Hey Patrick,

Coming back to give you 2 additional pro tips I got from Mike Blumenthal:

1. Get multiple people to report the issue via the "send feedback" link. This could help the job get done.

2. If you see no traction after a couple of months, go report the whole issue in the GMB forum. The TCs there can try to escalate it for you.

So nice of Mike to offer these extra tips

You're welcome, Patrick. So, I have 2 suggestions:

1. Short-term, change the email being sent out so that it links to a correct, custom map on your website instead of G Maps.

2. Long-term, go to your town on G Maps, and in the lower right, click the tiny "send feedback" link to report the missing street issue. It will likely take a month, but hopefully Google will act on this. Only then should you re-include the link to your G Maps map in the email.

Hope this helps!

Jen, thank you so much for contributing your findings to this thread. I'm so happy you have a resource you've linked to. Fantastic!

Thanks, John! Kind of you to say. Reviews happen to be my favorite aspect of Local.

Hi Michael,

You're welcome. Regarding the use of brand names in title tags, we've had some good discussions of this here in the forum over the years (https://moz.com/community/q/include-site-name-in-page-titles-or-not)

You'll see opinions differ. My personal feeling is that, for a local business, the brand name should definitely be in the title tags on the home, about, contact and reviews page + city landing pages for multi-location businesses. Then, it should be included where you can on other pages (product/service for example). I don't think it's essential for it to be on every single page, but for the sake of branding, I like making room for it where possible. I hope you'll read that discussion I linked to, and you might want to research this further. Great title tags are so important! Worth the research and effort. To that end, I think you'll enjoy this Whiteboard Friday:

https://moz.com/blog/title-tag-hacks-whiteboard-friday

Hi Michael,

Great, thanks for the further details. Okay, so typically, for a single location local business, you're going to have a homepage, about page, contact page, testimonials page and set of pages defining the services the business offers. Multi-location businesses are more complex, but with just a single location, you'll want to be sure that the complete NAP of the business is on every page of the website, either in the masthead or footer. Be sure it's also the first thing on the Contact Us page, too.

While this provides good, strong signals to people and search engines about the locale of the business, it remains a good practice to optimize the title tags with your geo-terms as well. So, for example, let's say your insurance agency (Progressive) is in Oakland and offers fire, health, life, home and renters insurance. You'll have a page for each of these services, and the title tags might read like:

The fire insurance Oakland, CA residents trust most | Progressive

Oakland's most affordable health insurance | Progressive

etc.

Your tags will be better than that, but my point is that there will be variety of language, and that sometimes you may use both city and state names, and sometimes only the city. I don't believe state abbreviations are essential, with one very important exception: if the name of the city you live in occurs in numerous states, definitely do try to work in the state abbreviation when you can. For example, there are apparently 30+ cities called "Franklin" in the U.S. I continuously see Google assuming when I search for something in Fairfax, CA, that I'm actually searching for something in Fairfax, VA. It's very annoying. This tells me that state modifiers are important signals to Google, and so while it may not be necessary to always specify them, if your clients are in cities with analogs, I'd play it safe by including state abbreviations in as many title tags as I could. But, if the client is in San Francisco, it's a safer bet that Google (and searchers) are going to get where you are if you do business there, without the addition of CA to your title tags.

Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions.

Hi Patrick!

Ooh - these can be tough! Thanks for providing such thorough details.

The good news is, the majority of your patients are unlikely to look you up via a street address. So long as their search for "Chalco Clinic" is getting them to a Knowledge Panel and a map that showing your accurate location, you're likely getting found by most of your patients. You'd also want to check to be sure that a non-branded search (like "health clinic omaha" is also rendering a listing that sends your patients to the right place from the local pack/local finder view).

When I do the searches you've listed out, it's clear that Google thinks of this geography as 168th St ... not 168th Ave. You can see that right on the map - it's being designated a street not an avenue. I want to be sure I understand ... there is just one 168th in your town, right? Or, are you saying that Omaha has both a 168th St. and a 168th Avenue? Please, let me know on that. I'll pop back by as soon as I can to read your answer.

Hi Michael!

Would you be able to provide a bit more context here so the community can fine-tune its suggestions? Are you asking about including these terms in your title tag for a local business website? If so, which pages of the site? What is the goal of the page you're optimizing? What is the business model (single location local business, multi-location local business, virtual business?). The more detail you can provide, the better of an answer you should receive here. Thanks!

I know, funny video, right? So glad if it gave you some tips, Ben!

I know! That cracked me up too - quite oddball! It certainly made me remember the video. Glad to know it may have given you a couple of ideas, Cesare.

Hey DaveyTree,

Some nice responses here from Cesare! I'm enjoying reading the discussion you two are having.

I agree with Cesare that it sounds like you're going above and beyond many companies in regards to your Yelp efforts, and yep, I've encountered other business owners expressing frustrations similar to yours. While it sounds like you've gained very advanced knowledge of Yelp in your efforts to promote your business, take a minute to watch this video from 2016:

http://localu.org/blog/guest-video-top-10-yelp-tips-small-business-2016/

It taught me some things I didn't know about Yelp when I first watched it, and maybe you'll get some new ideas, too.

Great topic, AL123al!

I agree with all of the posters who are stating that your client's approach isn't practical. I have a couple of resources I'd recommend you share with the client that should get him up-to-speed on this topic.

1. First, show the client this article on the realities of review spam. It's real, and there are actions you can take. It takes persistence sometimes, but you've got to be hearty in business:

https://moz.com/blog/review-spam

2. Then, show him this second article which details how to handle all types of reviews, from 1-star disasters, to 5-star treasures, to spam:

https://moz.com/blog/mastering-owner-response-quintet-google-my-business-reviews

If you get get the client to sit tight and read through both of those, he should walk away with a completely different (and much better) perspective on dealing with the reality of reviews.

End of the day, attempting to delete a GMB listing is not an answer. The listing could simply come back again, and your client's reputation will follow him wherever he goes. Much better to get the necessary education to deal with all forms of reviews, and move forward confidently.

LOL. Funny analogy, EGOL.

Thanks, Gabe! So nice of you to say. We've just had another good thread about EMDs going this past week, with a great response from Rand on it. You might like to read: https://moz.com/community/q/to-re-domain-or-not-re-domain-that-is-the-question#reply_376575

Good luck, Mike, and that would be great if you would share anything you learn with our community. Thank you!

Hey Mike,

I have been looking into your excellent question a bit for the last two days, and while there are good tutorials out there about implementing Facebook Locations (like this one: https://sweetiq.com/blog/how-to-claim-facebook-locations/), what I'm not finding is trustworthy documentation of downsides, and I have one concern about this.

One of my colleagues and I noticed that Facebook's API is not seeming to return the locations of businesses using Facebook Locations, unless you add a city name to your query. This seems a bit odd and I don't know what to make of it, and don't have the resources of time at the moment to explore whether this behavior of Facebook's API could have further-reaching effects on search. For example, does this mean that apps/directories that pull from this API aren't going to return your multi-locations in their results? How does this impact Google results? Etc., etc.

I think you've raised a question that deserves a full study, and I'm sorry not to be able to surface one for you. I think you may have surfaced something that's in uncharted waters, and I'd love to see an enterprising Local SEO explore this topic further. In the meantime, you might consider posting in Facebook's help community to see if you can get any anecdotal replies from businesses who are implementing Facebook Locations, to see if they've noted any peculiar or negative impacts of going that route instead of going with individually building out pages one-at-a-time.

Hi SSDigital,

Ooof...listing hijacking is truly awful. I'm so sorry for the trouble you're experiencing, and even sorrier to have to mention that it's not uncommon. Here's a phone number for Yext: 888-444-2988. Hope it helps!

Hi MrSem,

Yes, the limitations you've pointed out are, unfortunately, baked into the environment. There's no way to prove impact in a vacuum. You can't stop competitors from making changes on their end that could be positive or negatively impacting the rank of your business at the same time that you are cleaning up your citations. Search results are so dynamic, it's rarely possible to be 100% positive in stating causation, with no margin for error, because even if you can control what your company is doing, you can't control what competitors are doing in the same time frame, or as you mention, a Google update occurring in that time frame, or even a bug. So, basically what you have is industry practitioners over time noticing apparent cause and effect. When practitioners state that citation cleanup appears to impact search visibility, it's based on more formal studies like Andrew's (above) and on what they notice across the board with clients, over time.

As for what is actually being cleaned up, that's easier to define. It's going to be resolving inconsistent NAP+W, hours of operation, categories and duplicates, much of the time. It can also include remedying incompletions.

I understand your skepticism. Toothpaste manufacturers have a vested interest in telling you their product will make your teeth whiter. But there's an important difference here that shouldn't be overlooked: the things we've come to think of as local search ranking factors originate in the early study of local search results being performed in the trenches by very small agencies. Going back more than a decade, you can read through the blogs of folks like Mike Blumenthal, sharing what they are discovering moves the needle, client by client. That's not quite the same as the toothpaste company, because the scale was very small at the dawn of Local. You could chalk the corpus of local-related blog posts over the past 12 or so years up to being mere sales pitches, but I think if you start reading backward from 2017, you'll see it really wasn't that way. Just as in organic SEO, it's been a voyage of discovery

Great question, MrSem! Now, full disclosure: I do work for Moz and we do have Moz Local, and I want to validate your comment about not feeling certain whether you can really trust statements made by folks who offer citation management as a service. I can see why you'd feel that way - makes sense to ask a question like yours. So, if even given my work here at Moz, you can still find some value in my explanation of the role of location data management, I'd like to take the time to reply.

Here's one case study you might like to look at, in which Local SEO Guide fixed 8000+ citation issues for a retailer with 1,300 branches, with a documented increase of 23% in Google local pack visibility across 6000 tracked keywords: http://www.localseoguide.com/our-work/case-studies/local-retailer-citation-cleanup/

Here's another in which Mockingbird saw a 27% increase in traffic following citation cleanup using both Moz Local and Yext: https://mockingbird.marketing/mockingbird-case-study-local-optimization-nap-cleanup/

You can find other studies like this, and Moz has done some internal case studies of its own with customers where we've seen similar numbers resulting from citation/duplicate cleanup.

When it comes to citations, I think of their role in two ways:

1. We know Google draws data from a variety of sources. If Google is drawing in bad data about your business, it's not a good thing. So, this is on the SEO side of things: defending your Google presence by ensuring that the sources Google draws from are accurate and trustworthy.

2. From a consumer standpoint, bad data is a trust and revenue killer. One Placeable study found that a whopping 73% of consumers lose trust in a brand if its listings contain misinformation (https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2338839/73-lose-trust-in-brands-due-to-inaccurate-local-business-listings-survey). And, you have only to experience the annoyance of calling an out-of-service phone number or arriving at the vacated building of a business that has moved to form a very negative impression of a local brand.

For me, point #1 is table stakes in Local SEO. Between the numbers in studies like the ones I've linked to, and my own experience of seeing Google pull wrong data from various places, a clean citation profile is a must in a competitive market. But, beyond this, it's that 2nd point that really gets me: if you miss out on "being there" at a consumer's point-of-decision because your listing on Citysearch or Yelp or Foursquare is incorrect, who knows how much revenue you've just lost? Some statistics say that a customer is worth 6-7 times as much as the dollar amount of his initial purchase. So, you may not just be missing out on one $60 sale of a yoga mat. You could be missing out on $420 dollars of sales over time. You might not only be missing out on a single purchase of a $4,000 engagement ring; you could be losing $28,000 in lifetime sales. So, for sure, you want to be in the right places, at the right moment, with the right data.

Hope these thoughts are helpful, and that others in the community will join this interesting discussion. It's a good one!

Hi MrSem,

Thanks for re-launching this conversation with new questions, which are good ones. My advice here, numbered for clarity:

1. You should only have one "Contact" page on the site, listing all 5 of your locations. You should also have a unique page for each location. These are typically called "location landing pages", "local landing pages" or "city landing pages" - not "contact pages". The contact page should feature the basic contact info of each branch. The landing pages should feature much more than this. They should each be a unique resource of information about that branch, including NAP, driving directions, a map, reviews, special offers, customized CTAs, proofs of community involvement and anything else you can think of that might interest, inform and persuade customers as to the desirability of choosing your company. If you're listing a toll free number, be sure you're designating it as such and that it is the unique LOCAL number you're most closely associating with each branch of your business.

2. If the number of locations you have is beginning to create navigational concerns, you may be reaching the point where you need to consider a store locator widget. Typically, I don't see these being implemented for a business with just 5 locations. More like 10+. For major brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, store locators are an essential medium for helping consumers find the branch nearest them. For your business, with 5 locations, the function simply may not be necessary. You can list all of your location in high level navigation without clutter, and you can also put them in the footer, on the contact page, etc. This shouldn't take up too much room, and should provide good UX for your users.

Does this help answer your questions? Please, let me know if you have others.