You're welcome, Beehive, and good luck with the work ahead.

Hi Courtney,

Donna has surfaced the very best post for you on this topic. Will your client be at a slight disadvantage if he only wants to build citations on directories that allow one to hide the address? Yes, probably. But, if his privacy concerns are paramount, at least you can get him off to a good start by sticking to the platforms in Phil's article. He may have to rely on other forms of marketing to try to make up the difference, because he will doubtless have competitors who don't share his privacy concerns and are, therefore, able to build a larger number of citations.

Hi William,

Agree with your summary, but do want to stress that there generally isn't a good enough reason to be running two sites and that Google finding your complete or partial NAP on more than one site is definitely BAD!

Hi William,

I think you might like to check out Google's John Mueller's advice on this topic:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-one-site-locations-15454.html

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-one-site-15963.html

I think this advice about a single site vs. multiple sites is especially important in the local business scenario.

Hopefully, these links will be of help to everyone participating in this good discussion.

Hi Alexander,

Good question and good discussion going on here. I am going to recommend against having two websites, as it sounds like you are operating a local business with a physical location.

What is the purpose of you having two websites? How do you feel this helps your customers?

I believe you are right to be concerned, and here is why:

When Google crawls the web to bring data into the 'cluster' they have about your local business, what they are 'hoping' to find is a clear business name, clear address, local phone number and authoritative website consistently associated with your business. In your case, what Google is finding is that two websites are associated with your business name and address. What are they to trust in this situation? By the same token, which website are your customers meant to trust?

Having multiple websites for a single business often represents risk for:

• Citation inconsistencies

• Ranking problems

• Merged listings

• Duplicate listings, including hidden duplicates

• Duplicate content

• Customer confusion

• Bot confusion

I don't know all of the nuances of your unique situation, Alexander, but chances are, if a client came to me with this scenario, I would be recommending that he pick a single authoritative domain and redirect the second domain to it, then work on building his authoritative domain into a powerful asset. Splitting up your authority over multiple domains just seldom makes sense, and there are definite risks involved. Hope this helps.

Hi Beehive,

Was the Google+ Local page for city #1 previously pointing to the homepage of the old website, but now pointing to a landing page on the new website for just that one city (among the other 5 new city landing pages)? If so, chances are your old homepage had more clout than the new local landing page, which could possibly explain the loss of organic rankings. After all, you used to have a whole website devoted to just this one city. Now you've got just one page on a larger site devoted to it. Chances are, you've got to build up the authority of these new landing pages, if the scenario I've described is accurate, in order to regain your organic authority.

Hi Dan,

Hopefully your read-through of Google's guidelines will have helped to clear this up, too.

Hi Jim,

Yes, I think this is a serious consideration. But let's see what additional feedback you get.

Hi Jim,

Well, from a Local SEO perspective, I wouldn't advise putting content on a local business website that reflects anything other than your own city or location and service area, due to confusion this could cause on the part of your customers and Google, but lead gen is not an area of expertise for me. I'm going to ask our staff for additional input on your question. It's a good one, for sure!

Hi Beehive,

This is a good question. So, as I understand it, you originally had a city-specific domain name when you were a single location business. You now have six locations and have moved to a purely branded domain rather than a city-specific one and this site has a unique page for each of your locations (which is good - a best practice - provided the content is unique on each page).

I would not recommend putting all six city names in your homepage title tag or in the title tag of any other page. Once a business expands like yours has, you've got to come up with a different strategy than the one you were using for a single location.

Questions:

Did you 301 redirect the old domain to the new one?

Did you update all of your citations to reflect the new domain name? Realize this will take time to go into effect. This is very important.

Suggestions:

You might like to read this post about local landing pages: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Study the part about Business Model III in the above guide, if you've not already read it. It applies to your business model.

A multi-location local business that I think is doing a good job with their Local SEO is REI.com. Check out their location landing pages.

You must now start building the authority for each of the 5 new locations, with content development, citation building, review acquisition, social outreach, etc.

I hope some of these thoughts will be helpful to you.

Hi Jim,

Thank you for the excellent further details. I'm trying to envision your situation. You are an auto-related services company located in South Florida, and presumably, serving customers in that area. However, you mention:

"I had an opportunity to find a mutually beneficial way to provide these services."

Would this be along the lines of lead generation to businesses in other states that provide the same service you do but that are not part of your own company? Or, something totally different?

Hi Jim,

You've done a good job phrasing the details of your question, but this is one of those situations in which it may actually not be possible to advise you well without assessing your unique website/industry/geography/scenario. Businesses that operate in a non-competitive niche or geography often do rank for other cities beyond their city of location, simply because Google doesn't have much data to go on. For example, if you're the only tow truck company servicing a 50 mile radius in rural Kansas, you might very well show up for a variety of mobile and desktop searches for users who aren't located in your city or who are adding these other city names to your query. If, however, you are an attorney in Los Angeles, you are in a completely different situation and the fight for any kind of ranking is a tough one.

Are you familiar with the concept of developing high quality local landing pages for the various cities in which you serve? This is a common, effective strategy for service area businesses of all kinds. You can delve into this topic here:

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

The development of unique local landing pages for each service city is going to be a more common strategical move than simply altering the title tag of your home page to reflect a bunch of other cities. Not sure if your rankings can be explained by having added 'near me' to a single title tag, but again, it would be easy to give inaccurate advice to you without actually auditing the website and its competition. This might be one of those situations in which you'd be best off hiring a pro and using a non-disclosure agreement if you're concerned about privacy. Alternatively, you can share your website address and further details here to get more on-target feedback from the community.