Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Rod,

While there hasn't really been any more news that I'm aware of on this, you might like to check out the thread on Linda Buquet's forum, which has some additional discussion and some other links in it, for further reading:

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/29401-google-warns-about-doorway-page-algo-update-could-affect-local.html

Hey Gary,

I may be getting a bit confused here, as well. Are you saying you want to create 80-100 pages with one keyword to be focused on per page or are you saying you are trying to optimize single pages for 80-100 keywords? Something about this isn't quite clear.

Hi Harry,

Agree with Ryan here that your client is in an excellent position to rank organically (if not locally) for additional cities, given the non-existence of competitors in his 30 mile radius. However, you have 2 major challenges to address and overcome.

1. A car dealership is a brick-and-mortar business without any obvious relationship to any city beyond its own. This is not a service area business that goes to towns B, C and D to repair plumbing or trim trees. So challenge #1 is to sit down with the client and do an honest assessment of whether the two of you can discover a legitimate connection to cities B, C and D. Just off the top of my head, this might include:

• Sponsorship of events, sports teams or other things in cities B, C and D

• Rotating regional specials, as in, bring us a piece of mail with your address in City B and receive a 5% discount on X at our dealership

• Participation in industry-related happenings in these other cities. For example, blog coverage of an antique car show, an auto race, a vintage car club, teaching at a driver's training school or teaching road safety to students.

• Blog coverage of industry-related news or laws pertaining to cars, traffic, safety, etc. that is applicable to each of the specific cities

• Endorsements of or tie-ins to businesses in the other cities. For example, partner with an auto garage in City B to provide some kind or special for doing business with both companies.

These are the types of things you need to brainstorm. If no relationship to the other cities exists, then the customer can't move forward. He must either mine his business model to discover these relationships or begin to build them so that he can prove he is a relevant result for these other cities.

2. Challenge #2 hinges on the quality of what you and the client develop together. You mention that you are already working on city landing pages. The client should aim for just 1 page per target city on the website and make it as interesting, useful and strong as possible. Do not create thin or duplicative pages. This is not a good marketing strategy for any business, under any circumstances. Once you have got the basic page in place featuring the 'relationship' content, consider developing an on-site blog to continue on with this work, producing new writing on an on-going basis about contests, events, specials etc. You don't have to do tons of this, because of the lack of competition. Even a single blog post a month for each of the target cities will likely get you pretty far in what you're hoping to achieve, because of the client's fortunate lack of competitors. In all efforts, stress quality to the client and this should be a viable strategy.

Hope this helps!

Hi Gary!

It's never really been my mindset to think of these things in terms of raw numbers. I've always thought more along the lines of possible topics than numbers of keywords. If I had a brand new business to work with, I would likely do keyword research as an aid to helping me brainstorm both my basic pages (for product/service terms) and then my interesting possible topics beyond that. So, a basic page would be something like water heater repair and an interesting page or blog post beyond that might revolve around how to best choose water heater settings to save on your energy bill. Something like that.

There really is no limit to the number of keywords a website can aim to rank for - limits tend to revolve around how you stage accomplishing the work, based on the available resources or funds. Once the website is launched, you must determine how frequently the business is capable of producing or funding its on-going publication efforts. For many small businesses, a single blog post a week is a major achievement. For larger companies, that might be 5 posts a week. Sustainable growth is the ideal here.

Hi Gary!

Thanks for the additional info! So, for a local business like this, the marketing plan would typically look something like this:

1. Invest most effort in the quality of the website's UX, on-site Local SEO and content. Sounds like the company is well on the way to this. Just to be sure, though, go through the site to double check that contact information is highly prominent on the site and that the basic city+product/service terms are well represented.

2. Do a citation audit to check for both current and old versions of the name, address, phone number and website. Where citations are lacking, build them. Where they feature any incorrect information, edit them. Check for duplicate listings, too. Build both generic citations and industry-specific citations.

3. Develop a strategy for ongoing content development on the site or site-based blog.

4. Implement a review acquisition strategy that will be utilized on a monthly basis.

5. Gather testimonials on an on-going basis and post them on the website.

6. Research social opportunities that are a good fit for the business model. Create profiles there and begin participating.

7. Research non-structured sources for additional citations/mentions of the business, such as news articles and blogs.

8. Research industry-specific offline participation opportunities, like trade association conferences, expos and workshops. Participation in these can then develop content opportunities for the site, new people to network with socially on SM platforms and new business.

9. Audit the client's link profile and begin combing through all of the above to discover where opportunities may lie to develop content, outreach, news opportunities, etc., that can lead to natural links

This is a very general outline, applicable to most local businesses. Hope it helps!

Hi Katherine,

Thanks so much for writing in about this. Moz Local draws our categories directly from Google, so you are right to notice a correlation. Unfortunately, you are right that Google's categories are not all-inclusive, but whether you sign up for Moz Local or not, participation in Google's local product is a must for pretty much every local business. Because of this, rule of thumb here is to find the closest match you can for your broadest category and then use the business description to explain the nuances of the business.

So, per Ryan's example, you could choose Shipping Company or Shipping Services for the main category for one of your businesses, and in the business description, describe the packing and crating services you provide.

Not perfect - I know - but there is know known way to influence Google's categories. It's totally up to them.

You're not alone in your frustration with this. Mike Blumenthal, himself, can be quoted as stating,"Google’s category system is woefully inadequate at its job of indicating what a business actually does." And, the Google forum is full of tickets like this one:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/no$20category/business/ymdjxTXmDxI/g5OTvVGwqcoJ

For many common business models, the category system works just fine, but when there are facets of the business that the category system doesn't cover, going with the closest possible match is the only option. And, of course, be sure that your citations descriptions and website are highly descriptive of your services.

Hi Harry,

The first thing here is to explain to the client Google's bias toward physical location. In most cases, your client will be outranked in the local results by any competitor who has a physical location where your client has none. With that understanding, please, find your business model in this article and read the suggestions. I believe you'll find them to be helpful, but if you still have questions after reading, definitely come back with them!

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Hi Gary!

You've categorized this question as Local Strategy. Is this a local business? B&M or SAB? How many physical locations? How tough is the competition? The more information you can provide, the better answer you'll receive from the community.

Hi Ricky!

This may be a silly question from me, but if these aren't local businesses, why do they have citations? Can you provide further details on this.

Hi Thomas!

The key here is to separate your brand from your locations in your mind. Your brand is the same, regardless of how many locations you have (just Whole Foods - not Whole Foods Chicago, Whole Foods Boston, right?). So, you'll want to:

1. Use just the brand name on all citations with no extra geographic descriptors in it

2. Have a unique page on the site for each physical location you own

3. Link your citations to their respective page on the site

Regarding Google brand and local pages, if you only have a single location, Google lets you do this: http://localu.org/blog/google-now-allows-brand-pages-become-local-pages/ but not if you have multiple locations.

This article will be the best to read on this topic:

http://localu.org/blog/merge-google-pages-usually-cant-now/

Not sure what you mean about the publisher tag.

Hi Deedra,

Are you saying you have multiple physical locations from which you are serving multiple cities, or just one physical location from which you are serving multiple cities? And, also, are you meeting with clients face-to-face or is this a virtual business model? These nuances are important.

Hi Nick,

Your citations should all list the same URL if you are dealing with a single physical address. Citations may or may not act as followed links for your business, so in building them, earning links is not really the primary goal. Rather, you are building citations to be sure your local business' name, address, phone number and website are consistently distributed across a wide variety of local business platforms.

Hi There!

So, local rankings are mainly based on the physical location of your business. Are you talking about a local business or are you maybe talking about a virtual directory? If the former, then it is important to use your city terms in your optimization, whether this is items in a navigation menu, wording in a URL, title tags or main body copy. But, if the latter, and the business is a directory without a physical location, then it will not be eligible to rank in the local results.

Please, feel free to provide further details if I'm not quite catching your meaning here. Glad to keep chatting!

Hey There!

While I have not personally used this service, I do recall this blog post from Nyagoslav Zhekov a couple of years back on this topic:

http://www.ngsmarketing.com/why-yext-might-not-be-the-best-fit-for-your-business/

You might want to read through that. And, if we have any community members here who have positive experiences with Yext to share, please do speak up!

That's great, Linda! I bet you'll be getting stories from your community about things they see happening with this. Really glad you'll be covering it.

Hi Adam,

Good comment! I'm also thinking about the multi-site scenario - particularly the multi-mini-site scenario. I've never been a fan of this approach and it does seem like the update could be applied to this scenario. Not sure yet ... but could be.

Agree with you, Ryan, that creativity is so key. One thing I have long stressed to my own clients is that owning a website = having become a publisher. You want to publish great stuff - not junk.

Hey Matthew,

You're so right that it can be hard to figure out who to hire, and when it comes to Local SEO, you definitely need a service provider that specializes in this field. In addition to the Moz recommend list Don has linked to, I recommend that you look at the list of people who participate in the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Everyone on that list is a recognized expert in this field. See in the right column of this page:

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

With that list, you should have some really terrific providers to consider!

Nice discussion going on here, with Egol making some very good points.

Personally, I am not a fan of the multi-site approach. It's the brand that needs to be built as the authority, for all of its services. And when it comes to Local, having shared NAP on more than one website can cause citation difficulties. So, again, this comes down to having a single authoritative source representing your business on the web. This tends to be the consensus of opinion on the Local SEO world - 1 site is better than 2.

Hey Awesome Local Folks!

I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum:

Here's the update announcement:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html

And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this:

Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages:

Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?

I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track:

http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/

So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members Thanks, all!

Really nice discussion going on here. Just want to add one quick tip, regarding some of the advice about focusing on Local. Be sure the business meets Google's Guidelines, which describe this as an ineligible business model:

Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments. Sales or leasing offices, however, are eligible for verification.

See: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Hi Kris!

Moz Local pushes to the 5 major US aggregators + 2 other important platforms. The complete list of our 7 partners is:

Infogroup

Localeze

Best of the Web

Superpages

Factual

Foursquare

Acxiom

As others have mentioned, Yelp is not currently one of our partners, so that would be a listing you'd want to manage manually.

Moz Local provides a little bit of a different service than Yext, by updating the core data aggregators that the primary local search engines rely on for their baseline data.

Please, let me know if I can answer any further questions for you!

Hey Brett!

There are some nuances to this I want to be sure I'm understanding.

1. How many physical locations do you have? Are you saying that you have 1 physical location from which you are serving all of those states, or do you have physical locations in each of the states?

2. Are you meeting face-to-face with your customers in each of these states, either at your office or at their homes/businesses?

Please, answer these 2 questions as fully as possible.

Regarding instances in which Google does not show local results for a given query, this is based on their internal interpretation of what is most relevant. Google makes a decision about whether a searcher's intent is local or not, and also, they determine whether there is enough relevant local data to show on a given query. No one (but Google) knows all of the ins and outs of these decisions, but it's not something you can really influence. The important thing is to recognize whether Google is showing local or organic results for your core queries and then do everything you can to become dominant in those results, either via local or traditional marketing methods. Remember, too, that results are personalized - so you searching from Hawaii are not seeing the same results that your customer is searching from California

I'll look forward to your replies on questions 1 & 2.

Hi GSO!

Thanks for the further info on this. So, the typical structure for this would be that you would have 1 unique page per physical location the business operates, backed up by a unique set of citations for each of these physical locations and would then rely on Google to surface the location that is deemed nearest or most relevant to the searcher. If you have multiple physical locations within the same city, this is an ideal opportunity for thinking hyperlocally, and I believe you will find my latest Moz Blog post to be helpful in understanding this type of marketing mindset:

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

Remember, whether you are structuring this with subdomains or subfolders, the landing page for each physical location needs to be completely unique. There is no good excuse for duplicating content on these pages. My rule of thumb on this is that if you can't devote the energy to making these landing pages really strong and unique, don't make them at all.

Given that one of the reasons Google omits results is to weed out things that are too similar, this is all the more reason for the business in question to overhaul their pages to be sure they are unique. That being said, understanding the user-as-centroid scenario is going to be very important for this business, so that they will be encouraged to promote each location equally and then leave it up to Google to pick the results they feel are either nearest or most relevant to each given user.

Hi Kanya,

That's right - if the company is not local, having a P.O. box where they receive mail is totally fine. No worries about that.

Hi Miri,

Good feedback from the community. You might also want to check out these, on this topic:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

and from just this week:

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

Hi Kathryn!

You should only be putting the NAP (name, address, phone) on the landing page that is specific to the physical location. Don't put it on additional landing pages for cities served where you don't have a physical location. Think you might find these 2 posts helpful in formulating a good strategy:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

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

Hope these help!

Hey Victor!

Read these and you'll be totally up-to-speed on this:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/

...which is a follow up to Mike's 2013 post on this : http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/

I think you'll find these to be right on the money

Hi Kanya!

Local SEO and local rankings are meant for businesses that make in-person contact with their customers. This generally does not apply to e-commerce companies, most of which operate virtually. So, whether you use a P.O. box or not may be a bit of a moot point here. If the customer DOES make face-to-face contact and does want to rank locally, he cannot use a P.O. box on most citation platforms - it won't be accepted. He would need a real physical address.

Regarding adding cities and states to the site, of course, he should explain which places he ships to, but if like most businesses he ships to the 48 states or something like that, then this really isn't a reason to create unique content, as presumably the shipping process is the same for all customers. Don't just add a list of states or cities for the sake of SEO. Google frowns on such practices.

Likely, if the client makes no personal contact with his customers, organic SEO is going to be where you need to put focus - not Local SEO. Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Hi Ali!

I like Ryan's thinking and also want to emphasize one important point. Just because the new homepage will be beautiful, doesn't mean it can't include any text. There should still be crawlable text on the homepage, meaning you can still talk about your service there. Don't do away with all text.

Nice discussion going on here, everybody

Malachy - it's great that you're interested in starting a Local SEO company. I think a fundamental point to make here is that, while links can be important, they are like the 6th or 7th thing on your to-do list for local customers. My list would look like this:

1. Be sure customer is running a legit business at a valid location

2. Develop a clean website with good, basic Local optimization and room to grow

3. Begin to develop content that is local and hyper-local focused, on both the website and the blog - this will continue for the life of the business

4. Build out citations for the business

5. Earn and manage reviews

6. Investigate social opportunities that are a good fit for the specific client

7. Consider projects that could earn good, natural links - these might be infographics you create, exceptional text content, buzz-making news, videos, ad campaigns, contests, newspaper mentions, etc.

8. Investigate PPC

It's really critical to prioritize local marketing campaign elements so that major effort is going into the most influential factors.

You can read more about these factors here:

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

And here's a good post from Casey Meraz about Local SEO in 2015:

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-have-a-successful-local-seo-campaign-in-2015

And I highly, highly recommend tuning into BrightLocal's ongoing expert webinar series. Some amazing interviews there.

Hope this helps, and good luck with your new business!

Hi Llewellyn!

So sorry, but I'm not at liberty to share that. I do recommend you check out the major retailer REI.com to see how nicely they create their various city landing pages though. A fav example of mine.

Hey Scott,

That's a tough problem, but removing the phone number would not be a good solution as it is one of the 4 core pieces of NAP+W data that Google and customers need to see about any local business. I wouldn't trust a business with no listed phone number and expect most customers would feel the same about this.

I like Bryan's common sense suggestions on this. What I would like to add is that your thread has made me curious as to what it is about the client's business that is making it so confusing to customers that they need a 15 minute explanation before they understand the business model. Maybe the very best thing to do here would be for you to coach the client into whittling that down to a 4-5 sentence explanation that takes less than 1 minute to explain. Think along the lines of an elevator pitch. No business should require a 15 minute explanation, if we're just covering the basics.

Likely, what the client is experiencing is that it's necessary to then move forward from the basic explanation to the conversation that leads to discovering the fitness of a prospect and then closing a deal. While there is no way to avoid putting in this time, again, it comes down how the conversation is managed. I am thinking back to my own early days when I found it frustrating that I would spend a great deal of time listening to customer's issues and explaining my service, only to discover many minutes into the conversation that their budget did not match my fees. What I eventually learned from this was to mention my rates within the first couple minutes of the conversation. At that point, I would either hear,

"Oh, I can't afford that."

or

"That sounds reasonable."

This helped me determine whether a further investment of my time in the discussion was appropriate. It may be that your client is struggling with something like this and needs to refine her communications so that she can tell the difference between a good match and a poor one within a couple of minutes of answering her phone.

One other suggestion ... have the client answer the phone and then put the customer on hold for 30 seconds. In that 30 seconds, run an automated on-hold message with music and voice disclosing the key components of the pitch. By the time the owner then takes the customer off hold, they will have heard the basics.

Hey Peter,

It's generally considered a best practice to have your NAP at the top of your location landing pages, and I don't see any problem with you doing this and referencing the NAP again at the bottom of the page. Just be sure you're making each landing page unique and of as high quality as you can accomplish.

Hi Ron,

It's perfectly fine to run your business out of your home. No danger of being banned for this. Just be sure you are obeying Google's guidelines regarding how your address is displayed based on your business model:

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Hi Kathryn,
I believe you'll find this article helpful:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Hi Vlad!

I see  - you are talking about a contained business, but are asking about the address rather than the name of the business. In that case, I recommend looking up the business on smartystreets.com to see what the USPS deems as the official address of the business, and go with that version.

Hi Ron,
Yes, you can report competitors you know are spamming. 51Blocks has a good tutorial on how to do this:

http://www.51blocks.com/report-spammy-google-listings/

Hi Vlad,

Are you talking about container locations, like a shopping mall? If your business is in one, see Google's guidelines here:

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Expand the 'Names' section and read the section titled "Containment Information".

If I'm not quite understand, please, feel free to come back with further information on this.

Hey Paul!

If this is actually just one business, it should only ever have had 1 Google+ Local page. Google+ Local pages are meant to represent physical locations ... not a menu of services. So 1 physical location = 1 Google+ local Page. Unfortunately, if I'm understanding this correctly, Google would consider this situation of multiple pages to be a violation of their guidelines:

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

So, the best thing in this scenario would be to consolidate everything into a single website, build out unique content on the website for each service offered, but have just 1 Google+ Local page and a set of additional citations to support the single physical location. Now, if I've misunderstood and this is actually several different physical locations, please let me know.

Hi There!

Chances are, this is going to be an uphill battle; the ability to compete successfully with the likes of Google's own location-based packs of results + organic results featuring individual business websites + powerhouse directories like Yelp is going to depend on the resources you have to put into the development and marketing of the directory.

The competition is stiff for anyone entering the directory scene these days, but if you're creating something that doesn't yet exist, the best hope would be in becoming THE authoritative source for the niche. What can you do that will add value users can't get from Google 7-packs or Yelp's reviewers? What kind of content can you create that will earn you a spot amongst these already-established players? These would be the questions I would be asking myself to determine whether I wanted to dive into this new venture.

Hi Richard!

Our Help Team will definitely want to take a look at this, and via email, you'll be able to share with us the email address associated with your Moz Local account, the name, address, phone number and website of the business in question and screenshots of any troubles you are seeing in a private setting. Please, do write to us here: https://moz.com/help/contact

Someone on the team will gladly troubleshoot this with you.

Hi Ali,

So, Google's guideline on this is that the business name should be exactly what it is in the real world (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en_). Businesses should not be adding modifiers to their name for the sake of search. If the business is now considering going through a formal/legal re-branding process, then this would be mean marketing-wide, including the website, all citations and other web references, the way the phone is answered, print materials, radio and TV advertising. You'll need to pick one name and use it everywhere. This will need to be the legal name or DBA.

Yes, it could be of some degree of help if the legal business name included the city in it, but whether this advantage would be great enough to warrant the major task of a formal re-brand will be a big decision for the company to make.

Hi James,

I agree with Richard on this - you want to aim for the traffic that is most relevant to your client. For a small business, ranking organically just for health insurance is likely to be out of the question, but ranking locally for health insurance in his small town should be achievable.