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Oops, above post was from me Sorry, I was logged into a different account when responding.

Hi Morgan!

Just to clarify, you are opening a new office in TN but are still maintaining an office in Ohio? Or, are you saying you will no longer have a physical office in Ohio? Please, do be sure to explain this as it matters a great deal.

1. If you are running 2 branches now, with face-to-face contact with your customers, you are entitled to 2 Google+ Local pages - one for each branch. You are also eligible to build a unique set of citations for each of these offices on the various local business data platforms. You are not eligible to build 2 listings per branch on any platform, including Google. Yes, both branches need their own local area code phone numbers.

2. If you will no longer be maintaining an office in Ohio, then you cannot continue to list it in Google and should not have a citation set for it. Rather, after you've moved, you should update your existing Google+ Local page to reflect your new office location and update your other citations accordingly.

Hope this helps, but please feel free to provide further details if I've misunderstood any part of your scenario. Also, do refer to the Google guidelines ... they help a ton in matters like these: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Wow, great discussion going on here, everybody!

Marina, you would use local business Schema markup on the individual listings. So, markup for plumber A and markup for plumber B ... but not local business markup for the page itself.

...At least, I'm pretty sure that's what you're asking

Hey Jacob!

Just to be clear - I am not talking about the practice. That can surely have a Google+ Local page ... 4 of them, in fact, if there are 4 branches. My remarks relate only to the doctors. I want to be sure that was super clear

Hi Ricky,

If the doctors are moving from place to place, that would seem to me like it might fall under Google's guidelines about ineligible business models including holding classes in someone else's building. Let me dig that up:

An ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don't own or have the authority to represent. Please coordinate with your host to have your information displayed on the page for their business within their "Introduction" field.

So, it kind of sounds to me like your doctors are holding 'meetings' at various locations rather than having a permanent location, in which case, I would be hesitant to create Google+ Local pages for them. By that logic, the same doctor could have a Google+ Local page for 4 different locations ... and that doesn't sound right to me.

Regarding using an email address instead of a phone number ... I'm not sure what you mean. You can't put an email address in the phone number field of the GMB dashboard, so not sure what you are considering there.

Hey Ricky,

Good answer from Travis, and the guidelines he links to exactly describe Google's preferences regarding naming conventions for multi-practitioners, etc. Things to be aware of:

1. Because doctors do leave practices on a regular basis, you need to be aware of the closed listing phenomenon: http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/27109-can-closed-google-local-listings-kill-ranking-important-new-troubleshooting-tip.html

2. Google does not delete duplicates for doctors: http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-duplicates-doctor-dentist-lawyer.html  (recommend further research of Linda Buquet's work of doctor/dentist duplicates

3. If you're going to do a unique Google+ Local page for each doctor, be sure it links to a landing page on the site for the doctor ... not to the homepage for the practice.

I'm not saying you shouldn't create a unique Google+ Local page for each doctor, but if you decide to recommend this strategy, do fully research the issues of dr/dentist duplicates and closed listings before you make an official recommendation to the client. Hope this helps!

Hey David,

Yes, totally get where you are coming from on this, and agree that there is still a small edge in keyword domains. I predict that's one of those signals that is diminishing over time and may one day hold little power, so for me, I'd advised starting with a branded domain, planning to WIN now and in the future

Aw, thanks, EGOL Whoa - looking at those SERPs, I've been a busy bee.

Hey Corn!

Most Local SEO publications don't publish daily, but here's one that does almost every day:

http://streetfightmag.com/

Now, beyond this, here's a short list of many of the sources I check every week for possible posts:

http://www.blumenthals.com/blog (Mike Blumenthal is widely considered one of the best Local SEOs on the planet)

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/blog/ (Phil Rozek writes some of the very best Local SEO tutorials you'll ever read and is a prolific blogger)

http://www.localsearchforum.com/ (Linda Buquet's one-of-a-kind, prodigiously active forum)

http://www.whitespark.ca/blog (When Darren Shaw or his partners post, totally must-read)

http://screenwerk.com (Valuable industry insights from Greg Sterling)

https://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo (Here's the Local SEO category of the Moz Blog)

https://moz.com/ugc/category/local-seo (Here's the Local category of the YouMoz Blog)

http://localu.org/blog/ (Not updated frequently, but when it is, the authors and posts are excellent)

http://searchengineland.com/library/channel/local (Here's the local column of Search Engine Land)

https://moz.com/learn/local (On this page, you'll find the signup for the Moz Local 7 Pack - a free monthly newsletter highlighting our take on the 7 best Local stories each month)

http://www.localsearchassociation.org/main/blog.aspx (I've noticed some good posts from these folks lately and the blog seems pretty actively updated)

That should get you started. I further recommend that you follow some of the above folks on Twitter, in case they are surfacing things on other blogs worth reading. Hope this helps!

Hmm, $200 a month is a pretty small budget. In your client's market, it is a really small budget! His competitors are almost certainly spending 5, 7 or 10 x more than than that a month. Look at a respected service like LocalSpark (https://www.whitespark.ca/localspark-local-seo-service) Average budget for them is about $1500 a month, with a proviso that they may need to charge more if warranted.

What can you do for $200 a month? Perhaps offer him a couple of consulting hours once a month to give him ideas for things he should then undertake himself? From personal experience, I wouldn't even begin to offer implementation at that price point, unless it was writing maybe one blog post a month for him, which just isn't going to get him far in that market. So, maybe you can be his ideas man for that budget ... or maybe he'd better go on EGOL's diet and save up some money to be able to take a better approach in future.

Hi Mike,

Unfortunately - being under-funded in a highly competitive market is not a recipe for success. I understand the difficulty here, from past work with very small businesses. You can do a ton for a small business in a small market, but you may not be able to do much for them in larger markets, and it's really important to set correct expectations about this if such clients are determined to hire you. If your client's competitors have more to invest in their efforts, they do have the upper hand, and it isn't reasonable for any client who can't compete financially with his competitors to expect their SEO to work magic that will somehow make up for this budget problem.

But, there are some grace notes here, because SEO isn't 100% about money. It's also about creativity. Here are some suggestions:

1. Presumably, your client is paying you for X amount of hours of work a month. If, in that time, you have a staff member who can come up with something outside-the-box (perhaps a video or social campaign) that can generate a new, fresh burst of interest, this could make some phones ring and could perhaps move the client up a bit ranking-wise due to an increase in human activity on the site, links, social mentions, etc.

2. If the client is finding it impossible to budget to complete for head terms, consider going after long tail terms instead. In the legal industry, all terms are likely to be very tough to compete for in most cities, but the longer tail ones may be slightly less competitive.

3. Consider hyperlocal optimization. If your client's city has distinct neighborhoods or districts, create new content to focus on his services in these hyperlocal areas. They will, perforce, be less full of competitors than the entire city will be. For further reading, see: https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid

4. You ask how the client can appear for all his desired terms in the local packs of results. There are several hundred factors involved. Audit your client using these 2 resources:

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

https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit

Then, audit their competitors to the best of your ability to see if there are any weak points. If you can make these weak points your client's strong ones, this could help, if the budget is there for you to do the work involved.

5. Finally, you mention some spam score and back link issues. I'm no expert here, but if you could explain, in detail, what issues are being reported, I'll make sure you receive a clear explanation of this, either from me, or from a team mate. Hopefully the community will provide feedback, too

6. If competitors are genuinely spamming Google, it might be worthwhile to report them: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-report-spam-to-us-15187.html There may be more recent posts about this elsewhere, but I remember the above video.

Hope this helps!

Hi Blake,

I think David makes a lot of good points here. I'd like to offer some different thoughts of my own on this, building somewhat on what David has already said, but maybe taking it a step beyond that.

Personally, I think brands are more important than any specific keyword reach can be. Let's just think about this site we're both on right now ... Moz.com. It's not mozseattle.com or mozinboundmarketingsoftware.com or what have you. The domain and the brand are one, making them both mutually, immediately recognizable as 'the' Moz entity. Another example - let's think about the 49ers. Their official website is 49ers.com. They don't have to be 49ersfootballteamsanfrancisco.com. They've built a brand that stands for itself.

Unless a city or keyword is part of your legal business name, I think domains like this can look like kind of an awkward, not very sophisticated reach for search engine rankings:

plumbersanfrancisco.com

sanfranciscobestplumber.com

myplumberinsanfrancisco.com

Truly, I'd rather see walkerplumbing.com if the name of the business is Walker Plumbing. If I've used their service before and they did a good job and then I need a plumber later, I may have some chance of remembering that the guys who came out were Walker Plumbing. If I see that domain in the SERPs, recognition happens. I'm not going to recognize plumbersanfranciso.com as anything if the Walker guys chose that domain instead, hoping it would give them a bit of a ranking edge.

If you are planning to build a great brand, my personal choice would be to go with a domain name that matches it as closely as possible and focus on much more robust tactics for earning rankings. Added to this, putting a city name in your domain may become an albatross for the business if you earn enough success to want to expand to other cities. It could actually limit you.

I like brands I can instantly recognize. They are memorable and convenient for users. This is a good reason to choose your business name wisely from the get-go, so that it legitimately includes keywords from the get-go (i.e. naming your business Stellar Web Design vs. just Stellar or something like that).

Just my 2 cents - hope they are interesting pennies

Hey Patrick,

Adam's most important tip is to use creativity to not make these page read in a robotic, repetitive fashion ... that applies to how you write all tags, as well as main body copy. (Good point, Adam!). Personally, I wouldn't worry about a number of times you repeat a keyword in the text. Trying to meet numeric quotas can kill creativity. Write as beautifully and helpfully as you can on every page you publish, and you'll probably find that you are naturally optimizing all tags and text without having to jump through any hoops to do so.

Hey There!

In cases like these where you're in doubt about a given practice, your first stop should always be Google's own guidelines: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Check out the section on the business name, which reads:

Your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers.

And be sure to read the whole section on this so that you can explain these types of policies to clients. Thank goodness for guidelines!

I'm not 100% sure what your other question is about accounts. Please feel free to clarify that. Thanks and good luck with your client!

Hi John,

Also see the classic post from Ed Reese: http://localu.org/blog/how-to-segment-local-search-analytics/

Hey There,

Your question is a great one, but unfortunately, the answer is likely known only to a few engineers at Google. Google's choice to vary from 10 packs to 7 Packs to 3 Packs and now Snack Packs for various industries over the years has long been a matter of speculation. There have even been mind-boggling times when only a one-box would show (and usually a spammy one at that) for queries for which there was plenty more data. Why is this? Some suggest it has to do with the competitiveness of a query in a given industry or geography. Others have suggested at times that Google was making a conscious choice to reduce the local footprint in the SERPs. What has been standard through all this is fluctuation. Google is constantly testing what they feel delivers the most value to users and makes most sense for Google. There is no known magic number for how Google determines which type of pack treatment a query deserves, including whether it deserves any type of pack at all.

3 Packs are tough. Giving an entire city/industry only 3 spots can feel kind of miserly and frustrating for everyone who isn't numbers 1-3. It means having to work harder, longer and with more creativity if you want to be among the chosen few. My personal view of this is that all pack results must be viewed as possibly transitory and as a test by Google, because they can change overnight, both in terms of the pack number and in the order of rank.

One thing to remember here - don't forget to educate clients regarding the user-as-centroid phenomenon. There can be some hope in this, knowing that a client's customers are likely seeing different local pack results based on their physical location, again, both in terms of pack number and order of rank. I've trained people just one city away from me and have personally experienced how totally different their SERPs can be from mine for identical queries. Hyperlocal optimization and long-tail optimization may both be important considerations here.

Sorry not to have an authoritative answer to your question, but I hope these thoughts help form a good mindset for you to share with clients.

Hi There!

Recommended reading: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit

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

http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/seo/onpage-optimization-local-seo-perfectly-optimized-local-page/

Hope these help

Hi Pete,

Hmm ... could be my Yankee lack of knowledge here. What is a tool hire affiliate? This isn't an industry with which I'm familiar here in the US, but my best guess is that you rent tools (like mowing machines or bulldozers) to people. Yea or nay? At any rate, it sounds like what you are talking about might be similar to something we used to have here in which industrial strength vacuum cleaners (hoovers) are located at the front of grocery stores. The stores don't own the machines. Rather, the machine owner has a sort of kiosk within the store from which they rent their machines. Is this similar? In such a case, you'd need to have pages specifying that your products can be found INSIDE such-and-such market at 123 Front Street. You can create web-based content for these, but should scrutinize the Google guidelines to see whether you qualify for Google+ Local pages or not: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Does this help, Pete?

Hi Cornelius!

Good for you for getting your citations underway for this client. Without actually being able to audit the specific business, my suggestions will have to be general. Some things I'd consider:

1. If you feel that the number of citations you've built isn't resulting in as many calls as you would expect, the first thing I'd focus on is how usuable the website is. If you've earned good rankings and citations are taking potential customers to the site and the phones aren't ringing, then website quality issues could be causing conversion issues. There could be website improvements you could make for both desktop and mobile users that could increase conversions.

2. How well do you feel you understand this business' customer base? The product in question would make me want to research this as thoroughly as possible. For example, is the product mainly purchased by elders, some of who may not be as tech-savvy as other groups and who might be more trusting of offline forms of media? Or, is it the children of parents who require a lift chair? What age group would these children be who are making purchasing decisions? Is your marketing geared to this age range and trust signals they most trust? Or, is it, perhaps, differenty-abled people of all ages, many of whom are going to be super tech savvy? I'm afraid I don't have the market research at hand to answer these kinds of questions, but if it were my client, I'd definitely want those answers to be sure that everything my agency was producing was appropriately geared to the right audience.

3. How are you doing with reviews? Are numbers and sentiment commensurate with competitors' review profiles or is there a deficiency there that a well-implemented review acquisition program could remedy? If your customer is having trouble getting going with reviews, consider a paid product like GetFiveStars

4. How's your content? Do you have useful, fresh, unique content of high quality on the site or could there be issues with thin, unhelpful content that is failing to persuade users to pick up the phone?

5. Don't overlook the power of images. Google has been quoted as saying that images on Google+ Local pages can measurably increase click-through rates. Have you got the best possible images there?

6. Don't overlook video marketing. It's seriously powerful in some industries. Anecdotally, I was consulting with a business at one point with a user base made up primarily of elders. The info was that most of their clients weren't very apt to watch much online video, but they did watch DVDs. The company found a way to inexpensively produce high quality, short DVDs which they mailed to prospective customers so that they could see the product in action. These videos can, of course, also be published online for a user base that is comfortable with YouTube, etc., but again, be sure you know the audience.

These are just some ideas off the top of my head. I hope they are helpful as starters for brainstorming. Good luck with your marketing!

Hi Pete,

I want to be sure I'm clearly understanding your business model. You are saying yours is an e-commerce site, which is most commonly a virtual model, but you are also saying you have locations. Are these locations physical locations unique to your business (not like having your products in someone else's store) and do your employees interact face-to-face with customers who come to rent your products? If yes to all these, then there is no problem with you having a page for each of your physical shops - no problem at all. Just be sure each page you create is unique and useful and linked to from your navigation.

Please, let me know if there is some facet of this I'm not quite getting. For now, the practice of having a unique page for each of your shops is still a best practice.

Hi Travis,

I think, in addition to the advice David has given you regarding starting your work with ensuring that your citations are in good order (do a quick check to start you out on moz.com/local/search) on the major citation sources, there are two categories of links that would be most helpful to you:

1. A presence on any locally-relevant site of high quality

2. A presence on any industry-relevant site of high quality, regardless of its location

So, for example, you could aim to get a good profile going on your city's chamber of commerce. In addition to that, let's say you're in the fence building business. In that case, a presence on any contracting industry sites would be helpful to you. This might include places you're accredited or otherwise associated, regardless of if they are physically located in your city or a completely different state.

A two-pronged approach to examining your opportunities should cover the waterfront.

Hey Adrian!

Definitely keep this all under one roof, as others have said. Focus on building out super content about the different services and you should benefit the overall brand from all this work instead of divvying it up between multiple sites. *Do remember, one location only entitles you to one Google+ Local page, regardless of the number of services offered, unless you have a multi-dentist practice, in which case you can build a Google+ Local page for each practitioner. That scenario can enable you to do interesting things with the categories - optimizing one listing for a certain type of service and another listing for another service, provided you're adhering to the guidelines. Only proviso here is to be aware of historic problems with dealing with doctor/dentist duplicates in Google's system.

Hi Nichole,

Wow - sounds like you're getting it right in a lot of areas. That's fantastic, and so good that the landing pages you've created for the 2 physical locations include video, etc. Regarding the possible project of creating a new set of landing pages for your non-location cities, here's what I think: to cover 3 states, you'd have to build thousands of these to cover every possible town and city. Given the vast resources it would take to make this many pages unique, I would suggest a more refined approach. Perhaps something like this -

• Identify 3-5 most important location-less cities in each of the 3 states.

• Over the next year, task staff with doing photo or video documentary of beautiful projects in each of the target cities.

• Write text descriptions of each documented project.

• Secure good testimonials from the associated homeowners

• Create one other unique section of the page for each target city showcasing information that is not on any of the other pages. The sky is the limit with this. You might do cleaning tips for certain types of flooring, explain sustainable flooring choices, showcase made in the USA products, interview the business owner or staff members, offer a city-specific special, etc.

At the end of the year, you will have added 9-15 extremely strong pages to the top-level menu of your website that you can then hopefully build up internal linking to as well as hopefully earning some inbound links, too. Whether you expand beyond this to further cities should be determined on the success of this initial project, but at any rate, I don't believe this approach could hurt you, but it could certainly help you.

Hope this helps!

Hi Steven,

Coincidentally, we have a very similar thread going on right now for a church in Texas:

https://moz.com/community/q/an-apparent-ranking-mystery

You might want to read that and see if it helps answer some or all of your questions.

There are hundreds of factors that contribute to local rankings, including things you can't control like the age of a site or the user-as-centroid phenomenon. What you can have more control over are:

1. Website quality, usability and optimization

2. Citation consistency and growth

3. Review acquisition

4. Social marketing

In auditing your client's site and comparing it with his closest competitors, be sure you are really considering your most important terms. As has been highlighted in the other thread I've linked to, a term like Churches is really generic. To me (and other responders on that thread) it seems much more relevant to rank for the specific type of church (Baptist, Catholic, etc.)

Hope you'll pop over there and read the discussion. I think you'll find it relevant.

Hi Andrew,

I agree with what Tim and David are saying here ... part of this does depend on how successfully these 5 sites are currently performing for you. The fact that you're pondering this a bit makes me wonder if the sites aren't doing as well as you think they should. I'm having a little trouble envisioning the reason behind 5 sites for a photo booth company, but it's not an industry with which I've ever consulted.. Are the 5 services so distinct that they really warrant 5 sites, or are they all essentially related?

Hi Pete,

Hmm ... it doesn't sound right to me, either. Almost sounds like doorway pages, though without actually seeing it, I'm not sure about that. It doesn't sound blackhat, per se, but it sounds like it might not be going in a Google-approved direction. I guess what you'd want to do here is to see if you can do something similar, highlighting your own most popular categories, without making them into navigation-less islands. Interesting topic!

Hi Nichole!

Thanks for sharing some more about this. I totally know how frustrating it can be when competitors with supposedly-taboo practices are surpassing you in the results. I would be quite surprised if the secret sauce for them in stuffing the footer unless Google hasn't looked at this area of their data in years, but I do have some suggestions. My advice here is general, in the absence of actually being able to look at your client's site and his competitors' sites, too.

1. Be sure the city landing pages you've build are of high quality - no thin/duplicate content. Building statewide landing pages is really a tough challenge when what you are offering is essentially the same service in every city. Showcasing completed projects in the various cities and getting user generated content from your happy customers will likely be key here.

Your two truly local geoterms relate to the 2 cities in which you have physical locations. My advice is to put 75% of your effort into developing a strong local pack presence in the 2 physical cities and use the additional 25% to see what you can do organically for the non-physical cities. This 25% may be devoted to improving your on-site landing page quality or to other efforts like social promotions and sharing, video marketing and offline promotions. Start with 5 non-physical location cities in which you would benefit most from visibility for and develop a creative approach to marketing in these communities. If organic efforts fail, you may need to consider PPC for these location-less cities, depending upon the competitiveness of the various geographies.

The following comments relate solely to your physical locations:

2. Run your site through moz.com/local/search to get an initial sense of how the client is doing in terms of citations. This is a good free place to start, as it will give you instant data about the business on 15 of the major platforms, including info about incomplete, inconsistent and duplicate listings. Then, follow up on this with further citation analysis, either manually or with other tools.

3. Run your key competitors through Moz Local as well to see if you can identify any weaknesses in any of their citation profiles. If there are weaker competitors, set your sites on surpassing them first. If, however, your direct competitors are all doing well with citations already, this is likely not an area that's going to give you a lot of room for competitive advantage.

4. Assess your Google+ Local reviews in terms of number, quality and recency, vs. those of your competitors. Can you earn more reviews for the 2 showrooms than competitors have earned.

5. Are your competitors doing a good job with social and/or video marketing? Can you surpass them with a more creative effort?

6. Audit the overall basic SEO of the website.

7. Audit the usability of the website.

Analyzing competitors can yield clues, but once you have those clues, the hope is that you can create your own strategy that really shines out, and that Google will reward that instead of rewarding spammy practices. In some cases, this can be an uphill battle, but don't give up hope. A really successful social campaign or other effort can sometimes break through a stagnant situation and end up with the rewards you're hoping to win for this client. Good luck!

Hi Nichole,

Glad you asked about this. No, this is not a good idea. It is, in fact, cited by Google's webmaster guidelines as a practice called 'keyword stuffing' that is frowned upon. These guidelines are here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en. Please read those.

Are you able to share a bit more about your client's business model? Are they meeting face-to-face with customers in 40 cities/multiple states? Or is this a virtual business? The more information you can share, the better feedback the community can provide. It's really good that you've asked about this!

That's great, Chad. Good luck in the work ahead!

Haha - thank you Egol! I think you really got to the heart of the matter in your reply here. The decision regarding what it is most beneficial to rank for (just churches or a particular religion's church) is really the point here and you spotted that immediately. Your comments are always of such insight and value.

Hi Chad!

Congratulations on all of the hard work you've been doing for this church. They are lucky to have someone who is so concerned about making the best possible effort.

What I see in looking at your stats compared to the other church is that you are pretty much neck-and-neck. You are higher in some areas and they are higher in some areas, so the fact that the two churches have similar rankings for this and that seems normal to me.

I agree with Egol's assessment that it would be better for you to be more specific in your optimization efforts. I can only base this on my own experience. If I am a Catholic and am new in town, I'm going to search Google for 'Catholic Church' in my town. I'm not just going to search for 'churches'. Similarly, if I am a Baptist or a Reformed Baptist, and am decided about my religion, I'm going to search for my religion's particular type of church. The only reason I can see for any religion to want to simply rank for 'church' would be if they are trying to promote themselves to people who have no decided religion ... or possibly to tourists who like to visit various interesting churches as places of interest on vacation. So, I'm not sure if the decision on your part to simply rank for 'churches' stems from an evangelical effort to interest people who are not already Reformed Baptists or if there is some other thinking behind this. To me, wanting to simply rank for 'church' is a bit like wanting to simply rank for 'store'. It's more clear and direct to be a 'Reformed Baptist Church' or a 'Shoe Store', right?

In fact, here's something odd and anecdotal: setting my location to Tyler, Tx and searching just for 'churches', Google isn't even understanding my intent in their local pack of results. Instead, they think I'm looking for Church's Chicken Restaurant! Oops! But, if I search for Reformed Baptist Church with my location set to Tyler, you'll be happy to know that your church is ranking #3 organically and has a full result, complete with its Google+ Local information. Reformed Baptist Churches as a different search gives me a local 2-pack and you are #1 in it. For just Baptist Churches however, you are not in the 7-pack but are in the organic results. Forgive my ignorance on this - I'm not totally sure what the difference is between a Baptist Church vs. a Reformed Baptist Church, but if Baptists can choose to go to various types of churches, this would be a search I'd think it was valuable to rank in the local pack for.

Given all this, what I would suggest would be:

1. Consider fine tuning your on-page optimization to be specific rather than generic about your religion.

2. Looks like you're in lots of the major citation sources but there are inconsistent and incomplete listings, according to our Moz Check Listing tool:

https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMlN5bHZhbmlhJTI1MjBDaHVyY2glMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjI3NTcwMSUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMlN5bHZhbmlhJTI1MjBDaHVyY2glMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjIyODAxJTI1MjBTb3V0aCUyNTIwU291dGhlYXN0JTI1MjBMb29wJTI1MjAzMjMlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjI3NTcwMSUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjkwMzU5MjE1OTElMjUyMiUyNTVE

Clean these up and be sure you're listed on all 15 platforms, as well as other citation sources. Pay close attention to any listing Moz Check Listing surfaces as a duplicate.

3. Your Google+ Local page has only earned 5 reviews. This could be improved, for sure!

4. Take a close look at your Google+ Local categories. You have them listed in this order: Church, Reformed Church, Baptist Church. Google wants categories to be as specific as possible, so, if you determine that ranking for Baptist Church is more important than just Church, I'd make Baptist Church your primary category. Correct categorization is so important!

5. Don't forget that Local SEO hinges largely on the concept of the user-as-centroid these days. Your congregation members on one side of town will likely be seeing a different ordering of the results than those on the other side of town. Don't overlook this important point, because it relieves some of the pressure you may be feeling about attaining some kind of ultimate #1 rankings; there are no ultimate #1 rankings - everyone sees different ones. Consider the user as centroid and the possibility of some additional hyperlocal optimization. See: https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid

6. Take a close look at the mindset behind how you are promoting the church, in terms of whom you consider your competitors to be. In my view, your competitors are other Baptist Churches - not Catholic Churches, Methodist Churches, or just 'Churches' in general. Making this distinction could help you view your website and other marketing efforts in a whole new, more accurate light.

Hope this helps! My comments can't replace a formal audit, but I hope they are a useful start.

Hi Jolie!

Thanks for posting a good question. Moz Local guarantees your data on 7 specific platforms, which represent the 5 major US aggregators, plus 2 other important sites. These 7 partners are:

Infogroup

Acxiom

Best of the Web

Localeze

Factual

Foursquare

Superpages

We do not control the push beyond these 7 partners. That being said, it is typical for our partners to then push to their own partners. You can see an illustration of how data is typically shared in the link Patrick included in his reply. But, again, it's important for me to clarify that the movement of your data beyond the 7 partners is not part of our service.

So, if there are specific non-partner platforms (like Yelp or TripAdvisor) that you want to advise your client to claim, you are free to do so.

Hi Brett!

It's good to hear you're working on more content for the site, including a blog, The main thing that's hitting me about the site, is that while it's visually very nice, the content is duplicated between the home page and the various internal pages. I would recommend that you create different content for each page - it will be more interesting to visit your site and will be a show of greater effort and care on the company's part. There's excellent room for improvement here.

In addition to this, due to the competitive nature of your industry, Local SEO must be considered - but only if you you make in-person contact with your clients. If you do, then seeking rankings for your city rather than your state or nationally will be one way to start trying to break into somewhat less dense local results vs organic results. Here's a good place to start reading about the basics of Local SEO: https://moz.com/learn/local.

But if you don't make in-person contact with your clients, then local is not the right match for you and this means sticking with pursuing organic visibility, in which case it's likely to take months or years to dislodge well-established competitors in this highly competitive market both on a state and national level. You may need to investigate investing in PPC while you are working on other efforts like content development, link earning, social outreach, video marketing, etc.

Competitive analysis will be really helpful at this stage, helping you assess the strengths of competitors to see if you can match and surpass their efforts over time.

Lots of work ahead - wishing your company luck at this exciting time!

Hey there!

Normally, a change of address on a verified Google+ Local page should happen quickly. If it's been a week, I'd suggest phoning Google (https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639). I would also recommend that you use Moz Check Listing to be sure there isn't more than one Google+ Local page in the mix here.

Hey John,

You're receiving good input from the community. I'll just summarize a couple of points here:

• Without physical locations, no, you cannot rank in the local packs of results.

• This leaves you with trying to rank organically via a combination of website content and optimization (see the landing pages article Patrick linked to) and trying to shore that up with things like link earning, social media, video marketing, etc. The main pitfall to be aware of in this practice is that many companies end up building a large number of thin, duplicate content pages for their service cities. This should be avoided. The main goal of this practice is to gain some organic visibility for local searches in the absence of being able to gain local pack rankings.

Hope this helps!

Hi Fastrack!

That's very interesting - sounds, then, like there has been a change. Maybe what you were seeing was Google testing something? Thanks for updating this thread with your observation.

Hi J.P.,

You are correct that city centroids were once considered a strong ranking factor. This was then edged out by the concept of industry centroids, but this in turn has given way largely to the concept of user centroids. Recommend you read the history of the centroid here:

https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid

My answer beyond this is in two parts:

1. To discover whether your client can move up in the local pack rankings you must a) audit her business and b) do competitive analysis to discover if any competitors can be surpassed. Your audit of your client's marketing should include an assessment of their website, citations, reviews and social engagement.

2. Whether this will lead to your client appearing in black text at a lower resolution of the map is not known. I have never seen a thorough study of how Google determines which locations show at the lowest resolutions there, so this would be something you'd want to be sure you weren't promising to the client. In our sample 'newport beach plastic surgeon' the only 2 businesses receiving this treatment at the automatic zoom level are those ranking top 2 in the maps pack, but whether this is the case for every such search, I honestly don't know. If you could get your client to be #1 or #2, perhaps this would lead to them replacing one of the 2 businesses in black text, but I am not 100% sure of that and would need to look at a larger data set to begin drawing such a conclusion. Interesting topic!

Of course, the ideal is always to get the client as high in the local pack rankings/maps pack rankings as possible, but the difficulty in achieving this relates directly to how tough/strong his unique competitors are and how much motivation/funding your client has to make efforts to move up. And, these days, it's really important to bring into the discussion the fact that your client's customers are not likely to see the same rankings that he does or that you do, given the user-as-centroid phenomenon. Sometimes, in a really competitive field, going after hyperlocal or long tail keywords may enable them to earn traffic that they simply can't get from the main searches because the field is already too crowded with strong competitors.

Hope these are helpful thoughts.

Hi Jag!

Thanks for the links. Here's what I see:

1. Moz Check Listing is surfacing the filled out page as the main Google+ Local listing (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MasterKhechensMartialArtsAcademyWilliamsville/about) and the less filled out page (https://plus.google.com/116492650865307526395/about?hl=en-US) as a duplicate. So, this tool is being shown the better page as main by Google.

2. Going to Google and searching for 'Master Khechen’s Martial Arts Academy Williamsville' I am being shown the better page - not the less-filled out page in the 3-pack: https://www.google.com/search?q=Master+Khechen’s+Martial+Arts+Academy&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=Master+Khechen’s+Martial+Arts+Academy+Williamsville

So for this branded/city search, I am seeing what I believe is your desired page - not the thinner duplicate.

3. Searching Google for 'martial arts williamsville ny' the business isn't coming up in the 5-pack, but clicking on the maps results from there, they are coming up further down in the map pack. Clicking the 'be the first to review' link on that result, I am being taken to the thinner, duplicate Google+ Local page. So, that's a problem. Less users are likely to go through all these steps, but it is indicative of the problem and confusion in Google's system being caused by the duplicate listing. Fortunately, the duplicate is unclaimed, which minimizes the potential for penalties resulting from it, but it's still not good that it exists.

So 2 questions here:

• Are both pages showing up in the client's Google My Business dash or is only the good one showing up there at this point?

• Have you tried contacting Google again (https://support.google.com/business/#topic=4540083&contact=1)? Show them the above data to explain how the duplicate is still appearing.

Hi Jag,

Are you able to share the URLs for the 2 Google+ Local pages here? It would help to be able to to see them directly.

Hi Corn,
I'm so sorry you've not received a reply from the community on this. Could be we have more Moz Local customers here than Bright Local customers

I've never used their service, but do hear good things about the company's owner, Myles Anderson. A similar service is also offered by Whitespark, owned by Darren Shaw who is another nice fellow. You might look at past threads here in the forum regarding both companies. I'm sorry I can't offer a personal assessment of either service.

Hi Darren,

I agree with Andy that a bit more detail might clarify this.

I believe what you may be asking is whether it is better to optimize your website for local or national keywords. The answer to this would lie in where you want to build up your business. If you are hoping to serve clients mainly in your local area, and you meet with these clients face-to-face, then optimizing for your local geographic terms will be most appropriate. If, however, you do not have in-person transactions with your clients and are offering a virtual service on a national scale, then this would point more toward service-focused optimization instead of geographic-focused optimization.

Not totally sure this is what you are asking, though, so please feel free to provide further details about your question. Thanks!

Hi J.P.,

I confirm what Donna is seeing. Searching Google Maps, I see your client coming up when I search for 'newport beach plastic surgeon'. Both Donna and I are making a best guess at your search term, so if you're using a different search term, please share it. I'll gladly take another look, but for what I did look up, your client is coming up at position 8 in the Maps pack and if I click on that, is being clearly shown with the red teardrop marker.

Now, what isn't happening is that the client's name doesn't appear in the 'permanent' black text on the map, unlike Cruise Plastic Surgery and Milind K. Albe MD at the automatic resolution of the map - which may be what you are asking about. If you narrow in, however, it does. So, I don't believe there is anything to be concerned about here. Please, feel free to provide further details about the keywords you are searching for or anything else that might help us better understand any concerns you're feeling about the results. Happy to check it out with you!

You're very welcome!

Hi J.P.

As Dennis and Donna have suggested, sharing further details of this will help the community look further into your question. If you are unable to share the client's details, that perfectly fine, but it will limit the amount of support the community can give.

Hey All -

The above reply was created by me. So sorry - was signed into Mozzer Alliance instead of my own account when I created it.

Hi Lisa,

Unfortunately, I can't find any authoritative documentation from Google (or from anyone else) on this since the rebranding of GWT. It sounds like both you and William are seeing the same thing - your pack rankings don't seem to be reflected. So, that's a start, but what I can't come up with is an answer as to whether the tool can somehow be configured to reflect these. I would suggest that you write to Google about this and see if you can get an official response. If you do, it would be super nice if you would share what you learn with the community here, as these are early days and everyone is still in a learning phase with this. So sorry not to have a clear answer for you on this good question!

Hi There!

One thing that may be helpful to you is to put both business through our free Check Listing tool to start to discover duplicate, incomplete and inconsistent listings. Go to moz.com/local/search and enter both the current name and zip of the businesses and also try adding any old names and variants. You need to create a spreadsheet of every inconsistent citation that exists so that you can embark on a citation cleanup campaign, editing old references to reflect new data. Also recommend that you read this article by Joy Hawkins:

http://imprezziomarketing.com/seo-blog/google-maps/is-permanently-closed-killing-your-ranking-4-case-studies/

Hope this helps!

Hi Neil,

Yes, it a way, it can make explaining rank to clients harder because there are no set-in-stone rankings anymore, but in another sense, it frees us all from over-focusing on specific rank and focusing more on the most important metric - conversions.