Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Neil!

Not a silly question at all. In the past couple of years, what has become a dominant force in local results is typically referred to as the user-as-centroid. What this means is that results vary based on the physical location of the searcher at the moment he makes his search. The affects both desktop and mobile local results, and is especially sensitive on mobile, wherein a searcher at one end of town looking for a pizza is going to see different results than if he drives across town and searches again.

So, the user-as-centroid phenomenon is playing a major role in results being personalized to the searcher, and beyond this, things like past search behavior contribute as well to my results being different than the results my clients see when they do the same searches.

Hi AfroSEO,

Citation building is still completely fine for qualifying local businesses, but I tend to think of the main goal of this as being the dissemination of your business data throughout a wide variety of platforms rather than primarily as a linkbuilding strategy. In a competitive field, your best competitors are all likely to have similar citations sets on the major platforms, so you having the same won't really be a competitive difference maker between your business and others. Rather those types of gains tend to come from things your competitors haven't managed to achieve ... such as earning more or better natural links for great content on your site, having your business featured on blogs and news sites, earning social notice, etc.

Hey Bob!

Good for you for being open to constructive feedback. Given what you've described, I'm hearing two things:

1. You know e-commerce

2. You have an interest in Boise

Have you considered specializing in doing the e-commerce functionality for physical stores in Boise? And I mean everything ... setting up online shopping on their sites, setting up beacons in their stores, getting into mobile commerce, etc. Just a thought that struck me. What if you became 'the' company bridging the gap between on and offline for the major stores in Boise? The future is mobile. A plan like this could mean good work for you for years to come.

Hey There,

I'm just sorry I didn't have more knowledge to share on this topic. I wish I had 4-5 hotel clients I could begin tracking in this regard. One thing I did wonder is, apart from price, could availability have something to do with this? For example, as a given hotel approaches booked status, could it be falling in rank, while hotels still in need of bookings move up, guaranteeing more transactions? Another idea would be deals or specials for given dates. Could these increase rank for a given date ... even based on user behavior like click-thrus, temporarily boosting rank? I think a test would need to define variables like this to begin drawing any conclusions. It would be great if someone with a good handful of hotel clients could do a study.

Hi Fastrack!

I'm sorry your good question hasn't received a reply yet. Unfortunately, I've never marketed a hotel and so am lacking education on this topic. Your screenshots are very interesting. This is Google's own Help Doc, but unsurprisingly, it does not explain rankings:

https://support.google.com/hotelfinder/?hl=en

This SEJ article from 2013 suggests some possible factors you might want to take a glance at, but as it's a bit old, I'm not sure how current the info is:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-hotel-finder-war-hotel-serp-listings/67152/

Here's a beginner's guide that is more complete and more recent:

http://www.buuteeq.com/blog/a-hotels-guide-to-google-hotel-finder/

Honestly, it's interesting to me that there seem to be few studies about what influences rank in this Google feature. I'm not finding a ton that is recent or conclusive. An enterprising Local SEO firm that manages numerous hotels should really do a study on this. So sorry not to have better info for you - there doesn't seem to be a lot out there. I'm hoping if anyone in the community has hands-on experience with this industry, they can shed some further light.

Hi Donald!

Good topic! Ideally, this is how most Local SEOs would suggest organizing a business with this model:

• A single website representing the brand

• A unique page on the site for each service

• A unique page on the site for each of the two physical offices

• Both offices on the Contact page and in the footer

• A unique Google+ Local page for each of the 2 locations, and a unique citation set for each of the physical locations

Instead, what your client has done is to build out a unique website for each of their two specialties. Fortunately, as the business has two unique locations, many of the concerns that would normally surround such a strategy do not apply. If the client only had one office and had built out two websites - that would be a big concern. But, happily, this is not the case with your client.

Nevertheless, the drawbacks of your client's approach are that, instead of all of the work he does pouring into building up the strength of a single brand on a single site, he is going to have to split his energy and funding between two different sites. It's not as convenient to do this, but if the client wishes to stick with this approach, here are a few things to be sure not to do:

• Don't share phone numbers between the two offices. Each must have its own unique local phone number

• Do a citation audit to be sure that there are no merged listings and that the name, address, phone number and website for location A are not mixed up anywhere with those of location B. Everything must be separate and distinct at all times. The Google+ Local pages and citation sets for the 2 offices must be totally unique.

• Do not put the address, phone number or URL of website A on website B or vice versa, anywhere. Keep these sites totally separate. Do not link from one website to the other.

• Do not share content of any kind between the two websites. All content must be unique on the two sites.

Hopefully, following these steps, you can prevent merging of details, and can simply market the two sites the way any local businesses would be marketed. Hope this helps!

Hi There!

Your first link is taking me to a page not found page.

While I'm not certain why your Hyberbad page isn't showing up, I do want to mention that the page is striking me as over-optimized. In a very limited amount of text, the word Hyberbad is appearing more 15 or so times. Some work is ahead of this business in improving the quality of their content, ensuring there is no duplicate content, being sure the pages are seen as purposeful instead of as doorway pages. I would suggest improving the quality of the pages, toning down optimization and linking to both service locations from your top level menu.

Hope this helps!

Hey Ben -

That's right - Local SEO is going to based around where your offices are physically located; not tourist destinations you feature. So, local rankings will only be for your offices. Visibility for your destinations will need to attained via organic SEO or PPC.

My pleasure! And wishing you best of luck!

Hey There!

I totally get how this can be complex. While I think it's important to mention the areas which you virtually serve, what I, personally, don't find to be a good strategy is one in which any business that serves nationally tries to create a page for every city. The services they are offering across the country are the same, and the only reason to create a page for each city would be if the services are somehow different from city to city. This is different than a local business that has to describe their services in a small handful of cities to make it clear where they will travel to. For a virtual/national/international business, I don't know of a way to create unique content for hundreds, thousands or millions of cities and towns when the service is the same for all.

There needs to be another approach to clarifying countries served than a city-by-city approach. But, I wouldn't be the expert on this, because I work primarily in the Local SEO field. I could see, if you serve 3 different countries, having a unique page for each country explaining hours or operation, languages spoken, etc., ... but not every city. It doesn't seem scaleable or realistic to me to do this this way for a virtual business.

I'm going to ask for some additional input from our team from staff members with more experience in national/international SEO than I have. Please stand by, and thanks for asking a good question!

Hey James,

Thanks for starting this discussion. While I don't have stats on the number of businesses being 'caught', I do think it's a good thing that Yelp is willing to show proof to back up their decision to take action against a spamming business. I like transparency and some of the examples being featured in posts about this are totally outrageous. Business owners who want to fake reviews are starting out on such a wrong foot in rep management that an experience like being caught by Yelp could actually be doing these folks a huge favor. It may be one of those hard but vital lessons to learn.

Hey There!

I'm not aware of anything more recent or of higher quality than Ed Reese's piece at LocalU - which you've already found In fact, I recently asked around among some Local colleagues if the knew of anything newer or better, and it seems to me like most folks are still using the tips in Ed's post. So, you should be good to go with that. It would be nice to see bloggers writing more about this. There just isn't a ton of info out there about this topic.

Hi Edward!

Thanks for the further details. So, yes, you are correct. In order to participate in typical local search marketing activities, you must have both a physical location and make in-person contact with your customers, whether at your location or at theirs. Barring this, you have 3 main options open to you:

1. Organic SEO - creating content, earning links, optimizing pages, etc. geared to toward various regions for which you are hoping to rank organically, because you will not be able to rank in the local packs of results. It's critical here that anything you create be of the highest possible quality and unique. No duplicate content, spammy links, doorway pages, etc.

2. PPC - Paying to appear with ads in various regions, in which case, you can appear in any city or state for which you're willing to pay.

3. Social Outreach - gearing your social campaigns toward specific regions for visibility on social platforms.

Hope this clarification is helpful!

Hi Edward!

Would you be able to fill in with a bit more detail here? Are you talking about a local business that makes in-person contact with clients in specific cities in AU, NZ and USA? Do you have an office anywhere in these countries to which people come and have face-to-face contact with staff? Or, is this a virtual business, perhaps providing services via the web or phone?

The more detail you can provide, the better help the community can give. Thanks!

Hey there!

Sorry I was slow to pick this up again. I think the issue here is likely deeper than what you do with Schema. Schema, after all, simply exists to make NAP a bit clearer. I think the core question here is whether you are genuinely running two different businesses, in which case, you would have a unique legal business name, unique phone number and website for each. Google can generally handle two businesses occupying the same address. I don't recommend, at this point, creating a fictitious suite. Represent the business/es exactly as in the real world. Google has gotten better at not merging the listings of truly distinct companies occupying the same address provided all other signals besides the address are unique.

What Google would have a problem with would be a single company promoting itself as two companies. So, for the sake of example, let's say you are a landscaping materials company called Greenscape. You deliver compost, gravel, etc. You also do custom landscaping consultations. So, you've got two services (product delivery and consultation) operating out of your site at 123 Main Street. In this scenario, you are only entitled to 1 Google+ Local page. You aren't entitled to one for the delivery service and another for the consulting service. A business that decided to bend the guidelines on this would be in danger of punitive action on Google's part, which could hurt both listings they've created. I think the guidelines are very clear about this.

The only other proviso here is that merging is a possibility, even if it seems to be less of an issue now than formerly. So, there is a possibility that even if you are running two absolutely distinct businesses out of the same building, Google could mix them up, and the chance of that happening is likely greater if there is some unifying factor between the two businesses (two podiatrists, two auto service businesses, etc.). So, do be sure you're doing everything possible to keep two companies in this scenario distinct, including different legal business names, phone number, websites, citations and, of course, totally unique content.

Hope this helps!

Google's Jade Wang has offered some important clarification on the scenario of set-and-forget Google My Business dashboards - Google could determine that they are inactive and un-verify the listings they contain. She writes,

"In some cases, we may contact Google My Business users via email to confirm that they are still actively managing a business page. If a user is unresponsive to our attempts to contact him or her and has not logged into Google My Business for a significant length of time, then we may unverify pages in the account. We're doing this in order to continue to provide users with the best experience when they’re looking for local businesses like yours. If you find that a page in your account has been incorrectly unverified, please contact support to get assistance restoring verification. It's a good idea to keep an eye on the inbox associated with your Google My Business (Locations) account. It's also a good idea to regularly log into Google My Business (Locations) to confirm that your business information is current and accurate."

Mike Blumenthal initially posted that it was necessary to perform a null edit (a tactic in which you view the edit screen of your Google+ Local listing and hit 'save' without making any changes), but Mike has since updated his post to clarify that a null edit isn't actually necessary. According to what Mike learned, you can simply log into the dashboard once every few months, or if you have to make real edits or you post on your page, that should provide an adequate signal to Google that the dashboard is still being actively managed.

In the past, an agency with a limited contract with a local business could create the company's Google+ Local page and step away from it. Of course, it's the ideal that your clients are actively posting to their Google My Business page, if it's the right social strategy for them, but many clients don't do this. And so, they'll likely be getting an email from Google one of these days asking if they are still active. If that's the case, you may be hearing from past clients asking if the email is real and what they should do. Fortunately, they should be able to make the the quick visit to the dashboard without help. But for agencies with large numbers of long-term clients, this business of keeping track of how often you've logged into the clients' dashboards could be a bit of a hassle. Just one more task to add to the to-do list.

Google has been going through some growing pains recently. With the lock-down of the editing function on Mapmaker and the further removal of Google+ links from more places, many Local SEOs and local business owners are wondering where Google is headed in the local space. To my mind, the fact that they are trying to police active vs. neglected listings is a bit of a sign the Google remains serious about delivering Local quality. And for all of us ... that's a good thing!

Hi Rocio!

Good topic, and while nobody can provide a definitive answer to your question at this point (except maybe someone from Google!), my take on this is that Google could be:

1. Regretting that they tied Google+ to other products and is now untying it.

2. In the early stages of preparing for some kind of major change.

It could be both of these things or neither of them. I do not see Google's local product going away any time soon, and in fact, Google just announced that they want people logging into their Google My Business dashboard to signal to Google that their pages are still active ... so I believe the local portion of this is still a cornerstone of Google's big plan. But the social side ... it's having growing pains, I think. Not sure what's up, but it certainly is worthy of thought and discussion.

Sure, Pete. One thing ... obviously, we've had a shift in emphasis toward the user-as-centroid vs. the industry centroids mentioned in the above blog post. Thought I should mention.

Hi Peter,

I recommend you do a quick run-through of this post:

https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures

Followup from Miriam - the issue is now resolved. Yay!

Hi Adam,

My short and sweet answer to this scenario is:

A page for every city and a page for every service

So, you'd have a total of 30 pages to budget and plan for (one for each of the 10 cities and one for each of the 20 services).

Most small local businesses are not going to have the funding for developing 200 exceptional pages ... what I've seen when small businesses try to go this route of developing a page for every possible service/city combo is that they end up with a collection of so-so pages at best and at worst, thin or duplicate pages.

So, for a client like a dental practice, I believe that a sterling quality page for every city and for every service tends to be an achievable goal if structured over a reasonable time frame contract.

I definitely do not recommend developing a different website for each city. Build a powerhouse and keep working on improving it for the life of the business. Hope this helps!

Hi KS!

Unfortunately, that's not really a practice I would recommend to my clients at this point. There's been some indication in recent times that while Google is completely fine with a single-location home-based business, it's very easy for them these days to see that a string of houses is being used to indicate locations in more than one place. It's my gut feeling that they don't approve of this practice and that they would take action against Google+ Local listings created in this scenario. But, in any case, your lack of in-person contact with customers means that the business does not qualify for Google+ Local listings or local pack rankings, regardless of whether you have legitimate business offices or are using the addresses of your friends. So, this may be kind of a moot point. Virtual businesses need to compete organically and utilize PPC, social media, video marketing, etc. to earn visibility - but Local SEO is not the right marketing discipline for them.

Hope this helps!

Hi Adam,

Excellent advice from Laura. While Google has never taken a stance that I know of against putting all of your locations on a single page (and you'd be doing so on the Contact Us page, of course), it's considered a better practice in Local SEO to develop a unique, high quality landing page for each physical location for the following reasons:

1. Ranking a page that's clearly focused on a single city is going to be easier that ranking it for three different cities. You'll be sending a clearer signal to both humans and bots that 'dentist orlando' is a primary topic for the business than you would be if you're diluting the focus of the page with multiple cities.

2. It's very likely that your competitors will be making use of the practice of developing these landing pages, and you want to be able to compete with that.

3. Establishing a unique page for each office will enable you to link from all of the citations you build to a dedicated page on the website for each. Historically, this has been viewed as helpful in preventing against accidental merges of your Google+ Local pages, though there seems to be fewer cases of this in recent times. Regardless, it's very clear to be able to link your Orlando Google+ Local page and other citations to your Orlando page on your website, where the first thing one encounters in the compete NAP for the business, identically matching the NAP on the citations. It lessens the potential for error.

The prerequisite for developing these types of landing pages will be the willingness of the business owner to invest the necessary time/funding to creating high quality pages with unique content on them. If this is lacking, then it's better to wait until the owner is ready to devote the necessary resources to the project so that the pages are an asset rather than a liability.

Hi KS!

Thanks for the clarification on this. So, if you are not making in-person contact with your customers, whether here or abroad, then this means that the business is not a 'local' business in the eyes of Google. Face-to-face transactions are the prerequisite of this particular type of marketing. So, as you would not be able to go the local business route of building a Google+ Local page for each location in hopes of ranking in Google's local packs of results, then your two options would be:

1. Building organic content on the website that showcases your virtual services in each of your target cities and countries.

2. Participating in PPC that enables you to pay for placement in your target cities and countries.

I'm afraid international SEO is not my area - the links Patrick has shared will be your best bet for learning about this marketing discipline. Wishing you best of luck!

No worries, Hashtag We're all learners!

Hey Hashtag - Important to note here that in Local SEO, P.O. boxes are taboo. Forbidden by Google's guidelines. So, in this case, P.O. boxes are not a solution.

Hi There!

The decision here is whether you wish to run 2 completely independent companies or if you are planning to consolidate everything into one company.

If the former, and you are having in-person transactions with your customers, then you would establish the unique physical locations of the business on the website and create unique sets of citations for them on the major local business data platforms. This is predicated on you having a unique name, address and phone number for each business - as well as a unique website.

If the latter, then you'll need to bring all of your assets under one roof, merging Tonik and Ola into a single business and establishing a single website for this merged company. Then, if you have face-to-face transactions with your customers, you can build out your citations based on the name, address, phone number and website of this company.

Hi Landon!

Important question here - I understand that you don't want to have you address displayed, but are you at least physically located in Melbourne or are you located in a different city? Please, let us know!

Hi KS!

I'm responding on your other thread. Thanks for asking!

Hi KS -

Got your note on my older post and so am popping by here. I have some questions.

1. Are we talking about other countries ... or maybe other counties? I want to be sure I'm understanding if the business is national or international.

2. Are you meeting face-to-face with customers in the various cities and countries? Can you describe this in as much detail as possible?

Hey Matt -

Really appreciate you letting me know you are seeing this same behavior in AU. I'm truly hoping it's a glitch, but I wondered the same thing as you - is this intentional and a precursor to some larger change? Oh my!

P.S. The above post was created by me - signed into a different account

You're welcome, Vernon. I completely relate to what you're saying. Google entered Local with a brick-and-mortar mindset, which has left SABs a bit on the periphery all these years. I know it can be tough. Good luck in the work ahead!

Hi There -

Here's what I see when I do your 2 main searches, "nail salon pigeon forge tn" and "nail salon sevierville tn". You are ranking organically on the 1st page of Google for both terms but are excluded from the 7-pack. From what you've described, it sound like you may have violated Google's guidelines by having more than one verified Google+ Local page for each location. If you local rankings disappeared after you claimed more than 1 listing for each location, then this is likely what has caused you to disappear from the packs. This is sometimes referred to as a 'disconnected' listing - when you rank well organically but not in the packs.

What steps have you taken since then? Do you still have multiple listings for the same location in your Google My Business dashboard? Have you taken steps to close them, as described here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/4569146?hl=en . Have you tried contacting Google directly to ask about this? You can do so via the Contact Us link here: https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639

Hi Vernon!

Good questions! There are 2 really important facts to understand regarding marketing service area businesses (SABs):

1. Google is highly biased toward physical location and sees each business as most relevant to its physical location. Unfortunately, this puts SABs in kind of a weird position because, in the real world, they are equally relevant to every city they travel to in order to serve customers ... but Google doesn't see it this way. When we want to be visible in Google's local and organic results, we must perforce play by Google's rules. (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en)

2. Representing your location data accurately is a must. Do not ever attempt to be appear to be physically located any place that you aren't. Per Google's rules, you should only build 1 Google+ Local page per physical location and whatever town that office is located in will be the one for which you have the best hope of ranking in the local pack results. With few exceptions, for any city you serve but for which you lack a physical address, your best hopes will be to gain organic, rather than local, rankings. Unless you are in a rural area or a very niche profession, you are unlikely to rank in the local packs for any city in which you lack a physical location. This is the reality for all SABs.

So, the local search marketing strategy for SABs generally looks like this:

1. Create a unique landing page on your website for each of the major cities you serve. Make these pages of the highest possible quality you can. The goal here is to hope for some organic visibility for these pages. You can read all about city landing pages here: https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

2. Create a Google+ Local page for each city in which you have a legitimate physical office. Be sure your Google+ Local pages are in complete compliance with the Google guidelines linked to above. The goal here is to gain local pack visibility for your physical location cities.

3. If the combination of efforts in steps 1 and 2 fail to get you good visibility for any city that's really important to you, the only alternative is to pay for advertising via Google's Adwords program, creating a campaign that helps your ad to show up for chosen cities.

Regarding Moz Local, our service will help push out your physical location data to our partner network, helping you get your data consistent on the 5 major local business data aggregators and 2 other important sites. We draw from and validate against the data we find on your Google+ Local pages and Facebook Place listings. Having consistent citations is a major component of achieving high local rankings, but this will all fall under the same heading as Google's guidelines: local rankings for physical locations only.

Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions about this!

Hey Kevin!

Back in 2012 when Google stopped supporting Geo Sitemaps, they made a point of explaining that they were still supporting KML files. See:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/28/google-still-supporting-kml-files-but-not-the-use-of-geo-sitemaps/

and

https://developers.google.com/maps/support/kmlmaps

However, as Patrick mentions, Schema has become much more the markup of choice in the past few years.

My pleasure, Pete, and don't overlook the nice medium of the blog for continuing to showcase your involvement in various cities. I think Google is still very much in love with fresh content

Hey There,

My thinking is along the same lines as Calin's here. Assuming that it's your NAP you're encoding with Schema, why are you putting the same NAP on more than one website? It could be I'm not quite understanding the scenario you're describing.

Hi Peter,

My own preference for doing this type of Local SEO/copywriting is to structure sites like this:

1. A page for every office or a page for every city served

2. A page for every service

I feel like once you get into trying to cover every possible city/service combo on landing pages, there can be some danger of creating thin or throwaway content. Unless your city A lawn mowing service is somehow totally different than your city B lawn mowing service, you probably shouldn't be creating these pages. Instead, have a page for city A, a page for city B and a page for lawn mowing.

I'm not saying that what I'm describing is the only way to do this - just that it's my personal preference for small-to-medium businesses.

Hi Varun,

It sounds like you've identified some important things to work on. I want to be sure I'm understanding this explanation from you:

"Client deals in two way that is local and global. He gets requirement of manpower from Local employers and then search for right people around the globe to employee them with organizations"

Does the business meet face-to-face with its customers at a place of business? Or are all transactions happening virtually, such as on-line or over the phone?

Hi Bob,

I think Patrick is on the right track with this. If you have a legitimate connection to these other companies, it won't hurt you to be internationally listed. What I can't say is whether it will help you, but I don't feel that it will hurt you in any way.

Hi Rosemont,

Thanks for taking the time to ask about this. I want to share with you all that I can about this topic. I completely understand that there might be some confusion surrounding this, and we've recently updated our Help Hub to reflect our current best advice regarding duplicates.

Basically, what happens is that Moz suggests the duplicate closure request to given platforms and they then process these in very big batches, based on each platform's own internal structure of handling such requests, whether they come from Moz or from a data aggregator or what have you.

The issue, then, is that we have no way to estimate time frames or to guarantee that a request on our part won't be denied by a given platform based on its own assessment of whether a duplicate is really a duplicate or not. They have the deciding vote on this.

So, at this point, what we're suggesting to customers is that they consider manually closing small numbers of duplicates as they may get faster results than Moz will. For large accounts with hundreds of customers with hundreds of duplicates, it can be helpful to automate duplicate closure requests with the thought that they will eventually close, but it's unlikely to happen quickly, bringing us back to the suggestion that manual closure for small numbers of duplicates may be a smarter route where speed is key. We'd love this to be faster and more reliable to automate, but we're working within the limitations of the various platforms.

For your particular situation, as we've already assumed management of the duplicates in order to request closure of them, you would not be able to act manually. I'm not sure if it would be possible to reverse our management of the duplicates, but if you would like to get further feedback on this, you could create a help request with our Help Team who then might be able to escalate the question to our engineers to see if reversal would be possible. https://moz.com/help/contact

I want to apologize for the inconvenience you've experienced and disappointment with time frames. The duplicates feature is really helpful for surfacing duplicates, but for now, manual closure may be faster than automated closure.

Oops - haha. That was me, signing in by accident under our Mozzer Alliance account instead of my own. So, the above reply is from me, and I'll look forward to reading your answer:)

Hi Varun,

It's really important to assess how well your client is already doing and then define your goals based on where you need to take them. I noticed you had chosen 'Local Website Optimization' as one of your categories for this thread, so what is it you'll be doing for the client? Improving their on-site Local SEO? Or, maybe their website is already in good shape, and you've discovered they have inconsistent citations you're going to clean up, or that they need to earn more reviews from their customers.

So, basically, the first step in any local or traditional marketing campaign is going to be to do a formal audit of where the business currently stands on the web, and from your findings, you can then create a strategy for addressing things they're either not yet doing well enough or not yet doing at all.

Hey Jarrett,

Three things immediately come to mind regarding this.

1. Your Edmonton location is simply more powerful in Google's eyes than your Vancouver location. Does it have more content, more citations, more reviews, an older web presence or other things along those eyes that could be causing Google to consider the former location more authoritative than the latter?

2. You have NAP inconsistency, causing your two locations to be confused with one another. To start troubleshooting this, take different elements of your name, address, phone number and website for the two locations and put them together in Google's search. For example, you might find the Edmonton address mixed up with the Vancouver phone number on some platforms, and this would need to be fixed.

3. Your website should have 1 unique page for your Edmonton location and another unique page for your Vancouver location, featuring complete NAP and relevant content. Your Google+ Local pages and all of your other citations can then link to these instead of your homepage, helping to keep these two locations more separate. I wasn't seeing these landing pages on your site, but if you already have them, they don't seem very visible.

Hope these are some good starting points to consider.

Hi Michael -

Moz Local provides a little bit different of a service than Yext, in that we help you get your data updated on the 5 major US aggregators + 2 other important platforms, working on the concept that this data should then move out from there, as illustrated by this infographic of the Local Search Ecosystem:

https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-us

Moz Local also helps you surface inconsistent, incomplete and duplicate listings on a total of 15 different platforms.

At $84 per Moz Local listing, our price is also a popular selling point for many customers. If you have any further questions about Moz Local, please fire away!

Hey There!

Yes, if your Douglasville-related efforts are done correctly, users based in that town should be able to find you for your product/service terms without having to include the city name in their searches. Google definitely works this way.

Unfortunately, without a formal audit of your business and competitive analysis of your competitors, we'll just have to speculate here as to why you are being outranked by competitors who you feel aren't as strong as you are. There are so many reasons for this including the age of their sites vs. yours, the spread of their data vs. yours around the web, etc.

You could look for a good Local SEO company to perform this type of analysis, or, if you are on a bit of tight budget right now, you could get going with all of those steps I've outlined in my earlier reply, then give it a few months and see how far all of it gets you. Chances are, you should start to see a positive difference.

Good discussion here. I want to add, I noticed that you had categorized your question in two of our Local SEO categories, so I'm guessing you might be specifically looking to hire a Local SEO. If that's true, I recommend that you check out the websites of some of the experts who participated in the Moz Local Ranking Factors 2014 Survey. You'll see them listed on the left side of the survey in the box titled 'Contributors'. There are some very good companies represented there:

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

If you specifically need Local SEO rather than traditional SEO, you'll want to be sure you're working with Local experts.