Hi Edward!

Would you be able to fill in with a bit more detail here? Are you talking about a local business that makes in-person contact with clients in specific cities in AU, NZ and USA? Do you have an office anywhere in these countries to which people come and have face-to-face contact with staff? Or, is this a virtual business, perhaps providing services via the web or phone?

The more detail you can provide, the better help the community can give. Thanks!

Hey John,

You're receiving good input from the community. I'll just summarize a couple of points here:

• Without physical locations, no, you cannot rank in the local packs of results.

• This leaves you with trying to rank organically via a combination of website content and optimization (see the landing pages article Patrick linked to) and trying to shore that up with things like link earning, social media, video marketing, etc. The main pitfall to be aware of in this practice is that many companies end up building a large number of thin, duplicate content pages for their service cities. This should be avoided. The main goal of this practice is to gain some organic visibility for local searches in the absence of being able to gain local pack rankings.

Hope this helps!

Hey Patrick,

Adam's most important tip is to use creativity to not make these page read in a robotic, repetitive fashion ... that applies to how you write all tags, as well as main body copy. (Good point, Adam!). Personally, I wouldn't worry about a number of times you repeat a keyword in the text. Trying to meet numeric quotas can kill creativity. Write as beautifully and helpfully as you can on every page you publish, and you'll probably find that you are naturally optimizing all tags and text without having to jump through any hoops to do so.

Oops, above post was from me Sorry, I was logged into a different account when responding.

Hi CWSEO,

Just want to pop in to address the local side of this. Google has not shown local results for website design companies since early 2010, so no matter what efforts you make in that direction, you will not get true local results for your business. Everything, therefore, must be approached organically. If you do a search for 'Web Design Leicester', you'll see that there are only organic results..not local ones. I'll let others approach this from an organic perspective, because of this phenomenon specific to design and SEO firms.

Hi Arthur,

This past summer, Factual made a major policy change and they no longer accept individual updates. Here's an announcement about this from July https://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/07/29/factual-no-longer-accepting-individual-updates/

So, unfortunately, this platform no longer works the way it used to, and if you want Factual to have your data, you will need to go through a trusted provider. *Hint - Moz Local is a trusted provider:) And here is a complete list of all trusted providers:

http://developer.factual.com/trusted-data-contributors/

Hope this helps!

Hi Kat,

You're getting some good ideas from the community here. I want to add just a bit ... from reading your story about this client, I am getting this:

1. It's the client who has a problem here - not you. Failing to follow through even when you are bending over backwards, offering to come their office to take notes like a stenographer is all on the client - not on you. I've been writing copy for businesses for well over a decade at this point, and if a client can't take the time to fill out my questionnaires or keep phone appointments for follow-up questions or content brainstorming sessions, then they are not giving me what I need to do my job properly for them. It sounds like this is the situation you are currently in with your client.

2. There are two ways to be visible on the Internet. One involves all of the efforts you'd like to use on this client's behalf. The other is a straight monetary transaction between the business and advertising space. So, if the client cannot make the time to facilitate you making the effort to create content (plan A) then they should take the money they would have spent on this, likely increase the budget and start funneling all of that into paid advertising (plan B) that leads to a decent site, if they cannot run a great one.

Likely, the lawyers are simply too busy to sit down and think out a clear plan. They may be flinging money here and there hoping something will work, but then they're failing to back that up with the effort of teaching you about their business. So, there may be one more appointment you need to make with this client: to discuss whether PPC would be a better route for them than a halfhearted effort to win visibility via content that never gets created.

I totally feel for you in this situation and have been in it myself. If I didn't understand this type of lack going into a project, I've refunded the client and moved on. Good luck to you in this!

Hi Ruben,

I agree with Dmitrii that it shouldn't matter what program you use, so long as the tags are readable by Google. The only benefit I can think of for going with one service over another would be if some popular product happens to increase your chances that customers might see your stuff, but I honestly haven't ever seen that documented.

Hey Ryan!

I've really been enjoying your super contributions of late to the community. Just terrific! I want to include a little addendum here ... advice regarding using mailboxes might bear more investigation. Google wants all addresses to represent a physical location ... not a P.O. box, UPS box or what have you, so this might be something to research further. Thought I would mention, and thanks again for your recent generous contributions to so many local discussions!

Hey There!

You have 2 possible approaches here:

1. Build a unique landing page on the website for each store if you feel you can create high quality content for each. This should be possible, if the project has the funding to post things like unique specials, events, products, offerings in each store on an ongoing basis. Link the Google My Business page and all other citations for each location to its unique landing page on the company website. A good example of this would be a site like REI.com. Go to http://www.rei.com/map/store and type in a geographic search. For example, searching for San Diego, CA, takes you here: http://www.rei.com/map/store#San Diego%2C CA. From there you can click on the map-based link to get to the individual page: http://www.rei.com/stores/san-diego.html. Look at what a nice job they've done with that page!

2. If the project seems overwhelming, the alternative would be something more like this: http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/restaurant_locator.html. When you type in a zip code, it simply brings up a map. There does not seem to be a unique page for each store. No doubt, the corporation felt such an approach would be futile given that McDonald's has some 35,000 locations globally and they all serve basically the same thing (though I have heard you can get an unlisted green chile cheeseburger at the McDonald's in Window Rock, AZ. in Navajo Country).

Which approach is stronger? #1, in most cases, but whether you can take that approach is going to depend on the funding for the project.

Hope this helps.

Hi Maureen,
Thank you for bringing your question to the forum. I have a few  of thoughts on this:

1. First of all, folks are very unlikely to be seeking your business or your services by entering a phone number. So, I would call this concern a very low priority.

2. However, here's what I think may be going on, as I was unable to immediately  find anything connecting your phone number with your competitor (something may exist somewhere, but you'd need to hunt to find it if it does): I suspect Google is confused. The similarity in business names and domain names is leading Google to be uncertain about the identity of the business connected with that phone number. Because your competitor has earned more links and has a higher Domain Authority than your business, Google (in their uncertainty) is bringing their SERP entry up above yours. It's certainly weird behavior on their part (if, indeed, there is no asset connecting your number with their business hiding somewhere). But, that's my best guess. Somewhere in Google's system, they are confused about the identities of the two businesses and are conflating them with the same phone number in your phone number search.

3. What to do about this? According to Moz, your numbers stack up against your competitor's like this:

Them:

Page Authority: 25 ; Domain Authority: 19 ; Links: 911

You:

Page Authority: 5 ; Domain Authority: 3 ; Links: 2

As these numbers indicate, your brand is behind in building overall authority, and this is why I strongly suspect that Google is allowing this business to get into the mix of your search engine results because they aren't quite sure whether the competitor's stronger presence is actually a better version of your own business. This is my theory, anyway, and if correct, what you need to do is build up the authority of your domain so that it is firmly associated in Google's mind with your phone number.

You need more links, in short, and, as others have mentioned here, you may well need to start building out your citation set. Moz Local would be our home-grown solution for a UK business like yours needing to ensure that its local platform and directory listings are accurate and complete . You can learn more about it here: https://moz.com/products/local

4. Back to the beginning of this: it's unlikely that your brand is being harmed much (if at all) by what you've noticed regarding the phone number. People just don't typically search for brands or services by phone number. But, there is a good chance that your low authority is causing you to be outranked for the keywords that people DO search for in trying to access services like yours. And, what you've noticed is actually a good indicator that Google currently lacks confidence in the information they have about your business. That definitely matters, and so, the best way to build up Google's confidence is to grow your authority. I recommend that you put priority focus on both links and local business listings and that should be a smart start to making Google more confident about who your business is (and who it isn't!).

Hope this helps!