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Hi Andrew,

I agree with Jason that there are some nuances to this situation that could make it easy to give wrong advice (I also agree with him that Phil is a brilliant Local SEO consultant and it might be worth your while to reach out to him for some private consultation, during which you can show him the actual business). In the meantime, it's important to remember that Local SEO hinges on physical location. If Business A is located in Dallas and its airport limos operate from within that city, then this is how Google will see your business and it's what dictates what you can build out local listings for. But as to Business A's subcontracting relationships with Businesses B, C and D in other regions of the country, how you handle this in terms of content development would likely center around things like:

1. Whose brand is being used in those other regions? Is it Business A's brand, or the brands of the subcontractors?

2. What is the exact subcontracting relationship?

3. If the brands being used in the other regions aren't Business A's, could it confuse Google/hurt the business to associate it with these regions where there is no physical presence?

You'll want to dig deep into these questions and others (possibly with a consultant) to arrive at a strategy that helps the business instead of hurting it.

My pleasure, E2E!

Hi Imageco!

Thanks for the important details about your business model. In order to become truly dominant in the local market, you're going to need to be able to complete in Google's local packs, and in order to do that, you have to have

1. A physical address, even if it's your home address that you keep hidden on your GMB listing

2. Face-to-face contact with at least some of your customers

If you can't meet both requirements, you won't be able to build local business listings, and you'll be in the same scenario of real-world design houses beating your virtual business because they meet the criteria of "local" that your enterprise doesn't. You'll be stuck with either going after local-organic rankings (appearing for local searches but in the organic results instead of the packs) or utilizing PPC to show up for local searches (can be quite expensive).

So, basically my advice here is that if you want to narrow your consumer base to a local market, you've got to find a way to go fully local, meaning having a business model that meets the description of my 2 point list, above. Anything short of this and you'll likely be experiencing that same frustration you did trying to compete as a virtual national business.

However, I will add that the market may remain tough, whether your business model is virtual or local. Automation and cheap solutions have proliferated, as you've documented, and I'm not sure a local business just selling logo design would be financially viable. You mention you might expand into other service areas, and that you're doing research and seeing a ton of opportunity. I'm curious to know, these days, do most people think of ordering logos as a virtual or real-world action? I remember selling them back in the early 2000s on eBay and places like that. Have you seen a shift in the market that makes you feel people in Seattle would specifically be thinking of ordering a logo design from a real-world business that's local to them? Or would that hinge on it being tied into another service like print marketing? Curious.

Hey Joy,

I'll email you an example

Hey There!

It's great to see you getting such helpful input from our community here, and we're so glad to have you!

I respect the honest way you told your story, and you made it easy to follow the ups-and-downs you've experienced over the years. Donna has linked you to an article of mine with a graphic that can help you identify local business model options, and I have 2 specific question:

Are you planning to open a physical storefront?

Are you planning to meet face-to-face with clients, either at your store, your home or your clients' locations?

Hi E2E,

Definitely "bad". What the client is suggesting is called a "review kiosk" or "review station" and it's likely to result in their Google reviews being filtered out. I've not seen this documented, per se, with Facebook, but I wouldn't advise it as a strategy for any platform. In fact, sometimes reviews can even get filtered out if a customer writes them while using a company's in-house wi-fi. So, definitely advise the client against the kiosk. It's vital that reviewers use their own devices.

Of interest, there was a point about 6 years ago at which Google stated that it was okay to have review kiosks. They then did a 180 and stated that it wasn't okay. Kind of confusing, eh? But, if the client is waffling on this, just show them Google's review content policy (https://support.google.com/business/answer/2622994?visit_id=1-636355701683667727-3832853603&hl=en&rd=2) which states:

If you're a business owner, don't set up review stations or kiosks at your place of business just to ask for reviews written at your place of business.

Hopefully, that will steer them clear of this unadvisable concept

Ah, good to know we've narrowed this down together! For another reporting method, I'd tweet GMB @__GoogleMyBiz__ and link to your GMB forum post. If you do succeed in getting Google to edit the spammed names, I would love to hear what you see happen in the local pack after that. It may/may not affect rankings, so your experience would be educational to our community if you can share it. It's been a pleasure chatting with you about this.

So glad that helped. So, based on your anecdotal account, if the business is located near other law offices, it was previously ranking well locally but is now only showing up when you filter the results or zoom in, it does sound like Possum is a likely candidate.

Overcoming the Possum filter basically comes down to convincing Google that it is your listing that doesn't deserve to be filtered. How do you do this?

1. Familiarize yourself with the major Local Search Ranking Factors (likely, you're familiar with this annual survey, but if you've not looked at the 2017 version, here's the link: https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors). You've got to build both the organic and local strength of the law firm so that Google sees it as the one that deserves to be shown instead of filtered.

2. Do a competitive audit. Look at the businesses that aren't being filtered and analyze what they are getting right that your law firm is missing. The audit has to look at a wide variety of factors, including but not limited to:

• Age of the listing (is the competitor more established?)

• Age of the domain (same as above)

• Domain authority (links, content, etc.)

• Citation consistency and authority + lack or presence of duplicate GMB listings

• Google-based reviews (mainly total review count, but with some increasing emphasis on rating/sentiment)

• Page authority of the URL the listing points to

• Spam (are any of your competitors violating guidelines to achieve rankings, like stuffing their business title, - if so, report them)

• etc.

So, basically, what you need to do is evaluate your own marketing to identify weaknesses and improve in those areas, while also evaluating the non-filtered competitors' strengths and weaknesses to see what they're doing better than your client and where they might be vulnerable. This is a major undertaking, with no guarantees that you'll automatically get unfiltered right  away if you take the right steps to become the dominant player, but I've covered here your basic options for getting it right. If the business is experiencing a serious loss of traffic due to being filtered, it might be worthwhile for them to invest in some professional consulting with a heavy-hitting Local SEO (think Mike Blumenthal, Phil Rozek, Joy Hawkins) for a complete audit and some strategy sessions that will create a plan for improving the business' chances of becoming dominant again.

The problem with Possum recovery is that it doesn't work like some of Google's previous updates have. It's not like you've done something wrong that resulted in you being filtered out. It's just that you're not authoritative enough for Google to choose you as a top result. Joy Hawkins wrote an interesting article on Streetfight about how one business recovered from Possum (http://streetfightmag.com/2017/04/24/when-breaking-googles-guidelines-is-almost-necessary-with-gmb/) but she is careful to state that she's not advocating violating Google's guidelines in order to achieve recovery, though, like many Local SEOs, she empathizes with the business owner's decision to do so. I'd recommend reading that and considering your next steps, which might need to include high-level consulting. Hope this helps!

Hey There!

Was his disappearance from the local packs coeval with the rollout of Possum? If there are other law firms on the same block (or even couple of blocks), he could simply be being filtered by Possum. When you zoom in on the map, does he appear? If so, Possum is a likely culprit, though I can't say for sure without seeing the actual listing.

Obviously, the other thing to check for would be guideline violations/penalties/malware.

I also recommend reading this thread over at the Local Search Forum, which is discussing the phenomenon of proximity to the point of search impacting local rank in a variety of ways: https://www.localsearchforum.com/local-seo-ranking/43925-page-hated-within-100-mile-radius-city-loved-outside.html

From your description, I suspect Possum, but this is a guess without reviewing your client's unique scenario. Hope this helps!

Hi Platinum,

Thanks for the clarification. Okay, so if you've got multiple brick-and-mortar locations, the typical local marketing strategy would look like this:

1. One website with a page for each physical location, reached either via a main menu or via a store locator widget.

2. A unique set of citations for each of the physical locations.

Suggest to your boss that he think big, like Whole Foods or McDonalds, with a single website that builds the brand, while connecting local consumers with the appropriate location via a store locator widget. Everything that the brand does (earning media attention, links, etc.) goes toward building the overall authority of the website, benefiting all of its locations. There is no need to duplicate content because each store can have a single page with its own content (photos, reviews, special offers, staff interviews, local news/advice, etc.).

What your boss is suggesting you do, however, is to forego the idea of creating a powerful brand by attempting to take a shortcut. His shortcut of building duplicate websites will likely result in Google's duplicate content filter affecting the company's rankings, and will fail to achieve the visibility he is likely hoping for.

Even if he was prepared not to take a total shortcut and to build unique content on each microsite, the strategy wouldn't be one most Local SEO experts would advise, because it is simply a better use of resources to pour all efforts into a single website rather than trying to divide your resources up between 5, 10, 100 websites. Your boss is already sensing that it would be overwhelming to properly manage multiple websites, and so he's considering taking an unadvised shortcut by serving up duplicate content to his consumers and search engines. So, actually, I think he's already part of the way there to realizing something just doesn't add up in the multi-site approach; he can already see without being told that doing it authentically would be unmanageable, so if you're going to step up and tell him you're worried about his strategy, this would be something to keep in mind.

Depending on your role at the company, the best advice that could be given to this owner at this critical point of decision is to ask him how much faith he has in the brand. If he believes in it, he should build it to maximum strength via the real work of building a reputation for sterling service, both online and offline. There is no shortcut to doing this, but to say he's going to rely, instead, on a risky strategy that has been specifically targeted by Google as a no-no is like an admission that the boss doesn't believe in the brand and can only prop it up with funky techniques that will not pay off in the long run. You'd be doing him a massive favor by pointing this out to him, but whether he's open to hearing this is another question, right?

Hi Kris!

We just had a good discussion about this in June. Please check this out: https://moz.com/community/q/local-search-can-i-use-a-shortened-company-name

Hi PlatinumHouse,

Yikes - you're right to be concerned about what your boss is suggesting. Some questions:

1. What's the business model? Does the company have multiple physical locations for which the boss wants you to build these other websites or is it just one physical location and these sites will target cities where there is no physical presence?

2. Does the business meet face-to-face with customers? If so, where? At the place of business (brick-and-mortar) or in a service area (like a plumber)?

3. What is the purpose of targeting these other cities? What is the company's presence there?

Hi BigChad2,

Thanks for your reply. Just to be sure I'm understanding, you are positive that no GMB listings exist (either claimed or not) for departments B & C? If positive, do you know where the hours are coming from? Have you been able to trace them to the website or elsewhere?

Hi Mishel,

Thank you for inviting the community to brainstorm this important decision with you. I'm visiting your gallery page right now, and unfortunately, half of the sliders aren't loading for me ... I'm getting an "invalid slider ID or alias" message instead. The page loaded very slowly for me, and while technical SEO/UX isn't my area of expertise, the current state of the page concerns me, due to broken sections and slow loading. From a brief look at your site, it seems you carry a variety of garage door options and are looking for a way to provide a big-picture presentation of all the options so that the customer can drill down from there to the product that most appeals to them.

Instead of using sliders, how about breaking down the garage doors by types (wood, steel, swing, etc.) and then presenting the main page for them something like this Crate & Barrel setup for outdoor umbrellas: https://www.crateandbarrel.com/outdoor-furniture/outdoor-umbrellas/1

From this page on Crate & Barrel, you can then drill down to a unique page with each umbrella on it, which would be a great place for you to write fully about each garage door choice.

Hi BigChad2,

Hours of operation typically come from your GMB dashboard (though Google could potentially pull them from elsewhere). Are you saying that Department A of your business has its own GMB listing, but is showing the hours for Departments B and C, which also have their own listings, or is it a branded search for the whole business that is bringing up a single card with multiple hours on it and only the brand has a GMB listings (i.e. GMB listings don't exist separately for the different departments). And, are the hours correct? Incorrect? Is there any way you can provide a real-world example? If not, it's okay, but a few more details could help.

Happy 4th, Bryan, and good luck at your client meeting next week!

Wishing you best of luck, Dickens!

All good questions, Dickens, and it's my pleasure to keep chatting with you.

Local: You're understanding correctly - using the service radius tool is not going to enable you to rank in cities where you lack a physical location. Google may take this info into account in some way, but not typically in any way that you can see relating to actual rankings. Best practice is to set no more than a 20-30 mile radius if you wish to use the feature, but as I've mentioned above, your business model isn't an SAB, because you don't travel to clients in a radius to serve them face-to-face. If you were a plumber, I'd suggest setting the radius at 20-30 miles and no more, as there have been anecdotal reports of a larger radius than this actually causing problem. Actually, you might enjoy reading this old but interesting conversation over at the Local Search Forum on the topic of the service radius: https://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local/1754-best-practice-designating-service-area-miles-radius-listing-cities.html, but as I've said, your business is brick-and-mortar in Google's eyes and shouldn't be setting a radius.

Organic: Google does localize some organic results to either a minor or major extent, but this might be at a city level, a regional level, and possibly a state level, depending on what they believe the intent is of the searcher. So, let's say you publish a page called "Stopping Foreclosure in North Carolina". Ostensibly, Google is aware that Raleigh is in N. Carolina. Your best bet is that you've built the authority of this page by earning links to it. If your page has become authoritative enough, there's a chance it could show up for someone searching for "Stopping Foreclosure in Raleigh", but, if you have a competitor who is located in Raleigh and has built an authoritative article called "Stopping Foreclosure in Raleigh", I'd typically expect that to outrank your North Carolina article. So, there's a question of degrees of relevance here. Whichever organic results Google believes most match the intent of the user come heavily into play in what will make it to page 1, and geography does play a part when a user is specifying a city, not unlike if a user searches for "pizza raleigh". If your competitor's pizzeria is in Raleigh and he has a page called "best pizza in Raleigh", he's likely to beat out your "best pizza in North Carolina" article when a Raleigh-based searcher looks at the organic results for "pizza raleigh", or even just "pizza". The degree to which Google is localizing the organic results is something you'll need to observe on a case-by-case basis, because it's not one degree across the board.

So, all that brings us back to PPC, which you can set to appear for Raleigh searches, regardless of where you're physically located. Unfortunately, it can be an expensive investment, but publishing great organic content requires a financial investment, too.

Hi Dickens,

Thanks for the thorough replies to my questions, and Christopher, you might like to read this as well in case Dickens' scenario matches your own.

Okay, so this would be how to think about this:

Local

In Google's eyes, the only truly local component of your business is in Charlotte, where you meet face-to-face with your clients. This is the only aspect of your business you'll build a GMB listing for and other local business listings for. Do not use the service radius function of the GMB dashboard to attempt to represent the non-face-to-face aspects of your business. It will not help you rank locally in these other areas, because you have no physical location there. Just set yourself up as a local business in Charlotte on your citations, and don't confuse your business model (brick-and-mortar) with the model of a service area business (like a plumber). You don't travel to your clients beyond Charlotte like a plumber would.

Organic

Because you're unlikely to rank locally for anything beyond Charlotte, if you want to gain additional visibility for any other city, you should consider what you can do organically. If you can develop unique content on your website that is highly relevant to a specific city, publish it, but don't make the mistake of creating duplicate or near-duplicate content that simply swaps out one city name for another. If there is something that makes your services to clients in one city special (like maybe laws affecting only that city), then this might be a reason to publish this type of content, but if your services are identical across the state, taking the approach of building a page for every city in the state will, more often than not, lead to a library of very weak pages that have been built for search engines rather than people.

True service area businesses (like house painters) can easily take this approach because they can have a page showcasing houses they've painted in San Francisco, and another page showcasing houses they've painted in Oakland - they have genuinely done unique work in each city. For a legal firm, finding a purpose for creating truly useful content of this kind will be harder. I'm not saying it's impossible. Perhaps you can showcase famous legal cases in one city vs. another. As I've mentioned, depending on the type of law you practice, perhaps there are legal statutes affecting different cities about which you could write. Rule of thumb is, avoid any shortcuts that would result in weak, pointless or duplicate pages, as they are likely to water down your site instead of building it up.

PPC

If you determine that the organic SEO approach isn't right for you, then your best bet for beginning to get visibility in cities beyond Charlotte will be PPC. You can target specific cities that would drive the most business to you, rather than targeting the whole state, which might be a waste of your investment.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions!

Yes, unfortunately, what the agency is suggesting is like a recipe from a duplicate content cookbook. They are trying to offer a shortcut to doing the actual work that should be involved in publishing hundreds of websites.

Has the business ever considered consolidating everything into a single brand with a single site? That way, they could have 1 page for each city and 1 page for each service, redirecting all the old sites to the new one, and never having to worry again about creating content for hundreds of microsites.

Hi Bryan,

It's my pleasure. On your last question, technical SEO just isn't my area, but wouldn't blocking Google more or less defeat the purpose of attempting to build organic authority for the new site leading up to the point of sale? I'm not quite seeing the logic there.

BTW, I just thought of you seeing this coincidental thread over at the Local SEO Forum: https://www.localsearchforum.com/local-business-citations/42391-new-dentist-new-site-same-address-phone-staff.html

Hi Gavo!

Alick300 has provided a good link for the 2nd part of your question. For the first part, we just had a good discussion on this right here: https://moz.com/community/q/local-search-can-i-use-a-shortened-company-name

Hope it helps, but if you have any further questions after reading that, please feel free to ask!

Hi Nigel!

That is a really good list from Whitespark, but it's applicable to truly local business models. I think, in Edward's case, we're talking about a virtual business, which changes our outlook considerably on best marketing strategies.

Hi Edward,

That's a good question, and I can see that the WB Friday you've linked to doesn't really answer it. In a nutshell:

1. Local business listings on sites like Google, Infogroup, Yelp, etc., are meant to represent businesses that meet face-to-face with consumers in the offline world, either at the company's location (like a restaurant) or where the customers are (like a plumber). So, no, your virtual business shouldn't be building these types of "structured" citations.

2. This, however, does not preclude you from getting un-structured citations from entities that are local to you. So, for example, your carpet factory is located in Augusta, Maine. You do not have an offline showroom that sells your carpets directly to customers at the factory. Rather, your carpets are sold on your website, and perhaps at 3 local home improvement stores and also at select national retailers. While you don't sell directly to consumers at your factory, your factory plays an important role in the community. It sponsors a children's crafts program at the Augusta community center, as well as contributing team uniforms to the Augusta Little League. The website for both of these entities might then mention your sponsorship, including linking to your website, as a form of an unstructured, partial citation. Meanwhile, as a major employer in Augusta, your brand might be mentioned on local online news sites or blogs, providing further citations. These citations might feature your complete NAP (name, address, phone), your partial NAP, a link to your site or no link at all, but all of them act as references to your business that Google sees as data that reinforces belief in the existence of your company.

3. For a virtual business, citations are not nearly as important as they are for true local business models, If they contain links from authoritative sources, they definitely will help you SEO-wise, but their purpose in terms of featuring your NAP just isn't the same. For a local business, repeat references to accurate NAP are believed to strongly impact local rankings, but your business won't be going for local rankings, so your mindset in regards to being mentioned by local entities is organic, rather than local.

4. As for online-only directories, they do exist, but I wouldn't focus too much on them. These were a big deal a decade ago, but due to abuses of them, Google has significantly downgraded any impact they may have on actual rankings. So, rather than focusing on directories, you may be better off looking for ways to get press from local or industry publications that would enhance awareness of your brand and be a credit to it.

Hope this helps!

Hi DickensLawGroup,

Similar to what I've asked Christopher, please feel free to answer my 4 questions and I'll be happy to offer suggestions.

Hi Christopher,

Would you be able to answer a couple of questions to help me better understand your scenario? From what I'm reading, it sounds like your website HOMEPAGE  ranks well for for something like "Plumber San Francisco", but your service radius has now grown to include other cities like Berkeley, Oakland and Mill Valley. Am I understanding that correctly? If not, please correct me. Please also answer these questions:

1. Is your business model brick-and-mortar and have you opened new offices in several other cities? Or, is yours a service-area-business with a single physical location (San Francisco) that wants to expand its service radius to include other cities in which it lacks a physical location (Oakland, Berkeley, Mill Valley)?

2. Do you meet face-to-face with clients in all of the locations you want to target?

3. You mention wanting to rank the homepage of your website for the state. Is your offering truly statewide? How many cities do you intend to target, if your offering is statewide?

4. Are you asking about organic or local rankings?

I'll look forward to receiving your answers. The more detailed you can be in responding to each of the 4 questions, the better feedback our community can provide.

Hi Bryan,

You've provided such a good description of the scenario. What I see from what you're describing is that this client needs two resouces: a business advisor and an SEO company. If this client came to me, I would first want to know that his plans for selling his practice in a few years were being formulated with a professional analyst who would be able to describe all of the processes and laws involved. Only then would I begin to talk local SEO with him, and I would likely say something like this:

"No further steps should be taken until you (the client) commit to cleaning up the original site and getting out from under the penalty. You should not build a second site until you've cleaned up the first one. Why?

1. You don't ever want to put identical NAP on 2 local business websites. You will just further harm the original penalized site if you do this, and, you'll simultaneously be tying the new website to a penalized entity.

2. Normally, when one completely rebrands a business and builds a new website for it, you would be 301 redirecting the old website to the new one - in this case, particularly because of the needs of dental patients to connect with the dental practice they've gone to for the past decade, but also for obvious SEO purposes. However, you do not want to 301 redirect a penalized site to a new site, signalling to Google that someone they deem spammy now has not one but TWO websites that may not deserve to be trusted.

3. No savvy purchaser is going to want to buy a website that is tied to penalized website. Unless the purchaser doesn't do his research, he's not going to want that, and if he should buy the website that's tied to a penalized entity (either via NAP or 301 redirects) might he not take some form of legal action after the purchase when he hires a marketer who realizes you didn't disclose this info? I'm not a business advisor or a lawyer, so I don't know, but this would worry me.

4. You want to make top dollar when you do sell the practice. Right now, the penalty is decreasing the value of your business and may well be causing you to miss out on patients who could be growing your practice, right now, into an even more attractive offering. "

Those are things I'd have top of mind in speaking to the client, and maybe our community can add others.

By contrast, should the dentist be willing to own up to the mistake he made (hiring marketers who spammed Google) and pay for it by putting in the necessary work to recover from the penalty, the doors open wider as to what he can do. This is where a business analyst needs to step in to advise the dentist on matters like:

1. In a typical sale in the dental industry, does the purchaser normally want to buy the existing website as part of the package or does he want to name his business himself and start from scratch?

2. If he does want to buy the benefits of an existing website, but will not want to buy jonesdentistry.com, does it make sense for Dr. Jones (your client) to begin building the organic authority of a second, more generic domain (bostondentistry.com), while being sure that Dr. Jones' NAP is not anywhere on the new domain? Would building this second domain increase the value of the offering to the purchaser? How much?

3. If it would, when should this development of the second site take place, and at what point should jonesdentistry.com be redirected to bostondentistry.com. Will the offering be more attractive if, a year prior to the sale, Dr. Jones has already made the changeover to his own brand (changing from Jones Dentistry to Boston Dentistry), doing the permanent redirect, updating all of the existing citations to reflect the new brand, and helping his current patients to adjust to the new brand? Or should the redirects wait until after the purchase, leaving the work of citation management and client retention up to the purchaser?

Clearly, there are a lot of large and small details here that need to be hashed out. As a Local SEO, I can only help with some of them, and some I wouldn't dare answer because I lack the credentials to advise on sales, mergers, acquisitions, etc. But, the bottom line here is that if your client wants his website to be seen as an asset that will affect the ultimate price he receives from the sale, having that tied to a penalized entity is not the right move, and could possible even have legal consequences if he doesn't disclose that something he's selling is associated with a penalized entity.

Hope this helps and that you'll receive further feedback from the community.

Hi Robin,

Local business listings are meant for companies that meet face-to-face with customers or other businesses. If that's not your business model, then Local SEO isn't the right form of marketing for you. Hope that helps.

Hi Mark:

Two things should help you get this client on track.

1. Read Google's guidelines (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en) and pay particular attention to the sections on Name and Individual Practioners. Read them closely to avoid making costly mistake and let me know if you have any questions.

2. Know that what Google wants to see on your GMB listings is what customers see at street-level. Whatever is on the street-level signage and print marketing, and however the phone is answered by the customer service team, is what Google wants on the listing. So, if the sign on the business reads "Jim's Paint Shop", that's what goes on all of the local business listings that represent that business, even if the legal business name is "Jim's Paint and Sign Shop, LLC".

So, please read the guidelines and take point #2 into consideration and then let us know of any further questions.

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.

Hey Paul,

So, if your street-level and website-level marketing is all Evowrap rather than your full legal business name, then its Evowrap Google would want. It's the real-world consumer experience that Google wants reflected in their product.

Hi Paul,

I'm going to recommend that you contact our Helpsters directly at help@moz.com so that you can privately show them your business info and get one-on-one help with what you're seeing. Please reach out to them, and you should receive excellent help.

Hi Paul,

It's normal for Moz Local to pull in multiple listings when you do a lookup of you business, because we're trying to help you surface the best listing to verify your Moz Local listing with. If you're purchasing Moz Local, we'd recommend that you first correct the listing that we've marked as verified. Then, give it 24 hours and look up your business again to see if we've found your corrected version. Then, move forward with purchasing. It's very important to start out on the right foot, if you can, as the verified listing's data is the data we'll be pushing out to our partner network.

Once you've purchased the listing, you can use the Duplicates function to add incorrect variants of your name, address and phone number to help us surface wrong versions that exist. Then, if they are listings on our direct network partners, just use the "close" function to have Moz get them closed for you. Or, if they are on a non-partner platform, the tool will have at least identified them for you and link to these incorrect listings so that you can seek manual closure.

Hope this helps!

Hi Paul,

Good question. Google's guidelines make it clear that they want your business name on your GMB listings to identically match what consumers see in the real world. So, the name on your street level signage, your print marketing, your website logo and content, and your telephone greetings should be what you put on your GMB listing. And then, for the sake of consistency, as Sean mentions, you'll want all of your other local business listings to match this. So, short answer - no, don't shorten your name, unless you wish to formally change it and update all off and online marketing to reflect it.

I'm curious as to why you'd need to shorten the name. Is it super long?

It's great to see you working though your thoughts and options here, Paul, with the help of our community. Keep up the good work, everybody!

Nice coincidence! Thanks for letting me know, DickensLawGroup. So glad it helped.

Hi Paul,

When done correctly, Local SEO shouldn't hinder your national ranking efforts, but the fictitious suite approach is not a good idea, for a couple of reasons:

1. Google is quite able to identify that both businesses belong to you and they could decide what you are doing is spamming them (trying to make a single business appear like multiple businesses).

2. Post-Possum, you'd be likely to have the suite B result filtered out of the local packs, anyway.

So, really not worth it.

Your scenario is complex, and one in which it would be advisable to have a professional consultant who can evaluate your total situation. Knowing just the bare bones of your business model, it sounds to me like what you may need to focus on is brand building. Think about a massive company like McDonald's. When I look them up from my location in the US, I get their corporate site, from which I can buy things (like a gift card - so, analogous to your e-commerce scenario). I also get a local pack featuring their fast food locations near me (the local side of their business).

Now, imagine if instead of just being McDonald's, they had decided to be McDonald's Breakfast, McDonald's Big Mac and McDonald's Headquarters. Maybe this would help them to rank for different things, but consolidation is what has enabled them to be known for everything they offer under a single brand.

This may not be the right approach for every business under the sun, and after consulting with a professional, you could decide that you wish to legally brand, operate and market multiple businesses, but I always find it useful to look at "the big guys" and see how they became household words. No - you likely don't have the resources of McDonald's at your disposal, but you're hoping your own brand will become as recognized and profitable as possible. If you divvy your dreams up into different sections, can you eventually build the same recognition that you might have with a single push?

Tough questions, I know, but definitely worth full thought!

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 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 Paul,

Thumbs up on EGOL's good advice. I'll just add here that, as you've chosen "Local Strategy" as one of your categories for this thread, I strongly advocate the single site approach. Local SEO is centered on physical location, not product menu. So, if you've got 1 location in a city, then you'll want just 1 one website and 1 set of citations representing that location. You do not want to put your NAP (name, address, phone) on multiple websites as it can auto-generate citation inconsistency, undermining local ranking efforts. So, highly recommending the single site approach to you, specifically if the business has a local component.

Hi Gavo,

Citations are critical infrastructure for local businesses, but in order to qualify for them and for them to be useful, the business must:

1. Have a physical address, even if they are only going to list themselves on directories that allow the address to be hidden

2. Serve local consumers face-to-face

If your client doesn't serve clients face-to-face (which I'm wondering about as you mention her marketing doesn't include local keywords), then, no, citation building isn't appropriate. But if she meets both of the above criteria, then she should be marketing locally and building citations. And, she should also be building DA, as DA directly impacts local rankings.

That's right, Donna. Good answer.

Excellent point, Joy. Organic authority as Possum defense!

Those pesky duplicate, Joy!

FPK - has our community helped you? Do you have any further questions?

Hi Roman,

In addition to Logan's smart tips, I'd add that I wouldn't view schema as a ranking vehicle, per se. I'd view it as a way to make sure that a search engine like Google has received the maximum amount of very clear information about your business and what it offers. Schema brings clarity, and better or broader rankings can come from that clarity in some cases. Additionally, for local businesses, onsite original reviews that are marked up with review schema can sometimes lead to the display of review stars within the organic results, which can improve clickthrough rates.

Hi RobinEx,

No apologies necessary! Your question is a smart one about a rather confusing topic.

One of the best ways not to mess up NAP consistency is to have your existing phone numbers turned into call tracking numbers. A good company like CallRail can do this for you. I recommend you check them out.

Regarding citations, your business is only eligible for them if you meet face-to-face with consumers. Do you do this?

Joy's advice actually provides point #5, Jeremy. Personally, I wouldn't recommend outing your own client for review spam, but in addition to consumers realizing reviews are fake, your client's competitors and their SEOs may realize it and report the reviews to the GMB forum or to a Top Contributor like Joy, etc.

So, that would be a 5th point to raise with your client.

Hi Jeremy,

Good questions, and unfortunately, the bad news is that review spam on Google is rampant, and unfortunately, does not appear to be well-policed. Technically, yes, Google could both remove spam reviews and penalize the listing that is engaging in them (either manually or algorithmically), but as Mike Blumenthal has recently been documenting, Google does not seem overly interested in devoting resources to catching or penalizing review spammers (definitely read: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2017/04/17/the-largest-review-spam-network-ever-or-who-is-shazedur-rahman-and-why-should-you-care/)

There seem to be thousands of fake reviews in the network Mike has been tracking which violate not only Google's guidelines but also, likely, FTC regulations. Unfortunately, this state of affairs with Google appearing to ignore massive review spam calls into question the trustworthiness of their review product and it's something I would hope to see them crack down on in future.

Google's situation provides good background as to the famous stringency of Yelp's review policies. Yelp is highly invested in ensuring that reviews on their platform are legitimate. This is why they remove 28% of the reviews they receive and why they have publicly shamed erring accounts from time to time.

So, for now, if you're trying to convince a business not to spam Google's review product, you are likely to have to use something other than the immediate threat of penalties as your argument. This might include:

1. The possibility of a future Google crackdown at any time, with consequences that could be as mild as a soft penalty with loss of the fake reviews, to as severe as being banned with all of the traffic and revenue your GMB listing used to drive for your brand vanishing overnight.

2. The possibility of consumers discovering spam on their own and causing permanent damage to the brand's reputation via Word-of-Mouth, social sharing, etc., as well as the obvious loss of the customer and his network of friends if they are disgusted enough.

3. The possibility of FTC actions, lawsuits, etc. This should startle any business on the review spamming road: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2296366/fake-online-reviews-cost-19-companies-usd350-000

4. The weakness of a marketing strategy that relies of faking success instead of actually achieving it. You can't use fake reviews as a benchmark of growth, gains, quality control or anything like that. You're just fooling yourself, instead of putting in the work to achieve a genuine reputation for excellence.

You may think of other discussion points, but these four should be enough to convince any legitimate business with even a small amount of concern for staying in business that these risky shortcuts are a hazard rather than an asset.

Hope this helps!

Hi BigChad2!

Great topic. One thing that might be helpful to you would be this year's Local Search Ranking Factors survey of some of the best Local SEOs in the world:

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

You'll see that quality of inbound links to domain and domain authority of website are both top 10 local pack ranking factors and, if you drill down, you'll also see things like HTML NAP matching GMB NAP, diversity and quantity of inbound links to domain, page authority of GMB landing page URL, topical keyword relevance of domain content, etc. all being cited as top 50 factors. So, these are all organic factors that industry folks believe impact local pack rankings.

That being said, I'm not aware of any recent formal case studies, per se, that have taken screenshots of the correlation between high organic and high local pack rankings, but this would be something you could likely easily pull together if you needed to do so to illustrate/prove a point.

To undertake such a project, I'd do a variety of searches in cities across the country, such as "Dentist Santa Fe", "Dentist Boston", "Dentist San Francisco", etc. I'd do it across several industries, as well. I'd create a spreadsheet and notate the local pack ranking position of the top 3 and then its organic ranking. My bet will be that, at the end of the study, you'll find a high apparent correlation. It won't be the case for every single business appearing in the pack, because some will be there due to spam or other factors that have nothing to do with their website. But, my guess would be there would be a pretty high instance of those businesses with top 3 local rankings also having page 1-2 organic rankings.

For this search "Dentist Santa Fe", I see that the top 3 in the pack are all 1st page organically, and I see this phenomenon for many, many searches, and it offers a good explanation why an annual survey like Local Search Ranking Factors reflects that Local SEOs have noticed this behavior as being common.

I'm sorry I haven't seen a recent article on this, but doing a small study should be relatively easy if you should need to present proof of this phenomenon. Hope this helps, and if anyone in the community has authored or read such a study recently, please share!

Got it! Thanks for the further details.

Now, if you're a Moz Local customer at the Professional level, you can sync up your GMB listing to your Moz Local dashboard and we'd show you month by month gains your listing was making in terms of impressions and cool KPIs like clicks-to-call, clicks-to-website and clicks-for-directions, but when it comes to absolute proof that your edits resulted in a reordering of the results, I'm not aware of a tool that would offer such proof. The problem is, your edits could be responsible for pack movement, but ranking changes can occur for so many reasons, like a Google update, a guideline violation, a competitor doing a better or worse job building authority or links. So, to say, "I did this and, presto, the rankings were affected," has to be more of a hypothesis than a provable fact, because there are just too many variables at play. What if the pack was partly impacted by what you did, but also partly impacted by the fact that a competitor just had malware show up on their website? You can't really track all those aspects.

So, whether you take screenshots on a daily basis to track ranking changes, use analytics like Moz Pro, or are looking at the data in the Moz Local dashboard, I believe the best you can come up with is a theory, rather than absolute proof.

If anyone in the community has another solution or suggestion, please share with us!