Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Excellent discussion going on here, ladies and gents! I am so impressed by the deep questions and answers present here. Our community makes me proud!

Ruben, I'd like to bring up a couple of things to add to this good topic.

1. You might like to read my Moz Post http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide which covers the concept of building out pages for various locations in some depth.

2. Citations are a big part of the picture - absolutely! They serve 2 main functions which are a) to help customers find you on a wide variety of platforms and b) to build a consistent, trustworthy body of information about your business on the web, which is then crawled by search engines, causing them to have confidence in the cluster of data they have about your business which can then increase your chances of being considered a relevant answer for certain queries.

So, it's a 1-2 punch kind of thing, building citations. There are direct benefits in a customer finding your listing on a site like Superpages and indirect benefits in the consistency and prevalence of your citations helping search engines to feel confident about the validity and prominence of your business.

This being said, it's my belief and understanding that it takes time for validity/prominence to actually start affecting rank. Every local business platform has its own schedule for taking a citation from zero to live, and then I have to think about search engine bots picking this up and stirring it around in the bucket in which they've got all my other business data. Then, I have to take into account whether my citation building has, in fact, surpassed what my direct local competitors have done or has simply brought me on par with them, meaning citation building will not be the difference-maker I'd love it to be, because my toughest competitors have done the same thing I have (meaning, I'm going to have to find some other way to distance myself from the field).

In sum, citation building is a must-do for any local business that doesn't want to fall behind in their niche, but it takes time to see the positive effects from it and the level of positivity is going to directly relate to the stiffness of the competition. You are in a tough market - law in major cities, which I would consider one of the most difficult ranking environments. Yes, you've got to get those citations in good shape, but my honest appraisal of this is that you are going to have to go way beyond these basics to surpass what is doubtless a highly active/ heavily marketed competitor base. The usual advice of build excellent content, implement on-page Local SEO, build citations, earn reviews is going to be common to all your competitors', so finding something that they're not all already doing may be necessary to see yourself rise in the SERPs by dint of some extra creative, superior effort.

Hope these thoughts are helpful! Glad you brought up this topic, and I hope once Moz Local has had a few more months to bake in the oven, we'll be able to publish some case studies that prove a correlation between participation and positive results!

Lovely to hear, Robert! Couldn't agree more that being nice goes far in making the business world so much pleasanter for everybody

Hey Robert,

Thanks for clarifying about not cutting and pasting. I didn't think it likely that you'd do that, but just wanted to be sure

If Yelp publishes policies like the ones I've quoted, then I feel you should have a case for holding them accountable for sticking to what they say. These are their own policies - if they believe in them, they should uphold them. And should be willing to explain to customers the reasons why they have done something that appears at variance with their own stated guidelines.

I really do hope you will get an answer!

Hi Dana (and hey Ruben!),

Thanks so much for asking about this! So, basically, the Moz Check Listing tool features 2 types of data:

1. Data about your listing on Moz Local's 7 supported partner sites. These supported partners are:

Infogroup, Acxiom, Nuestar/Localeze, Factual, Foursquare,Superpages, Best of the Web

2. Data about non-partner sites like Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.

If you are a Moz Local customer (a paying customer, that is) then it is up to us to get your data correct on the 7 supported partner sites. You should not need to do anything, and shouldn't be trying to manually edit those listings.

For any non-partner site, yes, do go and manage it manually. So, let's say Check Listing reports that you've got an inconsistent business name on Yelp. Our tool is highlighting that this is something you might want to take steps to correct. If you'd like to do so, then you would need to go to your Yelp profile and make the necessary edits. If you don't happen to have a claimed profile with a certain site (like in the case of a listing having been automatically created) then, yes, you'd likely need to sign up, or verify, or what have you, to take control of that profile so that you could edit it.

Eventually, once you've manually edited one of these non-partner sites, Check Listing should pick it up. This will not be instantaneous. It will take time for a third party to push the data across their servers and for us to pick that up and positively reflect it in your completion score.

Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any additional questions!

Really good discussion going on here, gentlemen! Everyone on this thread likely agrees that Yelp's policies have made them the focus of a great deal of controversy over the years.

Their official stance on removing reviews for paying customers is:

Will Yelp remove or reorder bad reviews if a business pays for advertising?

No. You can’t pay us to remove or reorder your bad reviews — it’s just that simple. It’s worth pointing out some additional checks and balances that we build into the system: among other things, our sales team doesn’t have the administrative privileges that might allow them to remove a bad review for an advertiser; similarly, the folks who do have those privileges don’t have anything to do with sales and aren’t compensated on the basis of sales performance ... Our recommendation software treats advertisers and non-advertisers exactly the same. You’ll find plenty of Yelp advertisers with negative reviews, and plenty of non-advertisers with five-star ratings across the board ... In short, there is no relationship between reviews and anything having to do with Yelp Ads or the Yelp Ads sales process. Period.

(see: https://biz.yelp.com/support/common_questions)

My read of this is that Yelp is declaring that money can't influence review take-down because their sales department doesn't handle taking down reviews - but - that there are staff members who do have the privilege of taking down a review.

Robert, two things about what you've documented here are standing out to me:

1. It sounds like the company in question had multiple negative reviews that have now been removed. To me, this indicates some sort of close manual management going on on Yelp's side in conjunction with this business. Could legal issues be involved? Could there be some kind of extenuating circumstance that would warrant a general take-down of all negative reviews for the business in question? Maybe like a change of management, or legal pressure, or something along those lines?

2. You mentioned that you multi-posted your review. I am failing to find the guideline on this, but I am positive Yelp has a policy against re-publishing Yelp reviews on third party sites. Could it be that your mutli-publishing approach might have fallen afoul of this and looked to Yelp like you were re-publishing content (your review) that they consider to be theirs? Could this have happened with any of the other reviews that were taken down? Just a thought!

I think you've done the smart thing by personally asking Yelp for an explanation of what happened. It would be very educational, I'm sure, if you could share the reply you receive with the community as, clearly, there are some hard feelings about situations like this. Thanks for starting a good discussion!

Hi Ruben,

Yes, this is a bit confusing about Check Listing being completely separate from Moz Local, because you can reach Check Listing from inside the paid Moz Local publishing dash.

Have a great day!

Hi Ruben,

So glad you've asked! Often, it's best to bring a concern like this to https://moz.com/help/contact but I'd like to answer this here in Q&A because its and FAQ for sure. There are typically 4 reasons why you may see fluctuations in the Check Listing tool:

1. One of the platforms has a bug on their side. For example, Localeze had a bug where searching for any names with multiple words turned up no results. It took them days to fix.

2. Some of our platforms change the layout of their page without proactively telling us, so we need to react to customer complaints to fix them. I believe Bing was an example here in the past.

3. It's also possible that the data we’re in the process of pushing from your paid Moz Local publishing dashboard has updated the listing, but somehow, one of the 7 supported partner sites is making it difficult to search for in their system. We are working with our partners to understand what's going on and making it more reliable. So, for example, you might see in the Moz Local publishing dash that a listing has officially updated, but Check Listing (which is a completely separate tool) may not yet show that update either because a platform has not yet pushed the data out or is making it difficult to find.

4. We do these queries in real time. Sometimes, engines can be slow and time out, and we're out of luck grabbing any data, so we assume it does not exist (thereby lowering the score).  We're making a change to differentiate between a missing listing and an API that's unavailable. We'll put as asterisk by the score and explain somewhere that the score is being impacted by unavailable partners.

We're really hoping that, in cases where an engine times out or an API is temporarily unavailable, the improvements we're working on making to the messaging customers receive will help reduce unnecessary worry. In most cases, your listings will simply reappear on their own, but if you suspect a bug because a listing stays incomplete for a long period, please do contact the Help Team,

Hope this helps!

Hi EasyStreet,

What makes this a tough call is the sheer size of the company with markets in different states. In nearly all cases, it's better to think of brand first - by having all your websites assets on a single domain, then everything you do on that site for all of your markets is going to build the strength and authority of your brand. For example, McDonald's has a main corporate website you can search if you're looking for a specific location. They do have other sites for other purposes, but their locations across the US are all represented by a single site. You could definitely call them a strong brand, and it's a marketing example to follow, even if you're a plumber with just 3 locations.

It sounds to me, from what you've written, that right now, your firm is in a transitional period trying to determine whether to consolidate two brands into one, possibly. I would get this matter settled before you start changing websites, so that if you then further decide to consolidate multiple sites into one, you're going forward either with one or two clear brands.

Should you decide to consolidate, the main thing is going to be to make certain you have studied and implemented redirect protocols from the old domains to the main new one. Unfortunately, this is not my area of expertise. I am going to ask others to chime in with more skill in this area, but in sum, it's generally considered a best practice to go with a single site, but there can be nuances when dealing with a multi-state company that may not make that the best fit for every scenario.

Hi DragonSearch,

Oops! I'm sorry if I didn't explain that well. You would not create a Google+ Local or Facebook Local business page with an incorrect address. You'd want to create one with a correct address, that identically matches what you enter in the Moz Local CSV. This way, we can validate your information and then, once validation is complete, we can push you data out to our 7 supported partners, which are:

Infogroup

Acxiom

Nuestar/Localeze

Factual

Foursquare

Superpages

Best of the Web

Hope this helps!

Hi Perfect Pitch Concepts,

I'm so sorry your question hasn't received a reply. Looks like no one may have noticed this about Google+ Local vs Brand pages. You're supposed to be able to link out from the description with rich text, but my understanding is that it can take longer to get verified if you do.

Now, with the launch of the new Google My Buisiness, who knows! Google is definitely narrowing the gap between Local and Social page types, so I expect all kinds of changes to be going on with things just like this.

Hey Ruben,

The review help site I am most impressed with is getfivestars.com. Have you checked that out? It's pretty cool, in that it helps you earn not just third party reviews, but also on-site testimonials. It was developed by Mike Blumenthal, and no one knows local better than Mike:) Hope you'll check it out!

Hi Marketz,

I've not yet had a chance to play with the new Google My Business phone number, but I would expect it would have a place to list an alternate phone number. I wouldn't suggest putting it in your description. If you still have the old Google and Your Business dashboard for the Google+ Local page, there should be a place for an alternate phone number, I believe.

Hi Pieter,

Right, I did understand that your primary language would be Dutch, but what I don't get is why the listing would have automatically defaulted to English, given that you're located in the Netherlands. That seems pretty odd, so Google is probably the best bet for getting an answer on this.

Hi Pieter!

My guess is that what you're experiencing falls under the following Google guideline:

In countries where more than one language is spoken, choose a primary language that you want your listing to be displayed in. Even if users have their browsers set to another language, they'll still be able to find your business on Maps.

I am not aware of a way to manually reverse this once you've chosen to create a listing in whatever primary language you started with. Unless one of our community members has a better idea, I think you'd be best off actually contacting Google on this to see if they can help you make such a switch. Sorry not to have an easy solution on this one!

Hi Mike,

If the numbers exist anywhere, Google can decide to pull them. You should search Google for the existence of these phone numbers anywhere on the web (just to be sure they're not only in the PDFs) and then remove those numbers if having them pulled by Google in this manner is having a negative enough impact. Eventually, you should see them drop off.

Hi Michael!

Because of Google's bias toward physical location, simply mentioning the names of neighboring cities in which you have no physical location is unlikely to earn you a place in the local pack of results for 'used cars' in these cities, and will not typically be enough to gain you a spot in the organic SERPs, either. The exception to this would be if you are in such a niche with such low competition that it's easy to rank for anything - which isn't typically going to be the case with a used car dealer in a big city.

Meanwhile, the mention of these other cities in the titles of pages that you are trying hard to get to rank in the local pack for that main, physical city may actually somewhat dilute your ability to achieve that goal. Rather than saying, "Hey Google, THIS is our city of physical location!", you are splitting up the title to say, "Well, we're relevant to a whole bunch of places," when, in fact, you're really only strongly relevant to the main one.

Chances are that you'll need to consider whether the development of landing pages for these other cities is a good marketing decision and a user-friendly strategy. This typically involves brainstorming to see if a business has a legitimate presence in other cities, beyond the fact that it's near to them and that customers travel from there to the business.

With SABs (service area businesses), this decision is quite easy, because the plumber may be based in Metropolis, but is traveling to Gotham City, Star City and Red City to fix sinks. With something like a car dealership, the link is less obvious.

Does the dealership do something in these cities that would warrant the development of content specific to these locales, that would then provide a sensible set of pages to be optimizing for each individual city? For example, does the dealership offer unique specials based on the customer's city of origin (Red Star customers get 5% off their purchase of a used car this summer). Or, perhaps, does the owner send a mechanic to vocational schools in another city to give presentations. Does the company participate in seminars or events in these other cities? Maybe vintage car shows or charity events? If you can find a legit connection between the business and neighboring cities, then you have something interesting to write about and a user-centric reason to be building and optimizing pages for these cities. If no such connection exists, you may need to consider PPC ads, instead, targeting these cities.

You might like to read about this whole concept of city landing pages further at:

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

Good Morning!

Just a quick question in hopes this might be helpful. If you are struggling to gain control of your Google+ Local page right now, are you at least in control of your Facebook Local Business page? Moz Local can also validate against this, provided this name, address, phone number and website identically match what is in your CSV. I wanted to be sure to mention this as this might be something you could edit more easily.

Hi Gary,

We're sorry Moz Local just isn't available in the UK at this time, but Bright Local is very highly thought of. Hope you'll give them a look.

Hi Mark,

I think you're right to be concerned. The mutli-site approach is one I pretty much never recommend to local business owners. Google's own John Mueller has clearly stated that Google prefers the single site approach (see: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-one-site-locations-15454.html). As far as Google's rules go, it's not permitted to create a second local listing for a set of products a company vends. That's striclty forbidden, in fact (see: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en).

I've had business owners come to me in this situation and I've had to take a hard line with them and leave it up to them to take my advice or not. I tell them that they are a single company and should be running a single website backed up with a single set of citations for the business (unless they have more than one physical location, in which case, they can build out separate citations for each location). Ideally, the client should:

1. Consolidate his sites into a single site

2. Redirect his old URLs to the authoritative one

3. Clean up any citations that have been built as though this were 2 companies instead of one.

Alternatives:

1. The client can found a new business if his products are different enough to merit the effort of doing so. The new business would need a unique name, address and phone number.

2. If he insists on keeping the second site, all NAP (name, address, phone) should be removed from it as well as all references/links to the main site. He could run a blog on it or something about his industry, but he should not attempt to rank locally with this second site in any way. Content should not be duplicated in any way between the two sites. Once you start explaining this to the client, he may say, "Well then what is the point of the second site, if I can't try to promote it as though it were a second business?" That can be a sort of 'bingo' moment that can help you to help him see that he should really think hard about consolidating.

What I've found over the years is that business owners sometimes take this multi-site approach because they feel it will make them look bigger to Google and help them diversify their rankings. In point of fact, in the local business sphere, it only hampers them. Google wants an accurate representation of the business with a single, consistent set of NAP and a clear, authoritative website. This way, everything the business does goes towards strengthening their brand. The stronger their brand becomes, the easier it will be for them to rank for their various products.

Hope these thoughts are helpful. I'm wishing you luck discussing this with the client. I know it's not always easy:)

So glad it helped, Edward. Thanks for letting me know that!

Hi Pete,

If you are physically located in Sheboygan, then you should be reflecting this in your:

• Titles, meta description tags, content

• The footer of your website that should list your complete NAP (name, address, phone)

• The Contact Us page of the site, which should again feature your complete NAP

So, yes, if you're in Sheboygan, do optimize the site so that it makes this clear, in a natural, non-spammy manner.

If you don't have a staffed, physical office in Sheboygan, that's another story.

Hope this helps!

Hi DJ,

Any kind of box. The address has to be a staffed, physical office. Google frowns on boxes:)

Hi DJ,

So glad to have you here in Q&A! Just wanted to make a note here that Google doesn't view boxes as legitimate physical addresses, so this would not be considered a best practice and could result in the listing being removed from their index. You can dig into the Google Places Quality Guidelines here:

https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en

Hope this helps!

Hi John,

Having 2 companies occupy the same address does carry some risk of merging, but there are things you can do to lower that risk. First of all, you cannot have the two businesses share the same phone number, whether they are located in the same building or separate buildings. Every local business must have its own phone number, so you'll need to invest in a new local area code phone number for one or the other and be sure to edit references web-wide to the old phone number being associated with whichever business you choose to get the new number for. Once you have the 2 numbers, the other things you can do to lower the risk of merging are:

1. Be sure none of the content is duplicated from one website to the other. It must all be unique.

2. Do not interlink between the two websites. Keep everything separate.

3. Consider getting a legal suite number for the second business. Do not use a P.O. Box, virtual office or anything like that. This would be a real suite number from your local post office - not a fictitious number.

These would be some ways to decrease the risk of merging.

Hi Ruben,

That's right. Just sit back. You should expect fully updated status in about 8 weeks from your purchase date. Thanks for asking!

Hi Dragonsearch,

Unfortunately, no. Moz Local has to be able to validate the business info you provide us with the business info we find either on the Google+ Local or Facebook local business page. If the pages can't be found or the name, address, phone and website on them don't identically match what you've entered in the Moz Local dashboard, we can't validate. You would need to access the Google+ Local or Facebook local business page, edit the data to match, see that your edits go live and then try to validate through our system.

Hope this clarifies how this works!

Hey Brandon!

If you're a local business, there are likely 2 types of links that would be most relevant to your business. These would be local links and industry links. So, a local link might be your local chamber of commerce. An industry link might come from something like a national organization that represents your industry. Obviously, it's great to get mentioned in local news, local blogs, etc., too. The main thing to concentrate on with this is that you are publishing content or joining organizations that precisely relate to your business and its location. The ideal is for these things to happen naturally.

If you are targeting a state, that is not considered a true local search. Local search relates to cities - not states. So, from your query, if you are a BBQ restaurant in Colorado, the local element of your campaign would revolve around Denver, or whatever city the restaurant is in.

If you want to gain visibility for your BBQ keywords and the state of Colorado, you'd need to approach this organically rather than locally, hoping to show up in the organic results rather than in the local pack. So, you might produce content about the history of BBQ in Colorado (like, Basque sheepherders in the 1800s BBQing or whatever) or make infographics comparing the best BBQ restaurants in the state based on some criteria or write article about statewide BBQ contests, or what have you.

Hope this helps!

Hi Ruben,

I've not personally used Yoast, but here is a resource for you documenting how to do so for multiple locations:

http://kb.yoast.com/article/114-configuration-guide-for-local-seo

And here's a blog post on same:

https://yoast.com/local-seo-v1-2/

I hope others who have actually worked with this will chime in

Hi Ruben,

How people use your site (like traffic to your blog posts) can contribute to your 'authority', and thereby, your rankings, yes, but you would want to be blogging with your keywords in mind. If you are a wedding photographer with a local business website and you're starting this blog as a vehicle for publishing additional, on-going content, then consider viewing the blog as a showcase of the client projects you take on locally.

So, let's say you're operating out of your physical location in Taos, New Mexico, but you frequently get jobs in neighboring cities like Santa Fe, Mora and Albuquerque. Lacking a physical location in these 3 towns, you are very unlikely to earn Google local pack rankings for them, because that's just the way Google works. But, by steadily blogging about the weddings you've photographed in these other cities (writing about the projects, the venues, showing your photos) you will begin to develop a body of content that relates to your service keywords + these cities. The hope here is to gain visibility in the ORGANIC SERPS, rather than the local ones. If your work is impressive and your writing engaging, this additional organic visibility can help you to start getting phone calls from these additional cities.

That's basically how it works. If you are blogging regularly about your work in these other cities, and your competitors aren't as motivated in their marketing as you are, you have a chance to get into the organic SERPs with the kinds of blog posts that excite new potential customers and encourage them to pick you for their event.

Hope this helps!

Good suggestions on this thread!

What I would be sure that you are doing is that if you have a unique landing page for each office, you are consistently using the acronym for that specific business on that page. So, in other words, your landing page for the office in NM should consistently refer to the business as Keller & Keller LLC. This does matter. Presumably, you will have linked from the NM Google+ Local page directly to this landing page and if Google sees Keller & Keller LLC in both sources, it will confirm the identity of the business for them and lower your chances of merging and duplicates. Hope this helps!

Hi Freshfireone,

I would recommend that you identify the client's business model on this post and then look at the suggestions for how that business model can best proceed:

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

If you have more questions after you take a gander at that, please ask away!

Hi Jen,

Keri is quite correct that we don't currently have expansion plans for Moz Local, but I hope we'll be able to support Canada one day. In the meantime, definitely check out Whitespark.ca. They are a completely awesome Candian-based citation building company and offer great packages. Really good guys! Another alternative is BrightLocal, which is UK-based and internationally-supporting. Also high quality. Hope these alternatives help.

Hope this helps!

Good discussion here! One more tip: be sure you're not dealing with a duplicate page:)

Hi Min,
Thanks so much for providing your honest feedback about your experience with Moz Local. If you created an account more than 8 weeks ago and aren't seeing completion on any of the 7 supported partners, I recommend you create a support ticket to have someone on the team look into it.

Hi Yellabird,

MozLocal will get you listed with these 7 'big boys':

Infogroup
Acxiom
Nuestar/Localeze
Factual
Foursquare
Superpages
Best of the Web

Hi Yellabird,

You'll be able to track the progress of your listings being submitted by us and updated by our partners by logging into your Moz Local account and looking at the row of little circles next to your business information in the dashboard. You can mouse over each circle to see what it means.

I also want to update this thread with new information regarding typical time frames for achieving completion. This is really more like 8 weeks than 4 weeks.

Hope this helps!

Hi Sarah,

Provided that these are physical locations that are staffed during normal business hours and not shared by another business, then, yes, it's typically a best practice to link from each Google+ Local page to its respective landing page on the website. I realize this isn't your question, but as it came up in this thread, I thought I'd address it first.

1. Do you see a benefit for your customers in doing this? If so, go ahead. If not, what would be your goal in doing this?

2. It can't hurt, but may not give you a visible boost in any way.

3. Recommend you study the great new Moz Local Learning Center. Tons of good info there:

http://moz.com/learn/local

Hope this helps!

Hi Cestbob,

Good questions. Here are Google's official guidelines regarding addresses and SABs (service area businesses):

• Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas.  If you wish to display your complete business address while setting your service area(s), your business location should be staffed and able to receive customers during its stated hours. Google will determine how best to display your business address based on your inputs as well as inputs from other sources. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.
• If you don't conduct face-to-face business at your location, you must select "Yes, this business serves customers at their locations" under the "Service Areas and Location Settings" section of your dashboard, and then select the "Do not show my business address on my Maps listing" option.

So, from your description of your business model, Google would want you to hide your address. This being said, I agree with Richard that they seem very lax about enforcing this and have seemed so for some time. Who knows, though? Tomorrow could be the day they initiate some plan to crack down on businesses that aren't complying with this guideline.

So, whether you choose to comply with the guidelines or not is up to you, but I do think it's important to state that none of this has anything to do with you achieving visibility in neighboring cities where you serve. Only in very niche markets or geographic regions of almost no competition can one typically expect to show up in the local pack of results for any city beyond their city of physical location.

In order to achieve non-physical location visibility the most common practice involves the development of local landing pages on the website with the goal of achieving organic (not local pack) visibility. You can read more about this here:

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

Remember that such pages must be completely unique and serve the needs of your customers. Hope this helps!

Hi NetReach,

Matt-Antonio has raised 2 very important points, the first being that if you see competitors' listings with a category that no longer exists in the new Google Places for Business categories, this is likely because it's left over from the custom category days. The link he's included in his reply goes to Mike Blumenthal's category tool that should let you see which categories are currently available. I agree with you that 'electrician' isn't there. You'll have to find the next-best options.

Hi Alexander,

Google says that one website is better than two, and I almost never recommend that any local business publish more than one website, because of the risk this puts them at for NAP inconsistency, duplicate and merged listings as well as often creating thin/duplicate content risks.

Google's opinion, as voiced by John Mueller, can be found here:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/rOb2jIctBLQ/discussion

So, honestly, my advice is to go with just one site, Alexander.

Hi Alexander,

For multi-location businesses (that is to say, businesses with more than one, staffed physical office) it's generally considered a best practice to link to the location landing page on the website, rather than the homepage, because your Google+ Local page is then pointing users and bots right to a page that matches the NAP on the business listing. This practice may also lower the risk of merging happening, because Google's bots are easily able to see that everything matches on the designated page, rather than leaving them to scour around the website trying to pick the right location out of a handful of them.

You might enjoy reading:

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

Hope this helps!

Great, Mark. Hope it works out!

Hi Alexander,

Great question. There is no one, right answer to this question. On the one hand, it's true that having keywords (like 'homes' and 'ny') can give you a bit of leverage in the search engine results. On the other hand, having a generic keyword-oriented domain name always stands out as having been chosen largely for search engines rather than out of company pride or with the user in my mind.

My personal preference is generally to go with the brand name. This is name the you're trying to promote as 'the' authoritative resource in your field and a branded domain shows a lot of confidence and pride in your brand.  After all, Moz.com doesn't contain a keyword. The domain name for this company isn't  terrificinboundmarketingresource.com. Rather, Moz has put in the years and effort to build a brand that stands for something with its community and, at this point, it would actually be negative rather than positive if the domain name was keyword-oriented rather than brand-oriented.

So, I would encourage most businesses to reflect on the fact that their domain name is going to be their home base for years to come, and that having one that matches what the phone receptionist says when she picks up the phone is a good plan for building a recognized brand. You're going to have to make a superior effort to surpass competitors in the SERPs, anyway, and while some SEOs may feel that any little bit of leverage can help (such as a keyword-oriented domain), chances are this won't be enough to help you pass up the competition in a tough market.

An alternative is to build some keywords into a domain name, like sunnyassocnyhomes.com, but that can start to get rather long and messy. Some people are good a finessing this. You could try brainstorming a bunch of domain name ideas and see if you can come up with a good brand-keyword combo so that you're showing both pride in your brand and sensitivity toward keywords.

In the end, this is a highly personal choice. One last thought. When I'm looking at real estate and I see domains in the results, I'm personally more likely to click on Century21.com, that's earned its place in the SERPs through building a strong brand, than I am to click on homesforsalemycity.com, because I feel immediately suspicious that this may be just another low quality aggregate site (so many of which clutter up the results and provide little satisfaction). So, were I to see SunnyAssociates.com coming up for my search, that would signal to me that your brand has earned its place in the SERPs based on merit, rather than having squeaked into the mix with keywords.

Hope these thoughts are helpufl

Good Afternoon,

That's an interesting situation you've highlighted! You are quite correct that Google only allows one listing per physical location, but things get a bit fuzzy when it comes to multi-language listings. The first time I ran into this scenario was in about 2009, in which Mike Blumenthal published this article quoting Google's stance on how a business could have multi-language listings without creating multiple listings (http://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/08/10/local-business-center-same-listing-in-multiple-languages-is-ok/).

However, the current Google Places for Business setup does not allow for multiple languages. Google's stand on this is that you're supposed to pick a single language and create a single listing in it. See this:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/language/business/Ok7wphTl6hQ/v8pfqDRtj2gJ

Despite this, businesses have old multi-language listings from former times and are also creating mutiple language listings by using different accounts (which was once recommended as a best practice).

The exact guideline, currently, is found here:

https://support.google.com/places/answer/142906?hl=en

... and reads:

"In countries where more than one language is spoken, choose a primary language that you want the listing to be displayed in. Even if users have their browsers set to another language, they'll still be able to find your business on Maps."

So, according to Google, you should only have one language and one listing, but as we can see from your example, people are getting around this. You could try to report your competitor, but it may not be worth it.

What I actually find most interesting about your example is the fact that Google is surfacing those 3 same listings for your search term, hinting to me that Google may be confusing your search intent with a branded search that matches the titles of your competitor's Google+ Local pages. The titles on those pages don't look quite right to me.

So, bottom line ... yes, it's supposed to be just one listing, but I suspect this whole situation is a big mess given Google's guidelines that don't meet the real-world situation terribly well, coupled with their failure to sometimes police their own product. Hope these thoughts are helpful.

Hi David,

Something that's really standing out to me, visiting the cabinentsbayarea site is that the phone number is not a bay area phone number. It looks like it's in Florida. Is that correct? Is the business not actually located in the California bay area? This could be a problem.

Hmm, don't recall this ever happening with Yelp before. I guess we all have a bad day once in awhile

Hi Courtney,

Yes, that's correct. The process is outlined in the Google Places Quality Guidelines (see: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en). If you're not familiar with these, they are the main starting point for understanding Local SEO, as Google sees it. Google's guidelines regarding this are as follows:

• Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas.  If you wish to display your complete business address while setting your service area(s), your business location should be staffed and able to receive customers during its stated hours. Google will determine how best to display your business address based on your inputs as well as inputs from other sources. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.
• If you don't conduct face-to-face business at your location, you must select "Yes, this business serves customers at their locations" under the "Service Areas and Location Settings" section of your dashboard, and then select the "Do not show my business address on my Maps listing" option.

Hope this helps clarify your client's options. Additionally, if you're just getting your feet wet with Local SEO, please take advantage of the super free education offered in our new Moz Local Learning Center:

http://moz.com/learn/local

Hi Courtney,

No - the client can participate in Google Places for Business if they are willing to put their home address in the dashboard and then take the necessary steps to hide it. So long as it is hidden, no one should show up at their house. They can then get listed at the other directories highlighted in Phil's article that also allow the home address to be hidden. What they can't do is try to set up a Google listing using a P.O. box, because it's simply not allowed. If their concern is keeping their address hidden so that people won't come to their home, it's completely possible to do so and this justifiable concern should not exclude them from building citations; it will merely limit the number of citations they build to being on those directories that permit the address to be hidden. Hope this makes sense!

Hi Mark,

You might check out Bright Local's citation tracker tool. They are UK-based:

http://www.brightlocal.com/seo-tools/citation-tracker/

Hope this helps!

Hi Edward,

You are totally right to be concerned. This is spammy, extremely so:

http://www.generalplumbingsupply.com/American-Canyon-CA-v1.HTML

That enormous block of links to low quality pages for cities in which the business isn't physically located would almost certainly raise eyebrows with Google. The block of city names is a violation of Google's guidelines referenced on this page:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

And the duplicate content from page to page is a major taboo. The presence of this duplicate content is definitely downgrading the overall quality of the website and is likely to fall afoul of Google.

From my look at the site, it appears to me that this is a brick-and-mortar plumbing store with 5 physical locations. By no stretch of the imagination is it okay to be featuring text like this:

"Kitchen And Bathroom Products In Fairfax, CA" when there is no physical location in Fairfax.

I got to this page http://www.generalplumbingsupply.com/Kitchen-And-Bathroom-Products-In-Fairfax-CA-v1.HTML from the American Canyon page. Google Maps says American Canyon and Fairfax are about 35 miles apart, so stating that the store's products are 'in' Fairfax is simply untrue. The customer is not going to appreciate what could very well come off as an attempt to mislead him, right?

I think you are absolutely right to be concerned. In your shoes, I'd be flipping out at this extremely blatant, spammy approach. I'm not quite understanding what the relationship is between you, your client and the store, but if this business came to me asking for a consultation, I'd tell them to read their SEO the riot act. The business owner needs to understand that his rankings and reputation are being put at risk by this practice. I would get rid of all of those scores of pages ASAP and take the following approach:

• A single, unique, high quality page for each store

• Use the blog to write about legitimate connections with any city where the business isn't physically located. For example, if the American Canyon business owner travels to Fairfax to hold a seminar on green plumbing practices, go ahead and write it up. The operative word here is 'legit'.

I think this article will really help everyone involved in the project to correctly identify what this business model is and how to promote it in a user-friendly, safe manner:

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

If there's some nuance I've overlooked in this situation, please don't hesitate to provide further details, and I sincerely hope my no-nonsense reply on this one may save the business owner from a massive headache!