Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Bob,

By 'start a company from scratch' do you mean business consulting? Like someone comes to you wanting to open a hair salon and you advise them from the beginning? Or, something else?

The appropriateness of your rates is going to be based on the types of clients you are targeting. $200/hr will likely be too much for Mom & Pops and startups in Boise (though maybe not in Los Angeles!), but if you focus on industries that are typically populated by enterprise level companies, your rate may work. Think hospitals, large franchises, major brands, etc.

Hoping you'll get lots of community feedback on this one!

Hi Gavo,

The Google Rep is right - what you're describing about the second business has all the earmarks of a listing that would get flagged and removed by Google, and this could actually hurt the work you've done for the first business. What are those earmarks?

• Shared category of products/services

• Shared address

-Shared phone number

If your client's second business was selling vacuum cleaners instead of driveway services and had its own phone number, it would be okay to move forward, but from your scenario description, attempting to use Google to market the second business would be a mistake.

Now, not every directory shares Google's stringent policies, BUT if you do decide to build citations other than at Google for the second business, you should take these precautions:

• Separate phone number

• Separate website with totally unique content

• Don't link between the two businesses to try to cross promote them

Even with these precautions, there is risk of troubling citation inconsistencies arising from the fact that two driveway businesses are sharing the same address. You could wind up with merged listing details out there in the ecosystem, so if you choose to go this route, forewarn the client of the risks before taking any steps in this direction.

So sorry ... this is probably not the news your client is hoping to hear, but honestly, if you prevent him from making a costly mistake, you could be saving his bacon

Pahahahaha! Thank you, Michael. That made my morning.

Hi There!

Very important that you build all citations to reflect your real-world physical location and not your service area. So, this would mean that you stick with Farmers Branch. You can work on optimizing your website to reflect services you additionally offer in Dallas, Fort Wort or other locations, but when it comes to citations, it's always about physical location. Hope this helps and this would be a good time to do a read-through of Google Guidelines, just to be sure the efforts you'll be making to build citations won't cause problems but, rather, will reap maximum benefits

Thank you, John! Any predictions of your own to share?

Hi Ria!

I want to be sure I'm understanding exactly what you are describing. I'm concerned that what you are talking about may fall under Google's ineligible model guidelines which state:

An ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don't own or have the authority to represent. Please coordinate with your host to have your information displayed on the page for their business within their "Introduction" field.

What are the specifics of this. Does the client have:

1. A unique phone number?

2. A dedicated set of rooms?

3. It's own forward-facing front desk?

4. 9-5 (or similar) hours of operation?

Thanks for reading, Joe! Agree with you that Internet users are demonstrating an exceedingly high level of tolerance for Big Tech misbehavior. What's in front of us is a whole new year to see whether we see fundamental change at these brands or more and worse disasters that could bring us to a tipping point. I'm hoping for the former, but worried we may see the latter.

Hi Kevin!

Christy is asking some important questions. I'll add just a couple more:

1. Are these legally registered as 2 distinct businesses?

2. Do they have separate front entrances?

3. Do they each have a unique local phone number?

Please, provide as much detail as you can.

Glad you found this interesting, Andrew! Thanks for stopping by. Do you have any predictions of your own to share?

Hi Neil,

Unfortunately, if your client chooses to create 4 different listings with 1 phone number, he will be at risk for merging and possible ranking failures. If this were my client, I would not recommend that he do this. Honestly, if the client is only working 1 day a week at a facility, eligibility for inclusion in GMB sounds a bit iffy. I recommend that you contact Google directly to get their say-so on this, but a business that is only open 1 day a week could draw some scrutiny from Google.

Andrew, thank you for sharing such thoughtful observations, especially in explaining what you've seen work best over the past year. Useful!

Hi Jordan,
I totally get how confusing Facebook can be! So, Facebook has a product that is officially called a Facebook Place, and it is their version of a local business listing. This is different than their purely social options. A Facebook Place is Facebook's equivalent of a Google My Business listing, Bing Places listing or what have you. For each physical location a business operates, they should have a unique Facebook Place with complete NAP on it. They should categorize the FB Place as a Local Business and earn visits/checkins to it. They can/should socialize on these pages as well. As to whether the brand wants to have a purely social brand page as well, that would be a social decision rather than a local one.

I have found Facebook's education and outreach about their product to be somewhat lacking, personally, but you can search for more info about this here: https://www.facebook.com/help

Thanks so much, Taylor! Do you have any predictions of your own to add?

Hey James!

Good for you for doing your research and questioning stated best practices. It never hurts to ask! You are not going to find many examples of actual businesses that have been penalized for use of virtual offices because:

A) The business owner is hardly likely to advertise the fact that he was taken down for guidelines violations

B) Most SEOs don't consider it ethical to call out spammers by name. That being said, this is a good thread on this topic at Linda Buquet's forum about an attorney (unidentified) being caught for spam: http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/26844-busted-warning-attorneys-regus-non-compliant-offices.html. While I believe that instance related to a combination of fake locations and UPS store addresses, the thing to pay attention to is how easily the spammer was caught. TCs and RERs can act very quickly in escalating something like this when reported. I also recommend http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local/38965-virtual-office-question-issues.html and http://www.localsearchforum.com/local-search/37981-personal-injury-lawyer-wants-rank-tons-cities.html

If you know a business is operating out of a virtual office with a shared receptionist, then it's the Google forum folks (some of whom are speaking in the above threads) who would be determining your fate should your competitor report their suspicions about your GMB listing to them. It's pretty clear that your listing would fall under the close scrutiny of TCs and RERs who really do not go easy on guidelines violation reports to Google.

Definitely a good addition, Alex!

Hey Mike!

You've received great feedback from the community here (nice job, everybody!). While it's not a requirement to have complete NAP on every page, it is a best practice. I see these 3 options open to you:

1. Convince the client to go with a more normal layout. If you can, put complete NAP in the footer.

2. If no dice on that, put it in the masthead.

3. And if that won't work, you could certainly put it at the bottom of the main body of the pages, incorporating it into your call to action.

Hope this helps!

Hi Alexandre,

When you say that the 4 companies will cease to exist, does this also mean that their physical locations will close, or is your client opening 4 new offices in the former locations of the companies that have been acquired? Is there just 1 physical location post-acquisition, or 5 of them?

Just adding to what Marcus has written ... a multi-site approach is very rarely recommended for local businesses.

While Google can typically handle multiple businesses at a shared address, they need to either be:

a) legally distinct businesses (like a dentist and carpet cleaning company)

or

b) distinct forward facing departments within a business (like the service dept. and the sales department of a car dealership).

And, each would need to have its own direct phone number.

What Google does not want is any single business attempting to appear like multiple businesses. So, for example, a law practice creating 1 GMB listing for its personal injury services and another for its corporate law services. If it's just one business, at one address, it is only eligible for 1 GMB listing.

Hope this helps!

Hi Alexandre,

Thanks for the reply. Okay, so Google My Business listings are tied solely to physical location. If the main business has just 1 physical location after the acquisition, it should only have 1 GMB listing. At first glance, I do not recommend that you update the other 4 GMB listings to feature the new brand name, because then they might end up being marked as "permanently closed" while associated with the new business name, which could signal to consumers that the main company has gone out of business. This should be avoided at all costs, as "permanently closed" labels on the listings could also harm the ranking chances of the main business.

There are some complicated nuances to this scenario.

1. I wonder who is controlling the 4 other listings. Have you been able to verify them into the main business' GMB dashboard, or are they verified in the GMB dashboards of each of the 4 other companies.

2. I wonder what happens when you do 301 redirects of the 4 old websites to the main one. This may associate the 4 closed companies with the 1 open one in Google's eyes, and I'm curious (because I don't know for sure) as to whether that association could potentially lead to automation of duplicate listings. Hopefully not, but it's something you'll want to rigorously check for - duplicates cropping up as a result of the merge. Pro tip: Moz Check Listing can help you see duplicates for free, but given the size of this acquisition, you are likely to need the full version of a software like Moz Local to be able to add in all of the variant names/addresses/phone numbers to surface the maximum number of duplicates that may potentially exist of exist in the future.

3. I'm mulling over whether the best thing here would be to close the listings or mark them as moved to the new location.

I'm actually going to see if a colleague of mine has a good opinion on this. The situation is complex.

Just seconding Ira's excellent response here. Without in-person contact, the business is ineligible for a GMB listing. Very good topic!

Hi Kevin,

I've never actually gotten to implement a beacon, but my understanding is that the data is pulled from Google's Places API. Looks like this gives the full scoop: https://developers.google.com/beacons/get-started

Happy travels to MozCon!

Hey There!

Good question, and yes, if you use call tracking numbers improperly, it can play havoc with your NAP consistency and your lcoal rankings. I recommend you read this piece from start to finish to get a big picture sense of call tracking, including how to do it in a safe way:

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

Hope this helps!

What a great topic! There are likely going to be too many variables for someone in our community to exactly match your scenario and say, "Third person language vs. first person = X stats for a specialized medical practitioner."  In order to get answers for your particular business in your particular local community, you'd need to run A/B testing to track whether you see a difference in conversions from one form of language or the other. I think it would be very interesting to run such a test, and could be informative.

In lieu of having ready-made stats on this for you, my thoughts are these:

1. Focus on the voices of your patients, more than on "I" or "We" language in the majority of your content. Particularly with the evolution of voice search, it is how your patients talk, and how Google is able to understand the semantics of your patients' language as having a particular search intent, that are going to matter the most. The language on your website will typically convert best if it is built to solve customers' problems using customers' language. Example: instead of a dental practice saying, "Services: We offer dental crowns using our CEREC technology", you'd be saying, "Get out of the dental chair with a perfect crown in less than 2 hours, thanks to CEREC technology." By swinging the language in the direction of the benefits the customer receives, local businesses are operating in the world of the consumer instead of the world of the company.

2. Be authentic. If your practice is small and your service is highly-specialized, your website can properly set correct patient expectations of what they'll encounter at your office, potentially reducing patient churn. If I were consulting with you to help market your practice, I'd be asking you some questions like these to discover the ideal tone:

• Is the service you offer related to an upsetting health condition (like cancer) necessitating the need for a more formal or empathetic tone?

• Or, is the service you offer more of an elective service (like botox for wrinkles), prompting a more upbeat presentation?

• Who will be your typical patient (age, region, income, education, etc.)?

Ask yourself these and other questions about who will be reading your content, so that you can match its tone. There's a wide latitude between a specialist treating prostate cancer for men in their 50s in Boston vs. a integrative medicine doctor teaching the Forks Over Knives diet to women suffering from lupus in a laid-back town like Santa Cruz, CA. While empathy will be part of both scenarios, how formal/personable the doctor is in presenting herself/himself to patients may differ widely. So, know your audience, and present yourself and your office experience authentically, offering to solve patients' problems in language that will make them most confident and comfortable.

Hope these tips help!

Hey Jason,

Unless those modifiers (city names) are part of the legal business names of the 150 businesses, then the Google My Business listings are actually in violation of Google's Guidelines (see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en).

So, cleaning them up would be all to the good in terms of avoiding possible red flags at Google!

But, I'll be totally honest here. Could removing city keywords from your business name fields negatively impact you? Yes, it's possible, in that Google is still a bit goofy about weighting some exact match keyword brands in their SERPs. They shouldn't be doing this, they may be better at this than formerly, but I think this is still a factor.

So, you might see some ranking drops, BUT, that being said, I'd still recommend cleaning up your name as I'd rather struggle positively toward high rankings than deal with Google forming a negative 'opinion' of my business for violating their guidelines.

As you work on cleaning up your NAP, one thing to note. You will have to leave city names on your Facebook Place listings. They are the odd man out in this regard, requiring that you add modifiers to the business titles of multi-location listings, which is the exact opposite of what Google wants. Go figure!

Hope this helps!

Yep, something seems to be afoot, Phil.

See: https://moz.com/mozcast/

And: https://www.semrush.com/sensor/?date=2018-05-24&db=US&category=

Eric, yes, Joy's post is super! Thank you so much for thinking to link out to it. Very relevant to this discussion.

Hi Kathy,

So glad you are excited about the tool. One of the features we are working on for the future will be building custom-branded and emailed reports.

Hi John,

What you are referring to I would roughly term as a 'place label' though your industry doesn't have dedicated icons, as do restaurants or medical centers. Here is Google's somewhat old page on these:

https://support.google.com/business/answer/6056435?hl=en&ref_topic=4854129

They state:

_The place labels shown on Google Maps are determined algorithmically based on a large number of factors. One factor these algorithms consider is the accuracy of the business information and the richness of the content associated with the business. _

What you're experiencing is not uncommon, and your best hope is in excelling at as many of the factors as possible in the many that Google may take into consideration. How strong are your citations, how clean, are there duplicates, etc. Hope this points you in the right direction.

Hi Richard!

Our Help Team will definitely want to take a look at this, and via email, you'll be able to share with us the email address associated with your Moz Local account, the name, address, phone number and website of the business in question and screenshots of any troubles you are seeing in a private setting. Please, do write to us here: https://moz.com/help/contact

Someone on the team will gladly troubleshoot this with you.

Hey Paul,

Oh, good! Using Moz Local for that should save you a ton of time So, all I'd do in addition to that would be sure you've updated those URLs on any of your high ranking citations that Moz Local doesn't cover.

Hi Katherine,

Thanks so much for writing in about this. Moz Local draws our categories directly from Google, so you are right to notice a correlation. Unfortunately, you are right that Google's categories are not all-inclusive, but whether you sign up for Moz Local or not, participation in Google's local product is a must for pretty much every local business. Because of this, rule of thumb here is to find the closest match you can for your broadest category and then use the business description to explain the nuances of the business.

So, per Ryan's example, you could choose Shipping Company or Shipping Services for the main category for one of your businesses, and in the business description, describe the packing and crating services you provide.

Not perfect - I know - but there is know known way to influence Google's categories. It's totally up to them.

You're not alone in your frustration with this. Mike Blumenthal, himself, can be quoted as stating,"Google’s category system is woefully inadequate at its job of indicating what a business actually does." And, the Google forum is full of tickets like this one:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/no$20category/business/ymdjxTXmDxI/g5OTvVGwqcoJ

For many common business models, the category system works just fine, but when there are facets of the business that the category system doesn't cover, going with the closest possible match is the only option. And, of course, be sure that your citations descriptions and website are highly descriptive of your services.

Thanks for the helpful answer. While I apologize for not having any experience with Flat CMS, here's what I can tell you about Local:

You'll need to break this down for the client into 3 interrelated components: local, local-organic and (possibly) PPC.

On the Local Front - you'll want to be sure the website is properly optimized with the client's contact info in their city of location (header/footer, contact us page, in-text mentions etc), you'll want to build citations for the physical location and manage their accuracy/quality, and you'll want to earn and manage reviews on all citations that included a review component. The goal here is to show up well in Google's local results and organic results for terms relating to the city of location as well as being present across the major citation platforms.

On the Local Organic Front - The most typical thing to do would be to develop additional content for customers located in cities B and C, be sure these pages are internally linked to well from the navigation and elsewhere within the site, and then earn/build links to those pages. This part of the project should only be undertaken if the client can commit sufficient resources to developing really good landing pages. There must be a reason for these pages to exist beyond impressing search engines - they must contain unique content that truly helps customers from the targeted location. The goal here is rank in the organic SERPs for terms relating to the service cities.

On the PPC Front - Much can be done with the above 2 components, but where there are gaps in visibility, a supplemental PPC strategy targeting the service cities (or even the city of location) may remain a requirement, depending on the competitiveness of the client's unique geo-industry situation.

Hope this helps!

P.S. You might want to check out Moz Local for the citation component of this, and you might also like a recent post by Phil Rozek that outlines some of these components of work: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2017/01/27/relationship-between-local-and-organic-seo-a-simple-diagram/

Hi Shauna!

So glad you've written in with an important question. Here is how this works:

Virtual offices are strictly forbidden by Google's quality guidelines  (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en) which state:

Address

Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location. PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable.

• Make sure that your page is created at your actual, real-world location.

  • If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at a different address from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours.

  ---

So, Google is as clear as can be on this one and you should be sure the client is being educated properly about the fact that he is not eligible for a Google+ Local page for any location other than his real, physical ones. Rather, your client's eligible business model would be as a Service Area Business (SAB), if he has a single physical location from which he is serving a variety of other locations.

Now, how this comes into play with Moz Local is that we only want to push out real, physical addresses, too, and we are reliant on the data Google and Facebook show us about a given business for validation purposes. So, if your client has a real physical address, then this is what he can use to build citations via a tool like ours, or, simply manually.

One last important thing on this, specifically regarding Moz Local. If the business is listed as an SAB on Google, this will result in his address being hidden by Google. Moz Local cannot pick up or validate against a hidden address. So, for our SAB customers, the alternate validation route is to be sure the full address is published on the Facebook Place instead, as Facebook does not require SABs to hide the address of their physical locale.

Further reading on the topic of virtual offices:

Here's a recent case of a Google takedown of virtual offices:

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/26844-busted-warning-attorneys-regus-non-compliant-offices.html

And here's last year's Moz Local Search Ranking Factors, which cites listing detected at a false location as the #1 negative ranking factor:

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

Hopefully, you can share these things with the client and help them to ensure that they are running a guideline-compliant marketing program.

Hi Foothills!

Good advice from Donna, and I highly recommend that you go through Joy Hawkins article http://www.joyannehawkins.com/the-proper-way-to-deal-with-duplicates-in-google-my-business/ with fine toothed comb before you make a move in any direction.

The article does a super job of explaining deletion, merging, etc. and links to another resource for understanding moving reviews from one entity to another. I believe it will be exactly what you're looking for!

Hey Luke!

Nice to see you here. Because of the way data is shared throughout the local data ecosystem (https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-us), duplicate descriptions are not really avoidable. In other words, if your listing at Localeze creates a listing at YP, the description is likely to be carried along, too. With the rise of automated citation building tools, this sharing of data is simply being automated, but data is moving the same was as it would if you were building everything manually.

Can you go in manually to edit descriptions? You might be able to on some listings, but it's important to remember that Moz Local manages your listings rather than claiming them and creating a log in, so if you have to log into something, or claim something, it's my understanding that this could potentially prevent you from being able to continue to manage the listing through Moz, which would be inconvenient for you. Personally, I would not worry about descriptions being duplicated. It's pretty much baked into the way data is shared throughout the ecosystem.

Hi Marcelo!

Interesting question. While it's true that the inside of one McDonald's looks pretty much like every other McDonald's, Google is going out of their way to say they only want images that represent that location. Would you get penalized for going against this guideline? Probably not, but on the other hand, a user could potentially flag your images as incorrect and who knows where that could lead. So, my answer on this would be, no, don't go against the guidelines. It's always safest to simply stick to them.

Hi Lewis,

Good news! Our engineers have implemented a fix to increase the character limit in the second address line for UK businesses. Please try again. Thanks for your patience.

Hi Nicholas,

Interesting topic! If I'm understanding this right, you're hypothesizing that local businesses with BBB accreditation and a BBB badge rank higher organically. Is that right?

To be totally honest, the BBB has always been a bit of a mystery to me. It could have something to do with my age (40s) that, despite my association of this brand with business ratings, I have never, ever personally looked up a business on the BBB. It could be that older people rely on this more as a trust signal.

What I do wonder about is whether what you've observed might be that a business which is taking pains to get the BBB accreditation and put the badge on the website might be making more general SEO efforts, as a rule. Maybe they are more active in their content publication as well. Maybe they've earned more links.

On the other hand, we do know the emphasis Google places on the thing we call "trust", so while I'd be leery of saying that BBB accreditation correlates with higher rankings, it would be shortsighted to claim that I or anyone else knows all of the exact factors from which Google derives trust. Could BBB accreditation be among them? Sure!

But, that being said, I really hope we'll receive more input from the community here. Maybe someone else will have noticed what you have. I hope so!

Hey There!

Happy to have you aboard Moz Local. Here's how to accomplish this.

1. You'll need to contact Localeze directly to request that they release the listing. Sometimes, customers may need to make this request more than once of Localeze.

2. Once you've been notified by Localeze that the listing has been released, please contact our Helpsters (https://moz.com/help/contact), share the complete name, address, phone number and website of the listing with us and ask us to test to see if the listing has become available.

3. If it is not yet available, please come back to us once a week to ask us to test again. It can take a couple of weeks for the listing to become available for Moz Local to manage.

Within a few weeks of the listing being released, we can normally make this happen, no problem

Hi There!

Thanks for opening your site up for comments from the community. I hope you'll get many. Let me get the ball rolling:

1. You are in a highly competitive market in an extremely populous area. Yours will be an uphill battle, as opposed to what a business in a rural area would face.

2. Age is a factor in both local and local-organic rankings. You mention reading marketing materials for 6 months. If the business is also less than a year old, know that your ranking chances will increase the more your website and your Google My Business listing ages (provided you continuously adhere to to good practices), but that it can be very difficult to surpass older competitors. When a business is new, it can be tough to do a thorough audit of the type you'd do for an established company, because the age factor adds a bit of mystery as to where the business deserves to rank.

3. That being said, you or any Local SEO agency you hire should conduct as thorough of an audit as possible. Use the Local Search Ranking Factors 2017 study to see which factors you need to analyze, both for your own business and for your top competitors, in an effort to divine which areas (beyond age) your competitors are excelling at that your business isn't doing as well.

4. For every business, regardless of market, the core things you want to be getting right are:

• Adherence to Google's Guidelines for representing your business on Google

• Website authority and usability (creating excellent content that informs, persuades and converts)

• A clean citation set on the major local business listings platforms

• Earning and responding to reviews

• Earning links

Beyond these basics, you'll want to discover which additional forms of marketing convert most customers for your particular business. These might be social marketing, video marketing, offline, etc.

5. Looking briefly at your website, I"m noticing an absence of city terms in your title tags. It's important to make your city of location part of some/many of your title tags.

I hope this is a good start and that others will add to it!

Hi Aaron,

Good idea to check our Eric's suggestion, but the trouble here may be geographic. 3-Packs will be triggered by different search terms in different geographies. Not sure if a tool exists that can account for this.

Hi There!

Here's a few tips to help you create a good strategy:

1. Know that Google's local product hinges on your physical location, not on any location in which you lack a physical location. So, even if you set a service area, do not expect to rank in the local packs for Charlotte or Nashville. When it comes to Google's local rankings, you'll be specifically focusing on what you can do to earn visibility for searches that either contain the word "Atlanta" or stem from Atlanta-based devices. You are allowed just one listing, for your physical location in Atlanta. Creating any additional listings would violate Google's guidelines

2. Your multi-state service area is too large to utilize Google's service radius setting in the GMB dashboard. That tool is appropriate to something like a plumber located in Atlanta who also serves Decatur and Sandy Springs - not to a business serving three different states. So, don't attempt to set a service radius like that in your GMB dashboard.

3. Because you can only expect to rank in the local results related to Atlanta language or devices, your options for publicizing the availability of your products/services in any other area are:

• Creating organic content supporting these other service areas, in hopes of achieving organic (not local) rankings

• Investing in PPC for these other areas

• Utilizing social media to engage with audiences in these other communities

• Offline marketing in these other communities

4. Eventually, your brand may determine that opening additional staffed, physical offices in places like Nashville and Charlotte is essential, in order to compete for local rankings, but until then, Google's bias towards physical location will limit your local pack presence to Atlanta.

Hope this is helpful info!

Hi There!

My apologies, but at this time, Moz Local does not have multi-user access available. You would need to share your login information with the other person to whom you'd like to grant access. The alternative would be to sign up for reports and then email those reports to your friend after you've received them.

Hi There!

Are you saying that when you search for your business name, and the knowledge panel comes up on the right side of the results, you are not happy with the image appearing in that knowledge panel? I believe this is your question, but I'm so sorry if I've misunderstood. If I've understood correctly, I recommend reading:

https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Basics-for-Business-Owners/How-to-change-picture-in-knowledge-panel-center-when-people/td-p/899048

Hi Jared!

Please email help@moz.com so they can give you the steps to go through when a business moves. They'll be able to explain all of the details.

Hey Jason,

You're getting some great feedback from the community here! Are you able to share the URL of your website with the community, so that we can take a look at your actual scenario instead of just shooting in the dark? It could help a great deal. Thanks!

Hi Wick!

I'm sure our Moz Local support staff can get to the bottom of this with you, looking at your account. Please, email them at help@moz.com. You should receive a reply quickly!

I always find it useful to look at real-world examples, Paul. For example, look at the footer of Whole Foods' website: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com. You'll see them identified there as Whole Foods Market IP, L.P., but if you look up Whole Foods San Diego Ca, what do you see on the GMB listing? Just Whole Foods Market.

So, for legal purposes, you may need to include your full designation in the footer of your website, but provided the things assets I've mentioned previously (street level signage, website logo, etc.) are all consistent with your Evowrap name, I don't envision you'd have a problem there. Whole Foods clearly doesn't seem to be.

Hi Catherine,

If you are located in the UK, you might want to check out Bright Local. They are, I believe, located in the UK as well and have a large suite of tools. I have not used them, personally, but have heard good things about them.

I will CC our help staff on your technical question. I am sure you will receive a reply.

Hi Lina,

What does the street signage for the business say? That's typically the answer.

But definitely do go through Google's guidelines with a fine-toothed comb, as they offer specific advice for multi-department and multi-practitioner companies (a common scenario in medical practices). Please, read the guidelines and let the community know if questions remain after that.