Hey There

While I haven't personally experimented with this, these resources interested me and I thought they might interest you, too:

http://www.bestpestmarketing.com/nearbynow/

http://www.localsearchforum.com/local-seo-ranking/17695-nearby-now-heat-maps-reviews-does-anyone-use.html

What surprises me is the lack of coverage of this app in the past year. If you set your search parameter to the past year, you'll see very few mentions. I'm not sure why that is, but it actually took me a minute to even remember the app you were referencing when I first read this thread. Then, I remembered seeing it discussed in 2014. If you do play around with it and like the results, I'd love it if you'd update this thread with your experience, as there just doesn't seem to be a ton of coverage on it.

Hi Andrea!

I'm so happy this thread helped you! You wrote:

"From what I read, the best solution would be instead putting the blog on the main site and this discussion confirmed this."

YES! Absolutely.

Regarding what to do with the old domains, I go with choice #1 on that.

Hi Rosemary,

Oooh, this is a toughie. I have no experience with Local SEO in China. I know Baidu Maps outside of China used to be powered by Nokia Here, but since they sold their mapping unit to German car manufacturers, I'm not sure what happened with that. I believe Baidu Maps inside of China is powered by NavInfo, but I don't know anything beyond this.

So, my suggestions here, lacking concrete knowledge to share with you about this would be:

1. Go directly to the blogger who wrote that article you linked to and try leaving a blog comment asking this. If the blogger doesn't reply or is no longer there, contact the company and ask if you can book an hour of their consulting time to be brought up to speed on the regulations regarding local business submission in China.

2. If that doesn't work, see if you can track down Nyagoslav Zhekov of Whitespark. He has done more International Local SEO than anyone else I know, and as he was living in Asia for a time, might know more about Baidu Maps than the average Local SEO.

3. And, if that doesn't work, you might scroll through our recommend list to see if any companies there specialize in International SEO: https://moz.com/rand/recommended-list-seo-consultants/ Maybe get some consulting from there.

Clearly, this is important if you've got a client in China, but resources in the U.S. may be hard to come by for this, as finding an International SEO who does Local in China may be a rare flower

Hey Dominick,

You know - honestly what I'd do here is comment on Joy's post with your question! I bet she'll reply and because it appears she has dealt with your exact situation before, she might be able to offer some additional suggestions like that. Why not go right to the source?

Thanks, Dominick,

This scenario is actually more complex than it may seem at first glance because of a couple of things. It would seem like the obvious step would simply be to report your sold branch as closed and move on, letting the new owner open a new GMB listing for their new purchase. However, before you jump into doing this, do read this: http://imprezziomarketing.com/seo-blog/google-maps/is-permanently-closed-killing-your-ranking-4-case-studies/

I would not want you reporting the branch as closed to impact your other open branches, so please do read that case study to see if this helps shine some light on your strategy for this.

Hi Dominick,

So, is the new owner going to rename this old branch of yours to be something different? Have you discussed with the owner what their plans are, in terms of website and Local SEO efforts for the newly acquired branch?

Hi Jonas,

If re-branding is not an option, then it sounds like you will continue to experience NAP inconsistency, of the type you've noticed and explained. Without settling on a single brand for all references across the web, inconsistency sounds unavoidable.

Hi Lauren,

Also wanted to add a link to a related discussion here:

https://moz.com/community/q/does-multiple-sites-that-relate-to-one-company-hurt-seo

Hi Jonas!

I haven't had to deal with special characters much, personally, but here's how I look at this. It's going to be most important that your website and your Google My Business page match up - so, it sounds like Google is supporting your special character, so be sure your website is branded that way, too. As for your other citations, I do feel some concerns. You may need to stick to building citations only on those directories that support your special character, or what you will end up with is a bunch of citations that are sharing your phone number, address and website URL, but not your name.

Unfortunately, even if you do stick to building citations only on platforms which support the special character, you are likely to run into a problem because of the way data is shared around the local ecosystem. For example, if you create a citation on golocal and they do accept your character, but they then push that data to das ortliche, and this platform doesn't support the character, it could automatically change the N°1 to No1, meaning that citation inconsistency could end up being auto-generated around the web for the business, simply because of the way data is shared (see: https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-europe). So, basically, I think you're going to have NAP inconsistencies no matter what you do here.

Is it a big enough problem for the business to consider re-branding? That really depends on how well their business is already known. If they aren't well-known, a re-brand might make sense.

Hi Gayane,

We have a long recent thread on this same topic here, https://moz.com/community/q/does-multiple-sites-that-relate-to-one-company-hurt-seo , which you might like to check out

So glad it helped, Rich, and hope no one drowned in that sea of words