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 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!

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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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!