Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Chuck,

Want to be sure to highlight here that I'm not saying the domain is the only reason for what you're experiencing. There could be more to this that a full audit of your website would discover. But it does seem like an obvious signal. Also not suggesting you have to use an EMD if you rebrand, but my gut feeling on this is that Google is correlating the word 'events' with their concept of what an event is (Google has even used Events as part of their Plus offerings to let people publish upcoming events).

So ... before you jump into a re-brand solely based on one idea from my first-glance look at your website, I'd really urge you to consider hiring a good SEO company to conduct a full audit of the website and the issue. Rebranding is a major undertaking! You might consider looking through our Recommend List here at Moz for companies with good reputations:

https://moz.com/rand/recommended-list-seo-consultants/

And I'm hoping you'll receive further feedback from the community

My pleasure, Maureen!

I'm so glad you asked about Moz Local. We have a whole new-and-improved Moz Local now, and yes, we are definitely supporting the UK. See more here: https://moz.com/help/moz-local

Please write to help@moz.com if you have any questions about what we can do for your clients in the UK, and I'm so glad you found help in the forum.

Hey Radi,

What you are talking about is hyperlocal content, which, if developed deftly, can be great for both visibility and conversions. However, if it's obviously a stretch to create this kind of content for a specific business model, it can end up looking really spammy.

Issa is on the ball stating that the content for these hyperlocal landing pages would need to be strong and unique, and this is pretty much where the rubber hits the road: does you client have something unique to say about his product/service in each of these hyperlocal markets, or is it really just all the same from one neighborhood to another?

You mention that your client sells plastic plants. My guess is that he is selling the same goods to each suburb, so unless there is something unique you can think to for each suburban audience, my concern would be that these pages might be being created for no other purpose that SEO. Sadly, as you've pointed out, a competitor is getting away with it. This is where Google lets SEOs down: teaching the business community that low quality is rewarded.

Can you think of something better for this client to do, that isn't low quality? Maybe video marketing? A social campaign? Acquisition of awesome reviews/testimonials? Something about businesses in each suburb that used plastic plants? What I'm urging here is to use your marketing smarts to see if there is a higher path you can take the client along, rather than agreeing that he should imitate a low quality competitor.

One thing to bear in mind with this ... that spammy competitor may be getting away with this today, but they've got a sword dangling over their head. They may be only one Google tweak away from anonymity. Should that happen, and should your client have invested his marketing budget in more interesting, creative work, he could find himself standing tall as others fall away.

Hi Samuel,

Empathize with the confusion on this. Here is my understanding of how this works: if you've got a separate Google+ Local Business page and Place Page right now, you've got to manage them separately for the moment. Eventually, they will merge. Hang in there!

Hey Victor!

Read these and you'll be totally up-to-speed on this:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/

...which is a follow up to Mike's 2013 post on this : http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/

I think you'll find these to be right on the money

Hi Oliver,

It might help to think of it this way. Whatever your town is (small or large) that is your local home base. This is the address you'll be using in all of your citation building, the footer and contact page of your website, and in at least some of your website content and optimization, all for the purposes of ranking locally.

For any other locations you serve, but where you lack a physical location, you'll be aiming at organic (not local pack) rankings. So, this will have nothing to do with your citations. It will all have to do with service city content you build on the website + additional outreach in the form of social and paid promotions.

So, even if your town is small, it's the anchor that proves you to be a local, physical business. It's what proves your eligibility to be included in Google My Business and other citation platforms. It's your best hope of local pack rankings.

Everything beyond your city of location is for organic outreach.

As for how Google will handle all this, given the user-as-centroid phenomenon, Google will customize local results for the searcher based on his physical location at the time of search. So, you do want to be sure you're making it clear that your physical location is at 'X' so that Google is convinced searchers near there are close to you.

Hope this helps, and might like this for further reading: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

Hi Jon,

Situations like this can have very complex causes, so without actually being able to investigate your unique business, my suggestions will need to be broad.

First of all, it's great that you've worked with Darren Shaw's Whitespark tool to begin identifying citations. Please check out Mike Blumenthal's article regarding the time it takes for citations to go into effect:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/26/infographic-citations-time-to-live/

And, it's good that you have read through David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors, which is the key annual industry report (I'm proud to have been a participant since its inception). The information in the report is exceptional, but it's also a lot to take in. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to excerpt part of a post I published (see: The Rudiments of Local SEO ) recently, summarizing the typical elements of local search rankings:

All Top Rankings Are Not Created Equal

One of the most common questions I receive as a Local SEO is, “How do I get high rankings?” If ‘it depends’ were ever an appropriate answer, this is when. Read this carefully:

The effort and investment you will need to make to achieve high rankings for your local business is completely dependent on the competitiveness of your industry and local geography.

In other words, a personal injury attorney in Dallas, Texas is going to have to make way more effort than a baker in Boonville, California (population: 1,035).

It’s all about the competition. How many competitors you have locally and how much effort they are each making is what dictates the lengths to which you must go to surpass them, if possible.

There is a pretty long list of things your local business can do to establish and promote your visibility on the Internet. What you should do all comes down to how competitive your niche is. David Mihm’s annual Local Search Ranking Factors report is the Local SEO industry’s key survey highlighting the components of high local rankings. Some Local SEOs postulate that there are 200+ factors that go into determining the rankings you receive. Here is a short list of the most basic ones:

• Age and authority of your domain
• Local optimization of your website
• Lack of violations on your local business profiles
• Consistency of data about your business across the web
• Proximity to city centroid
• Number and authority of your citations
• Number and velocity of your reviews
• Social factors
• Number and authority of links

You cannot control factors like the age of your domain or the reviews you receive, but you do have control over other factors like the optimization of your website and the correctness of your local business profiles. Whether you need to make major investments in areas like Social Media and linkbuilding all boils down to how competitive your niche is. Every business is different. Educating yourself or hiring a pro is what will help you discern the amount of effort you need to make to achieve the highest possible visibility.

I'm excerpting this part of my post both in hopes that perhaps you can see something on the list where you realize you can improve what you're doing, and, also, because it speaks to your question as to whether X amount of something is enough.

In other words, 20 citations may be all some businesses need, based on their industry and locale, but they won't be nearly enough for other businesses in different places. What you need to do is based on the competitiveness of your specific situation.

Finally, if rankings for an established business (not a new one) begin to fall off, you must always investigate the possibility of violations, penalties or bugs. Such work typically requires a full audit of the website and all its profiles. There will never be a 'simple' answer when this arises, because there can be several things going wrong and these have to be discovered and, where possible, corrected.

I hope my response is helpful to you and gives you some idea of where to turn your attention. Good luck!

Hey Matthew,

You're so right that it can be hard to figure out who to hire, and when it comes to Local SEO, you definitely need a service provider that specializes in this field. In addition to the Moz recommend list Don has linked to, I recommend that you look at the list of people who participate in the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Everyone on that list is a recognized expert in this field. See in the right column of this page:

http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

With that list, you should have some really terrific providers to consider!

Thanks for the kind mention of that article, Ma Veronica B.

That's right, Linda. We can find exceptions to Google's rules all day long and violations can go unpunished for years, but once they are caught, they are really caught. You have done an excellent job here of trying to save a fellow member from feeling the pain of a Google penalty. I'm marking your response as a good answer.

Hi Rich!

Good discussion going on here, and many thanks to Alick for surfacing an older response of mine. If you can get a local phone number for each business, that will be your best bet against what would be the chief worry in this scenario - that Google will believe this is really just one business promoting itself as two businesses.

I have become less of a fan of suite numbers in recent times, as Google has become more capable of handling multiple businesses at the same location. So, currently, what I would recommend would be this:

1. Assess internally whether this truly is 2 businesses, or whether it is really just 1 business offering both in-studio and remote lessons. I think this step is really important, as the basic product (music lessons) is the same for both businesses and the best-known scenario in which Google has trouble with multiple businesses occupying the same location is when they share an industry or when a single business is trying to branch out its services to appear like multiple businesses. They have gotten better about understanding shared locations (lots of doctors in one building, etc.) but there is a potential for 2 music lesson businesses in the same home being flagged as suspicious. Just like if an HVAC company wanted to represent its heating services as one business and its air conditioning services as another. Google does not support his approach at any time. There may be nuances to the 2 business models of which I'm unaware that make it appropriate to promote this as two companies, but at a glance, to me this sounds like one company with both studio and at-home services.

2. If you determine that there is, indeed, reason to view these as distinct companies, then unique phone numbers, unique websites and unique citations would be the way to go with this ... with the proviso that you have notified the business owner that there may be a measure of risk in this approach.

Hope this helps!

Hey There,

Your city of physical location is your core city/core keyword, so yes, it would typically be a good strategy to use that geo term on your main pages (Home, About, Contact, etc.) and then develop city landing pages for the other cities in which you serve. This article should help:

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

And this one, too:

https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist

Hi Adam,

Good question. Unfortunately, a storage unit would not likely meet Google's guidelines for a physical location. Rather, what you'd need to do here is list whatever your headquarters are (your main location where you answer your phone, even if that's your house) and build just 1 Google+ Local page for that, being sure to set the business as a service area business so that the address is hidden. Then, instead of going for local pack rankings for your service locations, you'll need to go for organic ones via the city landing pages you build on your website for the various cities you serve.

Hi Gavo!

The link Richard has shared will take you to the Moz's most recent industry expert survey of the key factors that contribute to local rankings. If, however, you are new to Local SEO, understanding the meaning of some of the terms in the survey may be a bit of a challenge, in which case, I recommend that you read your way through the Moz Local Learning Center:

http://moz.com/learn/local

This is a free library we've developed which covers many of the basics of getting a local campaign going. I think you'll find it helpful!

Hi Rolando,

I noticed you've chosen 'local website optimization' as one of you categories. If yours is a local business, then the best blogs to seek to contribute to would relate to either a) your industry or b) your specific geography. The visibility/authority/credit you derive from becoming an author on such blogs is likely to be much more targeted than what you would experience from simply distributing content to generic sites.

So, for example, let's say you are an interior designer located in San Francisco. You do residential work, but you'd like to become better known for your commercial work doing home staging for real estate companies. You have some great photos of your work and your brain is full of helpful tips you could give. Who would you reach out to? Some local possibilities would be realtors with great blogs, local furniture/decor shops, etc. On the industry side, scoring an article on something like HGTV.com would be awesome, or something like this http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/2661221/list/sell-your-home-fast-21-staging-tips could improve your authority.

Ideally, and for the long haul, what you want to do is build relationships with leaders in both your industry and geography, so that when you want to outreach with an interesting article you feel you could develop, you have made contacts who like and trust your work and would be glad to have you contribute. I would recommend this scenario every time over the older strategy of simply distributing content to non-relational websites, which fail to build your brand in your geo-industry. You'll need to research your niche, see who the leaders are, and assess what you can contribute that would get their attention and begin a positive relationship.

Hi There! This is pretty typical that Google will show different results for different search terms ... even when to our eyes the terms are so similar. Building your authority for the second term will be your best bet for being seen as a relevant answer on the 'designer' term. Changing your title tag could help, but it could also make you less relevant for the pack in which you've achieved that great #1 spot, so I wouldn't be inclined to go that route. Rather, I would do an audit of the sites that are ranking well for the 'designer' term to see what is making them strong enough to do so. I would then try to up my efforts in the areas discovered, whether this would involve tweaking SEO, publishing new content, improving social signals, earning links or what have you.

In a nutshell, I wouldn't recommend taking steps that could work against the #1 ranking you've achieved for term one, but rather, would set term two as a new, separate goal and create a plan around it that could help me earn greater visibility in this second pack.

Nice responses from both Donna and Joy here. Thanks, ladies

Kimberly, definitely pay attention to Joy's advice regarding using friend's houses for this. It's a definite no-no. Review Google's Guidelines to know how to play by the rules and avoid disaster.

I recommend reading the following:

This one is now 3 years old, so there might be a few old terms in it, but it should help you define your business model:

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

And this one should help you with your approach to creating these landing pages:

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

Finally, I'm going to raise the issue of RankBrain here and link you to Rand's WB Friday on this:

https://moz.com/blog/optimizing-for-rankbrain-whiteboard-friday

Please take a few minutes to watch this to help you determine whether multiple pages for the sake of keyword breadth or a single, really comprehensive page for each theme/topic will serve you better. SEO is changing and that goes for both local and virtual businesses.

I hope these resources will help you skill up to develop a really smart and modern strategy for marketing your business!

Hi Rocio!

Good topic, and while nobody can provide a definitive answer to your question at this point (except maybe someone from Google!), my take on this is that Google could be:

1. Regretting that they tied Google+ to other products and is now untying it.

2. In the early stages of preparing for some kind of major change.

It could be both of these things or neither of them. I do not see Google's local product going away any time soon, and in fact, Google just announced that they want people logging into their Google My Business dashboard to signal to Google that their pages are still active ... so I believe the local portion of this is still a cornerstone of Google's big plan. But the social side ... it's having growing pains, I think. Not sure what's up, but it certainly is worthy of thought and discussion.

Hi RobinEx,

No apologies necessary! Your question is a smart one about a rather confusing topic.

One of the best ways not to mess up NAP consistency is to have your existing phone numbers turned into call tracking numbers. A good company like CallRail can do this for you. I recommend you check them out.

Regarding citations, your business is only eligible for them if you meet face-to-face with consumers. Do you do this?

Hi Peter,

I recommend you do a quick run-through of this post:

https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures

Hey Cesare,

Ideally, what you want is:

1. A strong homepage that gives an overview of your company

2. A strong page for each of your core services offerings

3. A strong page for each of your branches.

Your "Contact Us" pages can and should have unique, strong content on them with a bit of effort, and as these are your landing pages for your branches, no effort should be spared here. What can go on these pages? Please read: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages and then let me know if you have any further questions.

Hi There!

One thing that may be helpful to you is to put both business through our free Check Listing tool to start to discover duplicate, incomplete and inconsistent listings. Go to moz.com/local/search and enter both the current name and zip of the businesses and also try adding any old names and variants. You need to create a spreadsheet of every inconsistent citation that exists so that you can embark on a citation cleanup campaign, editing old references to reflect new data. Also recommend that you read this article by Joy Hawkins:

http://imprezziomarketing.com/seo-blog/google-maps/is-permanently-closed-killing-your-ranking-4-case-studies/

Hope this helps!

Hi Bryan,

You've provided such a good description of the scenario. What I see from what you're describing is that this client needs two resouces: a business advisor and an SEO company. If this client came to me, I would first want to know that his plans for selling his practice in a few years were being formulated with a professional analyst who would be able to describe all of the processes and laws involved. Only then would I begin to talk local SEO with him, and I would likely say something like this:

"No further steps should be taken until you (the client) commit to cleaning up the original site and getting out from under the penalty. You should not build a second site until you've cleaned up the first one. Why?

1. You don't ever want to put identical NAP on 2 local business websites. You will just further harm the original penalized site if you do this, and, you'll simultaneously be tying the new website to a penalized entity.

2. Normally, when one completely rebrands a business and builds a new website for it, you would be 301 redirecting the old website to the new one - in this case, particularly because of the needs of dental patients to connect with the dental practice they've gone to for the past decade, but also for obvious SEO purposes. However, you do not want to 301 redirect a penalized site to a new site, signalling to Google that someone they deem spammy now has not one but TWO websites that may not deserve to be trusted.

3. No savvy purchaser is going to want to buy a website that is tied to penalized website. Unless the purchaser doesn't do his research, he's not going to want that, and if he should buy the website that's tied to a penalized entity (either via NAP or 301 redirects) might he not take some form of legal action after the purchase when he hires a marketer who realizes you didn't disclose this info? I'm not a business advisor or a lawyer, so I don't know, but this would worry me.

4. You want to make top dollar when you do sell the practice. Right now, the penalty is decreasing the value of your business and may well be causing you to miss out on patients who could be growing your practice, right now, into an even more attractive offering. "

Those are things I'd have top of mind in speaking to the client, and maybe our community can add others.

By contrast, should the dentist be willing to own up to the mistake he made (hiring marketers who spammed Google) and pay for it by putting in the necessary work to recover from the penalty, the doors open wider as to what he can do. This is where a business analyst needs to step in to advise the dentist on matters like:

1. In a typical sale in the dental industry, does the purchaser normally want to buy the existing website as part of the package or does he want to name his business himself and start from scratch?

2. If he does want to buy the benefits of an existing website, but will not want to buy jonesdentistry.com, does it make sense for Dr. Jones (your client) to begin building the organic authority of a second, more generic domain (bostondentistry.com), while being sure that Dr. Jones' NAP is not anywhere on the new domain? Would building this second domain increase the value of the offering to the purchaser? How much?

3. If it would, when should this development of the second site take place, and at what point should jonesdentistry.com be redirected to bostondentistry.com. Will the offering be more attractive if, a year prior to the sale, Dr. Jones has already made the changeover to his own brand (changing from Jones Dentistry to Boston Dentistry), doing the permanent redirect, updating all of the existing citations to reflect the new brand, and helping his current patients to adjust to the new brand? Or should the redirects wait until after the purchase, leaving the work of citation management and client retention up to the purchaser?

Clearly, there are a lot of large and small details here that need to be hashed out. As a Local SEO, I can only help with some of them, and some I wouldn't dare answer because I lack the credentials to advise on sales, mergers, acquisitions, etc. But, the bottom line here is that if your client wants his website to be seen as an asset that will affect the ultimate price he receives from the sale, having that tied to a penalized entity is not the right move, and could possible even have legal consequences if he doesn't disclose that something he's selling is associated with a penalized entity.

Hope this helps and that you'll receive further feedback from the community.

Hi Cornelius!

Good for you for getting your citations underway for this client. Without actually being able to audit the specific business, my suggestions will have to be general. Some things I'd consider:

1. If you feel that the number of citations you've built isn't resulting in as many calls as you would expect, the first thing I'd focus on is how usuable the website is. If you've earned good rankings and citations are taking potential customers to the site and the phones aren't ringing, then website quality issues could be causing conversion issues. There could be website improvements you could make for both desktop and mobile users that could increase conversions.

2. How well do you feel you understand this business' customer base? The product in question would make me want to research this as thoroughly as possible. For example, is the product mainly purchased by elders, some of who may not be as tech-savvy as other groups and who might be more trusting of offline forms of media? Or, is it the children of parents who require a lift chair? What age group would these children be who are making purchasing decisions? Is your marketing geared to this age range and trust signals they most trust? Or, is it, perhaps, differenty-abled people of all ages, many of whom are going to be super tech savvy? I'm afraid I don't have the market research at hand to answer these kinds of questions, but if it were my client, I'd definitely want those answers to be sure that everything my agency was producing was appropriately geared to the right audience.

3. How are you doing with reviews? Are numbers and sentiment commensurate with competitors' review profiles or is there a deficiency there that a well-implemented review acquisition program could remedy? If your customer is having trouble getting going with reviews, consider a paid product like GetFiveStars

4. How's your content? Do you have useful, fresh, unique content of high quality on the site or could there be issues with thin, unhelpful content that is failing to persuade users to pick up the phone?

5. Don't overlook the power of images. Google has been quoted as saying that images on Google+ Local pages can measurably increase click-through rates. Have you got the best possible images there?

6. Don't overlook video marketing. It's seriously powerful in some industries. Anecdotally, I was consulting with a business at one point with a user base made up primarily of elders. The info was that most of their clients weren't very apt to watch much online video, but they did watch DVDs. The company found a way to inexpensively produce high quality, short DVDs which they mailed to prospective customers so that they could see the product in action. These videos can, of course, also be published online for a user base that is comfortable with YouTube, etc., but again, be sure you know the audience.

These are just some ideas off the top of my head. I hope they are helpful as starters for brainstorming. Good luck with your marketing!

Hi Bryan,

It's my pleasure. On your last question, technical SEO just isn't my area, but wouldn't blocking Google more or less defeat the purpose of attempting to build organic authority for the new site leading up to the point of sale? I'm not quite seeing the logic there.

BTW, I just thought of you seeing this coincidental thread over at the Local SEO Forum: https://www.localsearchforum.com/local-business-citations/42391-new-dentist-new-site-same-address-phone-staff.html

Hi Mike,

Unfortunately - being under-funded in a highly competitive market is not a recipe for success. I understand the difficulty here, from past work with very small businesses. You can do a ton for a small business in a small market, but you may not be able to do much for them in larger markets, and it's really important to set correct expectations about this if such clients are determined to hire you. If your client's competitors have more to invest in their efforts, they do have the upper hand, and it isn't reasonable for any client who can't compete financially with his competitors to expect their SEO to work magic that will somehow make up for this budget problem.

But, there are some grace notes here, because SEO isn't 100% about money. It's also about creativity. Here are some suggestions:

1. Presumably, your client is paying you for X amount of hours of work a month. If, in that time, you have a staff member who can come up with something outside-the-box (perhaps a video or social campaign) that can generate a new, fresh burst of interest, this could make some phones ring and could perhaps move the client up a bit ranking-wise due to an increase in human activity on the site, links, social mentions, etc.

2. If the client is finding it impossible to budget to complete for head terms, consider going after long tail terms instead. In the legal industry, all terms are likely to be very tough to compete for in most cities, but the longer tail ones may be slightly less competitive.

3. Consider hyperlocal optimization. If your client's city has distinct neighborhoods or districts, create new content to focus on his services in these hyperlocal areas. They will, perforce, be less full of competitors than the entire city will be. For further reading, see: https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid

4. You ask how the client can appear for all his desired terms in the local packs of results. There are several hundred factors involved. Audit your client using these 2 resources:

https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit

Then, audit their competitors to the best of your ability to see if there are any weak points. If you can make these weak points your client's strong ones, this could help, if the budget is there for you to do the work involved.

5. Finally, you mention some spam score and back link issues. I'm no expert here, but if you could explain, in detail, what issues are being reported, I'll make sure you receive a clear explanation of this, either from me, or from a team mate. Hopefully the community will provide feedback, too

6. If competitors are genuinely spamming Google, it might be worthwhile to report them: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-report-spam-to-us-15187.html There may be more recent posts about this elsewhere, but I remember the above video.

Hope this helps!

Hi Matt,

The problem of longstanding with kw research in Local SEO is that tools are unlikely to give you an accurate geographic search volume. If your client is in a major city, something like the Adwords Keyword Planner may give you some data that can be useful, or if they're next to a major city, you can look up keywords+that city name for an idea of how people search in that part of the country, but I wouldn't say the numbers should be viewed as set in stone.

So, for the most part, yes, you'll do your keyword research without geomodifiers and then just add them back in when you're optimizing the website or outreach for the business.

I also highly, highly recommend that you teach clients to document the EXACT language of the FAQs they receive continuously from consumers. The way those queries are worded really matters. Do customers in New Orleans phone a sandwich shop to ask about a submarine sandwich or a po' boy? Do people at your restaurant order soda or pop? Do you clean gutters or troughs? Regional language difference matter, particularly in Local and particularly in a large country like the US.

I recommend taking a look at Britney Muller's most recent Moz Blog post as her ideas are highly applicable to this subject: https://moz.com/blog/30-minute-keyword-research

Hope this helps!

Hey There,

Your question is a great one, but unfortunately, the answer is likely known only to a few engineers at Google. Google's choice to vary from 10 packs to 7 Packs to 3 Packs and now Snack Packs for various industries over the years has long been a matter of speculation. There have even been mind-boggling times when only a one-box would show (and usually a spammy one at that) for queries for which there was plenty more data. Why is this? Some suggest it has to do with the competitiveness of a query in a given industry or geography. Others have suggested at times that Google was making a conscious choice to reduce the local footprint in the SERPs. What has been standard through all this is fluctuation. Google is constantly testing what they feel delivers the most value to users and makes most sense for Google. There is no known magic number for how Google determines which type of pack treatment a query deserves, including whether it deserves any type of pack at all.

3 Packs are tough. Giving an entire city/industry only 3 spots can feel kind of miserly and frustrating for everyone who isn't numbers 1-3. It means having to work harder, longer and with more creativity if you want to be among the chosen few. My personal view of this is that all pack results must be viewed as possibly transitory and as a test by Google, because they can change overnight, both in terms of the pack number and in the order of rank.

One thing to remember here - don't forget to educate clients regarding the user-as-centroid phenomenon. There can be some hope in this, knowing that a client's customers are likely seeing different local pack results based on their physical location, again, both in terms of pack number and order of rank. I've trained people just one city away from me and have personally experienced how totally different their SERPs can be from mine for identical queries. Hyperlocal optimization and long-tail optimization may both be important considerations here.

Sorry not to have an authoritative answer to your question, but I hope these thoughts help form a good mindset for you to share with clients.

Hey Kevin,

I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with Google for Jobs, but here's something that caught my eye in a TechCrunch article:

To create this comprehensive list, Google first has to remove all of the duplicate listings that employers post to all of these job sites. Then, its machine learning-trained algorithms sift through and categorize them.

This sounds like it might be applicable to what you're describing. Maybe read the rest of the article? And I'm hoping you'll get further community input from folks who have actually been experimenting with this new Google function.

Hi Mark,

Google's rule is 1 listing per physical location. So, if you've opened a new office (congrats!) that means starting a second, totally separate listing on Google. I believe you'll find Google's guidelines to be a big help: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Just be sure:

1. This is a physical location with in-person contact with customers

2. You have a unique local area code phone number for the new branch.

Hope this helps!

Hi Gary!

That's a great question. From a UX standpoint, repetitious links in a menu aren't something I'd recommend. But, from a pure SEO standpoint, from all we've seen, Google only "counts" the first link of multiple same-destination links on a given page. For more on this, see point 6 on this awesome Whiteboard Friday (I recommend watching the whole thing!): https://moz.com/blog/should-seos-care-about-internal-links-whiteboard-friday

The video doesn't specifically speak about menu links, likely because it's just not a great or common practice to double them up as in your example. So, while redundant menu links may not directly impact SEO, poor UX can definitely lead to higher bounce rates and shallower page sessions. This can result in decreased repeat traffic to pages. Which can then result in you earning fewer links. Which can then definitely decrease your ability to rank well. So, holistically speaking, poor UX decisions can lead to poor SEO outcomes, even if indirectly. Likely, your website would benefit from a careful overhaul of the menu structure to improve its clarity, reduce wasted screen real estate and enhance the quality of the user experience.

Hope this helps!

Hey Dino,

Are you able to share the website? It would definitely help the community provide specific, rather than generic, suggestions. If you can't, that's okay, but you are welcome to share the URL here if you're comfortable with that and will probably get much more actionable advice by doing so.

In the meantime, I'm wondering about your chosen category. I think of a garbage collection service as a city service that picks up my recycling cans ... not something I would call to haul away an old car or something like that. I noticed that Google offers these 3 categories:

Junkyard

Salvage Yard

Auto Wrecker

In addition to Garbage Collection Service, which you mentioned you're already using, I also see a category for 'Garbage Dump Service'. I wonder if that's an important one for you to know about as the synonyms are very similar to those used for Garbage Collection Service:

pick up, pickup, recycling, trash, pick up, pickup, recycling, trash, pick up, pickup, recycling, trash

So, some interesting possibilities, but without seeing the site itself and looking at the results, best I can do here is suggest you do a full audit of the website. Here's a great post for that: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit

Hey There, Green Web!

Thanks for reading my article. It's a bit of an old one, but in the main, is still pretty accurate advice. This one is 2 years fresher, in case it helps: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

All that being said, there are horses for courses, and a blog post like the one you've linked to is offering general best practices rather than one-on-one consulting about what you, personally, should do for your specific business model. You're totally right that that post (though long!) didn't cover every possible scenario.

From your description, it sounds like you have a service area business that serves within a tight radius (as opposed to having a restaurant chain with 30 locations across the state of California). Please, correct me on anything I'm not quite getting right about your model. If you have a single physical location, you are only able to create a single Google My Business listing and citation set for your business. This often frustrates SABs, because they may serve multiple cities from a single location, and can't rank in the local packs for them, because Google will only rank their physical location within a single town. So, a plumber in Oakland might be annoyed that he can't also rank for San Jose and San Francisco, because he lacks physical locations there.

It's from this dilemma, and from the desire to target content to specific user groups that the practice of creating local landing pages evolved. If you can't rank in the local packs for your service cities, you can go after organic rankings with landing pages. If you don't do anything, you have little or no chance of ever seeing rankings of any kind for these service cities.

Beverly Hills is considered a separate city from Los Angeles, as is another city like West Hollywood. These are not merely neighborhoods of Los Angeles, but actually considered separate cities. If you do a search for "plumber Los Angeles" you will get completely different local and organic results than for a search for "plumber Beverly Hills". So, clearly, Google sees these as totally distinct user bases, and if a searcher located in Beverly Hills or Los Angeles just searches for "plumber", they are going to see these totally different results, localized to their location at the time they search.

Because of this, it's not really safe to go with your assumption that people know a plumber in LA serves Beverly Hills, despite the short driving distance between them. Whether this is good common sense or not, it's not the way Google works, and relying on Google to show your LA-based plumbing company to Beverly Hills searchers will not work unless you give Google some additional reason to do so (that being content on your website showcasing your services in Beverly Hills, which may give you some hope of ranking organically for these searches).

Upshot: If you need customers from Beverly Hills to find you on the web, you must build something for them to find. Your options for this would include:

• A Beverly Hills landing page

• Ongoing blogging showcasing your work in Beverly Hills

• Paid advertising targeted to Beverly Hills

• Social media outreach targeting Beverly Hills

In a competitive market, you'll likely need to do all of this to build brand awareness in any city where you serve but aren't physically located.

I completely get your UX concerns. You are rightly perceiving that there's a real danger of putting up a bunch of weak, silly content for every city your company serves, and that this would downgrade user experience and the overall quality of your website. So, you can't take that route. Rather, you'd want to come up with a plan for making those landing pages incredibly useful and persuasive, so that they truly do serve users, while also signalling to search engines that you have relevance to this target community. Hopefully, that newer article I've linked to will provide some inspiration, but if you need further ideas, please feel free to ask here.

Hi Taysir,

Those are Google's new Home Service Ads. The rollout began with plumbers and locksmiths. Check this out:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/07/30/googles-home-service-ads-questions-and-observations/

I think you'll find it just what the doctor ordered in understanding these results!

Hey Dandelion,

I honestly don't think Google is going to care whether a strong piece of content is labeled a page or a post, if you're taking care to permanently link to these core assets from the top level navigation menu of the site, and are internally linking to them wherever relevant.

What could matter is user experience. Does the formatting/design of these articles change in some way, making them look like they aren't consistent with the core pages of the website? Is the experience startling for the human user? If so, you might want to look into Donald's idea, but otherwise, it's not likely something I'd worry about too much.

Hey J.P.,

I've heard good things about Moz Local, too

However, we won't push specifically to hospitality directories, as we focus mainly on the big aggregators.

I believe Whitespark's citation building service will do niche-specific directories. You might want to check them out: https://www.whitespark.ca/citation-building-submission-service

Hi Rosemary,

Thanks for the clarification. For a pharmacy chain (or any other franchise) here is what would typically be appropriate:

1. You have a single website.This website has some basic pages like home, about, specials, contact and what have you.

2. In addition to this, you build a unique page of high quality for each of your locations. I don't recommend subdomains. I recommend subfolders. So, this would look like: thepharmacy.com/sugar-land for your store in Sugar Land Texas, and thepharmacy.com/dallas, for your store in Dallas. If you have more than one location in a city like Dallas, your URLs might look like thepharmacy.com/dallas-deep-ellum and thepharmacy.com/dallas-highland-park. Put the complete contact info (NAP) at the top of each page and then create strong content to make the pages interesting, helpful and unique.

3. From your Sugar Land citations, across the web, be sure you are linking to the landing page you've created on the site for Sugar Land, ditto for Dallas citations, etc.

This would be considered a standard methodology for any multi-location business.

How you then showcase these pages on the website needs to be dictated by the number of locations you have. You want them to be easy to find. You might check out a chain like REI.com. Look at how they are surfacing locations for their users and how they are making their pages unique. They do a good job!

Hope this helps!

Hi Joe!

Yes, you want a single website for the company, with 3 good landing pages on it (one for each of your locations). With just 3 locations, you could put all 3 in the footer, if you like, but it's likely not necessary to do so.

And, if these are physical, staffed locations and the company meets face-to-face with its customers and you have a unique phone number for each branch, it is eligible for 3 GMB listings.

You can then either link all 3 branches' listings to the homepage (which some argue is better for rankings) or, link each to its own landing page (which I much prefer as it offers a much better opportunity of converting the customer with content that's been created just for them). But, it's up to you which you prefer as Google doesn't insist on one path or the other.

Just be sure your locations meet the specifications of Google's guidelines and you should be good to go.

Hi Rosemary,

Glad you've asked. Google has just become quite specific about this practice. Here are their guidelines:

Website & Phone

Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.

• Use a local phone number instead of central, call center helpline number whenever possible.
• Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or "refer" users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business, including pages created on social media sites

So, in short, no. You should not link to the client's Facebook Place from their Google+ Local page. Studying the guidelines can be super helpful in researching the answers to client questions like these: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Google is sometimes totally clear about a policy, like the above. Other scenarios have grey areas. This one is, fortunately, easy to answer:)

Hi Jarod,

Thank you for the further information. I'm going to take a look and jot down what I see:

1. Using BrightLocal's rank checker with my zip set to 92008 and searching just for "chiropractic", I confirm that you are not in the local pack and are coming up on page 2 in the organic results around spot 17. In the local finder view, you are #7.

2. I see that carlsbadchiros.com and carlsbadchiropractic.com are both at the top of the organic rankings with what are basically exact match domains, which still, unfortunately can heavily influence Google's rankings regardless of site quality. Compared to your domain name, gohlclinic.com, their domains more identically match the user's query.

3. Now, searching manually from my locale in NorCal for "chiropractic carlsbad", I see different competitors in the local packs, but the same two competitors ranking organically. I see you at spot 12. organically  and when I click through on the local pack to the local finder, you are coming up at #7, which is pretty good, though not as high as you'd like to be.

4. So, from the above exercise, we've identified that you aren't in any way barred from ranking or suspended or anything like that. You're just not ranking as well as you would like to. Good to know.

5. Locally speaking, and again using BrightLocal for this same search phrase + your zip code, I see that Google has two rough clusters of businesses coming up at the top of the local finder. The top 3 businesses for this search (Kline, New Wave and Longevity) are clustered between Palomar Airport Road and and Cannon Road near something named the Carlsbad Premium Outlets. The next 4 businesses are clustered around what Google is deeming the city center of Carlsbad, near the juncture of Carlsbad Blvd. and Carlsbad Village Dr.

This second cluster is where you are located, and as I begin to zoom in on it, I see that you in the midst of at least 15 chiropractic listing in this very small area. So, competition is quite fierce! And, in fact, when I zoom in quite a bit, I see that you are located right next door to two other listings (Chad R. Chapman, DC and Brian T. Killeen, DC) which appear to be practitioner listings both located at 2564 State St # A, Carlsbad, CA 92008 next to you at 2562 State St Ste B.

These 2 unclaimed practitioner listings are giving me some pause. I'm looking at your website now to see if these doctors appear to work for you, but they don't. Do you know for whom they do work? Is there actually a chiropractic office located at 2564? There's no website associated with either listing. Neither listing is outranking yours organically, and you are not being filtered out by either, but I am curious about these listings.

6. From the above exercise, we've learned that this is a highly competitive search term and that you are located near the second of two clusters Google appears to be making on the map for the local results. You are just slightly west of the second cluster, actually.  We've learned that there is nothing geographic preventing you from ranking well locally, but we do see that the top 3 businesses are located down by the Carlsbad Premium Outlets and it could be that Google has some bias regarding that locale. Your rating is equal to or better than the top 7 competitors. You could use some more reviews to catch up with some of the competitors, but weirdly, you are also being outranked for this search by competitors with fewer reviews (in one case, a competitor with only 4 reviews!).

7. Looks like you have a bit of work to do regarding citations and possible duplicate listings: https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMkdvaGwlMjUyMENsaW5pYyUyNTIwT2YlMjUyMENoaXJvcHJhY3RpYyUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjkyMDA4JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyR29obCUyNTIwQ2xpbmljJTI1MjBPZiUyNTIwQ2hpcm9wcmFjdGljJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyMjU2MiUyNTIwU3RhdGUlMjUyMFN0cmVldCUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjkyMDA4JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyNzYwNzI5ODgwMiUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMlVTJTI1MjIlMjU1RA==

8. Now let's look at some organic metrics using the Moz Bar.

You:

Domain Authority: 22 with 503 links from 104 root domains

Spam Score 28% (you have a number of questionable links pointing to your website)

Page optimization score for "chiropractic": 84 with an advisory not to keyword stuff

Page Title: Gohl Clinic of Chiropractic in Carlsbad - Gohl Clinic of Chiropractic (this is odd and repetitive)

Your Top Organic Competitor (carlsbadchiros.com)

Domain Authority: 12 with 196 links from 48 root domains

Spam Score 2%

Page optimization score for "chiropractic": 84 with an advisory not to keyword stuff

Page Title: Chiropractor in Carlsbad CA | Carlsbad Chiropractic and Integrative Wellness

Stacking these up side by side, your spam score is coming up as a concern for me, and while the DA of this competitor is lower, so is their spam score. So, looks like you need to delve more deeply into this. Their title tag is also somewhat better than yours, although it's still about repetitive due to their brand name.

9. I also notice the Moz Bar is finding schema for your competitor and not for you. Not a ranking factor, per se, but it does make it easier for Google to understand your information.

10. Summing up, what I've done here is not a replacement for a professional audit. That really can't be done in the space of a forum, and if you need to move up in the rankings, I'd recommend hiring a really good local SEO firm to help you create a strategy based on the findings of a full self-audit + competitive audit. But, in our quick glance, we've seen some interesting things:

• Your market is densely competitive for this term

• Google may possibly have some local bias towards that area of town near the Premium Outlets

• You are in the running with #7 local finder rankings and 2nd page organic rankings

• You may have a problem with link spam/link quality that needs to be addressed

• Exact match domains could be helping some of your competitors organically

• Your citations could use some work

• There are some curious unclaimed listings next door to you that deserve investigation, and of course, you should always look at all listings in your market to see if any of them could be spam.

I hope this provides some insight to get you brainstorming. In all likelihood, Jarod, you can improve your rankings, but my best advice is to invest in audits first so you can figure out a data-based strategy.

PS. Traffic to any part of your website is helpful, yes. Ranking a page for multiple terms is possible, yes, but not always easy.

Hi Henya!

Great question! For many years, Google was not in favor of toll free numbers as primary numbers. It was standard advice that you absolutely had to use a local area code number, instead, both on Google and in all your citations. However, over the past couple of years, we saw a change with this and I began noticing quite a few listings listings (particularly hotels) with 800 numbers on them. That was very surprising.

However, I believe there is more to this story, because it seems to me that in the past year or so, I notice that I am, again, no longer encountering 800 numbers with any frequency in the 3-packs, hotel packs, local finder, etc. Do some of your own searches for hotels boston, hotels santa fe, hotels dallas, etc. and look at the 'more' link that takes you to the local finder results. You'll likely see all local area code phone numbers. Whether these are the result of the business owner consciously ensuring that their primary number is local, based on older version of Google's guidelines, or because Google is somehow manually overriding the suggestion of a toll free number as primary, I'm not sure. I suspect it's the former. Nevertheless, there is nothing about toll free numbers in the guidelines, which read:

Website & Phone

Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.

• Use a local phone number instead of central, call center helpline number whenever possible.
• Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or "refer" users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business, including pages created on social media sites.

So, officially, Google is not forbidding toll free numbers, but personally, I would still avoid using them if possible, because of the following:

1. A local area code number is a signal of 'localness', just like a zip code. You always want to appear as local as possible.

2. Moz Local Search Ranking Factors found 'Listing 800 Number as Only Phone Number on My Business Page' to be the 16th most negative ranking factor. So, there is some negativity suspected regarding 800 numbers, though the language here is referring to having this as your only number. The factor does not speak to having 800 as primary and local as secondary, but still, there is still some perception out there as toll free numbers being negative.

3. Finally, unless the business is something like a hotel, I do believe that using an 800 number as primary could potentially make you less powerful than competitors who are using a local number.

So, in a nutshell, if your client has a local area code phone number - yes, I do feel it would be worth it edit citations to list it as the primary number and relegate any toll free numbers to the secondary field.

Hope this helps!

Hello There!

That's a great question, and it represents a challenge local marketers have faced for years without a good solution. I have some good news on this topic that I hope will come at just the right time for you. At Moz, we are currently in beta with our new Local Market Analytics software which is breaking ground in multi-sampled local analytics. Check out these two screenshots, please, for a sense of what Local Market Analytics provides, including local keyword volumes and rankings:

https://imgur.com/a/2eFUZJm

https://imgur.com/a/7kz8FN3

I would like to personally invite you to come join the beta and, especially, to participate in an experiment our engineers are  currently running surrounding scenarios just like yours that involve neighborhoods/boroughs within markets. For example, if you look at the above screenshots I've shared, above, you'll see analysis refined down to the level of the borough of Queens. To sign up to be part of this beta experiment, please go here:

https://moz.com/local-market-analytics-announcement

We're extremely excited about developments and would love to add you to the beta and have you be part of this experiment!

Hi Ben,

Okay, good, so it sounds like there is just 1 listing for the business, rather than 2 duplicates, if I'm understanding you correctly.

I can't be 100% sure what happened, though it's not an uncommon issue - see:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/SMlY6vWQO2Q;context-place=topicsearchin/business/closed

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/vDsruw9z3gY;context-place=topicsearchin/business/closed

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/-ze8h1fStbY;context-place=topicsearchin/business/closed

etc.

My best advice is 2-pronged:

1. Create a thread in the above forum, sharing the complete details of the business and what happened, in hopes that a TC or employee will jump in to help you.

2. If you don't get a response within a week, get on the phone with Google via the Contact Us button here: https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639  Let them know what happened and also that you started a forum thread but didn't experience resolution.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Hi Gavo,

If you are talking about local business citations, most of these exist on business profiles on local business directories. If you have a national/virtual business, then local business directories aren't really the right match. However, if you do have something like a corporate headquarters that accepts walk-in traffic during stated business hours and makes face-to-face contact with customers there, then you can certainly create local listings for that office. But, it sounds to me like you are describing a national/organic SEO campaign for a non-local business, in which case, citations are not the right fit for what you are doing.

Hi Joel,

What you've noticed is correct. Google has removed nearly all Google+ Local links. This was first noticed in late July. Here's a good thread over at Linda Buquet's forum:

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/9397-major-update-missing-links-google-local-pages-new-review-windows.html

You can still use Moz Check Listing to find a link directly to the Google+ Local page at moz.com/local/search

Hope this helps!

Hi Niclaus,

Keri is right on. You'll need to do a full assessment of the client's present status, their competition, their goals and opportunities to determine which actions may benefit them most. This type of assessment will typically go beyond the types of advice you can get from a forum, as it will be the result of some hours of work auditing the client's unique situation and goals. Most national businesses need to implement a combo of organic SEO, social, PPC, etc., but the right recipe for your specific client will be unique to them!

Hi Brian,

As others in the community have rightly indicated, sharing a phone number across multiple websites is definitely a no-no. It may help to think of it this way. You have a Google My Business listing for your company, HappyTrees.com, and it points to your website. Google's bots travel from your GMB data to your website to cross-check for accuracy. They find your name, address and phone number on the website page your GMB listing points to and say, "A-okay, this checks out."

Then they crawl further and they begin to encounter the phone number you've got on your GMB listing and HappyTrees.com on BigTrees.com, TallTrees.com and GreenTrees.com. The bot stops and says, "Wait a minute, I thought this phone number belonged to Happy Trees. What's up with this? Hmm ... my data isn't trustworthy about this business. Likely, this shouldn't be ranking as well as this competitor here who clearly has this very consistent NAP."

Maybe a somewhat cartoon-ish explanation, but I find it can be helpful to visualize how Google may react to decisions you are making in your online marketing. One of your best bets for achieving high rankings is to have utterly consistent NAP across the ecosystem, and so, the following things can dilute this:

1. Any mismatches in name, address, phone, website anywhere on the web

2. Taking a multi-site approach instead of a single site approach

3. Duplicating your content across multi sites

4. Sharing details or interlinking between multi sites

5. The use of call tracking numbers in any local search campaign except in a very few instances which are described very well in these 2 posts:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/

http://localu.org/blog/truth-about-seo-call-tracking/

Any mistakes in these areas have been described as severely damaging to a business' ability to rank well for its desired terms, so a thorough study of the history of each of these types of issues would be your best bet for protecting your company against unwanted outcomes.

Hope this helps, and glad you've asked!