Hi Lingke!

Good feedback from everyone here. I just wanted to be sure to throw into the mix that fact that John Mueller specifically stated last December that Google does not want markup on on-site testimonials:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/wY1vF2RRos4/discussion

More on this here:

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local/26385-say-what-google-says-dont-add-review-markup-your-customer-reviews.html

Hi Rosemary,

Thanks for the clarification. For a pharmacy chain (or any other franchise) here is what would typically be appropriate:

1. You have a single website.This website has some basic pages like home, about, specials, contact and what have you.

2. In addition to this, you build a unique page of high quality for each of your locations. I don't recommend subdomains. I recommend subfolders. So, this would look like: thepharmacy.com/sugar-land for your store in Sugar Land Texas, and thepharmacy.com/dallas, for your store in Dallas. If you have more than one location in a city like Dallas, your URLs might look like thepharmacy.com/dallas-deep-ellum and thepharmacy.com/dallas-highland-park. Put the complete contact info (NAP) at the top of each page and then create strong content to make the pages interesting, helpful and unique.

3. From your Sugar Land citations, across the web, be sure you are linking to the landing page you've created on the site for Sugar Land, ditto for Dallas citations, etc.

This would be considered a standard methodology for any multi-location business.

How you then showcase these pages on the website needs to be dictated by the number of locations you have. You want them to be easy to find. You might check out a chain like REI.com. Look at how they are surfacing locations for their users and how they are making their pages unique. They do a good job!

Hope this helps!

Hey Rosemary,

Sometimes, local lingo can be a bit of an obstacle in having a clear conversation. I want to be sure I understand what you are saying here when you are talking about 'listings'. To me, a listing is a citation - such as your Google+ Local listing, your Yelp listing, your Bing Places listing, etc. I believe you may be talking about city landing pages on your website, instead. Is this what you are describing:

1. You have a multi-location business with physical offices in various locales?

2. You do not have a strong page on the website for each of these offices? Instead, all of your search engine results, including local pack rankings and organic rankings, are pointing to your home page?

3. You have a unique set of citations for each physical office? You have a Google+ Local page for each, a Bing listing for each, a Best of the Web listing for each, a Yelp listing for each, etc?

Is this all correct? Please, provide as much detail as would be helpful.

Hi Henya!

Great question! For many years, Google was not in favor of toll free numbers as primary numbers. It was standard advice that you absolutely had to use a local area code number, instead, both on Google and in all your citations. However, over the past couple of years, we saw a change with this and I began noticing quite a few listings listings (particularly hotels) with 800 numbers on them. That was very surprising.

However, I believe there is more to this story, because it seems to me that in the past year or so, I notice that I am, again, no longer encountering 800 numbers with any frequency in the 3-packs, hotel packs, local finder, etc. Do some of your own searches for hotels boston, hotels santa fe, hotels dallas, etc. and look at the 'more' link that takes you to the local finder results. You'll likely see all local area code phone numbers. Whether these are the result of the business owner consciously ensuring that their primary number is local, based on older version of Google's guidelines, or because Google is somehow manually overriding the suggestion of a toll free number as primary, I'm not sure. I suspect it's the former. Nevertheless, there is nothing about toll free numbers in the guidelines, which read:

Website & Phone

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.

So, officially, Google is not forbidding toll free numbers, but personally, I would still avoid using them if possible, because of the following:

1. A local area code number is a signal of 'localness', just like a zip code. You always want to appear as local as possible.

2. Moz Local Search Ranking Factors found 'Listing 800 Number as Only Phone Number on My Business Page' to be the 16th most negative ranking factor. So, there is some negativity suspected regarding 800 numbers, though the language here is referring to having this as your only number. The factor does not speak to having 800 as primary and local as secondary, but still, there is still some perception out there as toll free numbers being negative.

3. Finally, unless the business is something like a hotel, I do believe that using an 800 number as primary could potentially make you less powerful than competitors who are using a local number.

So, in a nutshell, if your client has a local area code phone number - yes, I do feel it would be worth it edit citations to list it as the primary number and relegate any toll free numbers to the secondary field.

Hope this helps!

Hi KJ,

Agree with the consensus here that building mini sites is not the right approach. Take whatever energy you would have put into developing these and channel it into making the landing pages for your locations the best in their industry/towns. I was just watching a great little video by Darren Shaw in which this is one of the things he covers. Might be worth sharing with your team:

http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/70-website-optimization-basics-for-local-seo

And earlier this year, Phil Rozek penned some pretty fine tips on making your pages strong:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/04/06/25-principles-of-building-effective-city-pages-for-local-seo/

I am curious about one element of your original post. You mention, "We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations." I wasn't sure whether you were saying that you've never done well in them, were doing well in them until something changed (such as the universal rollout of Local Stacks) or something else. With the latter, I would guess that a huge number of businesses are now struggling to cope with the fact that there are only 3 spots to rank for any keyword, necessitating greater focus on lower volume keywords/categories, organic and paid results. Everybody but the top 3 businesses is now in this boat. Very tough.

Hey There,

No I wouldn't worry about that. Most optimized local business sites have complete NAP in schema in the footer and then that is repeated on the Contact Page. I really doubt there's any problem with this.

Hey Michael!

Very good and creative tips from Moosa and Umar about trying to track this down, so I'll just respond to the part of your question dealing with what to tell clients.

100% consistency may not be a realistic goal for any business, precisely because of a scenario like yours in which old or bad data ends up on a directory you just can get connected up with. In such cases, judging the overall importance of the directory in question becomes key. If the directory is ranking in the top few pages for your client's name, then incorrect NAP there warrants making every possible effort toward resolution. But, if it's an obscure result, make normal efforts and then let it go at that if you can't find any way to correct it. Document your work for clients and pre-set expectations that you are shooting for high consistency, but not perfect consistency. Some of the smartest citation building experts I know have told me that 100% consistency is not only frequently impossible, but not even actually essential.

Hope this helps!

Hi Steven,

There is no ideal length. Different platforms have different minimum and maximum requirements, and if you're using Yext, I would expect they have that, too. In Moz Local, we have a 250 character minimum, which is pretty average. In manual citation building, it's long been considered a best practice to write a number of descriptions of varying lengths for use on various platforms, but with the advent of automated citation building tools, you typically would just write one. So, I'd say 250 minimum, but definitely write more if there's more to say. Be concise, but take the time to highlight the key points you feel will influence customers (or the congregation, in your case!) most. Hope this helps!

Hi Christina,

Unfortunately, Google does not always reflect how things work in the real world. Their policy on virtual offices is clear and they are also not in favor of re-directing phone numbers. Home-based business are not the same as virtual offices. Google make provisions for home-based businesses via the hide address function in their dashboard. The owner is providing their real home address but then opting to have it hidden. A virtual office is providing an address at which the business isn't actually located, and this is what Google does not want. But, it's always up to the business owner to interpret the guidelines, assess risks and go with the strategy they feel confident with.

I can completely understand your position that Google 'should' see things a certain way. There are many things Google does with which I don't personally agree and their weird treatment of SABs over the years has always vexed me, but, it won't do me any good to insist that Google should see things my way if, in going against their stated wishes, I end up penalized. Google isn't interested in how I think things should work. They are interested in how they think things should work, and if I want to win the game using their system, I consider playing by their rules a prerequisite for participation.

Hi Jes,

You can approach this in the manner you've specified with a page for each city/service combo, but what I find is the challenge there is coming up with really valuable content in this scenario. My preference is to go with:

• A page for every city

• A page for every service

In other words, let you your service pages be about the services, because they are the same services regardless of where they are rendered. If you've only got 2 locations, you can of course mention those 2 cities on the service pages, but the main keywords on them should relate to the service. Then, have separate pages for each of your cities. Link to everything from the top level menu.

That being said, if you've got awesome writers and large resources, you could go with the approach you've specified to cover every possible keyword-city combo, but my advice would only be to go this way if you have the budget/available talent to make each of these pages amazing instead of so-so. What you definitely don't want is a big set of thin or duplicate pages that have been created solely to cover the combos rather than to educate and help the user.

Hope this helps!

Hey Umar!

Really appreciate you taking the time to respond to this thread, but I'd urge you to consider that just because businesses may be getting away with the violation today, doesn't mean that they'll continue to do so tomorrow. Bending Google's rules to suit one's circumstances may not be a sustainable approach to local search marketing, given the numerous crackdowns we've seen over the years. They happen quickly and can sometimes be all but impossible to recover from.

Hi There,

Very good question! While you can use any address you like on your own website, virtual offices are expressly forbidden by Google's guidelines. See: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en  The guidelines state:

Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location. PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable.

While Umar is correct that many companies are violating Google's guidelines, (and, yes, getting away with it!) the problem with doing something you know Google doesn't want is that you never know when consequences may arise. If this were your own business and you were willing to take the risk of a possible takedown of the listing, then it would be a risk/benefit question you would need to carefully consider. It's different when it comes to advising a client. Most good Local SEOs will agree that advising a client to violate a Google guideline isn't the right thing to do. Some folks will argue that they can profit short-term from a guideline violation, and that's likely true, but most clients care so much about their businesses that they are looking for advice that will help them both now and in the future - they want a sustainable marketing strategy.

Highly recommended reading on virtual office takedowns: http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/26844-busted-warning-attorneys-regus-non-compliant-offices.html

You've asked an important question. It's these types of questions that can help us to be so useful to our clients!