimize the listings for the lawyers to remove as much of their ranking power as possible.

Hope this helps!

Thank you for bringing your scenario to the forum. So, as I understand it, your T-shirt page is ranking for the term you'd prefer your Embroidery page to rank for, in a city in which you're not physically located but to which you are adjacent. While it's always up to Google which page they feel is most relevant for a particular search term, here are some things I see when looking at these two pages:

1. You are duplicating content between the two pages. This speaks of a lack of effort on the part of the brand to build unique, high quality content for the customers. If you are going to create a unique page, create unique content for it.

2. I see in your menu that you have a section for "Locations".  From your Contact Page, it looks like you have just one physical location in High Wycombe. Looking at this, what appears to have been the strategy here is to create dozens of pages for locations in which the business doesn't physically exist, but would like to serve. Unfortunately, as I look at these pages, I would have to say that these pages have been created for search engine rankings rather than for human visitors. There has been little effort put into making these valuable resources for people, and if the brand's only connection to these other cities is wanting to rank for them/sell to them, that's really not good enough inspiration for publishing something worthwhile. A better approach would be to evaluate whether the brand has any actual connection to these cities. For example, let's say the the company had a large commission to embroider the work uniforms for a famous commercial pottery studio in York. You could then create a page about the job  the brand did  for this studio in York, complete with images, videos, text, and testimonials for the company. This would be a page that would have a real reason for existing, instead of the present state of these "location" pages that have been created. Google is likely viewing this entire collection of pages as being of low quality.

3)  Something odd is happening at the top of your Marlow Embroidery page. It's as if you've got a Title Tag in the text at the top of it (instead of in your code) reading: Embroidered Workwear Marlow | Embroidery Marlow | Workwear Marlow. This is not human-style language and doesn't belong in the customer-focused text on your page. To Google, this could look like an attempt to over-optimize the page in a spammy way.

Overall, the brand isn't taking an optimum approach to marketing itself to communities beyond its city borders. If this were my client, I would be advising the brand to discover if there are real relationships they can build with customers in other cities so that they have something useful and interesting to publish. The danger of continuing with the present approach is that it could easily be pushed down by a competitor who is willing to invest in higher quality content. The duplicate content issue needs to be addressed, and the Marlow Embroidery page ranking issue might be sorted out if you do this and earn a few good new links to it, but from just a quick look at the site, this brand may have greater overall needs than this, given the current state of their content strategy.

There's a very good opportunity for your agency to get this client onto a better path. Recommended reading: https://moz.com/blog/rank-beyond-location

Hope this helps and good luck!

Hello Daniel,

You are right - this is an unusual time for all of us, and local businesses are facing some real challenges. If you need to temporarily close your location, contact Google via twitter at @GoogleMyBiz. Mike Blumenthal reported on the 16th that Google will be pushing out a "temporarily closed" label on businesses that local and state governments have ordered to close.

Other areas of your GMB listing you can use to push out info about the changes include:

• Hours of operation

• Google Posts

• Description

• Google Q&A (remember, you can write questions AND answer them as the business owner, but you can't apparently mention COVID-19 in this area.)

For restaurants, Google is apparently allowing them to edit their business name to state that they are offering takeout.

I recommend reading this post from Darren Shaw for more ideas: https://whitespark.ca/blog/keeping-gmb-accurate-during-covid19-pandemic/

I hope this helps, and I'm wishing you well.

Hi Jason,

Good topic! The pandemic has resulted in lowered responsiveness from Google in many areas, so that's one thing to keep in mind right now. Persistence is the best strategy for fighting entrenched local spam. You sometimes have to report things repeatedly, and when that doesn't work, if you uncover what appears to be a large network of spam, publicity can sometimes move Google to action when nothing else will.  Here are a couple of good articles, in case you've not seen them:

https://moz.com/blog/simple-spam-fighting

https://www.sterlingsky.ca/ultimate-guide-fighting-spam-google-maps/

But you are so right that Google doesn't have a realistic approach to managing spam in their index. The problem is large, ongoing, and poorly addressed. Good luck!

Good morning!

It's good that you're doing a competitive audit for the business, as I agree, it appears to be being excluded from Google's local finder for searches like "senior placement". I am able to find the listing's Google Business Profile doing a branded organic search and I'm able to find it via a branded search within the finder, but it's not coming up for me for non-branded searches. So, the listing hasn't suffered a hard penalty (removal) but it's not ranking for your stated search phrase.

I can't replicate a full audit here in the forum, but here are some things standing out to me, at a glance:

1. Many of the top ranked competitors have exact matches of "senior placement" and "placement" in their business titles. You don't. If these are legitimately their names, then this is to their advantage. But if any of them have added "senior" "placement" or "senior placement" to their business titles when this is not their name, this would be a violation of Google's guidelines that you could report.

2. Many of the ranking businesses have a street address published on their listing. Your facility doesn't. In fact, there are zero signals of location on your website, other than the 502 prefix of the phone number. I see no address, no mention of Tucson in the text content of the pages, and only a reference to locality in some title tags. Is the business actually based in Tucson? Why does it not publish an address, and why am I not seeing Tucson referenced in the content of the website? It's making me curious about the business model. Is this a single business at a single location, or is it part of a franchise and the website I'm looking at at aseniorjourney.com is just for the Tucson branch of a much larger business? At any rate, there's no address on the Google listing (compared to competitors) and very weak signals of locality coming from the website. I do see that Old Pueblo Placement Services is ranking without an address, so what I've noticed here is not "the answer". Still, it's something to investigate further.

3. The Possum filter does not appear to be at play here, because no matter how many times I zoom in on the map, the business just isn't showing up.

4. How confident are you that the review practices the facility has engaged in are guideline compliant? 33 all-five-star reviews makes me slightly worried. Not saying anything is wrong there, but I always find businesses with perfect 5 star rating to be slightly unusual.

5. Without a street address, I can't run the diagnostics I would like to seek problems with the listing. Have you done this?

6. It looks like the GMB listing hasn't been claimed. Is that right?

That's all I have time for this morning. Something is definitely amiss with the business. I would recommend taking the listing over to Google's Help Forum for further troubleshooting.