Hello there! You've come to the right place. Local SEO hinges on the physical location of your business and its customers. If you have a physical store in NYC, you can work towards competing for visibility in Google's local packs for users and queries surrounding that city. If you have a physical location in LA, same story.
What you can't do is hope your NYC store will show up for users in LA. Local search doesn't work that way. Rather, you'd need to pursue organic rankings and paid advertising in markets where your business lacks a physical location.
_Moz just published the Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, which will teach you all the basics of local SEO for free! Hope it helps: _https://moz.com/local-seo-guide

Hi Susannah,

Google My Business listings relate entirely to physical locations. So, if you have 2 physical locations, you are eligible for 2 GMB listings. However, the practice should definitely assign a unique phone number to the second location, as Google wants the number you list to connect as directly as possible to the location.

Having the same business name is no problem at all, and, in fact, you should not add any modifying keywords to either name (like a city name). List the name exactly as it appears in the real business world for both listings.

Finally, in regards to web pages: it's ideal to create a unique landing page on the website for each of the physical locations. So, the GMB listing for Location A would link to the landing page on the company site for Location A, and the GMB listing for Location B would link to the landing page on the site for Location B. Location landing pages represent very powerful opportunities to target content to a specific set of users. Make the content unique and as helpful as possible, and don't forget to put the name, address and phone of the business at the top of its respective landing page. Finally, be sure the citation set you build for Location A links to landing page A, and the same goes for Location B.

You can read more about landing pages here on the Moz Blog: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

Hope this helps!

Hi OhMichael!

Greg Gifford's 2015 post on Local content silos may be a good place to start with this, as it offers a good diagram of how these work: http://searchengineland.com/local-content-silos-secret-local-search-success-223371

Whether you take this approach or a different one, yes, the main question is: what content belongs on pages that describe a single location of a multi-location business? These 2 articles may help a lot with that:

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

https://moz.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-creating-onsite-reviews-testimonials-pages

Basically, whether you build a single landing page per each location, or you build a cluster of silo'd pages, what belongs on those pages is whatever content you feel will be most helpful to consumers at that location, and will be most persuasive that the location is the right choice for their transaction. Please, check out those articles and then definitely let me know if they spark further questions. Happy to keep talking!

Good question, Nathan!

If the business model is changing from local (defined as serving customers face-to-face at your location or at theirs) to virtual (no face-to-face contact with customers anywhere) then it will no longer be eligible for a Google My Business listing. If this is the case then, yes, you'll need to act on this, and unfortunately, as you are not simply moving to a new location, you are likely to end up with the red 'permanently closed' label on the listing. I recommend reading Joy Hawkin's article from 2016 on this issue in case you see any nuances that might apply to your situation:

http://searchengineland.com/google-fixing-permanently-closed-problem-242364

And, I would further recommend contacting Google's support to ask if they have any further advice for you, as your situation is not the run-of-the-mill moving locations scenario, but represents a complete change of business model.

Hi There!

I believe you're asking about how to name your multi-location business across its local business listings. The answer is, you should name it exactly as it appears in the real world, on your store signage, print marketing and the way the telephone is answered there.

So, if you own McDonald's, you're going to name the business just "McDonald's" on all of its listings for all of its locations. You wouldn't have "McDonald's San Diego", "McDonald's San Jose", "McDonald's Santa Clara", etc.

So, unless a city name is part of the real-world business name, don't included it in the name field of your citations. In fact, to do so would be considered a violation of Google's guidelines, which you can read here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB

*The one exception to this is Facebook. If you're going to create a Facebook listing for each of your locations, you DO need to add some kind of modifier to it, as Facebook won't let you create multiple listings for the same name. So, in this one case, you likely would add the city name to the business name field, but on all of your other listings, follow Google's guidelines and don't include any extraneous keywords in the business name.

Hope this helps, but if I've not clearly understood your question, please feel free to provide further details!

Hey There,

Donald is correct that virtual offices, P.O. boxes, etc. are ineligible as far as Google My Business listings go. What you are describing is a Service Area Business (SAB) if you are going to the homes of your clients or other remote locations to serve them. So, in order to be guideline-compliant, you'll want to list yourself as an SAB, using your home address, which Google will then hide publicly. The most important thing here is to avoid violating Google's guidelines ... that is a much more important consideration than how something affects your rankings.

There has been debate over the years as to whether businesses with physical, public addresses have a ranking advantage over home-based businesses with hidden addresses, it's true, but until you do get a staffed physical office to which customers come to do business with you, it's not accurate to represent your business as having one. So, list yourself accurately and focus all the energy you have on the ranking factors you can control. Hope this advice is helpful!

Hi There!

This must be very frustrating, indeed. It's a really interesting case, actually. Looking up "racine" in Google and observing Google's red border on the map, I see your client as actually being just inside the city border of Racine. So, I think you actually have a case here for speaking to a Google rep about the incorrect designation showing up on your Google Business Profile. I would take a screenshot of the client's pin marker, and then a screenshot of the map search for Racine. It proves that the client is physically in Racine rather than in Mount Pleasant, so Google's designation is wrong.

Once you have your screenshots, this is what I would do:

Send a tweet to Google's Twitter support at https://twitter.com/GoogleMyBiz telling them you have an incorrect city designation showing up in their category summary and want to show them an image.

Be sure you are following them on Twitter as they will likely want to DM with you.

Once they get back to you (I find it takes 1-3 days typically) upload the screenshots you've taken and explain the problem and ask if they can help, as the map shows their text is wrong.

See what they can do.

Come back to me and tell me what happened.

Hope this helps!

Hi Eastco,

Good discussion going here. Of first importance: you must determine whether your client truly qualifies for local inclusion. From your description, this isn't totally clear to me. Can you answer yes to all of these 3 points about the client:

1. Has a unique physical address in the city of location (not a shared address, not a P.O. Box, not a virtual office).

2. Has a unique local area code phone number in the city of location (not a share number, not an toll free number)

3. Has in-person transactions with its clients, either at the location (like a restaurant) or at the clients' locations (like a plumber).

If the client doesn't meet all 3 of these criteria, he doesn't qualify for inclusion in the eyes of Google. As you've mentioned your client develops software, the question naturally arises as to whether the business meets face-to-face with its clientele or if the business model is solely virtual.

So, that's step one - to determine qualifications for local inclusion.

On to your second question regarding wishing to target a whole country - yes, you would need a physical office (and all of the 3 above criteria) for each location you wish to target. McDonald's would be a good example of this. Obviously, they have a national (and international presence) but they also have a physical presence in countless cities across the nation. So, you'd have to approach it like that.

Regarding your third question, there has never been a keyword research tool that offers accurate data about local keyword searches. Local SEOs typically do their research by searching without geo modifiers and then adding the geo terms back into their list of discovered product/service/brand terms. That being said, Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends/) does offer you some ability to play around with location settings, but the accuracy of the data is going to have to be seen as relative rather than black-and-white.

Hope this helps!

Hi Digitalkiddie,

I would expect Google to be able to understand international prefixes. Can't give you a 100% guarantee on that, but I'm reasonably certain that they are sophisticated enough to get this. So, my advice is to list your complete local number wherever possible, but if some directories require a different format, follow their guidelines and provide what they want.

Hope this helps!

Hello Taso,

While there isn't really anything you can 'do' to get Google to pick up notes on third party reviews, you mention Yelp in your question and that is a special case. Google stopped showing notation of Yelp reviews in mid-2010, so if this is the source of your 3rd party reviews, you will not see them show up in G. Places. Here is a good article from Lisa Barone at that time:

http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/08/yelp-reviews-out-of-google-places.html

So, you will need to be sure you're getting reviews in sources Google does use. Look at your competitors' websites for a quick picture of what those include. It can take Google some time to pick up new reviews, so be prepared for that, but do go ahead and start planning to acquire them.

And, definitely, work on getting Google-based reviews. Those are very important since Google stopped displaying 3rd party reviews from any source but their own. Hope this helps!

Miriam