Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Mick,

I would recommend that you actually work with the postal authorities in your region to acquire a separate suite number for the business and this should eliminate concerns. Your client legitimately has 2 businesses and should make the effort to set up a proper unique address for both. And, as you've mentioned, a different phone number is essential, of course. You should also be sure you're running unique websites with completely separate content for the 2 businesses. What you're trying to do here is to differentiate for customers and engines, as much as possible, the two companies. On the customer side, you want them to be able to correctly contact and find the two businesses. On the engine side, you want to prevent accidental merging and duplicates by being sure that two businesses are being run as unique entities, if they are unique entities.

It is generally not difficult to acquire an official suite number, but who you go to for this depends upon where you live. It is different in different regions.

Hope this helps!

Hey Jack!

Good questions. I want to preface my comment by stating that this is the type of issue that is typically going to require a formal audit from a Local SEO expert to properly diagnose. There are too many factors that contribute to local search rankings for someone to be able to take a look for 2 minutes and say 'voila, here's the problem.' So, I would highly recommend that you consider hiring a local search expert for some consultation to dig down properly, but in the meantime, I can take a glance at this.

What you are describing is not an uncommon issue. If I'm understanding properly, when you are searching from a Philadelphia-based device, you are ranking well in the local pack for your core term 'garage door repair', but when you add the geomodifier, you are no longer ranking well locally. Right so far?

In a city of any good size, it is totally normal for your non-geomodified local searches to bring up different results than your geo-modified ones. What I have personally noticed about this is that the former searches tend to tighten my radius to be nearer to my exact physical location at the time of search, whereas adding a city name appears to alter the radius or industry centroid. So, in other words, if I just search for pizza, Google shows me the pizza places nearest me. If I search for 'Pizza Philadelphia' Google may choose some other centroid than me, and show me pizza places downtown, near the courthouse, near a cluster of other pizza restaurants, etc.

What I look at in cases like yours is the proximity of your company's physical address to the addresses of the competitors who are outranking you in the pack. I see your address is hidden on your Google My Business page, so I'm popping over to your website and see the following address:

13440 Damar Drive Unit F2
Philadelphia, PA 19116

Now, do this comparison:

1. Do your 'garage door repair philadelphia' search in Google and then click into the more results view. Look at where the high ranking businesses are located.

2. Open a second browser window, go to maps.google.com and look up your own address.

I think you will very quickly see that, sure enough, you are located way on the outskirts of the radius Google appears to be pulling results from for that geomodified search.

Again, this is my very quick glance at this, but I would suspect that geography appears to be playing a role (and not one you can influence) in this scenario. Other things to investigate?

-History of Google guideline violations, be they past or current

-Citation consistency and spread (glad you are using Moz Local!). Pay attention to duplicates we report!

-Google-based review count and rating

-Domain authority

-Link quality

So, that's a start, Jack, and I do recommend that you either dig deeper into research on this or consider hiring an expert who can take a more thorough look at numerous factors. Hope this is helpful!

P.S. BTW, in regards to your comments about spammy names, unfortunately, yes - these still often rank dreadfully well in Google. It's a shame. What you want to find out is whether these suspiciously generic names are, in fact, the legitimate business name or DBA of the competitor. If they are not, consider reporting them for a guideline violation. I've seen it work. But, if those are the real names, you are out of luck

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

Hey There!

Sounds like a big project. It's normally best to update current listings. I think you'll find these posts to be helpful, while bearing in mind that each platform has its own policies and options:

http://www.joyannehawkins.com/the-proper-way-to-deal-with-duplicates-in-google-my-business/

http://www.localsearchforum.com/moving-name-changes/36969-moving-business-best-practices.html

Hope these help!

Nice discussion going on here, with Egol making some very good points.

Personally, I am not a fan of the multi-site approach. It's the brand that needs to be built as the authority, for all of its services. And when it comes to Local, having shared NAP on more than one website can cause citation difficulties. So, again, this comes down to having a single authoritative source representing your business on the web. This tends to be the consensus of opinion on the Local SEO world - 1 site is better than 2.

Hi Dina,

Unfortunately, no, there is no way to ensure that Google will show your GMB data for a branded search with a different spelling of your name. You're not alone in asking about this (https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/FwNJpoLy0vE;context-place=topicsearchin/business/ampersand). If your GMB page lists you as '&', this is a very strong signal to Google that this is your business name. It could be possible to overcome this if there were enough incidental references to your business as 'and' around the web, but I can't recommend building citations this way as you really do need to pick one version and go with it.

Hi Leonie!

I found these to be helpful:

http://www.slideshare.net/seosmarty/relpublisher-versus-relauthor

https://support.google.com/business/answer/4569085?hl=en

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!

Hi Redkey!

Oh, my, I do not envy you this situation. What the client has done is one of those few things that would actually make me turn and run, but if you are already under contract with them, these would be my suggestions:

1. First, have a really good and honest chat with the client about the 'iffiness' of their chosen strategy. Tell them that you totally get that they were just imitating what appeared to be working for a competitor, but that the competitor is in danger of big let down at any time in the future if their microsites are, in fact, duplicative/thin/spammy. If the client is in a market that is a spammy or non-competitive one, the competitors' pages may be really old ones that are just gathering dust, waiting for some update from Google to blast them into oblivion. I know this kind of junk exists out there in the SERPs, and that some of it is still ranking well (sadly) - I run into it not infrequently. I consider it an object lesson in Google's failure to deliver quality for some phrases, but not a smart opportunity for creating a marketing strategy. Google is always trying to improve result quality, and one day, I believe these types of sites will meet their deserved doom:) I would talk all of this over with the client and describe the strategy as clumsy at best and very risky at worst.

2. There are very few instances in which I can imagine that a single business could turn out 35 highly valuable city websites. Unless there is some extremely decisive factor that makes Boston Business different from Cape Cod Business, there is really no legitimate reason to have different websites. I would, indeed, advise the client to let them expire, unless he can explain a real-world reason for having a unique website for each city, backed up by a plan to create completely unique content for each of the sites.

3. The preferred approach here would be to help this client take new pride in a single website for his brand, with strong, unique pages for each city with which he has a legitimate relationship. By building out an extremely strong, helpful, accurate website, he will be building his brand and doing what he needs to to alert bots and humans to his presence in the various cities. I don't know the nuances of your client's business, if it's single-location or multi-location, if it's B&M or an SAB, but, in general, this would be the very best approach. If he can take all of the effort he's likely been putting into managing 35 different websites and put it into managing just 1, think how awesome his site could become!

You might like to read:

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

I hope this straight stuff from me is helpful. You actually have the opportunity to educate this client and put him on a much better path that could serve his business well in future!

Hi There,

This past summer, Yahoo did spin off their small business division into Aabaco. Here's an article on this:

https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/learnmore

Yahoo's own links to creating a listing seem to all point here https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/local-listings but there just hasn't been much of an outcry over this because I think not many Local SEOs are promoting Yahoo as a must-list platform to their clients anymore. Max Minzer's awesome list says this about Yahoo (http://www.reengageconsulting.com/be-where-your-customers-are-with-local-business-listings/#yahoo

Listing Support:

Some support is available but don’t rely on it! General support and information provided.

• (408) 916-2149 – support if you create an incident number.
• @YSmallBizCare – Aabaco Small Biz Support Twitter account. Your best bet for free listing support.
• Customer Support – not much help here unless you’re a paying customer.
• Help for Aabaco Local Basic (free) – general information as well.

So, you might want to check those options out. Interesting to note he thinks the Twitter account is the best bet for support!

Yahoo used to be one the most prominent directories for local businesses, but these days, many Local SEOs agree that it may not be worth fussing with anymore.

Chris & Egol - you guys are a couple of jokers

Hi There!

Thanks for the screenshots - they illustrate your question very clearly. Because I'm not located in Canada, I have to add your city name to my query rather then setting my location. When I search for 'Car Medics Elginburg', I am getting both of your locations, as in your August screenshot.

As to why you are no longer seeing this searching from where you are, it's important to understand that it's always totally up to Google whether they want to display one location or both. Some ideas:

1. It could be that they are only showing you the location physically closest to your mobile or desktop device. Have you tried taking your cell phone closer to the second location and doing the search from there to see if it is then showing as a single result, or as part of a double result?

2. Looks like you're not sharing phone numbers, so that's a good thing.

3. Looks like both businesses could earn some more reviews to make them a bit more powerful.

4. Here's something odd. From the Maps results, I'm clicking on the website link for your Perth Rd. location and am being taken here:

http://www.carmedics.ca/

This looks like a homepage, and rather than having Elginburg as the core city term you're optimizing for, it's talking about Kingston. Additionally, in looking up at your masthead, there appears to be NAP discrepancy going on. Your Google My Business data is:

1985 Perth Road
Glenburnie, ON K0H 1S0

vs. what is on your website:

1985 Perth Rd, Elginburg,ON K0H 1M0, Canada

So, is this business located in Kingston, Elginburg or Glenburnie? Clearly there is a discrepancy here of some kind that could be contributing to a lack of trust on Google's part in the data they have about your business.

5. Now I'm clicking on the website link for the Rigney location, which is also taking me to:

http://www.carmedics.ca/

It is not a best practice to have both GMB listings link to the same page on your website. You should have a unique landing page for each location and link your GMB listings to these instead of the homepage. These landing pages should be optimized only for their own NAP - without mixing in other geo-terms. They should feature strong, unique content and be linked to from a high level menu and elsewhere within the website.

In Sum -

You have NAP inconsistency going on for the Perth Rd. Location, and it's very confusing that both listings are clicking to a page talking about Kingston. More effort needs to be made to sort these locations out from one another and to be sure that NAP is consistently listed for each location everywhere it appears on the website, on GMB and on all citations.

Now, whether this will resolve the issue you are experiencing with only one location appearing is another matter. It's very important that you do the above work, but it still could be a user-as-centroid phenomenon you're experiencing on either desktop or mobile devices as you've got 2 locations in 2 different cities. Google may simply be choosing to show you the location nearest you, and I think it would be smart to test this physically with phones, bearing in mind that no 2 customers are guaranteed to see the same results. Their results will also be governed by their own physical location at the time of search, and other forms of personalization. Test both with phones with no geo-terms added to the search query and test with geo-terms added. See what you get.

What I've mentioned here is a start to troubleshooting. There could be other factors involved, but I really hope these quick thoughts help!

Just speaking from personal experience on this as a consumer rather than as a marketer - some jingles are annoying in actual sound, but regardless of that, I can remember word-for-word, note-for-note, jingles I heard 30 years ago, some for businesses that are no longer even in business. And, in chatting with peers, you start singing one of those jingles and everyone joins in, laughing, because they have these burned into their brains as well. In fact, if someone mentions the name of a business, I find it's very common for someone else to chime in with the jingle, just because they associate the brand with the tune and find it amusing that they do so.

Now, I was too young to be a consumer of anything more than dolls and Kit-Kat candy bars 30 years ago, but these days, my family listens to the radio at least once a week to hear football games. One jingle we hear over and over again is a really simple one for an auto parts store. It says, "Oh, Oh, Oh, O'Reilly - Auto Parts!". We've noticed where the local O'Reilly auto parts store is, we sometimes can't keep ourselves from singing the jingle if we notice the sign while driving by and if we need to replace our windshield wipers this winter, you can bet that's the first auto parts store that will come into our heads. We don't have a similar jingle in our heads for Joe's Auto Parts or Bob's Auto Parts because they're not on the radio. Songs are really magical. Listen to how simple this jingle is, but how the repetition of the word 'Oh' makes it feel energetic and fun to mimic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkSDGk67IWI

So, again, speaking purely from personal experience, I do hear jingles, I do remember them if I hear them frequently enough, and they do make me feel sort of amused about businesses ... and, while feeling amused, I've given space in my brain over to the business to be recalled when I need their product, because their advertising has put a tune to a spot in the local business landscape where I live.

Hi Jubaer!

The first thing to do here is to establish what connection your business has to these other target states where you lack a physical location. A web design company isn't like an SAB (a plumber, electrician, etc.) that will typically travel to various cities to serve clients. So, your connection is likely to be different to this, and for your industry, is typically going to be the fact that you have clients in these states. So, one suggestion would be that you create a page for each target state (it sounds like you're going after states instead of cities, right?) and then showcase your clients in that state on its designated page on the website. Add really good testimonials from the clients in those cities, accompanying their business showcase and brainstorm other content you might add to these pages to make them interesting and helpful.

Understand that you will, of course, be going after organic rankings rather than local ones, and that if you fail to get the organic results you're hoping for (competition is likely to be very stiff) you may need to rely in part or in full on PPC instead of organic.

Hi Nik!

Google's local results depend entirely on having a physical location in a specific city. Right now, you have a physical location in Sydney, so you're doing well for these Sydney-based-or-related searches. But, you don't have an office in Perth or Melbourne, so there is no reason for Google to rank  you locally for these cities. Simply stating in your Google My Business description or service radius that you deliver nationwide is not going to override Google's bias toward physical location.

So, what this leaves you with is working to earn organic rankings for terms that relate to these other cities, and the main struggle here will be determine if it's logical for you to do so and then discovering content topics that make sense for the effort. Creating a bunch of pages that say 'we deliver to Perth', 'we deliver to Melbourne' will not be enough. It's not interesting and not a good reason to create a page. So, rather, you might need to think in terms of customer testimonials, stories about customers' use of your product, if you install your product then maybe video/text coverage of your installation projects, showcases of gardens in the different cities featuring your mirrors, contests in the cities, etc.

You'll need to find reason for writing about these cities beyond simply delivering to them. Then, you'll likely need to earn some good links to these pages. And, hopefully, that will lead to some organic visibility for these other cities where you lack a physical location. Hope this helps!

Hi Steve,

If you are dealing with citations for 120 locations, there is pretty much no way you should be doing that manually ;). That's an enormous project!

As others have mentioned on this thread, there are going to be several options for you to choose from in terms of a purchased service, and, you may need to implement that with some manual follow-up in case these programs don't correct everything, in which case, this resource may help: http://www.reengageconsulting.com/be-where-your-customers-are-with-local-business-listings/

Hey There!

Have you checked out this recent Whiteboard Friday? https://moz.com/blog/how-to-hack-the-amplification-process-whiteboard-friday

I believe it may give you some good ideas!

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.

Hey Bas!

This is definitely the kind of thing I'm hoping our community will contribute to the discussion. Sounds like Todoist is really working well for you, and I like you point about how you can jot this stuff down quickly enough that it's not then distracting you from the work at hand, knowing you can return to it later. Cool!

Thanks so much for taking the time to share your strategy.

Hi Rosemary,
No, the traffic will not be automatically separated by Google, but what your post has made me realize is that we really do need an update on this celebrated post that was written in the pre-Plus-divorce era:

http://localu.org/blog/how-to-segment-local-search-analytics/

I honestly don't know if anyone has written anything on this important topic since the breakup. I'd love to see Ed Reese do a followup on that post, or someone else who is up to the task!

Hi Donald!

Good topic! Ideally, this is how most Local SEOs would suggest organizing a business with this model:

• A single website representing the brand

• A unique page on the site for each service

• A unique page on the site for each of the two physical offices

• Both offices on the Contact page and in the footer

• A unique Google+ Local page for each of the 2 locations, and a unique citation set for each of the physical locations

Instead, what your client has done is to build out a unique website for each of their two specialties. Fortunately, as the business has two unique locations, many of the concerns that would normally surround such a strategy do not apply. If the client only had one office and had built out two websites - that would be a big concern. But, happily, this is not the case with your client.

Nevertheless, the drawbacks of your client's approach are that, instead of all of the work he does pouring into building up the strength of a single brand on a single site, he is going to have to split his energy and funding between two different sites. It's not as convenient to do this, but if the client wishes to stick with this approach, here are a few things to be sure not to do:

• Don't share phone numbers between the two offices. Each must have its own unique local phone number

• Do a citation audit to be sure that there are no merged listings and that the name, address, phone number and website for location A are not mixed up anywhere with those of location B. Everything must be separate and distinct at all times. The Google+ Local pages and citation sets for the 2 offices must be totally unique.

• Do not put the address, phone number or URL of website A on website B or vice versa, anywhere. Keep these sites totally separate. Do not link from one website to the other.

• Do not share content of any kind between the two websites. All content must be unique on the two sites.

Hopefully, following these steps, you can prevent merging of details, and can simply market the two sites the way any local businesses would be marketed. Hope this helps!

Hey Jon!

If you feel totally confident that Google will agree that these are 2 different forward-facing businesses at the same address, than the differentiating items will be the name, the phone number and the website landing page the Google My Business listing links to. Being sure that all 3 things are unique should help Google keep them separate, ideally. Hope this helps!

Hi Melissa!

A few thoughts on this:

1. I understand that the owner wants to rank as highly as possible - of course. Nevertheless, in order for him to be keeping current with the way search works, he needs to understand that there are no universal #1 rankings. Due to personalization and the user-as-centroid phenomenon, what the owner sees on his cell phone is not going to identically match what his customers see on theirs. Rather than obsessing over rankings, the owner would be strengthening his business by focusing on conversions. Are the pages being created by this business causing phones to ring? If yes, conversions are high. If no, conversions are not what they could be. We've already identified that the page you've shared here is weak. Rather than focusing too much on rankings, the owner needs to start at the beginning by focusing on quality. If he can't invest in this or wait for a careful effort to pay off, he should simply invest directly in PPC.

2. There are 2 ways to approach a multi-service, multi-location business:

A: You have a page for each service and a page for each location. You do not develop a page for every possible combination of services/cities. This is the best approach when funding, creativity or commitment to quality may be in question.

B: You do create a page for every possible combination of the cities and services. So, you have a shredding page for city A and a shredding page for city B. You have a page for data management for City A and another for the same term for city B. While this approach is possible, it should really only be undertaken where there is sufficient commitment to quality and sufficient funding, otherwise you'll end up weakening the site with thin/duplicate pages instead of strengthening it.

Whichever approach is taken, you should always link obviously to all pages. Don't hide them. If they are pages for the public, they belong in a high level menu.

3. Right now, it seems like the business is experimenting with option B, but not doing a really great job at it. So, the business is at a critical point here and needs to decide whether they can continue with option B in a way that adds value and strengthens the site and is fully public, or, if they actually would be better off going with option A.

The website is only 1 aspect of rankings, but it's an extremely important one, and a key factor in conversions. Hope this helps

Hey There!

Good question, and brace for a long answer here.

So, where we start with this is Google's own guidelines for multi-practitioners which we excavate for clues to see how they feel about your scenario. These guidelines state:

Individual practitioners (e.g. doctors, lawyers, real estate agents)

An individual practitioner is a public facing professional, typically with his or her own customer base. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, and insurance or real estate agents all are individual practitioners. Pages for practitioners may include title or degree certification (e.g. Dr., MD, JD, Esq., CFA).

An individual practitioner should create his or her own dedicated page if:

• He or she operates in a public-facing role. Support staff should not create their own page.
• He or she is directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours.

A practitioner should not have multiple pages to cover all of his or her specializations.

Multiple practitioners at one location

If the practitioner is one of several public facing practitioners at this location:

• The organization should create a page for this location, separate from that of the practitioner.
• The page for the practitioner should be titled with name of the practitioner only, excluding that of the organization.

This is the sum total of what Google tells us and, and while some of these guidelines apply to your scenario (like your agents operating in a public facing role) there's a catch here.

Though you've described having multiple offices across the country, you have further described that these agents you'd like to market don't work at these offices. They work from home and would need to keep their addresses hidden because of this. This is a common scenario and one of the more significant grey areas of the guidelines. The problem here is, should Google discover than you've created 30 listings in Iowa for your agents, and then they look at their street level imaging of the back-end addresses you've listed in your GMB dashboard, they will see that these are not offices - they are houses. And, at that point, it's up to Google to decide whether you have a legitimate business model or whether you are trying to game the system by appearing to have offices in these 30 locations when you really don't.

The problem here is that many companies have spammed Google in this way. The yard cleaning company whose owner literally does work from home in San Francisco, but who has also set up listings in San Jose (his cousin's house), Oakland (his mom's house) and Walnut Creek (his sister's house). Google catches onto this and hammers down not only on the 3 spammy listings but may also hammer down on the legitimate listing in San Francisco, as well.

So, while this is not what you are trying to do, and your agents genuinely do work at home while representing your company, the grey area here is whether Google will see it that way. There is no guarantee that they will, and so what I would say on this is that the safe path here is to only list your physical offices in the cities where you have them and list any agents that work in these offices and are "directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours". You could try it the other way, listing every possible agent, but you'd be doing so at your own risk.

Hope these are helpful thoughts! It's good you're considering all the options here. Very smart.

P.S. So sorry about the formatting on this. It is wacky.

Hey Joseph,

Coincidentally, Rand's Whiteboard Friday today speaks to exactly this topic. Definitely check it out and let us know if any further questions arise!

https://moz.com/blog/ranking-multiple-domains-to-own-more-serp-real-estate-whiteboard-friday

Hiya!

Oof, that's a toughie, indeed. To my knowledge, there is nothing you can do to get Google to increase the speed with which they re-visit a third party site. Good news is, you are in the same boat as everyone on this, and as Eric mentions, it's likely best to simply turn your attention elsewhere while you wait. How about scoring a few really awesome new citations for the business? Maybe a feature in a local newspaper or blog? Something robust would be great. Sorry there's no magic wand on this one

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!

Hmm, that's too bad that you haven't rec'd a response in 24 hours. And your experience with phone support sounds typical - some staff are very good, but others don't seem to have equal training. Frustrating.

On Google dedicated reps, I have wondered if they might go that way if they fully implement Home Service Ads in Local, but, I'm not holding my breath. It would be awesome if they did!

Hi Veronica!

That is, indeed, such a difficult situation. I hope you and the client are aggressively reporting the spam, and yes, maybe this will be the year in which we see Google step up its game in this regard. Crossing my fingers! Thanks so much for the good wishes

Hi Ben,

What you want here is:

1. Ideally, 1 website with a landing page on it for each of the 2 locations.

2. A unique Google My Business Page for each of the 2 locations, linking to their respective landing pages

3. Google Plus, as a local product, is dead. Read: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/11/25/google-plus-upgrade-faq-for-the-smb/ The only reason to maintain a social presence on Google Plus is if your business has somehow earned a major following there. Otherwise, you may be better off devoting social efforts to Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, and what have you. For a couple of years, the advice for local businesses was to post on Google+ but it never really took off and then Google divorced it from Local, so, remaining pages are kind of useless and if you don't log into them every 6 months, Google will un-validate them. Whether it's necessary to close them, I can't really say. That's a good question, but not one I've seen raised before and am not sure how the millions of local businesses who have recently gone through the +/local divorce are handling that.

Hope this helps!

I like your thinking, Nicholas! Some good tips here and intriguing predictions. Thank you so much for contributing to this thread.

Hi Michael,

Yes, this is a bit complicated. Ideally, you'd have just 1 website for the business, but if you have to have 2, be sure there is no connection between the two. No shared NAP, no shared content, etc. It would need to be run as a completely separate business to avoid the danger of NAP confusion.

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?

Hey Jim!

Normally, I would not recommend having more than one city modifier in the URL per page. So:

domain.com/service-city

but not

domain.co/service-city-city-city

Ideally, you want a unique page per city. Hope that helps!

Howdy To Our Super Community!

When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by ladies who spent hours combing through newspapers and mailers, clipping coupons to put in a coupon drawer for future shopping excursions. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to in order to save a a few bucks, especially given that I grew up in an era that still boasted a pretty stable middle class, but, it turns out, those ladies of yore were really onto something.

A recent survey by Bazaarvoice and CMO Council found that coupons and discounts drive way more return/loyalty business amongst modern shoppers than any other factor, including recommendations from family and friends and paid advertising. Another survey by ROTH and Research Now discovered that 70% of millennial moms sought and downloaded mobile coupons while doing their shopping chores.

There are a couple of facets of these findings that should interest any e-commerce business or local retailer. We've learned from a variety of studies that it can cost up to 7x more to earn a new customer than to retain an existing one, making loyalty programs smart business. Meanwhile, publications like the Wall Street Journal have made it clear that, in the U.S., the middle class is no longer the majority. These two factors seem to lend themselves to an important discussion for our community here at Moz, and in the marketing world at large.

What is driving 70% of young mothers to use mobile coupons, as per the above study?

Is it tight budgets, the love of a deal, pride in outsmarting 'the system' with a little extra effort?

Is your company using coupons? Which ones have you seen convert most highly? Is there some element to them you've discovered to be a real winner?

Interestingly, price is repeatedly cited as a minor factor in customer complaints, and yet, I've personally seen discounts/sales drive business like mad in both e-commerce and retail settings. Just how powerful is the love a deal?

I would love it if you'd contribute your coupon/discount savvy to a discussion here, to help our community better latch onto this massively powerful influence. What are your thoughts and first-hand experiences?

Hi Charity,

Great topic. Unfortunately, in your industry, Google does tend to favor aggregators over individual businesses, and the ability of a business website to outrank these giants organically with temporary listings is going to be limited. They may simply have too much strength.

So, barnacle SEO is going to be important (ensuring that you are properly profiled on the major real estate aggregators that outrank you) but you may also need to resort to PPC and pay to be ahead of these huge competitors if it's essential to do so. Not ideal, but unless you can find a way to make your house listings somehow tremendously more relevant and popular, every time you list a house, than the same data appearing on the aggregators, chances are, the goal of outranking them is not realistic, and you might be better served by setting a different goal. At the end of the day, if your properties are at least appearing highly in the results of the aggregators and you are receiving conversions from that, you may need to shift organic goals to ranking other types of content well. This post from Bruce Clay is a couple of years old, but might have some good inspiration for your business: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/real-estate-seo/

I hope you'll receive additional community feedback.

Hey Marcus!

What good insights ... particularly about the 'fun' of coupons. I honestly think the coupon-collecting ladies I knew when I was young were making a sort of game of it, and maybe even feeling a bit smarter than the 'average Joe' who was paying full price when he could have done better for himself with a little effort.

And, yes indeed, every coupon is a brand exposure. I would love to hear more from our community, if any of you are having success running coupons (or even if you don't run a business, but are a coupon clipper and have something to share about what motivates you).

Thanks, again, Marcus, for the interesting observations!

Hi Jim,

Don't worry, you're not being repetitive

It's very common for service area businesses to serve a variety of close-set cities, and best practice for this is 1 page per city. In fact, doing so could help you to outrank your competitors who are crunching multiple cities onto the same page.

If you offer multiple services in multiple cities, the choice here is whether you want to create:

a) a page for each city and a page for each service

or

b) a page for every possible combination of services and cities

If budget, time or inspiration are limited, option A may be best in which case, you'd have URLs like this for your services

domain.com/bathroom-remodeling

domain.com/kitchen remodeling

and domains like this for your services:

domain.com/leesburg

domain.com/sterling

...with the city landing pages needing to feature geo-specific content for projects you've done in those cities.

If you have ample time, inspiration and budget, you can go with option B, in which case, you'd build a set of pages like:

domain.com/bathroom-remodeling-sterling-va

domain.com/bathroom-remodeling-leesburg-va

domain.com/kitchen-remodeling-sterling-va

domain.com/bathroom-remodeling-leesburg-va

etc.

It's really a matter of how much creative writing you commit to so that, with either option A or B, every page you publish is as helpful as possible to customers, is unique, and is of the highest quality you can produce.

This recent Moz Blog post may help: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

Hi Chad,

Good question. As you mention that there are budget constraints, here's what I would suggest for your initial contract with the client: build one website with a page for every physical city and a page for every service, and build the client a blog. Then, structure into the relationship with the client the option to continue to build out pages for the cities where he serves but isn't physically located, either later in the year or whenever he can afford to begin growing the site. Additionally, with the blog in place, the client can be empowered to begin blogging about their projects relating to both their physical cities and their non-physical ones.

I want to be sure to be clear ... even if the client had a huge budget, I would not recommend trying to build multiple sites, mini sites, etc. You want one, really strong domain with unique content on it for each of the different target cities so that everything the business does is working to build up his brand.

It may be that your client already has the budget to build a page for each office, plus pages for his major non-physical service cities, plus a page for each service, in which case, you can do it all at once. But, if money is a bit slim for starters, I'd go with a basic plan of 1 page per city, 1 page per service, basic standard pages like home, about, contact, testimonials + an on-site blog. This would be the basic 'package' any business should be able to budget for, with room to grow in future.

P.S. You might also like to check out this thread, on a similar topic: https://moz.com/community/q/concerned-about-cannibalization-for-local-seo-results-should-we-move-some-of-our-location-pages-to-a-subdomain

Hey Jason!

The most common reason for what you are describing is geographic. The high-organic-ranking-but-low-pack-ranking business is either outside of:

1. The user's centroid (where the user is physically located at the time of search)

2. Google's industry cluster (business is far from the industry centroid Google has assigned)

3. The business isn't actually inside of the city of search

Joy Hawkin's actually wrote a very good article about the 3rd issue over at Search Engine Land recently: http://searchengineland.com/rank-high-organically-not-locally-case-study-240692 I highly recommend reading that and doing a thorough study of any geographic limitations that may be holding you back.

Now, if it turns out not to be any of the above 3 things, the next thing to look into is whether something is wrong with the way the business is using Google My Business. Namely, if you've violated any guidelines, that can tank your local pack rankings.

Finally, if neither geography nor guideline violations are at play here, then you have to go back to the basics, like:

1. Organic strength

2. Citation consistency, spread and age

3. Reviews

etc.

Pretty much every case I've ever seen like the one you're describing can be diagnosed by investigating all of the above, and will it will turn out that one of the above things, or a combination of them, is the answer.

Hope this helps!

Hi Chad,

You're very welcome. By 'practice areas' do you mean service areas, like a plumber physically located in Dallas but who, from that office, also serves the neighboring towns of Plano, Irving and Grand Prairie? I think this is what you mean, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

For these non-physical city pages, optimization would essentially be the same as for the physical cities, with the exception that you won't have complete NAP to put at the top of the pages. As you'll already have a strong page for each service focusing on a couple of keywords (like hot water heater repair, hot water tank repair on one page, and bathroom sink repair and sink drain repair on another page) then the focus of the set of city pages should be more generic, like a top level keyword (plumbing) + the city name.

As you only have 3 physical locations, you should be fine to include all 3 in the sitewide footer, and to use Schema. If you had more than 10, I wouldn't suggest it, but just 3 should be fine. Also, be sure that all 3 are on the Contact page, too. Hope this helps!

Hi Jackson,

Yes, I'm not a fan of phone trees either, particularly as Google doesn't really like them (they prefer numbers that connect directly), and what you've described about temporarily disabling them for phone verification has been the main advice I've seen for some years on this. However, and here's something interesting, Mike Blumenthal recently reported that verification options may be emerging that could bypass phone verification: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2016/02/15/google-mybusiness-now-surfacing-web-verify-option-2/

As for replacing a phone tree with something other than a live human being who directs calls to staff, I'm afraid I don't know. I will ask that some of my teammates pop by to see if anyone has any further suggestions about this.

Hi Blake,

I think David makes a lot of good points here. I'd like to offer some different thoughts of my own on this, building somewhat on what David has already said, but maybe taking it a step beyond that.

Personally, I think brands are more important than any specific keyword reach can be. Let's just think about this site we're both on right now ... Moz.com. It's not mozseattle.com or mozinboundmarketingsoftware.com or what have you. The domain and the brand are one, making them both mutually, immediately recognizable as 'the' Moz entity. Another example - let's think about the 49ers. Their official website is 49ers.com. They don't have to be 49ersfootballteamsanfrancisco.com. They've built a brand that stands for itself.

Unless a city or keyword is part of your legal business name, I think domains like this can look like kind of an awkward, not very sophisticated reach for search engine rankings:

plumbersanfrancisco.com

sanfranciscobestplumber.com

myplumberinsanfrancisco.com

Truly, I'd rather see walkerplumbing.com if the name of the business is Walker Plumbing. If I've used their service before and they did a good job and then I need a plumber later, I may have some chance of remembering that the guys who came out were Walker Plumbing. If I see that domain in the SERPs, recognition happens. I'm not going to recognize plumbersanfranciso.com as anything if the Walker guys chose that domain instead, hoping it would give them a bit of a ranking edge.

If you are planning to build a great brand, my personal choice would be to go with a domain name that matches it as closely as possible and focus on much more robust tactics for earning rankings. Added to this, putting a city name in your domain may become an albatross for the business if you earn enough success to want to expand to other cities. It could actually limit you.

I like brands I can instantly recognize. They are memorable and convenient for users. This is a good reason to choose your business name wisely from the get-go, so that it legitimately includes keywords from the get-go (i.e. naming your business Stellar Web Design vs. just Stellar or something like that).

Just my 2 cents - hope they are interesting pennies

Great question! Unless each doctor has his/her own phone number, then I would strongly advise against creating Google My Business listings for them. You've done a 100% excellent job up to this point of keeping your locations separate with unique phone numbers and unique landing pages. If you then begin to degrade NAP clarity by creating a whole bunch of new listings that share the practices' phone numbers, you will be dimming that clarity and putting the listings at risk for merging and potential ranking issues.

Is it a guideline violation for practitioner to share a phone number with the practice. Technically, it isn't, as the guidelines read:

Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible

So, Google is speaking specifically about locations here, rather than practitioners. They aren't stating that practitioners HAVE TO have a unique phone number, but later on in the guidelines, they do state this about them:

He or she is directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours

So, one can sagely infer from this that Google wants a person rather than a call center to answer the practitioner's phone number if called, but Google really doesn't spell this out in terms that are as black-and-white as I'd like.

Nevertheless, whether it's a guideline violation or not to share phone numbers, it's not a best practice, given the problems it can cause, so, unless the doctors are willing to have unique phone numbers at which they can be contacted directly, I wouldn't advise creating GMB listings for them.

Hope this helps!

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?

Hi There, CalicoKitty!

As Robert mentions, the community would likely need more details to look into this for you personally, but yes, things change in Local on an ongoing basis. This Checklist should help you thoroughly assess how well you are doing as well as trying to assess why competitors have surpassed you:

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

The one thing I would add to this would be that, even if you are doing everything perfectly, there are some cases in which spam will outrank better quality results, simply because Google doesn't always do the best job in policing its data. Any time you reach a clear determination that a local result is genuinely spam (and not just mysteriously outranking you), you can always report it to Google.

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!

Donna - the reason I'm asking so many questions is because of things like this:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2016/04/04/the-most-obscure-rule-in-google-my-business-a-nasty-surprise/

Thought I would add Hope it helps!

Hey There!

Good feedback from the community here

If a competitor is actually spamming the local pack, you have the option to report them, but it has to be more than that they are just outranking you. There needs to be proof of spam. Lacking that, I agree with what Dmitrii and Dan have suggested about focusing on your own work. You might like to go through our big Local SEO checklist to be sure you're doing everything you can:

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

Hope this helps!

Hi Donna,

Thanks for taking the time to answer. You have checked off all of the obvious reasons that I can think of for rejection. It sounds like the business is doing everything as one would advise and the fact that these locations are in 2 different states cannot lead us to suspect that Google is sensing a spamming of the SAME service area. My best suggestion here would be to phone Google and see if they can offer you any further explanation. If that doesn't work, you might want to hire somebody like Joy Hawkins at Imprezzio as she is a real detective when it comes to odd problems like this, and she is also either a TC or an RER and might have access to more information about this than the average Local SEO. I think this thread has helped clear away common problems, leaving us with the conclusion that there might be something about this scenario that is uncommon.

BTW, thanks for the kind mention, Robert!