Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Sida,

If you wish to go beyond the free basic Yahoo Local listing, you can get an enhanced listing for about $10/month in the U.S. I am not being shown UK rates, but here is the page I'm looking at:

http://beta.listings.local.yahoo.com/comp.php

Honestly, unless you have money to burn (and few small businesses do), paying the amount you've specified may not be a good investment unless your company has proof that your customers are heavy users of Yahoo! Local. There are countries where something like YP is so dominant that paying for inclusion may be worth it, because they are literally one of the only strong indexes in 'town', but this is probably not the case in the UK.

Hi Alex,

Good question! Google's bias toward physical location has built into local search a specific way of handling website optimization for service area businesses like yours. Typically this looks like this:

1. You optimize the overall website for your city of location, meaning that you put your complete NAP on the contact page and in the sitewide footer. You also typically optimize your core pages (home, about, service pages) for this city of location as well. You develop your Google+ Local page and your citations to reflect the NAP of your city of location, as well. You work on earning reviews on these profiles, as well as social mentions and links. The goal of all of this work is to achieve high local pack rankings for your business for queries that either contain your city of location or that stem from devices based in your city of location.

2. For your service cities where you have no physical location, you don't have NAP. But, you do have the ability to build a unique landing page on the website for each of your major service cities. Be sure that the content is unique and terrific for each page you create and then link to these pages from a top level menu under a heading of something like "Cities We Serve'. Work to earn social mentions and links to these pages. You can also work to add on-page testimonials from clients in these service cities to the respective city landing pages. Do not put the business' NAP on these pages, because it does not apply. The goal of this work is to earn secondary organic rankings for these service cities, because it is highly unlikely that you will earn local pack rankings for any city in which you're not physically located.

Having NAP on the rest of the website will not harm your ability to rank organically for your other service cities, but you have to go into this with the understanding that you're aiming for local rankings for your city of location and organic rankings for your location-less cities.

Hope this helps!

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 Bob,

You are getting some very thoughtful answers here. I thought I'd pop in as we've chatted so much about Local SEO. Thought I would add...if this client is Local, remember that he must NOT duplicate the address or phone number on these websites. In other words, if his legal business name is Bob's Appliance Repair and his main website uses his NAP, no part of it should be replicated at Bob Fixes Heaters or Bob Fixes Washing Machines. He would need to obtain completely different addresses and local area code phone numbers for the other businesses. I do not recommend getting suite numbers in a situation like this, because the services rendered are the same or similar and Google would likely catch on that something was odd.

I will also add, I have seen local businesses make an absolute mess of this concept of multi-sites or micro-sites. The end up with a bunch of neglected, thin or duplicate content sites. It would be so much better if they put their money/effort into building one really strong website to which new elements are being added on a regular basis. In my experience, local business owners who want a multi-site approach have either come across bad advice somewhere or have an excess amount of energy. If you can step in with great advice and funnel that great energy toward them building a killer on-site blog, you may be able to save them from being spread too thin and assist them in becoming an authority resource in their field.

Hi Kynduvme, Definitely follow the link Bede Fahey has provided. This was a major policy change that I would recommend you take note of and comply with in signaling to Google the correct business model. By being accurate in your settings, you will hopefully avoid future penalties of your listing.

Hi Kelly,

I agree with Thomas that Local SEO, Content Development and Social Media activity, surrounding your local geography, are the best tools to consider for achieving your goals of increasing your visibility for local long tail traffic. Thomas has made some good suggestions here, and I will add something more specific.

I have seen a few sites, some of them not very beautifully designed, that offer 'what's it like to live here' user generated content. I've had to look at this when writing about areas in which I don't live. You have an advantage here in writing about your own home town, it would seem. What if you wrote a good article about each of the neighborhoods in your local city/cities and then invited users to expand on the article with their take on what it's like to live there? There could be subtopics, too, like what are the schools like here, what are the restaurants like here, what are the shops like here, what's the government like here, parks, doctors, etc. Here's an example:

http://www.city-data.com/forum/san-bernardino-riverside-counties/839376-whats-like-live-palm-springs.html

That is more in the form of a forum, which you might consider, or you might do yours more like blog posts and then treat the user entries somewhat like reviews, marking them up with Schema.

Don't know if this is the perfect fit for the things you want to rank for, but it is a UGC feature I've noticed that I think is really cool. If your site could become THE powerhouse site offering this type of content in your city, that could be pretty powerful. Hope this helps!

Hi Samantha,

Good discussion going on here. I'll add my own thoughts.

For local businesses, a single site approach is generally preferred over a mutl-site approach for the following reasons:

1. Easier management for the company/webmaster

2. Reduced risk of duplicate content

3. All marketing activity goes toward building the authority of the brand and then this flows down to all locations listed on the site, instead of the authority being split up over multiple websites

4. Possible reduced risk of merges

5. Google has said a single site is a better approach. See: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-one-site-locations-15454.html

So, in general, if a client came to me and asked if they should start out with a single site or many sites, I'd say a single site 99% of the time. That being said, if the client was in your position with multiple sites already in place, I would help them assess:

1. How old these sites are

2. The quality of these sites (great content, unique content or thin/duplicate content)

3. The overall authority of these sites

4. The depth of citation building that has been done for these sites

5. The client's ability to keep multiple sites updated with fresh content on an on-going basis

6. Any problems the client is having with managing multiple sites.

Answers to these questions would help me understand how big of an asset or a liability the multi-sites are for the business. If they are spammy, low quality, low authority, few citations, it would be a no-brainer to suggest bringing everything together in a single site. But, if they are high quality with lots of citations, I would have to warn the client that some ranking drops could likely occur that would take time to recover from and that a great big citation editing job would be ahead of us to ensure that all references to the old sites had been corrected to reference the new landing pages on the single site.

So, it's going to be different in each case, and hopefully these thoughts will help you assess your own situation. Good luck! This is an important decision you are making.

Hi Mark,

I think you're right to be concerned. The mutli-site approach is one I pretty much never recommend to local business owners. Google's own John Mueller has clearly stated that Google prefers the single site approach (see: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-one-site-locations-15454.html). As far as Google's rules go, it's not permitted to create a second local listing for a set of products a company vends. That's striclty forbidden, in fact (see: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en).

I've had business owners come to me in this situation and I've had to take a hard line with them and leave it up to them to take my advice or not. I tell them that they are a single company and should be running a single website backed up with a single set of citations for the business (unless they have more than one physical location, in which case, they can build out separate citations for each location). Ideally, the client should:

1. Consolidate his sites into a single site

2. Redirect his old URLs to the authoritative one

3. Clean up any citations that have been built as though this were 2 companies instead of one.

Alternatives:

1. The client can found a new business if his products are different enough to merit the effort of doing so. The new business would need a unique name, address and phone number.

2. If he insists on keeping the second site, all NAP (name, address, phone) should be removed from it as well as all references/links to the main site. He could run a blog on it or something about his industry, but he should not attempt to rank locally with this second site in any way. Content should not be duplicated in any way between the two sites. Once you start explaining this to the client, he may say, "Well then what is the point of the second site, if I can't try to promote it as though it were a second business?" That can be a sort of 'bingo' moment that can help you to help him see that he should really think hard about consolidating.

What I've found over the years is that business owners sometimes take this multi-site approach because they feel it will make them look bigger to Google and help them diversify their rankings. In point of fact, in the local business sphere, it only hampers them. Google wants an accurate representation of the business with a single, consistent set of NAP and a clear, authoritative website. This way, everything the business does goes towards strengthening their brand. The stronger their brand becomes, the easier it will be for them to rank for their various products.

Hope these thoughts are helpful. I'm wishing you luck discussing this with the client. I know it's not always easy:)

Hi Mnkpso,

Marcus has done an awesome job responding to you. I will add just a few things here.

When I have clients who are completely new to Local SEO, I have them read these 2 pieces I wrote to describe both the technical and mental basics of Local SEO:

The Zen of Local SEO

The Rudiments of Local SEO

For the most complete description of the factors that make up local rankings, I point to:

Local Search Ranking Factors 2012

*Note that this last survey was conducted a year ago and that significant changes have taken place since then, but the basic factors are pretty much the same.

And, because a major key to success in Local is keeping on top of the news, I would recommend these blogs and fora in addition to the two mentioned by Marcus:

http://www.blumenthals.com/blog

http://www.ngsmarketing.com/blog/

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/

There are other super Local SEO bloggers out there, too.

Hope these tips are helpful!

Hi David,

Unfortunately, Mike's reply is right on the money. The rich text feature of merged pages is really unreliable and I don't know of any solution to this. For some time now, none of the Local SEOs I know have recommended merging to clients, because the whole thing is so wonky. Sorry to hear you're having trouble with this, but I'm not surprised. The ball is in Google's court now to improve their product so that the things they offer actually work.

Hi Nick,

If you can take the business owner through door number one, I agree that will be the very best choice. Good luck with the conversation with him.

Good morning, BBuck!

Good questions, and as others have stated, the template and host really shouldn't be a concern. Just be sure you're not interlinking the sites in some unnatural way or duplicating content, image files, etc. Be sure you're keeping the citation building for each client in two completely separate 'baskets' (e.g. don't accidentally mix up details if you are building citations for both clients at once) and be sure you're writing unique descriptions on the citations. I would be very surprised if Google cared about the template or the host. You should be good to go, provided you treat each project as a separate effort in terms of content development and marketing. Hope this helps!

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 Mike,

Opinions vary on this. Local Search godfather, Mike Blumenthal, refuses to pay the BBB. See:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2010/10/07/google-better-business-bureau-ratings/

Others point out the authority of the BBB in the world of SMBs:

http://moz.com/ugc/the-best-link-your-clients-may-be-missing-12889

My feeling on this is that, if a client has money to throw around, having the BBB link won't hurt, but I'm not convinced that it really helps a ton, either. Provided your core business NAP (name, address, phone) is correct on the listing, then that is, in my opinion, the main thing.

Hey There!

Paramaya has given such a great answer (including that very important link to Phil Rozek's work on directories that support hidden addresses) that I have only a couple of things to add here:

• This is not an uncommon situation, with home-based businesses. Owners' privacy concerns are legitimate. While it is believed that the lack of a street address will have some negative impact on Local Pack rankings, the degree of negativity is speculative and is industry-dependent in some ways. I would like to see a side-by-side study done on this, but am unaware of one. There is likely some negative impact, but the amount is not set in stone.

• Be sure that the client understands that he can have a Google+ Local page with a hidden address. There is nothing to prevent him from gaining inclusion in Google's local product.

• In your client's industry, if everyone is abiding by Google's guidelines for SABs (see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en), the only competitors who will have an edge on him in Google's product will be those who have a staffed, physical office. This is the only type of scenario in which Google states the address of an SAB should be displayed. It's important to be aware of this, because if every other plumber in your client's city is working from home, then their addresses shouldn't be displayed either, leveling the playing field.

• Where the playing field becomes less level is actually outside of Google's local product. There is some thought that any competitor who displays his address on his website and on his other citations may have an edge on a business that doesn't do this. So, this is where your client may fall behind competitors who do not mind having their home address published on the website and their non-Google citations. This then trickles back toward Google, as Google will find less instances of the address contained in your client's dashboard (and hidden to the public) to match up with references around the web. This decrease in NAP prominence could speculatively lead to a decrease in 'confidence' on Google's part that could, to some degree, decrease rankings.

Once you've educated the client about all of the above, he can make an informed choice. He may change his mind and decide to display his address on his website and non-Google citations, in which case, he has every chance of leading the pack with the right marketing efforts. Or, if he remains resolved to keep his address hidden, he should get a Google+ Local page, hide the address, build citations on only those directories that support hidden addresses and then will have to get as far as he can ranking-wise with making the most superior effort he is capable of in terms of building his website authority, content, social presence, earning links, reviews, etc.

Hi Ira,

While I know that an email address is a required field of our .CSV template you'll be filling out, I'm not actually sure if there would be negative outcomes of using a non-working address in that field, in terms of updating your listings on our partners' platforms or otherwise. Let me bring this up with the rest of the Local team to get a consensus of opinion. I'll come back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for asking a smart question!

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 Abe,

I want to double check here that we are talking about local businesses in all of these cases. Do each of these businesses you've mentioned have:

1. In-person transactions with customers?

2. A physical address at which mail is received and a local phone number which matches this address?

While a trophy shop is a typical local fixture, I wanted to be sure that the electric wheelbarrow and sump pump concerns are actual, physical local businesses.

For the moment, let's assume that they are. In such a case, the niche nature of these three businesses should make it fairly easy to become locally dominant. My bet is that competition would be modest for all three businesses. So, a moderate amount of work in the following areas should yield good results:

1. The development of an excellent, optimized website

2. The building of citations in various places

3. The earning of reviews

4. Earning of a modest amount of links

5. A content develop strategy designed to make each business the most active authority in its local region

6. Social outreach on a modest scale

You're not working with personal injury attorneys in Los Angeles, here, so my broad assessment would be that a moderate effort in all of the above should generate quite a bit of visibility for these businesses, provided that they are local and not virtual.

Hi Mark,

Once you've got the website properly locally optimized, on-going activities will typically include content development, citation building and earning reviews. You may also want to pursue earning links and social mentions. I recommend that you read this article to see how you're doing on the Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors:

http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide

Hope this helps!

Hi Steven,

I think the answer to this would be found in your keyword research. While I agree with much of what Ray has written, honestly, I would not count on Google to match 'Indy' with Indianapolis or Indiana. After all, 'Indy' is also slang for independent and the Indy 500 and what have you. So, unless KW research indicates that more people are searching for Indy that the city name or state initials or what have you, I would not choose that as your URL. Go ahead and use this term in various places in your text, if it's in common usage in your geography, but I recommend being more formal in the URL.

Hi There!

This is a very important question you've asked. Unfortunately, call tracking is generally considered to be a no-no in the Local SEO environment. The basic reason for this is that the consistency of your business NAP (name, address, phone) around the web is considered to be a vital ranking factor, not to mention being important for customers. Inconsistent NAP (created by call tracking numbers) can lead to merged and duplicate listings and ranking problems.

The best post I know of that's been written, to date, comes from Mike Blumenthal and discusses what you should and shouldn't do in the Local environment with call tracking:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/

I think you'll find the above really helpful!

Hi Rox,

Good for you for going straight to Google with this. That was just what I was going to suggest after reading your initial post but before I saw your follow-up. And thanks for generously share what you've learned. This may be of future help to other community members:)

Hi Frank,

Thanks for the additional info on this and for clarifying that the business models are local and well-acquainted with the role citations play in Local Search Marketing. What follows is just my opinion, based on what I've seen over the years.

I've honestly never been a fan of any paid local directory, though some people swear by them. You shouldn't be having to pay for a BOTW listing. Unless I've totally missed something, I'm pretty sure those are still free (https://secure.botw.org/secure/Signup.aspx?type=jumpstart&directory=local). I'm not familiar with the benefits of Business.com and have never submitted a client to them, so I'm afraid I can't speak to that.

If my clients were in the hospitality industry, I'd make sure I'd covered their citations in as many of the free generic local directories as possible and then be sure they were enrolled in any industry specific directories that do drive traffic/bookings to hotels, even if these were paid ones. Beyond this, I'd devote resources to content development and social outreach rather than paid generic directories. I'd predict a better return from that kind of effort.

Hey VZpro,

Your description of your client's location sounds quite similar to the client featured in this Mike Blumenthal post. Check it out!

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/08/03/pigeon-an-anecdotal-impact-report/

Hi Ali,

So, Google's guideline on this is that the business name should be exactly what it is in the real world (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en_). Businesses should not be adding modifiers to their name for the sake of search. If the business is now considering going through a formal/legal re-branding process, then this would be mean marketing-wide, including the website, all citations and other web references, the way the phone is answered, print materials, radio and TV advertising. You'll need to pick one name and use it everywhere. This will need to be the legal name or DBA.

Yes, it could be of some degree of help if the legal business name included the city in it, but whether this advantage would be great enough to warrant the major task of a formal re-brand will be a big decision for the company to make.

If there's a local component to the business, building real-world community relationships can be the best way to earn links. For example, joining local business organizations, sponsoring community projects, teams and events, or hosting events.

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 Scott,

I'm a wee bit puzzled by this - could it be that the client did submit their complete NAP but then marked the address so that it would be hidden? This would be quite common for a service area business. I would not have believed that you could create a Google+ Local Page/Google My Business Page without at least submitting the complete NAP. I could be wrong about this, but just to be sure, have you taken a logged-in look at the client's Google My Business dashboard to see if the NAP is, in fact, missing?

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.

Hi There!

You might like to check out our list of recommended companies here: https://moz.com/community/recommended

Hi Spartan,

Good topic! I agree with the advice of mentioning your zip codes within the content of the existing landing pages, but, I would specifically warn against putting a big block of zip codes or city names on any page of the website. Google's webmaster guidelines cite this as a suspicious practice, see: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

I would prefer to take a more creative approach to covering the zip codes in a given city. Let's say you are a house painter, servicing 3 zip codes in Davenport Iowa. Why not do three project features on the landing page, including the zip code of the house you painted in the project description? Something along the lines of, "Look at this fabulous turn-of-the-century charmer in the 52081 zip code area of old town. We chose a pearl grey and mustard palette to stately effect!" Or something like that. This would be my preferred approach to ever just putting blocks of zips, given Google's warning about this.

Regarding your more general question ... yes, developing a landing page for each city serviced by an SAB is a standard practice, but it is not a guarantee that you will rank for these cities. How well these pages do will depend on:

1. The competitiveness of the industry/geography

2. The quality of the pages

3. Overall strength of the brand/site

Unfortunately, in nearly all cases, competitors with a physical location will outrank your business for their own cities ... just as you are likely to have an edge over competitors who lack a physical location in your own city. But, if strong enough, and if the competition isn't too stiff, these types of pages can gain you some extra visibility and generate valuable leads.

Hi Ruben!

I want to be sure I'm understanding the scenario here. You already own 2 companies which are occupying the same address. You are now considering renting out an office to a 3rd business that belongs to someone else. Right? If I've misunderstood, please clarify.

If I'm on the right track, I'm actually concerned about the scenario of the 2 businesses sharing an address to begin with. I'm assuming that they at least have separate phone numbers and separate websites with unique content. Hopefully that will prevent Google from confusing/merging the two businesses in future, but it is something I'd always be monitoring, just in case. Normally, it's considered a better practice to get a separate suite number for different businesses in the same building. How you do this is likely dictated by how things work in your state, but, yes, getting an official suite number from the USPS would be the most correct and solid way to do this so that each business can receive its own mail and customers are properly directed. So, in renting out an office to the 3rd business, this would be my advice as well (separate website, separate phone, separate suite).

Could yet another business at this address draw Google's attention to the situation in some negative way? It's possible. The 2 businesses sharing the address make me a bit nervous, frankly, but as you say, they are ranking just fine, so perhaps there will be no negative consequences at all. There is always an element of unpredictability when it comes to Google's behavior in regards to local businesses. They hammer down on some things that are kind of puzzling while letting overt spam go in other searches. So, no guarantees. Good luck!

Hi Carlo,

This is just fine. What you are doing is creating a type of content typically referred to as city landing pages. It sounds like this may be a bit of new concept to you, so I would like to share a guide with you that I wrote a few months back that digs deeply into this topic and has received quite a bit of positive feedback in the Local SEO sphere:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

I hope you will find this helpful as you brainstorm the types of content you can develop in scenarios like this one. Best of luck!

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

Greetings, Matt!

Thanks so much for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Your assessment of the situation is an honest one - how much can one say about auto insurance over and over again? Member, Ressler Motors, has gotten you off on the right track here, thinking outside the box to discover creative types of content that could make each page different.

I would further recommend discovering how you can personalize the pages in a meaningful way. For example, each city page could tell a real story about insuring a real driver there. This would take some doing - you would need the company to identify a happy customer who would be willing to tell their story and you would have to arrive at a level of privacy for them that meets their comfort at the same time. So, you might not publish photos or full names, but getting a driver from City X to describe why he needed to come to your client's company would make this page different than your page for City Y.

Similarly, you can mine the staff at the company for other stories. Get them to describe what is most common in different towns in terms of the types of issues that make for high risk drivers. Does town X have a lot of DUIs, while the highway passing through town Y engenders a lot of speeding tickets?

Does the company offer any type of seminars about improving one's driving record? Could these be featured on certain pages?

How about interviews with highway patrol officers explaining their side of the story?

How about advice for parents whose teens have already racked up a bad driving record? When should they take the keys away? When will the law take the keys away in these cities, towns, counties?

Ressler's idea about photos is excellent, complete with good captions, of course, and I definitely think there is room here for videos. Statistical videos (with text descriptions) showing worst traffic areas in town with stats of the numbers of accidents and violations would be unique and very local.

How well your client is funded and how invested they are in the creation of quality pages vs. squeaking by with the least possible effort is likely to determine how far you can take this. Assuming that the client has only one main office, I would expect the pages to have to be pretty strong to break into the organic SERPs because the client is likely to be outranked by companies with actual physical offices in the neighboring towns in the Local SERPs.

I think the overall picture needs to be one of telling a compelling story about what happens in each of the towns in terms of driving problems, who these issues affect and how the company can help. You may want to engage a creative copywriter to manage the project, but I do believe your richest data sources for whatever is written or produced will be the company's clients and the staff.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

Miriam

Hi H.M.N!

Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. So, what you'll be doing is to build a complete set of both structured and unstructured citations/linktations for each of your public-facing offices. For each location you will:

1. Have a page on your website featuring excellent, unique content

2. Create, claim and manage a Google My Business listing

3. Create and manage structured citations on the major data aggregators and directories (Acxiom, Yelp, Infogroup, YP, etc.)

4. Create and manage structured citations on any further directories that are specific to your industry or geography (like Avvo for lawyers or Healthgrades for doctors)

5. Seek out unstructured citation/linktation opportunities on platforms like news sites, blogs, local business associations, event sites, etc. to grow the authority of each location

You'll go through this process for each of your locations.

As far your structured citations go (the ones on platforms like YP, Yelp, etc.) there is no cause for concern about listing multiple locations. Whole Foods Market must have hundreds of Yelp listings, after all, and there is no reason to worry that Google might find this suspicious.

As far as your unstructured citations/linktations go, these you will need to handle more singly. What might this look like? Let's say your business is a legal firm in the San Francisco Bay Area with 4 locations. Your office in Oakland could sponsor something like a Know Your Rights Camp event in Oakland. Your office in Berkeley could create a scholarship for law students at UC Berkeley. You have 2 offices in San Rafael. One could be cited in a news article in the Marin IJ online newspaper and another could join the local chamber of commerce. Etc, etc.

So, the difference for a multi-location model like yours would be that your structured citations for all locations can all be easily created on the same set of local business listing platforms, but that your unstructured citation/linktation development program will require more creativity and greater uniqueness. A single article in a newspaper is unlikely to cite and link to all 4 of your offices, right?

All of the above represents quite a bit of work, of course. Multi-locations typically need to automate part of this process. I highly recommend that, if you're a Moz Pro customer, you explore the Link Intersect tool to help you with the research for linktation opportunities, and if you have signed up for Moz Local, it will take care of many of your most important structured citations.

Hope this helps!

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!

Hi Ruben,

That's a good thing to learn! Yes, I've run into different requirements over the years in different states. Interesting to know how it works in Florida. Good luck:)

Hi ActivitySuper!
Thanks for coming to Q&A with what is actually very important question.

I sympathize with your puzzlement here because I hear many local business owners saying the same thing - what am I supposed to write about?

Members here are giving you good advice - you've either got to be ready to make the effort/investment, or be satisfied with simply mentioning your services and locations and cross your fingers. If you are the only game in town, that might get you somewhere, but if you've got even 1 local competitor, such an approach will not lead to the dominance that you no doubt seek.

Here is what I do for my clients (some of who, coincidentally, are carpet cleaning companies!) This advice is given with the understanding that, like most business owners in the cleaning industries, you have one actual physical location but serve within a variety of neighboring cities. If that's correct, read on. If that isn't correct and you've got multiple physical offices, let me know.

1. Implement the major local hooks on the website for the physical location - Google is always going to see you as most relevant to your city of location, not other cities within the service radius. In addition to doing the on-site Local SEO, get the business properly listed with a violation-free Google Place Page and other local business directory listings.

2. Create a list of your 5-10 main services. Make a menu on the site of a page for each of these services, optimized for the services + your city of location. The content must be good, strong and unique.

3. Create a list of your 5-10 main service cities. Create a city landing page for each of these cities (including your city of location) creating an overview of your work in each city on each page. Make a menu of these pages on the site. Again, the content must be good, strong and unique. No cutting and pasting!

At this point you will have developed 10-20 pages of unique, creative content for your website. Depending on the competitiveness of your industry in your region, this may get you enough rankings to satisfy you and get phones ringing. However, in most cases, you will want to do more. Move on to step 4.

4. Now, create a big list of all possible combinations. This might look like:

Carpet Cleaning City A
Carpet Cleaning City B
Carpet Cleaning City C
Window Cleaning City A
Window Cleaning City B
Window Cleaning City C
Tile and Grout Cleaning City A
etc.

Create a timeline for beginning to write articles over a set number of months to cover each of these phrases. You're not going to do this all at once. My clients have most typically requested that I do anywhere from 3-10 articles a month for them. A blog is terrific for this sort of thing, by the way. If the client has hired me to do 10 articles a month, in 3 months, we've covered 30 terms, in 6 months, we've covered 60 terms, etc.

The client has to participate in this. If he simply paid some penny copywriter to write a bunch of boring, generic content for this large number of terms, chances are, he wouldn't end up with a very pleasant or persuasive website. Rather, he needs to be photographing his projects in the different cities and coming to me with photos, testimonials from clients in the service cities, anecdotes and what have you. I take this, combine it with a solid knowledge of the city and the service/products used, find some other photographs and maybe maps and turn each article into a very solid piece of content. The approach is quite authentic and results in the ongoing creation of an ever-growing library of content about the client's work in each of his cities.

Remember, the whole point of this approach is to obtain secondary visibility (typically organic) for terms outside of his city of location. It should be seen as an ongoing project, and I've seen this approach work time and again for my clients.

You're at an important point of decision right now. You need to decide if you have the creativity and time to do this right on your own, hire a Local SEO-skilled Copywriter to do it for you or if you just can't do either. Sincerely wishing you luck!
Miriam

Hello Jon,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. You've asked one of those questions for which there still isn't a 100% percent satisfactory answer, but I'll do my best to provide you with some excellent resources here.

The trouble is, that unless you are doing KW research for a pretty major area, tools are often likely not to actually show you appropriate geo modifiers. However, I was recently speaking with Darren Shaw of Whitespark (awesome company) about this and will quote his advice to you, which is about as good as it gets on this topic.

Use Google Adwords tool without the location modifier, supplement with data from Google Insights, Suggest, and Related. Build a huge list.

Then, remove all location-oriented KWs from your list and set them aside temporarily.

Then, go through the list again and remove any KWs that don't trigger local search results in the search engines, or don't bring up your competitors in the search engines. Set those aside, too.

Next, go through the list again and identify all main keyword terms. These are keepers. So, if you're in the vacation rental business, then 'vacation rental' would be in this list.

Then, go through the list again and identify plurals, more descriptive terms, combined terms, etc. So, here, in the same business, terms might be 'pet friendly vacation rentals'.

At this point, you should have a really big list of main terms, plurals, longer terms, combined terms.

Now you can add back in any geo terms that came up. So, you can have Vacation Rentals Boise, Idaho, as well as Pet Friendly Vacation Rentals Boise, Idaho and so on. At this point, your list will be quite huge because for every possible geo term, there are all of the non-geo keywords you have identified that you can add the geo terms to.

Finally, if your research hasn't turned up any geo terms, it's likely that they aren't being tracked. Add them. Also, look at your analytics for any geo terms that didn't appear during your research. Add those to the list, too.

From this step by step process, you should end up with a really good list.

Also recommend you read these:

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/local-keyword-research/1787/

http://www.expand2web.com/blog/tips-for-using-google’s-keyword-research-tool-in-a-local-context/

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi H.M.N.!

We're so happy to have you here. Now, you'll have to educate me here on the Canadian meaning of "Local" in your address:

One street West, Local 202, Toronto, Ontario 555 555-5555

I'm not familiar with this as an address component. What does it mean, please?

Hi WebFeat,

You've taken on 2 tough things here - a spammed record and a business owner who may not want to do things correctly. Hopefully, you will be able to help him see the light on this. Let me copy some of your remarks and respond to them individually, please, so that I'm sure I'm covering what you want to know.

Before hiring my company he had like 30 domains (keyword based) and had tons and tons of fake google places listings. He actually got a lot of traffic that way.

Bad, bad, bad. Yes...you can game the system, but this is the type of account that eventually gets banned and getting back into Google's good graces after that can be something even the best Local SEO on earth will be unable to accomplish. The client is in an emergency situation right now. If you can get the record cleaned up before punishment occurs, you're saving his neck.

However I will not tolerate that kind of stuff and want to do things the right way.

Thumbs up for you and 'boo' to the previous company who taught the client to engage in these practices.

In the end he will have 8 sites and wants to expand into other services and regions.

Some business owners do take this approach of having a separate site for each of their cities or services. The main argument for such a practice is that a) the exact match domain name can give a ranking boost and b) links coming into the domain will have matching primary keywords because of the URL. One can choose to do this, but I don't consider it a best practice for several reasons.

The first is that it hints at a single entity being multiple entities, which is not really true. The second is that it makes management (SEO, marketing, webmastering)  incredibly complicated. The third is that I believe it is better to build the authority of a single domain with tons of great content and links than to spread this thin like a scrape of butter over a whole loaf of bread. Of these three statements, the last is really just my opinion on this as a Local SEO. It's not proven fact or anything like that, but like you, I just think it's not a best practice. I would advise my own client that if they've got a single legal business, that = a single really authoritative website they can develop.

To me the best way to do this is a generic domain with a locations page and a page for each city.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by a generic domain, but at any rate, I agree with you about a single domain with a landing page for each city and each service. Then, I would build beyond this on the website, perhaps with blogging, covering every service he offers in each city one at a time. This is somewhat akin to the process your client thinks is best - having a different domain for each city and each service in each city, but instead of doing this on a ton of different domains, it's all under one roof, under the name of his business, on a single, powerhouse website.

The for the Places he would get one account - an address that is hidden since he goes to customer locations, and just multiple city defined regions.

He does have an office like address at each city. So should I make him a Places listing for each city or just the one? And of course how should the actual sites be organized?

If the client has a REAL location (and you should be sure of this because what he's told you are locations could turn out just to be virtual offices) in each of his main cities, then yes, he is allowed to have a Place Page for each of his cities. If he has only one legit location, then he should have only one Place Page.

That's good that you're hip to the recent 'hide address' guideline changes. This is still early days with this. My interpretation of the new guideline, at this point, is this:

Type A
Your business is brick-and-mortar and serves all customers at its location. Show your address.

Type B
Your business is home-based and serves some customers at your home and some on the road. Show your address and use the Service Radius tool.

Type C
Your business is home-based and does not serve any customers at your home. Hide your address.

*see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap

You'll need to figure which one of those fits your client's business model. I would also recommend that you read this post on this subject by Mike Blumenthal which points out some of the vagueness of the guidelines that have yet to be adequately resolved by Google:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/24/is-googles-new-requirement-to-hide-a-home-business-appropriate/

Google has really done a poor job with clarity on the new guideline. Hopefully, you can figure out the right move for your client on this and he will abide by your advice.

So, bottom line on this is that my professional preference would be for a single domain and whatever number of place pages matches the legitimate offices of the client. I would focus on building out content rather than building out domains.

That being said...if the client has built an empire of domains that are getting him business, it may be necessary to maintain those, but whatever he decides on that, he should be informed that by spamming Google Places he is risking his total visibility in Google. Additionally, if he ends up with just 1-2 Place Pages and 20 domains, it's going to be complicated deciding which URL the legit Place Page/Pages can point to. Again, another reason to put everything in one basket. If he wants to keep the domains, you can go with that, though it's not ideal, but insist on him cleaning up his act in Google Places or tell him you can't work with him as he's heading for a train wreck, sooner or later.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Brandon,

The short answer to your key question is - no, there is not currently a tool that provides reliable geo terms. Even if you are in a major city, like LA, you cannot really rely on any tool for this. The reason for this involves data centers, IP addresses, etc.

So, how to Local SEOs conduct keyword research, then? Good question! Here is how I do it, and how the other Local SEOs I know handle this task:

1. Perform your keyword research without any geo modifiers. Search for your brand, your services and products and create a spreadsheet of the terms you discover.

2. From this list, create a second list including your geo terms. These might include city names, county names, neighborhood names, regional names and zip codes. They might also include modifiers like 'in' (i.e. computer repair in green bay).

3. You now have the most reliable list of keyword terms to target.

While there isn't a kw tool that can take the place of this method, I recently became aware of an interesting free tool that helps you generate geographic terms, by themselves. You might like to check this out in helping you determine good geo keywords to add into your list in step 2:

http://www.localmarketingsource.com/local-keyword-research-tool/

Google Insight does provide some help, but don't overlook the most important factor - listening to what your customers call who you are and what you do. If you've been in business for a long time, you may have become aware of interesting terms your customers use that aren't necessarily in-house terms for things. Definitely, look those terms up to see if people are using them to search.

Good luck with the task ahead!

Miriam

Hi Jeff,

I'd be surprised if it's hurting you in any way. However, it's good that you're thinking about it. Now could be a good time to modernize your approach to building relationships with (and links among) related businesses in your community. My latest post on the Moz blog is all about this, and you might find it a good read: https://moz.com/blog/2020-local-seo-success

*See particularly the Q4 strategy section.

Hi WebFeat,

Yes, it is forbidden by the Google Places Quality Guidelines to use virtual office addresses, so don't to that.

I have had Local SEO clients in a similar situation to the one you've described. To be totally honest, if the client has once office, he should really only have one local area code phone number, but I'm aware of the fact that many service providers have multiple regional numbers, in part for the totally above board reason of saving their clients long distance phone charges. Looks like this might be the case with your clients, as his numbers are in two different states, right?

So, let's say that the client wants to keep his regional phone numbers. I would suggest that he put them on a page of his site, couched within an image to prevent them from being indexed. The one number that he should keep in real text and use as a local hook on his contact page, footer, about page, etc., is the one that matches his physical street address. So, if he's located in Cincinnati, his real text phone number should be the one with the Cincinnati area code.

And, this should be the number used on his Google Place Page and on all of his directory listings and other citations. Consistency in this is critical.

Explain to the client that should Google find and index half a dozen phone numbers for they same business, they are likely to become 'confused' and lose trust in the validity of his business and profile. He definitely does not want that to happen!

Regarding 800 numbers...yes, that might be an alternative to his having the other regional numbers if his goal is to save his clientele long distance charges. But the advice is the same here - put the 800 number in image text, not real text, on the site, and honestly, I don't recommend putting it anywhere on the Google Place Page. Google does offer the option to provide a secondary phone number on the Place Page, but given their history of automated duplicate creation, merging and etc., I think treating the Place Page (and Google) as simply as possible is the best route to go.

Regarding rankings, my advice unchanged because failing to earn Google's trust outweighs and potential (unlikely) rankings the client might earn from publishing regional phone numbers., If the client needs to gain visibility for cities in which he isn't physically located, you have 2 tasks ahead of you.

1. Discern the client's business model to understand how to optimized the Place Page. If the client serves all customers at his brick-and-mortar address, then you simply input his physical address and allow it to be displayed. If the client serves some clients at his brick and mortar business and others at their places of business, you can show the address and also use the service radius tool. However...this is something to be a little careful about. The distance between Columbus, Ohio and Indianapolis, Indiana is apparently 175 miles. I would not recommend using the service radius feature to indicate a distance like that. In fact, I have seen some indication in the past that choosing a service radius greater than 30 miles may have a negative impact on your rankings. What I've noticed about this pre-dates Google's major policy change regarding the use of this feature, so I don't know exactly how circumference of service radius is affecting rankings these days, but it's something to consider carefully. I think if I had to use the radius tool for a client with locations like yours, I'd check out the miles between his Ohio cities (if he's located in Ohio) and see if any of them fit within the 30 mile radius, just to be safe. *I am having to guess about this here, because of the new policy change. I haven't seen any new mentions of possible effects since that change was put in place.

2. If the client is serving his customers in a variety of cities, utilize copywriting and linkbuilding to build secondary organic visibility for the cities beyond his city of location. He is unlikely to achieve actual local rankings for these other cities if his vertical is at all competitive because Google will typically view his competitors actually located in these other cities as being more relevant results. That being said, you can achieve good organic visibility for the client if you can showcase his work in these secondary cities with creative copywriting and targeted linkbuilding.

Hope I've covered everything you've asked about. Your question is a good one, deserved of a complex answer because there are so many ways to go at this wrongly. It's easy to make a mistake, but with good advice from you and good planning, the client can approach his goals the right way, without risk of penalization. Good luck and thanks for coming to Q&A with your question!

Hi Tammy,

A couple of suggestions.

1. You might want to check out Whitespark's Local Rank Tracker (see: https://www.whitespark.ca/rank-tracker). The creator, Darren Shaw, is extremely Local-aware.

2. If you are in the dental space, you might like to follow Linda Buquet, if you aren't already doing so. Linda used to be a specialist in Local SEO for dentists before she started her forum (see: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/) and she often shares good tips related to this.

Hope this helps! Dentists are really nice clients, in my experience. It's a nice market in which to specialize!