Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi There!

My latest Moz blog piece might help you:

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

If you still have questions after reading that, please definitely ask.

Hi There!

Applause from me for trying to do your part to crack down on spam listings. What, specifically, are you hoping to track? Ranking shifts? Something else? Please, share as much as you can. Thanks!

Hi Adam,

Good question. 3 tips:

1. Document the client's current and former NAP (name, address, phone) including any branding or phone numbers and any location they may have used in the past decade or so. And, if the client is a multi-practitioner model (like a legal firm, realty firm, dental office), document the names of all of the practitioners for whom listings may have been created.

2. Now, enter these name/zip combos for each entity into the free Moz Check Listing tool for a very fast check. By clicking the Duplicates tab in the results, you'll see all of the duplicates we were able to find on the major platforms based on the information you entered. If you are Moz Local customer, we can help you automate closure of the duplicates across our partner network (saves a ton of time and worry!).

3. You may wish to supplement this with a manual search for Google My Business duplicates. Here's an excerpt we published from Joy Hawkins eBook that covers duplicate listing management in depth: https://moz.com/blog/duplicate-gmb-listings. And, here is Joy's own blog post about managing duplicates: http://www.sterlingsky.ca/the-proper-way-to-deal-with-duplicates-in-google-my-business/

These three elements should get you going. Hope it helps!

Hi There!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Earning and responding to reviews

• Earning links

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

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

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

Hi FPK,

Glad to have you here. So, your client is #2 in the screenshot (I believe I'm understanding that correctly, but please let me know if I've misunderstood). If I'm correct, here are a few things to remember:

1. Local rankings are not static. What you see is not what your client or his customers will necessarily see, depending on your and their locations at the time of making the search. For more on this, read Phil Rozek's recent article: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2017/05/24/did-your-local-rankings-really-sink-or-are-you-just-looking-at-them-wrong/

2. Reviews are just one factor of several hundred. To do a complete audit for any client, we recommend assessing all of the top Local Search Ranking Factors mentioned here: https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors. You need to audit both your client and any competitor who is outranking him to discover what the higher ranking businesses are getting right that your client may not be excelling at. The breadth of factors is wide: age of domain, age of listing, links, domain authority, topical authority, citation accuracy, authority and scope ... there is so much to consider here, so it's important to avoid oversimplifying this to something like "X is outranking Y because X has more reviews."

3. Definitely dive deep into the effects of Google's Possum filter, which has caused many businesses that share a category and building or street with competitors to experience extreme ranking changes. It looks like Kingston Mortgage Solutions is right across the street from you. To see if Possum may be at work in what your client is experiencing, read Joy Hawkins' article: http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900

4. It looks like the client is well within Google's borders for the city of Kingston, so no worries on that score.

5. I'm concerned that I'm seeing duplicate GMB listings for your client. They appear to have listed themselves twice with the identical address and phone number but with two different names: The Mortgage Professionals and Mortgage Pro Team (The Mortgage Professionals). This would be a violation of Google's guidelines (see: <cite class="_Rm">https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en</cite>) and needs to be investigated swiftly. I am also seeing at least 3 practitioner listings at this same address that need to be investigated to ensure that they are guideline-compliant and not being viewed by Google as duplicates. None of the names on these listings meet Google's guidelines, unfortunately. So, we've hit on a real problem here and one that your agency will want to research fully and make every effort to resolve for the client.

6. Moz Local now supports Canada, and a good thing to do would be to look up the client in our free Check Listing tool to begin to assess how widespread this issue is with duplicates. With the full, paid version of the tool, you'll be able to add alternate info, as well, to find as many duplicates as possible.

This is a start, but isn't a genuine substitute for a professional audit, which it looks like this client definitely needs. I hope this quick glance of mine provides a good starting point!

By coincidence, Nikki, Tim Capper just wrote a great post on this very topic this week. This should answer your question beautifully:

http://onlineownership.com/create-google-page-connected-google-business-page/

Good, Andrew. A rep named Mike told me they'd be on the lookout for your tweet to them. Hope you hear back, and you're very welcome.

Hi Andrew,

Okay, so I rec'd this response back from a GMB rep on Twitter:

I'm happy to help. First, send a private message and include your listing and account details. https://goo.gl/lDYjYK  -Mike

<iframe id="xdm_default9191_provider" src="https://twitter.com/i/cards/tfw/v1/865177259983994880?cardname=2586390716%3Amessage_me&autoplay_disabled=true&forward=true&earned=true&lang=en&user_color=rgb(0%2C 132%2C 180)&card_height=35&scribe_context={"client"%3A"web"%2C"page"%3A"connect"%2C"section"%3A"connect"%2C"component"%3A"tweet"}#xdm_e=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com&xdm_c=default9191&xdm_p=1" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="100%" height="34"></iframe>I wrote back, let them know I was asking on behalf of a Moz Q&A forum member, that your name is Andrew and that I'd pass the message along to you. So, my advice here is to reach out on Twitter today and let them know you're the member on whose behalf Miriam Ellis reached out. I'm hoping you can at least have a near real-time conversation with them.Here's a link to the interaction I had: https://twitter.com/GoogleMyBiz/status/865177259983994880My gut feeling on this is that there may not be much they or you can do, but it's worth checking out. It would be great if you'd come back and let us know how it went, Andrew. Good luck!

Hi Andrew,

Helpful details! I understand your situation well now, and I can see why this is problematic. I've just tweeted GMB support, because I'm honestly concerned you may be stuck here, unless they have a tip I've not encountered before. The problem is, were you to attempt to get rid of the GMB listing, it might well end up being marked "permanently closed" which is definitely not the signal you want to send to your B2B partners. We'll see what support says - they're typically pretty great, but I'm not sure there's a foolproof solution here. Your situation isn't unheard-of, for sure. See: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Enhance-Your-Presence/How-to-replace-Google-Local-listing-with-Knowledge-Graph/td-p/496345

In the meantime, as you've got the GMB listing currently representing your brand to the public, I'd say the most important thing you could do would be to ensure you've got a strong review acquisition campaign going so that you can encourage better sentiment to appear that better reflects the current status of your operations. In the local business world, a whopping 73% of consumers don't consider reviews older than 3 months to be relevant, according to BrightLocal (https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/local-consumer-review-survey/). So, I would expend a great deal of effort over the next year to push down those older negative reviews with newer positive ones.

I'll definitely return to this thread if I hear back from Google's Twitter support. And, if anyone in the community has dealt with this situation before, please chime in!

Hi Andrew,

May I ask you some questions, please, to get a clearer picture of the business model?

You mention that your company is a national B2B business. Does this mean you have multiple physical locations to which your business associates come for transactions, or do you only have a single home office to which they come?

If you've got multiple locations, do the others have Google My Business listings, or only the home office?

When you are performing searches to see whether a local knowledge panel or general knowledge panel result is coming up for the business, are you physically located in the same town as the business headquarters?

Can you further clarify why you feel bad reviews are built into the situation? What has caused this to be so?

Thanks!

Thank you, ma'am!

Good luck, John!

Joy, thank you so much for your generosity in coming to share your advice on this (Alexandre, it's Joy I reached out to for an expert opinion).

Just to be sure we've covered all bases, Joy, would you leave the details of the "moved" listings as-is, with the old names on them, or would you edit the business titles to reflect the new name of the brand that acquired them, before getting them moved?

Hi John,

Thanks so much for the answers and further details. I am seeing all of these addresses associated with your business when looking it up in our Check Lisitng tool:

1. Local SEO Search Inc
   210 Simcoe Street, Unit 2109, Toronto, ON, M5T 1T4
   (416) 888-8756Verified
2. Local SEO Search
   45 Pond Mills Rd, # 1110, London, ON, N5Z 4W5
   (226) 271-4998Verified
3. Local SEO Search
   2400 Midland Avenue, Suite 112, Toronto, ON, M1S 1P8
   (416) 888-8756Verified
4. Local SEO Search
   25 Main St W, Suite 1115A, Hamilton, ON, L8P 1H1
   (905) 667-5557Verified
5. Local SEO Search
   41 Creek Ridge St, Kitchener, ON, N2R 0B6
   (226) 243-4002Verified
6. Local SEO Search
   255 Queens Ave, Suite 1760A, London, ON, N6A 5R8
   (519) 937-1845

All of the above appear to be stemming from Facebook rather than Google. This could have nothing to do with why your GMB listing isn't appearing if Google is saying it's a technical glitch, but it caught my eye as setting up chains of listings for employees could result in listing suspension. Google hasn't done a super job about communications surrounding this, but if you built listings like this on Google it could possibly have gotten the account flagged for spam. A few more questions:

1. Has Google been any more forthcoming about what, exactly, this technical glitch is? Any further details on that?

2. Have you tried pleading for escalation of your issue in the GMB forum?

3. Have you tried Google's GMB Twitter support? Sometimes the service there is faster. https://twitter.com/GoogleMyBiz

The level of support really varies across Google's support vehicles. I'd be going for the forum and Twitter on this after a year of having no listing.

At the very least, the company should clean up those Facebook pages so that they aren't diluting the clear NAP of the company. This won't resolve the issue you're experiencing with GMB, but it's important nevertheless.

Just wanted to add that you definitely do seem to be missing from packs, knowledge panel and maps. Curious about the physical location of your business. I'm looking you up in Check Listing and see 7 possible addresses associated with your business if I toggle the hidden results:

https://moz.com/local/search/Local SEO Search Inc/M5T 1T4

Are all of those your company? Have there been moves?

That does sound odd, Dan. I'd give this one 48 hours to see if it auto-resolves. I had something like this happen once and it auto-resolved. Let us know how it goes.

Hi John!

Wow - a whole year. Our community may not be able to help, unfortunately, if Google, themselves, say there's a glitch in their system. I do have some questions, though:

1. Are you talking about a Google My Business listing, or a Google+ page? What you've linked to in your post is the latter.

2. Are you saying you've created 3 GMB listings or 3 Google+ pages?

3. When did the disappearance occur?

4. Why do you keep creating additional listings/pages?

5. To your knowledge, have there been any past problems, such as soft of hard suspensions of the Google My Business listing?

I'd like to know further details of what you've experienced.

Hi Alexandre,

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

There are some complicated nuances to this scenario.

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

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

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

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

So happy to hear that, Cieron. Good luck!

Hi Ben,

Another good question. I want to preface what I'm saying here by saying I'm not an expert in linkbuilding and that I see what you're asking about as having some grey area. I'll do my best to describe what I'm talking about.

In an organic SEO scenario with virtual businesses, I agree with Rand's explanation in this WB Friday https://moz.com/blog/backlinks-maximize-benefits-avoid-problems-whiteboard-friday. Please, watch the video and pay special attention to his explanation of linking from mysite.com to myothersite.com, where he's describing cross linking between two domains you control. So, his explanation is good on this and very educational and well-thought-out.

Now, once you've watched that, we need to consider that your business scenario is not virtual - it's local, and you're having to take all of these extra steps to make sure your two websites don't get mixed up with one another in Google's "mind". Again, if you were able to get the client to consolidate, then you and I would be recommending a super internal linking strategy because that would be purely internal and would not look like the business is trying to manipulate anything. But, in the multi-site local business scenario, we're dealing with 3 possible outcomes from cross linking:

1. It could potentially look to Google like the business is trying to artificially elevate the authority of that second site, though Rand's advice could help lessen the chances of that.

2. You're taking all these steps to separate website A from website B (ensuring there is no shared NAP or shared content) to avoid citation confusion, but now, you could potentially be undoing all of that by overtly associating the two sites back together by crosslinking between them. If there's no matching NAP between the two sites, citations may not suffer and duplicate listings are unlikely to result, but you are definitely letting Google know that both sites are related.

3. And, even if you think you're being pretty mild in your cross linking, it's important to know that there have been cases in which the industry has speculated that Google was applying the Possum filter in the local rankings based on a parent company controlling the two entities. See the #2 case in Joy' Hawkin's article about Possum: http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900. I mention this not because you'd be going after local rankings for the two entities (you're only pursuing then for the main business), but simply to illustrate that Google may well understand that the same business is controlling both websites based on something like the same parent company being listed on two business licenses. Google can dive pretty deep, it seems.

Point of all of the above: there really may be little way to hide from Google that a single business owns both entities, so basing the SEO strategy of either on crosslinking between the two may not be that smart. To me, personally, it's a strategy that seems kind of manipulative at face value, and while I've described nuances that could make a gentle approach not too big of a deal, I'd be leery of making it into a "strategy", per se, for the business. That second website, if it must exist, needs to be good enough to earn links on its own and to be a candidate for selective external linkbuilding efforts. If it has to lean heavily on the main site, it's just another argument for why the multi-site approach isn't really recommended.

Whew! Long answer, but this is a complex topic. Hopefully you can read up further on this topic to form your own opinion and help the business make a sound decision.

Hi There,

Your question is especially good, because it perfectly highlights a practical concern and actually points to an answer. You're right: it would be hard to find something different to say about 1 inch screws vs. 2 inch screws vs. 3 inch screws. So, if the screws are all actually the same brand, why not combine them onto a single page with a dropdown for purchasing the various lengths? Think of how clothing retailers sell a pair of pants. They don't have one page for small, another for large, and another for extra large, right?

So, the idea here is to envision that you've got a single page for screws made by X brand and it has all of the different length purchasing options on it. Much easier for the customer. And, you can come up with some good content about this brand of screws. Is it aluminum or steel? Why is that good, in terms of durability? Is it made in the USA? Is it suitable to particular projects (appliance repair, home building, fixing screen doors?, etc.). Does it come with a satisfaction guarantee? Are there photos of the product? Videos of it being used? Consumer reviews of the product? Quotes from the boss?

If you can put all of this content once onto a single page instead of finding ways to repeat it on 20 pages for 20 different lengths of the same product, you're likely to come up with a much stronger page with a better chance of ranking well.

Hope this helps!

Hi Klemens,

Joe's advice is right on, and I'd recommend these Whiteboard Fridays to help you get into a powerful mindset about this topic:

https://moz.com/blog/beat-your-competitors-rankings-comprehensive-content-whiteboard-friday

https://moz.com/blog/optimizing-for-rankbrain-whiteboard-friday

Hope you enjoy those!

Hi There,

Good question! Short answer here is: no, a Local SEO is seldom going to suggest a multi-site approach to represent different services a business offers. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. You will only be able to build local business listings for the main business at the physical location, so there is no local pack ranking advantage to having two different websites, as you can't build additional listings for one of the services offered - this would violate Google's guidelines.

2. Simultaneously, what you worry about with the multi-site approach isn't so much a duplicate penalty/filter (unless you duplicate content between the two sites) but, rather, the accidental creation of duplicate listings. If Google (or another local business index) gets confused by finding shared partial NAP (name, address, phone) on two different websites, it can confuse them and lead to the accidental duplicate listings being created, which can then sap the strength of the main listing for the main business. It can also confuse consumers. The way to reduce the likelihood of this would be to be sure that the physical address isn't on the second website and that you either have a) a unique phone number for the second website or b) put the phone number in image text. Even so, these things can get referenced off the website and pulled in that way, so it's not really foolproof, but it is a best-effort attempt.

3. Finally, a major drawback of the multi-site approach is that, instead of every marketing effort you make adding to the strength of the brand, and therefore all aspects of what the brand offers, you are dividing this in half while doubling the management efforts that have to be expended trying to market two websites, instead of pouring all of that marketing goodness into a single entity. This really matters when it comes to your organic rankings. If you have an absolutely awesome website with high authority, you should be able to get your pages that surround the topic of this particular service the business offers to rank very well. With a second website, you'll be starting from scratch, trying to rank an unknown newcomer instead of simply building on the strength of the existing website by building great content and earning links to it, all under the umbrella of a single brand.

So, hopefully these are points you can bring to the company to help them see why in both organic and local marketing, a single site approach is generally preferred. Particularly as we've moved into the era of RankBrain, the ability to become an authority in a certain topic has become a central marketing mindset. You might even show the client this website (Moz.com) as an illustration of how a brand can become associated with a topic (SEO) that then helps it to rank for a multitude of related facets (linkbuilding, on-page SEO, local SEO, content development, etc.). Rather than creating a website for each of these areas, there is just one Moz, and that has helped the brand to become known, overall, for all of these things.

Please, let us know if you have any further questions!

Hey There,

Are you talking about the "people also search for section" that shows up when you see a knowledge panel? Please, let us know which specific data you are referring to in the knowledge panel. Thanks!

Hi Ben,

Good question. Yes, what you're concerned about here is genuine. The key point to understand is that Local SEO (in particular citation building) is completely tied to physical location, not to brand. So, in your case, you've got two different websites promoting two different aspects of your business, but only one physical location, meaning that you're only eligible for one set of listings representing the location. I'm not totally clear about what the main business model is; you mention a sports site. Is this like a gym or something like that?

The main concern with what you are doing (promoting two websites) would be that if the address and phone number is on both websites, it could potentially feed Google confusing information about which of the two brands is associated with that address and phone number. Is it the sports site, or the camps? This can lead to duplicate listings appearing, which can undermine your efforts to rank the physical location.

So, if I'm understanding correctly that the sports site is something like a gym, or a rock climbing school, or something like that, with a physical location customer come to, here's what I'd do if it's absolutely impossible to consolidate the two websites into one:

1. Build citations for the sports site only. Link all of them to the website for the sports site.

2. Do not build citations for the camp sessions (which are likely ineligible for GMB listings anyway as they sound like an event rather than a place). If these must have their own website, be sure they have a unique phone number that is placed on the camps' website. Do not put the address of the camps in crawlable text on the camps' website. Put it in image text as a safeguard. This is to avoid the NAP of the camps getting mixed up with the NAP of the sports site.

3. Do a really thorough check for duplicate listings that may already have been created. Moz Check Listing would be a good place to start: https://moz.com/local/search. Resolve any duplicates and check for them regularly.

4. Be sure that the content on the two sites is completely unique. Don't duplicate content between the two sites.

And that will be about the best you can do. Ideally, though, I'd try hard to persuade the owner that the above approach is kind of  a workaround to what would be the much better solution: consolidation of the website, which completely resolves the need for all of these provisos and careful steps. Then, you'd simply have a section on the site listing the camp sessions as part of what the sports site offers and there would be far less concern that any duplicates would crop up or that there would be duplicate content or what have you.

Hope this helps, and if I'm in any way misunderstanding the business model, please feel free to provide further details.

Hi Alexandre,

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

Hi Bee,

Provided your company makes face-to-face contact with its customers, then the discipline you need to start learning is Local SEO. Your efforts will involve a combination of website development and local optimization, content development that surrounds the topics that matter to your industry/geography/clients, building and managing local business listings on a variety of platforms whether manually or via a service like Moz Local, review acquisition and then additional forms of outreach like social media and video marketing.

All of these practices combine to begin building your geo-topical authority. You'll be striving to earn local pack rankings relating to the city in which you're physically located, and, in some cases, organic rankings for other cities in which lack a physical location but which relate to your business in some meaningful way.

There is a lot to learn here. If you have a more specific question, please feel free to ask!

Hey Mothner

As Joy mentions, the best bet for getting targeted advice here would be to share the identity of this client and the precise search you're trying to rank for. Otherwise, we can only speculate. The possibilities could range from the Possum filter to whether you've got the right categories, to a lot of other things. If you're unable to mention the client, that's perfectly okay, but it does leave the community here guessing rather than investigating.

Hi Nicholas,

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Christian,

Good advice from EGOL. Your question raises an issue the Local SEO community, in particular, needs to look into further, as we tend to look at sponsorships as good sources of links. That being said, you'll see discussion like this in the general SEO industry:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-chrome-bought-a-paid-link-for-350-000-21690.html

So, this is an area I believe needs further research to define exactly how Google views links from sponsorships.

Hey James,

Just want to offer a proviso here: the fact that Google localizes results automatically for queries they feel have a local intent does not mean that the optimization of the local business website can simply overlook local keywords. In fact, it's fundamentally important that each page you create targeting a specific city/neighborhood includes those city terms. Not only does this optimization signal to Google what your page is attempting to be relevant to, but it's also so important that human users know that your Sugarland page is for them in Sugarland, or that your Dallas page is for them in Dallas.

I can see why Google's automatic localization of results might cause people to think they can overlook geographic optimization of the website, but to do so would be to fail to send the clearest possible signals of relevance to specific geographic intents or users-as-centroids.

Hey There!

Yes, the strategy you're mentioning is a good one. In your scenario, I recommend:

1. A set of city landing pages

2. A set of service pages

It just gets too confusing if you try to mix the two up. *Just be sure each page you get is of very high quality and non-dupicative. This article might help:

https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

As might this one, though it's 3 years old now:

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

Good luck with the project. The more you can involve the owner/expert staff at the business in this phase of content development, the better

So glad to help, Gabe!

Hi Matthew,

Searching from California for the term 'roofing tyler tx' I am seeing Estes coming up in the #6 spot in the local finder view (which you reach by clicking on the 'more places' link at the bottom of the 3-pack. This should be helpful to know, because the client is actually making onto Google's radar, but it's not making it into the top 3 for a search like mine.

Curious - when you search that same term and click into the local finder, are you really not seeing the company at all in the local finder results?

Nice responses from both Donna and Joy here. Thanks, ladies

Kimberly, definitely pay attention to Joy's advice regarding using friend's houses for this. It's a definite no-no. Review Google's Guidelines to know how to play by the rules and avoid disaster.

I recommend reading the following:

This one is now 3 years old, so there might be a few old terms in it, but it should help you define your business model:

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

And this one should help you with your approach to creating these landing pages:

https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

Finally, I'm going to raise the issue of RankBrain here and link you to Rand's WB Friday on this:

https://moz.com/blog/optimizing-for-rankbrain-whiteboard-friday

Please take a few minutes to watch this to help you determine whether multiple pages for the sake of keyword breadth or a single, really comprehensive page for each theme/topic will serve you better. SEO is changing and that goes for both local and virtual businesses.

I hope these resources will help you skill up to develop a really smart and modern strategy for marketing your business!

Hi Kirk,

Good question. Answer is, this is not an exact science. It's something you get a 'feel for'. Do this experiment. Look up "car dealerships" in the city nearest you and see if you see them clustered around a certain street in town on the Google Map. Look at the rankings next to the map (called the local finder view) and see if most of the high ranking businesses are in or around that cluster and if car dealerships that happened to be on the other side of town, away from this auto-row kind of setup common in much of the US, are not ranking quite as well as those physically located on the auto row.

If so, then this could be the concept of the industry cluster at play. I still see this phenomenon, but important to mention that, with every passing year, we are seeing more and more emphasis on the user being the centroid  rather than the industry being the centroid. In other words, if me and my cell phone are on auto row in a town, Google will predominantly show me businesses there. If we drive across town, Google will show me the car dealerships over there. So, I am the moving centroid!

But, if you are searching from your house in San Diego for a car dealership in Santa Fe, NM, you're not much of a centroid in that scenario because you're awfully far away. In that case, you might see these clusters being more obvious than you would if you were physically located in Santa Fe.

Complex ideas, huh? But interesting!

Hi Setokin,

Glad to know I hit close to the mark in understanding this. Here is my advice:

1. It is essential that no one else use the park's phone number. You will need to let each of the vendors know this. Each entity being listed on Google MUST have its own phone number, whether these are entities you own or entities your vendors own.

2. If all of these businesses are located at the same address (123 Palm Dr.) then I recommend reviewing the following Google guidelines:

• Containment information indicating that your business is located inside another business (whether or not the businesses are part of the same organisation).
  • Not acceptable: "Link ATM (in Tesco)", "Apple Store at Stanford Shopping Centre", "Benefit Brow Bar - John Lewis", "Kwik Fit Tyre & Battery (part of Kwik Fit)", "Costa Coffee (inside Tesco Extra)"
  • Acceptable: "Chase ATM", "Apple Store", "Benefit Brow Bar", "Kwik Fit Tyre & Battery", "Costa Coffee"

Also read Google's sections on Departments and Categories in the guidelines thoroughly to understand how each entity at your park should be listing itself and if it is, indeed, eligible for a GMB listing.

3. For those businesses that you deem eligible for a GMB listing, you are going to have to do a really masterful job with GMB category selection to avoid the effects of the Possum filter as much as possible. If you have 2 Mexican Restaurants in the park, for example, Google is unlikely to show both because of the shared category. So you may have to get creative here in choosing categories for those businesses you control and ALSO, look at the categories each vendor is using to be sure they aren't 'stealing' the main category that the park, itself, most definitely needs.

Wow! A lot to do here. In your shoes, I would honestly hire a really good Local SEO to work out this strategy with you, based on Google's guidelines, but if you need to DIY, I hope my pointers will prove an actionable starting point.

Hi Brett!

There is actually some reason for concern here. Let's get some more details from Setokin before we determine whether or not his scenario is problematic. The devil is in the details of these situations

Hi Setokin!

I can see exactly why you are concerned. Let me ask some questions here, please. Is your scenario something like, you own a museum at 123 Main St. and inside of your museum, there is a restaurant, a cafe and a gift shop, all owned by different owners but also all located at 123 Main St? Is this your scenario, or would you describe it differently? Also, please clarify if these different entities have their own phone numbers or the phone number is the museum's (i.e. yours)?

The details really matter in a scenario like this. Please, provide as much info as you can. Thanks!

You are very welcome, Michael. So glad to have you here, asking good questions!

Hi There!

It will be really helpful to the community if you can share two things with us so that we can look at your actual business:

1. Your website URL

2. The keyword phrase you are trying to rank for

If you can't share these, it's okay, but the community won't be able to provide feedback specific to your business and there are believed to be over 200+ ranking factors in Google's algo, so we'd only be guessing. Thanks!

Hi Michael,

Yes, Google does say "whenever possible", so this is one of those things where you could possibly decide that there isn't a huge risk in the redirecting numbers, but it would make me a bit uneasy. For one thing, there have been numerous documented incidents of Google calling businesses. If the switchboard receptionist answers "Happy Sailboats" or "Happy Sailboats Marina" instead of "Happy Sailboats Shipyard" this can actually trigger a red flag about the accuracy with which you're representing the business name/s on the Google My Business listings. So, just so you know, there is some risk whenever you don't stick to Google stated preferences to the letter. How big a risk? Hard to say. The risk-free way would be for the business to change its phone system if having 3 GMB listings is deemed important enough, so that each department answers its own phone directly.

I'd also build a really strong landing page for each of the 3 departments and link the GMB listings to them.

Or, in the end, the business may decide to simply marketing itself with a single GMB listing, which is also risk-free but could miss out on the opportunity of ranking for the wider variety of categories the department approach can cover.

Hi Michael,

No, no typo on my end. For SABs like your client, your best available strategy is to go after organic rankings for his service cities, since you can't typically go after local ones because of Google's bias. A typical local marketing plan for a service area business involves creating a set of really excellent landing pages on the website for each of his main service cities, differentiating them with unique and useful content. You might check out:

https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

These pages take time and resources to develop well, and their goal is to gain organic visibility for local queries.

And, finally, there is PPC - paying for Adwords to show up for specific cities. If being visible for a specific city is vital for an SAB, a combination of city landing pages + PPC can bring in the leads the business is seeking.

Hope this helps!

Hi Chris,

I want to be sure I'm understanding your business model. It sounds like your business is virtual (doesn't make in-person contact with customers) and might be along the lines of a directory or a lead-generation company. Am I close to getting that right?

If so, then basically you are limited to go after organic rankings for the terms you want to rank for. Virtual businesses are not eligible for inclusion in Google's local results, so what you want to do is evaluate your ability to compete for spots in the organic results for the terms that are important to you and your customers.

An example of this would be the review platform Yelp. Yelp specializes in a product: business reviews. They have been so successful at becoming known for their review product that when you search for a very wide variety of businesses in Google, Yelp pages often come up on page one of the organic results due to the authority this brand has built.

Another example would be something like ZocDoc - a directory for medical professionals. If you search for 'doctor san diego' or 'doctor boston' or 'doctor burlington', chances are strong that you'll see results coming up from the ZocDoc directory, because they have become a perceived authority when it comes to finding a local doctor.

So, your own brand needs to take a look at where you can build this type of authority, whether on a local or national level, and then create the types of content that can begin to earn organic rankings for relevant terms.

Hope this helps, and please feel free to provide any further details if our community isn't quite understanding your exact business model.

Hi Michael,

I totally get it that you'd love to find a solution for a client like this, and also that you won't find a 'play by the rules' type of reply helpful from the community, given that this is what you've doubtless encountered a number of times as the answer to the question you are asking. So, I won't suggest playing by the rules, but rather just want to stress the importance I've always felt about my role as an educator to local business clients. It's not fun being the bearer of bad news (you're unlikely to rank in the local pack if you lack a physical location in city X and Google could drop the hammer if you put up listings for virtual offices), but if I don't set the client's expectations properly about how local search works, I'm actually doing him a disservice.

Unfortunately, over the years, I've had so many business owners come to me from scenarios in which their previous marketers gave them false expectations and didn't educate them about the limits of Local, and those relationships with their former consultants did not end well. Money was wasted, penalties were incurred, people grumbled about lawsuits... not good stuff. And I've had to decide whether I could get these disenchanted business owners onto a good path again or let them go by as hopelessly blacklisted.

So what can we do when Google limits us in this way, particularly in this historically frustrating scenario of applying a physical location bias to business models to which this shouldn't apply? You get it and I get it and consumers get it that it makes zero difference to us if the plumber we call is in our town or the town 10 minutes away, but Google continues to treat SABs with a lack of genuine consideration, lumping them in with brick-and-mortar businesses and letting the chips fall where they may. So what can we do?

We can educate the client and tell them we're going to go after organic rankings for those service cities, because that's just the way this works. That's the way it works for us, it's the way it works for our client and for his competitors, and unless we want to risk a really negative outcome for our own brand and our client's brand, we're stuck with this. But, at the end of the day, our job matters because we have provided the education and come up with a strategy for gaining maximum visibility for the client within the limits of the situation. To me, that's why what I do matters. I educate, even when it's saying things people would rather not hear

Hi Michael,

Yes, these are always head-scratchers. There are always a ton of nuances. So, let's start with the basics: Google's guidelines, which read:

• Individual practitioners and departments within businesses, universities, hospitals, and government buildings may have separate pages. See specific guidelines about individual practitioners and departments for more information.

• Departments within other business, universities, or institutions

  Departments within businesses, universities, hospitals, and government institutions may have their own listings on Google.

  Publicly-facing departments that operate as distinct entities should have their own page. The exact name of each department must be different from that of the main business and that of other departments. Typically such departments have a separate customer entrance and should each have distinct categories. Their hours may sometimes differ from those of the main business.

  • Acceptable (as distinct listings):
    • "Walmart Vision Center"
    • "Sears Auto Center"
    • "Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Dermatology"
  • Not acceptable (as distinct listings):
    • The Apple products section of Best Buy
    • The hot food bar inside Whole Foods Market

  For each department, the category that is the most representative of that department must be different from that of the main business and that of other departments.

• The main business "Wells Fargo" has the category "Bank" whereas the department "Wells Fargo Advisors" has the category "Financial Consultant"

• The main business "South Bay Toyota" has the category "Toyota Dealer" whereas the "South Bay Toyota Service & Parts" has the category "Auto Repair Shop" (plus the category "Auto Parts Store")

• The main business "GetGo" has the category "Convenience Store" (plus the category "Sandwich Shop") whereas the department "GetGo Fuel" has the category "Gas Station", and the department "WetGo" has the category "Car Wash"

So, in a nutshell, Google says that these different departments TYPICALLY have a unique customer entrance and unique categories. So, that's the first thing you have to look at for your client. Are there genuinely different doorways (or at least different front desks like in an auto dealership) that the consumer encounters? And, do unique primary categories exist for each business? If not, post-Possum, your listings are likely to get filtered out anyway if you create more than one of them, leaving just one of the departments visible at the automatic zoom level of Google Maps.

Google, you'll notice, makes zero mention of phone numbers in their explanation of department listings, but, elsewhere in the guidelines they do state:

Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.

• Use a local phone number instead of central, call center helpline number whenever possible.
• Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or "refer" users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business, including pages created on social media sites.
• The phone number must be under the direct control of the business.

So, Google doesn't like call centers, and from one Local SEO to another, I would strongly advise that you have a unique phone number for any listing you create (to prevent possible conflation of multiple listings) and that the number connects directly to the department being listed, not to a call center.

Hope these tips are helpful. Please don't hesitate to ask if you have further questions. As I've mentioned, there are so often peculiar nuances to this particular scenario.

Hi Gabe,

As James mentions, there's not a known number that would  = too many. What is known is that Google does filter out reviews if they arrive in unnatural patterns. A business that has been sitting in Google My Business for years and has only earned 15 reviews in that time suddenly acquiring 30 reviews in a month might, indeed, look odd and trip that filter. But those are not exact numbers.

I've never actually consulted with a college as a client before so the idea of a review campaign amongst students is a bit new to me. Just brainstorming here, off the cuff. In a traditional business setting, one fundamental technique of review acquisition to is ask your HAPPY customers to review you. You'll need to consider how to approximate this in an educational setting. How do you know which students are happy? Ones who have won some sort of award? Members of a winning rowing team? One idea might be former alumnae who have gone on to great things for which you know they credit the U, in part. If you simply do a student-body-wide ask, you are likely to end up with the sort of complaints seen here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+University+of+New+Mexico/@35.0843187,-106.6197812,15z/data=!4m7!3m6!1s0x0:0x7777c7361d5ed347!8m2!3d35.0843187!4d-106.6197812!9m1!1b1

So, it seems to me that, in order to control the velocity with which reviews come in and also to approach this as a business would, you'd need to focus on a small subset of students or former students for a given time period and then focus on another group.

I'd start by defining a goal for this project. What do you hope to achieve by earning more reviews? Then, begin experimenting with different forms of outreach that might contribute to this goal. And, of course, avoid known pitfalls.

1. Don't ask for too many reviews at once.

2. Don't specify that you want positive reviews.

3. Don't offer incentives/gifts of any kind.

4. Don't ask people who work for the U to review it.

Just some initial thoughts here. Hope they are helpful.

Hey There Garrett!

You're right that parallax has been the subject of some controversy when it comes to SEO. Here are a couple of good articles to dig into:

https://moz.com/blog/parallax-scrolling-websites-and-seo-a-collection-of-solutions-and-examples

https://www.semrush.com/blog/parallax-vs-seo-web-design/

In visiting your website, I noticed that your company offers SEO as a service, so it's super important that your team fully researches the pitfalls/benefits of optimizing in a parallax environment before offering this to clients. The articles I've linked to are a good start, but hopefully you can research this further. I'm by no means an expert at parallax, and I've asked a teammate to take a second look at your very good question to see if they can add more. I hope this is a helpful start to a big learning curve!

Hi There!

I'm so sorry, but I have no experience with this product. Maybe others in our community will?

In the meantime, just a word to the wise: modern Local SEO has moved away from the idea of building hundreds and hundreds of citations as a smart use of time/funding, as when you start talking numbers like that, you are likely talking about very low-quality directories that your customers will never see and that will have little or no effect on your local rankings.

Rather, these days, a typical approach to citation management would look something like this:

First, audit your existing citations by a) doing a lookup of your name/zip on a free tool like Moz Check Listing to discover where you have accurate, inconsistent, missing, incomplete and duplicate listings on the most important general local business data platforms, and, b) do direct searches in Google for your brand name and your industry/geography to see which platforms are coming up in the first 3-5 pages for your searches, again, to discover any missing or problem listings. This combination of efforts will turn up the platforms your consumers are seeing and that are most like having the greatest impact on your local rankings. Likely, were talking about 50 or so citations - not 500 of them, as you can see.

Next, once you've identified all problematic listings from the above 2 steps, you have 3 choices:

1. Correct everything manually, keeping track of all of these listings in a spreadsheet, including columns for the data they contain, their location, their status and any user/passwords you were obliged to create to set them up. Then, on a regular basis, you will want to manually monitor these listings for any changes that might occur (automation of bad data or third party edits).

2. Pay someone to do everything in option 1 for you, including the ongoing monitoring of the listings.

3. Use a citation management service. You might like to check out Moz Local if you've not done so before, as this is our product designed to manage your citations and monitor them on an ongoing basis for any changes. Moz Local covers the most important general platforms, and you might want to back this up with manually managing a handful of other citations if there are major industry-specific platforms in your industry (like Avvo for lawyers or ZocDoc for doctors). Using Moz Local tends to represent a major savings in effort on your part, and does contain that vital element of notifying you if your listing data changes (as well as other really cool features like review notifications). You might like to compare it to some of the other citation management services out there, like Whitespark or Yext.

In any case, you should not have to worry about hundreds and hundreds of citation regardless of how you approach their management - it's just not going to move the needle. These days, you want to get those core citations accurate, be sure you've dealt with any rank-draining duplicate listings and that you're monitoring your listings for changes. Then, move onto other areas of marketing that require more creative investments: content development, earning and building links, managing your reviews, social participation, offline marketing, etc.

Hope this helps!

It's always my pleasure! I appreciate the good question you asked.