Hi Taysir,

This kind of scenario is not going to be easy for the community to troubleshoot without actually being able to look at the specific players and queries in question. It's completely understandable if you cannot share your client's info here on the forum, but that will limit the specificity of the advice you'll receive.

Donna has highlighted some good questions for you. I will add, In the absence of being able to look at the actual situation, I would recommend you do a run-through of this article to see if anything stands out to you:

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

Hi Peter,

I believe you're referring to a David Deering article on Whitespark (http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/50-how-to-make-your-local-business-schema-better) from earlier this year. I would trust pretty much any advice regarding citations published on Darren Shaw's company's website and I think that's a great article from David.

I'd like to know more about his/Darren's experience with seeing quicker citation pick-up using sameAs. I'm not sure if the speed they are citing comes from something Whitespark has noted handling the massive numbers of citations they manage, or if this is something David Deering is experimenting with on his own, or what have you. The folks are extremely nice and friendly up there in Canada, and if I were you, I'd reach out to David and ask him if he can tell you a bit more about any phenomena they have documented regarding use of sameAs, to see whether any gains in speed would warrant you investing in implementing this. I've not seen any side-by-side testing done, but maybe the fellows at Whitespark have done some? Great topic!

Thanks, Dominick,

This scenario is actually more complex than it may seem at first glance because of a couple of things. It would seem like the obvious step would simply be to report your sold branch as closed and move on, letting the new owner open a new GMB listing for their new purchase. However, before you jump into doing this, do read this: http://imprezziomarketing.com/seo-blog/google-maps/is-permanently-closed-killing-your-ranking-4-case-studies/

I would not want you reporting the branch as closed to impact your other open branches, so please do read that case study to see if this helps shine some light on your strategy for this.

Hi There,

Good question! Short answer here is: no, a Local SEO is seldom going to suggest a multi-site approach to represent different services a business offers. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. You will only be able to build local business listings for the main business at the physical location, so there is no local pack ranking advantage to having two different websites, as you can't build additional listings for one of the services offered - this would violate Google's guidelines.

2. Simultaneously, what you worry about with the multi-site approach isn't so much a duplicate penalty/filter (unless you duplicate content between the two sites) but, rather, the accidental creation of duplicate listings. If Google (or another local business index) gets confused by finding shared partial NAP (name, address, phone) on two different websites, it can confuse them and lead to the accidental duplicate listings being created, which can then sap the strength of the main listing for the main business. It can also confuse consumers. The way to reduce the likelihood of this would be to be sure that the physical address isn't on the second website and that you either have a) a unique phone number for the second website or b) put the phone number in image text. Even so, these things can get referenced off the website and pulled in that way, so it's not really foolproof, but it is a best-effort attempt.

3. Finally, a major drawback of the multi-site approach is that, instead of every marketing effort you make adding to the strength of the brand, and therefore all aspects of what the brand offers, you are dividing this in half while doubling the management efforts that have to be expended trying to market two websites, instead of pouring all of that marketing goodness into a single entity. This really matters when it comes to your organic rankings. If you have an absolutely awesome website with high authority, you should be able to get your pages that surround the topic of this particular service the business offers to rank very well. With a second website, you'll be starting from scratch, trying to rank an unknown newcomer instead of simply building on the strength of the existing website by building great content and earning links to it, all under the umbrella of a single brand.

So, hopefully these are points you can bring to the company to help them see why in both organic and local marketing, a single site approach is generally preferred. Particularly as we've moved into the era of RankBrain, the ability to become an authority in a certain topic has become a central marketing mindset. You might even show the client this website (Moz.com) as an illustration of how a brand can become associated with a topic (SEO) that then helps it to rank for a multitude of related facets (linkbuilding, on-page SEO, local SEO, content development, etc.). Rather than creating a website for each of these areas, there is just one Moz, and that has helped the brand to become known, overall, for all of these things.

Please, let us know if you have any further questions!

Hey Ed,

I'm not sure if you realize this, but you're never supposed to use aggregate Schema review markup on your homepage. More on this: https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-use-aggregate-review-schema-to-get-stars-in-the-serps/

So, skip that goal of stars showing up from this in relation to the homepage.

I want to be sure I'm understanding your goal here. I believe you're saying that you homepage isn't ranking for your core term. It's only ranking for branded searches. And this is making you think you need to make a landing page for your core term. If you only have one location, that really wouldn't be a best practice. Rather, you have to figure out what WILL move the needle for you and this core term (if anything). Some things (like proximity or filters) will be a brick wall you can't easily pass through. Others (like building authority) are what you're going to typically run into as recommended strategy. There is something about your competitors that is holding you lower than that coveted #1 spot, Ed, and a competitive audit is going to be the best solution to find out what that something is.

I did a post here on the Moz blog about doing a competitive audit to analyze local rankings, but you're talking about organic rank, right? That would be a bit different, though related. Either way, you've got to find that secret something. It could be proximity, it could be links, it could be content, it could be spam!

Am I understanding your topic correctly?

Hi Gal,

Are you talking about a local business with physical locations in California and South Carolina, or are you talking about a national business that does not make in-person transactions with customers?

Hey There!

Kudos to you for revisiting how important a well-optimized web presence can be for any local business. You have 2 options here, in terms of site structure:

1. Build a unique page for each service you offer, optimized for that service + build a unique page for each city you serve.

or

2. Build pages for each possible combo of keywords+city

Unless you have really considerable resources, approach number 1 is typically best. I'd like to point you to 2 resources here on Moz that should be a big help both with structure and landing pages:

Check out the big graphic at the beginning of this post: https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist

Then, check out this article on landing pages: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

Hope these will get you going with your strategy!