Hi Courtney,

Donna has surfaced the very best post for you on this topic. Will your client be at a slight disadvantage if he only wants to build citations on directories that allow one to hide the address? Yes, probably. But, if his privacy concerns are paramount, at least you can get him off to a good start by sticking to the platforms in Phil's article. He may have to rely on other forms of marketing to try to make up the difference, because he will doubtless have competitors who don't share his privacy concerns and are, therefore, able to build a larger number of citations.

Hi Again VicMark,

There are several reasons for building out a strong landing page for each physical office that you own. In short order, these are:

1. A local landing page tells the residents of that city that you are here to serve them and care enough about them to have devoted a page on your website to them. It can speak to their direct needs and show that you are local to them.

2. A local landing page can improve your search engine results visibility, as opposed to expecting the bots to rank all of your cities by glancing at your homepage. Just like the old SEO concept of building out a page per topic/keyword set, building a page for each of your physical cities creates a body of data that makes it very clear to bots that you've got something important going on, surrounding that city keyword.

3. For multi-location businesses, having a unique page for each physical office can help keep your data separate and clear, reducing the risk of ending up with duplicate or merged local business listings.

To my mind, these are all really good reasons for local businesses to invest in create an incredibly good and unique page for each of their physical locations. I've found it to be well worth the investment! You might like to read more about this concept of local landing pages at:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Hope this helps!

Hi Imedia,

So glad to help. A multi-location business model's most unique power is that it can have multiple, legitimate local listings in Google (unlike a service area business with only one location but many service cities). The multi-location business can have one listing per public-facing physical office and these listings can be tied to landing pages on the website. For instance, the Chicago office listing can link to acmeplumbing.com/chicago-plumbing-company (just an example).

As for subdomains, Google reps have stated that Google has no preference for these over subfolders. In other words:

acmeplumbing.com/chicago-plumbing-company

is not a better or worse alternative to:

chicago.acmeplumbing.com

So long as Google can crawl the architecture of the website, they don't care. I find subfolders to be easier to manage than subdomains, personally, so I tend to go that way with my own clients. And, I would consider either subfolders or subdomains to be preferable to microsites, even for a multi-location business.

Exceptions to this? Possibly for large franchises with multiple franchise owners, it could be good for each branch to have its own, fully-fleshed-out website. For example, Ace Hardware is a large hardware franchise where I live. If each Ace location in California wanted to have its own website, in addition to the Ace Corporate website, this might be doable, but I wouldn't think of these as microsites. They'd need to be full-fledged websites. And, I would only suggest such a thing under the rare circumstance that the parent company had very clear guidelines about content policy, management of Google+ Local pages and citations and a whole host of other things. It could be a big huge mess, but in some circumstances, with tech savvy franchise owners, it might work.

Hope this helps!

Hi Kurt,

Yext is an option - not an essential. And Yext, while good for some things, is not without problems of its own (see:http://www.ngsmarketing.com/what-happens-when-canceling-yext/).

I am not quite following your statement that you can't register businesses manually anymore. For example, here is the signup page for HotFrog.com: http://www.hotfrog.com/AddYourBusinessSingle.aspx. Most of the important local business directories are still completely accessible with no Yext account necessary. Perhaps you can provide an example of where/how you are experiencing problems with manual claiming, Kurt.

I recommend you take a look at David Mihm's recent post: http://moz.com/blog/2013-local-search-ecosystems

This will show you how data is shared and should help you feel reassured that Yext is just one of a ton of different players.

I also recommend that you check out GetListed.org to assist you with your manual claiming, for free!

Hi Lingke!

Good feedback from everyone here. I just wanted to be sure to throw into the mix that fact that John Mueller specifically stated last December that Google does not want markup on on-site testimonials:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/wY1vF2RRos4/discussion

More on this here:

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local/26385-say-what-google-says-dont-add-review-markup-your-customer-reviews.html

Hi Marty!

Good topic! Honestly, the only reason you should create county pages is if keyword research indicates that people search this way. They may in some cases, but for an HVAC company, this might not be the case. What your research teaches you will dictate whether this type of page will actually be useful to users.

Hi Robert!

By BSC are you talking about the educational term Bachelor of Science? If so, then Google would almost certainly be trying to parse the intent of a search phrase containing that term. If I name my meteorology store "Weather Near Me", Google is going to have a very hard time knowing that customers are looking for my store and not for a forecast for their area. Sounds like this may be what's happening to your client ... that their name is too much like a more general search phrase, causing Google to diversify the SERPs because they aren't 100% certain about searcher intent.

If I'm not understanding, please feel free to provide more details.

Hello Tyler!

What an interesting question! Not one I've seen asked before and I don't have an authoritative answer for you. I did find a couple of mentions of this out on the web.

Here's one from http://www.tastyplacement.com/6-best-free-local-business-directories-for-backlinks-customers-hits

4. Yelp.com. Yelp is popular (a fair number of visitors) and its pages rank well in the search engines. So, a listing here might earn you some supplemental results in a Google search. It’s review-based, and there are a lot of “interactive” features you’ll want to skip if you just want to list your business. Valuable and free. One limitation: Yelp does not give dofollow (a link that passes valuable pagerank to the target site) backlinks.

And a discussion at Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/jburq/acquiring_citations_from_directories_yelp_hotfrog/

I tend to think of the value of sites like Yelp as being in their quality as a citation and their ability to host conversation (hopefully positive) about your business. I am going to ask one of our super SEOs to step in and give you an opinion on this. It's a very good question!

Miriam

Hi Edward!

Thanks for the further details. So, yes, you are correct. In order to participate in typical local search marketing activities, you must have both a physical location and make in-person contact with your customers, whether at your location or at theirs. Barring this, you have 3 main options open to you:

1. Organic SEO - creating content, earning links, optimizing pages, etc. geared to toward various regions for which you are hoping to rank organically, because you will not be able to rank in the local packs of results. It's critical here that anything you create be of the highest possible quality and unique. No duplicate content, spammy links, doorway pages, etc.

2. PPC - Paying to appear with ads in various regions, in which case, you can appear in any city or state for which you're willing to pay.

3. Social Outreach - gearing your social campaigns toward specific regions for visibility on social platforms.

Hope this clarification is helpful!