Hey Chris,

Multi-practitioner business models have the option to either:

1. Promote the practice + promote the practitioners, or

2. Just promote the practice

If you go with the first, the main thing is to be sure that each practitioner has a unique landing page on the website (to which his/her citations link) and that each has his or her own phone number (separate from the practice's main phone number). Taking these precautions should normally prevent any issues with merging, but I am not quite sure what you mean about duplicate reviews. Are you saying that the patients are posting a review for the practice and then posting the same review again for a specific doctor? A little clarification on that might help.

If you go with the second option, then, yes, you can attempt to get rid of citations for the practitioners, but, because you are talking about a medical practice, it's very important to dig into Google's history with not closing doctor/dentist duplicates. It may be that the Yext rep with whom you're communicating is unaware of this. Note Linda Buquet's remarks on this previous Moz thread regarding this: https://moz.com/community/q/dental-practice-google-and-dentist-personal-google

Hope this give some good food for thought.

Hey There!

Important question ... why does the company have 80 websites? Are they being individually managed by the owner of each store, or are they all in the control of the central company?

If the latter, what you are describing is a strong illustration supporting the typical advice that it is generally better to build 1 powerhouse website for your brand than a large number of thin, weak, duplicative sites.

If this company was my client, I would be earnestly urging them to consolidate everything into a single site. If they are currently investing in maintaining 80 website, there's reason to hope that they've got the funding to develop a strong, unique landing page for each of the 80 locations on their main corporate website, and redirect the old sites to the central one. Check out how REI.com surfaces unique pages for all of their locations. It's inspiring how they've made each page unique. If your client could take a similar approach, they'd be on a better road for the future.

You would, of course, need to update all citations to point to the landing pages once you had developed them.

If, however, the 80 websites are being controlled by 80 different franchise location managers, what needs to be developed here is a policy that prevents these managers from taking the content of the corporation. If they want to each run a separate website, they need to take on the responsibility of creating their own content. And, of course, the corporate website needs to be sure it doesn't have internal duplicate content and is not taking content from its franchise managers, either. 80 separate websites should = 80 totally separate efforts. That's a lot to have going on, pointing back to the preferred method of consolidation wherever possible.

Hope this helps!

Hey Donald,

What I'm understanding is that your clients use

"I offer estate planning services"

as opposed to

"At Adams Law, comprehensive estate planning services have been designed to help you ..."

And that you feel the second example seems more professional. I can see where you're coming from. I can also see that overuse of the word 'I' can start to look rather narcissistic. There's an anecdote about Teddy Roosevelt writing a book so full of the word 'I' that his typesetters had to purchase more of that letter! And, interestingly, this same topic has been coming up in the 2016 primary cycle in which pundits are counting the number of times one Democratic candidate is using the word 'I' vs. the other using the word 'we'. The upshot is, at least in my view, that pronouns definitely set a tone and say a lot about a person or a business. Here's what I think:

1. Legal firms are supposed to sound professional because they deal in matters of serious import for their clients. Most people would not want to entrust their legal affairs to a law firm that seems sloppy or careless. So, a small but significant signal of professionalism is the company's name. Adams Attorneys At Law sounds very official, right? More so than "I do law and stuff like that." would. Then, too, web copy should always be modestly optimized with a brand's name, just for the sake of associating the brand's content with the brand's name in the user's mind.

2. However, mention of the brand's name does not need to exclude use of personal pronouns like 'We' or 'I'. As in, "I want every client of Adams Law to be empowered with accessible, affordable counsel." Or "We will make sure you feel comfortable at Adams Law from your first phone call, to your first meeting, to your final settlement." You can use both. A key point of using first person pronouns is to indicate that a human being or group of humans are communicating something. This is meant to engender a sense of approachability - of someone manning the ship, right? "We are here to help you" is more indicative of a personal communication than "Adams Law exists to help clients".

3. But how far you go with with this depends on the culture of your business. A lawyer who deals with family law may want to project more personal empathy than one who deals with taxes. Or, one who is managing wealth may want to project more of an energetic, hip vibe than one who is trying to appear aggressive because he takes criminal cases.

4. I've written copy for so many different industries over the past 10+ years and my preferred pronoun for nearly all business models is actually not 'I' or 'We'. It's 'YOU'. For most business models, I advocate that 'you' be the most frequently used pronoun, and that 'I' or 'We' come second to that and the brand comes third. How you finesse this relates to how formally a business interacts with its customers. From stuffy to downright laid back, knowing the preferred tone of a client's culture is what should set the tone for all copy, creating consistency and a clear message.

Hope this helps!

Hey Tom,

I see how this could be problematic. In general, Local SEOs will cite the guidelines Joey has, in which Google states they don't want this:

Location information, such as neighborhood, city, or street name, unless it is part of the real-world representation of the business.

So, short answer here is that you need to leave your name exactly as it appears in the real world on your websites and the citations that you can control (and, of course, your Google My Business listing). I wonder if it would be possible for you to reach out to the top 20 aggregators appearing for your core search and ask them to edit your listing name. If not, then the consolation here is that the playing field is level if competing colleges area all suffering the same fate with the aggregators. In other words, their percentage of NAP inconsistency would be the same as yours.

Anecdotally, what you're experiencing is also experienced by all multi-location businesses that list their locations on Facebook. Facebook won't let you have more than 1 FB Place with an identical name, so you have to be Joe's Diner Boston, Joe's Diner Chicago, Joe's Diner St. Paul, etc. Again, because their competitors are all in the same boat, it's something they don't really have to sweat.

100% NAP consistency isn't normally achievable. You want to be as consistent as you can, but don't stress about attaining absolute perfection, and my bet is that the inclusion of your city names on these aggregators is not hurting you very much, if at all. So, this would be a see-what-you-can-do-and-then-leave-it-at-that situation. Hope this helps! Interesting thread.

Hey There!

You have 2 possible approaches here:

1. Build a unique landing page on the website for each store if you feel you can create high quality content for each. This should be possible, if the project has the funding to post things like unique specials, events, products, offerings in each store on an ongoing basis. Link the Google My Business page and all other citations for each location to its unique landing page on the company website. A good example of this would be a site like REI.com. Go to http://www.rei.com/map/store and type in a geographic search. For example, searching for San Diego, CA, takes you here: http://www.rei.com/map/store#San Diego%2C CA. From there you can click on the map-based link to get to the individual page: http://www.rei.com/stores/san-diego.html. Look at what a nice job they've done with that page!

2. If the project seems overwhelming, the alternative would be something more like this: http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/restaurant_locator.html. When you type in a zip code, it simply brings up a map. There does not seem to be a unique page for each store. No doubt, the corporation felt such an approach would be futile given that McDonald's has some 35,000 locations globally and they all serve basically the same thing (though I have heard you can get an unlisted green chile cheeseburger at the McDonald's in Window Rock, AZ. in Navajo Country).

Which approach is stronger? #1, in most cases, but whether you can take that approach is going to depend on the funding for the project.

Hope this helps.

My pleasure, Michael!

Hey Donald!Great topic. Building city landing pages is a common best practice for service area businesses with staff who travel to clients to serve them in a variety of towns beyond the town in which the company is physically located. Does your client go to clients' homes/businesses, or do his clients come to him? If the latter, then city landing pages are unlikely to be a good fit, but if the former, here's how you evaluate this:

Bad City Landing Pages:

• Have duplicate content

• Have thin or poorly-written content

• Have no reason, beyond a grab for rankings, to exist

• Are buried somewhere deep in the architecture of the site instead of in a high level menu

• Contain large blocks of zip codes or similar spammy stuff

• Contain fake or virtual addresses for the purpose of trying to appear to have a physical location where none exists

Good City Landing Pages:

• Have the absolute best content you are capable of creating, including text, videos, photos, testimonials and anything else you can think of to make these pages terrific

• Do not duplicate one another in any way

• Actually serve customers, rather than simply grabbing for rankings

• Are linked to from a high level menu

• Cover a reasonable number of cities for the business

The challenge facing any service area business when embracing the creation of city landing pages is to make them as interesting, unique and helpful as possible. This can be a challenge when you essentially offer the same service in each location, so this is where your marketing smarts can help.

For example, you might have the client take a camera along to do video documentary of his projects in each given city. Or, you might ask 5 really happy customers to allow you to do a shoot of a video testimonial for each of the given cities. Or, you might be running a geo-sensitive business in which advice for customers in one city might be different than advice for customers in a different city (not likely in your client's industry, but applicable when it comes to things like terrain, weather, laws or other micro conditions).

As the marketer, you can be a huge help in assisting the client in a brainstorming session that will surface different topics and media that can make each city landing page different and useful for customers. If the marketer or the business owner are not up to the task, my advice is always going to be not to undertake the project. This really requires the best effort both can make, and it can be a truly fun and educational undertaking for both the owner and his marketer.

Hope this helps!