Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Neil!

Not very familiar with train-oriented business models. What does your company actually do, vs. what the ticket desk of the train station does?

Hi Neil,

Please check out the big table of options in one of my recent Moz Blog posts for instructions about handling duplicate listings:

https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing

Then, please come back with any questions you didn't feel were answered by it that relate to your specific scenario. Thanks!

Hi William!

My search Monday morning from California for "Florist Middlefield OH" is currently showing your client #1 in both the local pack and organic results. If you're seeing the organic ranking appear and disappear, it could be:

1. Google testing things

2. The result of whatever the crawl issue was or is; do you have confirmation from Google Search Console that the homepage is fully crawlable?

3. Something else ... is there any pattern to the appearance/disappearance of the organic ranking? Like, are you searching for it at the office and seeing it, or searching for it at home and not seeing it? Or searching during open hours and seeing it, but searching after hours and not seeing it? Is there any pattern?

Hi Flynn,

Unfortunately, what Google determines to display is up to them, and not something you can choose. You can influence what Google displays by the excellence of the local search marketing for each of your locations, but if Google chooses to display a single result nearest you, rather than a pack of several results, that's their call.

Hi Marge,

What do you mean by it not "working"? What, exactly, happens? Please, feel free to provide as much detail as possible.

You're welcome, Neil. Glad to have you here!

Hi there!

No worries: it's totally find to list all your locations on a contact page, and as you only have two locations, no worries about putting both on the homepage.

Hi David!

Please check out the tutorial in this recent Moz blog post of mine, which I believe will outline the options in your scenario:

https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing

If any question remain after reading that, please definitely let me know!

Hi Neil,

Good question, and unfortunately, the answer is no. The children's club wouldn't be eligible for a GMB listing, according to Google's guidelines, which state:

Ineligible businesses

The following businesses aren’t eligible for a business listing:

• Businesses that are under construction or that have not yet opened to the public.
• Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes, model homes or vacant apartments. Sales or leasing offices, however, are eligible for verification.
• An ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don't own or have the authority to represent.

The description of the club you've provided would fall under that guidelines of an ongoing class at a location that isn't owned by the club. The club can ask the school to mention its existence in the school's description of its own GMB listing, but doing so is actually kind of pointless because Google doesn't publicly display the description.

So, lacking an address of its own that it has the authority to represent, the club's business model isn't truly local. And, should the club attempt to build citations, this could actually interfere with whatever Local SEO efforts the school is trying to make. So, complete local outreach is going to be limited here for your client, and they may need to rely more on organic optimization, PPC and social.

Hope this helps!

Yeah, I'm sorry I'm not seeing a really good resource for you, Kevin. It's early days. The person who takes on the task of writing that resource will have valuable information to share. I would say your best hope is in experimentation with this, but I don't see that anyone has figured out a solution to the important questions you've asked.

Hi Kevin! It's nice to speak with you, too. Another article that might help:

http://www.clearedgemarketing.com/2017/06/optimize-google-jobs/

I'd love to see someone do a deep dive on the exact questions you've raised.

Hey Kevin,

I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with Google for Jobs, but here's something that caught my eye in a TechCrunch article:

To create this comprehensive list, Google first has to remove all of the duplicate listings that employers post to all of these job sites. Then, its machine learning-trained algorithms sift through and categorize them.

This sounds like it might be applicable to what you're describing. Maybe read the rest of the article? And I'm hoping you'll get further community input from folks who have actually been experimenting with this new Google function.

Hi D E!

Thanks for the opportunity of looking at your client's site. A foundational concept to understand is that the company's local pack rankings will depend on their physical address, not on the addresses of the homes they build in various communities. So, as the home builder is in Saint Louis, their local pack rankings will be most achievable for searches containing the words 'st. louis' or stemming from Saint Louis-based devices. They are unlikely to rank in the local packs for any city other than St. Louis because of Google's documented bias towards physical locale of the business.

So, where we move beyond this kind of understanding of how local packs work is when we are going after additional organic rankings, instead of local ones. For this purpose, building out content that showcases the homebuilder's work in specific neighborhoods or in neighboring cities supports goals of ranking organically for searches that use these geographic terms. For a good example of how to build landing pages that serve users making these types of searches, please read: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

In that post, you'll see an example of how a house painter could create a landing page showcasing his projects in a specific community, so that seems quite similar to what you're hoping to do.

That being said, I can't predict whether city landing page or style-of-home landing pages will convert better for your particular client. Are you tracking how people currently interact with the website? When a potential customer contacts the business, are the asking what styles of housing are available, or are they inquiring about neighborhoods? Answering questions like these will necessitate some serious research.

Without knowing all of the details, I'd be inclined to think that you could have both a set of landing pages based on the neighborhoods of St. Louis, and then a separate gallery depicting popular home designs, regardless of what part of the city the homes are in. You'd have the best of both worlds that way, but if there's a reason why you have to choose one or the other, only real research into the preferences and needs of the client's customers can provide a data-based answer.

Hi Rohit,

First step for you will be to read (and memorize!) the Guidelines for Representing your business on Google: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

If you are hoping to serve local business clients, so many of your actions will be governed by those guidelines, so read them until you know them by heart.

For your particular question:

If you client has 4 physical offices, and each of those serves customers face-to-face, has its own address and own phone number, you can build a Google My Business listing for each office.

If, however, your client has just 1 physical office, but it traveling to 4 different locations to offer services, then the business only qualifies for 1 Google My Business listing  - not 4 of them.

Hope this helps!

Hey There,

Please check out this recent Moz blog post: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing

It gives thorough advice for google listing issues like the one you're describing. If you don't find an answer to your specific scenario there, please let me know, but I'm hoping you will!

Hey There SEOJaz,

As you mentioned the word 'optimal' my own description of this would be:

1. A single website representing the brand

2. A store locator linking to an excellent set of landing pages representing the physical locations of the brand. These pages feature unique, compelling content and good CTAs.

3. A submenu or sitemap somewhere on the site linking to these landing pages to sure they are indexable.

And that's it.

When we start throwing subdomains, 20% different content and micro-sites into the game, what you typically wind up with is confusion, mistakes, content of less than sterling quality and marketing efforts having to be spread too thin across an ecosystem of properties instead of being poured into a single, very strong, branded website.

What I've described is optimal, but I'm not sure I've answered your questions...

Hey Slumberjac!

Whew ... that was an alarming experience you helped the client through. Well done! Thanks for sharing your story.

Hi Donald!

Thanks for sharing these anecdotes with us all. Good ones!

That's a good guess, EGOL. Google definitely does call, and there have been instances in the past where failure to answer the phone with the exact name on the listing have resulted in being "caught" for spam, and many other scenarios I've seen. I like your intuition here about why Google might be asking what is down the street. I think they should also add, "And how's the weather outside your building today, hmm?"

Hey There!

This does sound like a complex scenario - even a bit of a messy one. Ideally, what the brand would have done here was to build a single website with a single store locator taking users to an appropriate landing page based on the city or zip they type in. The single website would feature a single product menu, accessible to all users regardless of city, removing any risk of creating duplicate product description pages. Something along the lines of how REI.com handles their web presence (you might like to show that to the client).

Instead of taking this approach, am I right in understanding that your client got into this thousands-of-subdomains predicaments in order to provide single-user access to a specific franchisee in a specific city, while not allowing him access to the entire website? Or, for some other reason?

Hey Marketing CH and Kevin,

Interesting! First I have heard of Google asking what is across the street/down the block from a business. Sounds rather aggressive. Might be worth posting in the Google My Business forum to see if you can get verification from Google that they are, indeed, asking for this specific type of info.

Hi Kiakh,

Like Kris has answered, this is an 'it depends'. You'd need to be able to show a consultant your current pages, including the optimization of their tags, to get an expert opinion on whether changes you plan to make are likely to improve rankings, improve conversion, or the opposite.

You're welcome, Jeenu, and good luck with the audit. It can be really fun wading into these kinds of details. You never know what you'll discover!

Hi Jeenu,

Thanks for the reply. Okay, so your best bet at this point is to do a complete competitive audit of the company that is outranking your client, doing a side-by-side comparison of their metrics vs. your client's. This will enable you to form a hypothesis about what factors the competitor has that are stronger than your client's and that may be leading Google to favor that competitor over your client. You need to look at every possible factor so that you can form a picture in your mind of why the competitor gets to show at the automatic zoom level while your client is being filtered out. Is it domain authority, age of domain, citation consistency, reviews, links, etc? You'll have to be extremely thorough to start to get to the root of the matter.

Once you've formed your hypothesis, the second step will be to create a plan for your client to begin beating the competitor's metrics. Maybe your client will need more authoritative links, better GMB landing page URL content, etc. Every case will be different, so there's no shortcut for getting down into the trenches on this one and doing the research and analysis to form a clear plan.

Your goal: find what improvements your client needs to make in order to convince Google that his business is the one that deserves to be shown at the automatic zoom level, instead of being filtered out.

Hope this helps!

Hi Jeenu,

So that does, indeed, sound like Possum. I have a couple of follow-up questions for you:

1. What is the relationship of the 2 businesses? Are they actually just one business, trying to appear as though they were two businesses, or are they 2 totally separate legal entities?

2. Are both of these businesses your clients, or just one of them?

Hi Kiakh,

Good topic and question. Your business is at a really important point of decision here. The very best advice I can give you is that, if the company does not have the resources to create 18 unique, high quality location landing pages, reconsider whether it makes sense to create them at all. Well-crafted landing pages have the potential to help with both your SEO and conversion goals. They can speak directly to consumers in a specific market and provide a great experience and customized CTAs. Conversely, pages into which you've not put maximum effort represent lost opportunity, and may end up watering down your overall website with thin and duplicate content. So, rule of thumb here: if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

All that being said, the truth is that many large brands get away with weak store locator pages. I wrote about this phenomenon in 2016 (see: https://moz.com/blog/getting-local-store-locator-seo-right) but your business, with less than 20 locations, has so much opportunity to devote real resources to the dev of amazing landing pages (as opposed to a business with 500 or 1000 locations) that it would be a shame to see you not take advantage of it. Please, read that article and come back with further questions!

Hi Brent,

Great topic! So, fundamentally, yes, the business isn't being honest in representing itself to the consumer public as being in a city where it isn't actually located. So, from an ethical standpoint, this is problematic.

From a search standpoint, Google is going to rely on the physical address of the business. If the company's website and citations state that it's at 123 Anderson Road in White Horse, SC, no amount of optimizing for Greenville is going to fool Google into thinking that the business is physically located there. Because of this, the company cannot expect to rank in Google's local packs for Greenville-related-or-based searches, unless there is almost no competition in this company's geo-industry (like they are the only gas station servicing a 25 mile radius).

I know - it's a drag that a business just outside of city borders is typically out of the running for local pack rankings, but Google's bias towards physical location is very strong. Where does this leave a client like yours? It depends on the exact nature of its business model. Some questions:

1. Do your clients' customers come to the physical location of the business, or is it a service area business (SAB), like a plumber, that services customers in a variety of towns?

2. Does the company also have customers in the town where it's physically located, or is it only getting customers from Greenville or other cities?

Please, let the community know what you can. If you're not able to share the identity of the client, that's okay, but the more specific you can be, the more customized feedback you'll receive here.

Hi Jeenu,

Your scenario has all the earmarks of Google's Possum filter. Possum filters out business that share the same category and are in the same building or even the same couple of city blocks. The way to verify if this is Possum typically goes like this:

1. Search for your keyword and note which business is appearing on the map for it at the automatic zoom setting of the map.

2. Then, begin clicking on the zoom button, one click at a time. If the second business then appears once you've zoomed in a few times (it could be 5 clicks, 10, clicks etc.), then it's reasonable to assume that it's the Possum filter you're dealing with.

You can read more about Possum here: http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900

Anecdotally, when I'm searching from my location in California, both Marriett and Caver are in the local pack, but I'm very far from Illinois. If you're seeing this behavior from a more local location, and the zooming tip does surface the second business for the desired keyword, it's likely Possum at play.

Hi Tyler,

Can you be more specific? What types of issues?

Hi Tyler,

I second Nigel's vote for the single domain approach. In a nutshell, it's nearly always better to build your brand on a single website than to try to spread your efforts across multiple websites. Local SEO best practice is to stick with a single domain on which you build out the necessary pages to reflect your various branches, linking to them from a high level menu or a combination of a store locator widget + an accessible html menu somewhere on the site so that you can be sure these pages get indexed.

Hey BigChad,

Embedding a G Map wasn't considered a Top 50 local or organic ranking factor in this year's Local Search Ranking Factors survey (https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors). That being said, one thing that could potentially help you is to drive users to Google Maps to get driving directions to your business, as this behavior could potentially influence rankings.

Hi Attic,

Kris is correct that you can alter the settings in your Google My Business dashboard so that Google won't display your physical address, but this will not change the type of knowledge panel you're receiving. It will still be a local knowledge panel.

Kris - thanks so much for the excellent advice to Attic about changing these settings. On the city centroid tip, this phenomenon has been largely replaced by the user-as-centroid phenom. You're right that the city centroid did appear to exert influence at one time, but these days, the location of the user tends to override any other centroid concept which was previously in effect.

Hi There,

I really like Donna's answer, and I think, on an even more basic level, the fact that you are feeling overwhelmed and oppressed by the workload is a clear indicator that the agency has bit off more than it can chew.

Unless the business was doing consulting ONLY (in which case 3 hours per month of consulting for each client might be tenable), it does sound to me like your agency has enlarged its client stable without making the necessary hires to enlarge the staff. A larger agency could certainly be handling 50 clients, but your company is small. The business sounds like it is at an important turning point at which it should consider:

• Reducing the client list

• Determining to take fewer but more lucrative clients

• Determining to continue to grow the client stable, but only after making the necessary hires to grow the agency

I'd be completely frank about this with your agency - let them know it's causing you genuine stress because you don't feel you can deliver quality because the staff is being over-tasked. If the agency is committed to building a respected brand and lasting success, wise decisions are necessary here, and you could be instrumental in helping to protect the brand from earning a reputation for poor quality work. Good luck!

Hi Attic,

I believe what you're saying is that your business is currently listed in Google My Business as a local business and is therefore being given a local knowledge panel when people search for your business by brand name. But, you wish you were simply being given a brand knowledge panel instead of a local one. Is that right?

If I've understood correctly, then, no, you do not get to choose which type of knowledge panel Google displays for you. If your business model is local, Google will display the local knowledge panel. Does your business have a physical address and does it meet face-to-face with clients?

Hi Mjesse,

I think you can't go wrong removing anything that doesn't seem to make sense on a page. Obviously, I'm not looking at your actual website, but if you are feeling that some content on a page isn't user-centric, then yes, I'd remove it and replace it with something superior for that user group.

My pleasure, Nails. Good luck!

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.

Hi Matt,

The problem of longstanding with kw research in Local SEO is that tools are unlikely to give you an accurate geographic search volume. If your client is in a major city, something like the Adwords Keyword Planner may give you some data that can be useful, or if they're next to a major city, you can look up keywords+that city name for an idea of how people search in that part of the country, but I wouldn't say the numbers should be viewed as set in stone.

So, for the most part, yes, you'll do your keyword research without geomodifiers and then just add them back in when you're optimizing the website or outreach for the business.

I also highly, highly recommend that you teach clients to document the EXACT language of the FAQs they receive continuously from consumers. The way those queries are worded really matters. Do customers in New Orleans phone a sandwich shop to ask about a submarine sandwich or a po' boy? Do people at your restaurant order soda or pop? Do you clean gutters or troughs? Regional language difference matter, particularly in Local and particularly in a large country like the US.

I recommend taking a look at Britney Muller's most recent Moz Blog post as her ideas are highly applicable to this subject: https://moz.com/blog/30-minute-keyword-research

Hope this helps!

Hi There!

I believe you're asking about how to name your multi-location business across its local business listings. The answer is, you should name it exactly as it appears in the real world, on your store signage, print marketing and the way the telephone is answered there.

So, if you own McDonald's, you're going to name the business just "McDonald's" on all of its listings for all of its locations. You wouldn't have "McDonald's San Diego", "McDonald's San Jose", "McDonald's Santa Clara", etc.

So, unless a city name is part of the real-world business name, don't included it in the name field of your citations. In fact, to do so would be considered a violation of Google's guidelines, which you can read here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB

*The one exception to this is Facebook. If you're going to create a Facebook listing for each of your locations, you DO need to add some kind of modifier to it, as Facebook won't let you create multiple listings for the same name. So, in this one case, you likely would add the city name to the business name field, but on all of your other listings, follow Google's guidelines and don't include any extraneous keywords in the business name.

Hope this helps, but if I've not clearly understood your question, please feel free to provide further details!

Hi Mjesse,
Great context you've provided, thanks! Now that I've understood the business model better, here's what I would suggest:

I would include this type of hyperlocal content, but I'd be extremely specific. Homeowner needs are going to be different in different communities. I'm being totally speculative here, but let's say your client builds a development meant to appeal to retirees in a moderately-sized city in Florida. You'd be asking yourself the question,"What would our typical purchaser most likely want to be able to do in this city?" You do some research and discover that retirees care most about:

• Distance to medical care including hospitals and pharmacies
• Distance to restaurants
• Distance to affordable grocery shopping
• Distance to golf courses
• Distance to casinos
• Distance to safe walking paths

You then compile a list of a) resources within a short driving distance and b) resources within walking distance that fit these needs. You don't bother with mentioning major attractions (like Disneyworld) that are miles away and may not be go-to resources for this base of retired home buyers. You then work up your list into a couple of paragraphs of travelogue-type writing that explicitly describe the distance to specific medical centers, supermarkets, eateries, golf courses, casinos and nice places to walk that will immediately accessible to anyone buying a home in this development. It will lend to the appeal of the development, and will simultaneously hyperlocalize your content if all of these resources you're mentioning are in a desirable neighborhood or district of a given city.

This approach could have an excellent impact on conversions, but, as far as its impact on actual organic rankings, that remains speculative. It's something you have to sort of suss out in scenarios. So, for example, someone considering moving to Florida finds your page on the housing development so useful that they link to it, spend a lot of time on the page, click on it more from the SERPs because it has an exciting meta description, etc. These things could boost the rankings of the page over time, but I would personally consider that a secondary consideration to making the page so useful that it converts at a high rate.

Does this help?

Hi Mjesse,

Great conversation you're having with EGOL, whose advice is always excellent.

The details of your scenario matter a great deal here. If you owned a restaurant, mentioning on the website that you're located 1 minute from the Chicago Children's Museum and have a great kids' menu, or across the street from Adler Planetarium and open for late night food could, indeed, help you to highly localize your content. This could lead to a variety of positives, including either direct or indirect impact on your local-organic rankings, which could, in turn, impact your local pack rankings. These types of landmark/neighborhood-oriented descriptions can also be extremely helpful to visitors to the area.

But, as you are a home builder, what I'd like to understand is the exact nature of your business model. Would you be able to answer a couple of questions:

1. Are you building housing developments and, if so, do they have a staffed office on the property, at least until all of the homes have been sold? Who occupies the office? Your company or a third party? And, do you meet with consumers at this office?

2. Do you sell the homes directly to the consumer, or are you just constructing them?

Please, let me know! This is a very good topic.

Hi Bee,

So, yes, this definitely looks like Possum. When I search Google Maps for "Yacht Broker Port Adriano Spain" I see that there are numerous similar business in this location and that when I zoom in on the map, Marlin Marine Services does appear. So, a listing does exist for this business, but it simply isn't being judged by Google to be deserved of showing at a non-zoomed-in level. So, this brings us right back to my earlier comment regarding the need to do competitive research to discover the top competitor's strengths and your client's weaknesses so that you can create a plan for improvement. Hope this helps!

Hi Bee!

Without looking at the actual listing, the community will only be able to offer some guesses. If you can share the website of the business, I'll gladly look more closely at it for you, but if that's not possible, it's okay.

The first thing I'd try to rule out here is the Possum filter. Find out if your client shares a dock, marina or building of any kind with a business in the same industry as itself. Even if the business is down the street, if there's another yacht-related company located in the same general area as your client, Google's Possum filter could be causing your client to be filtered out at the automatic zoom level of Google Maps.

If your client confirms that there are other yacht-related businesses at or near their address, here's how to see if Possum is impacting the business. Go to Google Maps and type in the core search term for which the business is trying to rank. Then, begin clicking on the zoom level to get more and more zoomed in. If your client appears on the Map at a zoomed in level, but does not appear at the normal zoom setting, then it's likely Possum.

If this experiment helps you determine that Possum is at play, and even if this experiment isn't conclusive that it's Possum, the task for you as the Local SEO on the job will be to do both an internal and a competitive audit. This will look like:

1. Ruling out for your own client anything problematic like guideline violations, spam, malware on the website, robots.txt issues, limiting business location, etc., while also documenting your finding about your client's complete online health (age of domain, on-page SEO, link profile, DA, PA, citation health, age of GMB listing, etc.). Do a full audit.

2. Then, take your client's numbers and statistics from your internal audit and set them side-by-side with the top-ranking competitor in the local pack for the search term. See what this top competitor's strengths are and compare them to your client's weaknesses to determine why Google is favoring their listing over your client's.

3. Finally, create a strategy to bring your client's numbers/stats up to the level of the top competitor, as best you can.

Again, if you can share the client's website, our community will gladly take a look, but if that's not feasible, what I've outlined here is the basic process that lies before you. Hope this helps!

Hey Alex,

I want to be sure I'm understanding this fully. Some questions:

1. Is artificial grass the main product your business sells?

2. If that's right, are you saying that your domain name is something like Alexs.com instead of AlexsArificialGrass.com?

3. And if that's right, are you asking if your landing pages should look like alexs.com/country/city/artificialgrass instead of just alexs.com/country/city? Or, something else?

4. And, finally, I'm curious about the use of a country name in your URLs. Do you have offices in more than one nation?

Hey There!

Yes, you can set URL tracking via neighborhood or zipcode in Moz Pro. The one thing is, the results of this type of tracking will show you the pages that rank highest from that locale. We can't necessarily pair it with one particular landing page, as we will just pull in the page that is ranking highest for the keyword, but there is definitely this more localized option available. I should also add the proviso here that, in some cases, you may only be able to narrow the search down to the city instead of drilling down to the zip or neighborhood. You can read more about this here:

https://moz.com/help/guides/moz-pro-overview/rankings/add-and-manage-keywords/local-keywords

https://moz.com/blog/local-rankings-in-moz-analytics

Hope this helps and that you'll give it a try!

Hey Cesare,

Ideally, what you want is:

1. A strong homepage that gives an overview of your company

2. A strong page for each of your core services offerings

3. A strong page for each of your branches.

Your "Contact Us" pages can and should have unique, strong content on them with a bit of effort, and as these are your landing pages for your branches, no effort should be spared here. What can go on these pages? Please read: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages and then let me know if you have any further questions.

Hey Jason,

Thanks so much for the answers to my questions. Okay, I'm going to number these points for organizational purposes:

1. Holy crow! There are a LOT of Internet marketing firms in Brisbane.

2. Go to Google, look up "SEO brisbane" and then click on the Map. Now, begin zooming in on the map, click by click. From my location in the US, it took me 9 zoom levels before your company appeared. You are 11th in the Local Finder view to the left of the map at this zoom level for me. So, the good news here is that your listing does exist. The bad news is, it's not making it into the higher echelons of Google's local rankings. I'm not sure if this is a classic case of the Possum filter, because the nearest business I see to you in the same category is over on Adelaide St (Code Digital), which looks to be a couple of blocks away. I've heard some anecdotal reports of Possum having an effect at that distance, but I can't say with 100% certainty here. Nevertheless, whether this is an artefact of Possum or not, the solution is likely to be same: you've got to convince Google that it is your business that deserves to show at the automatic zoom level instead of the businesses of your competitors.

3. First, you've got to root out problems. I noticed one oddity looking at your reviews. It appears that you've reviewed your own company in the past week. You should remove the review as this violates Google's guidelines and be SURE you aren't violating them with any other reviews you've gotten. You also need to root out any potential Google My Business duplicate listings. Unfortunately, Moz Local doesn't currently operate in Australia, so you may need to do this manually, or hire a company like Whitespark to help you root out duplicate listings or other problems with your citation set. I'm also curious about the way you've formatted your Google My Business address:  Level 4/196 Wharf St, Spring Hill QLD 4000, Australia. It has been years since I've consulted with a local business in Australia. What is Google's standard formatting of floors/suites in your country? Should they come before or after the actual street numbers? I'd double check on that.

4. Next, you've got to do a competitive audit of the competitors who aren't being filtered out. You've got to stack up their numbers against yours (local ranking, organic rank, age of domain, age of listing, DA, PA of GMB landing page URL, review count, review rating, link profiles) to try to identify what elements of the competitor's presence Google is favoring over yours. Then, you've got to try to beat those numbers/stats.

5. Next, you should carefully comb through the businesses outranking you to see if they are violating any of Google's guidelines. For example, it appears that one dominant player (Webgator) may be spamming the business title of their GMB listing (they're listing themselves as WebGator SEO Brisbane) when this does not match the logo on their website. I'm unable to see street-level signage for them looking at Google Streetview, so I recommend that you a) drive over there and take a photo of their sign and B) phone them and see how they answer the telephone. If they are simply "WebGator" in either instance, then their addition of the keywords SEO Brisbane to their GMB title would be something you would want to report as a violation. You should do this same process for any other competitor who is outranking you with a spammed business name. And, of course, make sure your own hands are clean in this regard and that you aren't violating any guidelines.

6. Know that you are in an extremely competitive and crowded market. It's not going to be easy to move the ranking needle, but it's not impossible.

7. Test proximity factors. Where do you rank locally when you are standing in front of your business looking at your mobile device? How about 2 miles, 5 miles, 20 miles, 50 miles away? Remember that local rankings are NOT static and can alter drastically depending on the location of the searcher.

8. I'm not doing a genuine audit here. It's just a 5-minute glance from me, and one thing that is bothering me here is the fact that your business is coming up 12th organically for me for the search term, but isn't appearing until zoom level 9 on the map. This would make me anxious enough to do a complete audit, referenced in point number 4, and if I didn't have the in-house skills to do it, I'd hire a heavy hitting Local SEO for the job.

This is as far as I can go right now, Jason, but I hope it gives you a game plan. Good luck!

Hey Again, Jason,

Looking at your Moz profile, I believe you're here: https://www.bambrickmedia.com.au/

Please answer these questions:

1. What is the exact search term you're trying to rank for?

2. What is your city of location?

3. Are there any other marketers in your building or on your street?

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!

You're welcome, Andrew, and good luck with your further investigation of the best strategy!