My pleasure, Joe!

Hi Joe!

Yes, you want a single website for the company, with 3 good landing pages on it (one for each of your locations). With just 3 locations, you could put all 3 in the footer, if you like, but it's likely not necessary to do so.

And, if these are physical, staffed locations and the company meets face-to-face with its customers and you have a unique phone number for each branch, it is eligible for 3 GMB listings.

You can then either link all 3 branches' listings to the homepage (which some argue is better for rankings) or, link each to its own landing page (which I much prefer as it offers a much better opportunity of converting the customer with content that's been created just for them). But, it's up to you which you prefer as Google doesn't insist on one path or the other.

Just be sure your locations meet the specifications of Google's guidelines and you should be good to go.

Good Morning, Bek!

I hope you will receive a variety of responses from our community on this, as citation management is often a case of horses for courses. What you choose should be based on factors including the scale of your business model, your funding, your expectations of control/management, etc.  Basically, you have 3 options when it comes to citation management:

1. Do it all manually. The plus side of this is that you have as much direct control as possible. The minus side is that it is time-consuming and can't be scaled easily for companies with multiple locations. It's all but impossible to efficiently, manually manage local business listings for dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations. And, manual on-going monitoring of citation quality is a huge chore even if you only have a single location business.

2. Hire a company to do it for you manually. Whitespark is one of the more popular companies that builds a la carte citations manually. The plus side of this is that you pay once and the citations are built well with good data that you've approved, without you having to invest a lot of time. The minus side is that citations typically need to be managed on an ongoing basis, which companies like Whitespark don't do. They are an excellent service for a one-time manual build, but because of the way data can degrade over time, may not be the right match for a business that wants to monitor and manage their listings on an on-going basis.

3. Automate it. This is what companies like Moz Local, Uberall and Yext do. Moz Local, for example, distributes your data to the major citation platforms (including the major aggregators) and then offers you a dashboard for ongoing monitoring. The plus side of this is that the work on your end is nominal and, at least with Moz Local, you'll be alerted to ongoing issues with your data, including inconsistent and duplicate listings, as they arise. A solution like this scales to dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations. The main minus side is a lack of direct control, plus cost can be a factor, and one of the key complaints about Yext is that (unlike Moz Local) they charge for your distribution to low-quality directories that few people actually use.

So, those are your 3 options, and what might work best for a single location boutique may not be the right match for a multi-location restaurant chain. Some businesses do like Yext, but if you do a bit of searching, you will also find genuine complaints, as you will about most providers. Other people are big fans of Moz Local, BrightLocal, Uberall and other providers. So, as I said, I'm hoping you'll get multiple points of view on this thread, do some investigative work, and discover the right match for your brand's scenario. In the end, that's what matters most!

I'll just finish up by letting you know that if you have any questions about how Moz Local could help you business, please email our customer service support at help@moz.com. You'll receive a friendly and helpful reply.

Good Morning, Isenselogic,

I totally understand the frustration here, but it sounds to me like you need to have an important conversation with this client regarding the fact that no SEO has the ability to control Google's presentation of its data. For whatever reason, Google considers your client more relevant to the plural form of this search than to the singular form, and they also feel that the user is best served by the more limited results for the latter. Google has always treated singular and plural keywords differently, and in local, they do all kinds of zoom variations based on perceived intent and user location. If the client is expecting you to change Google's mind about this, then this is an unreasonable expectation and one you need to sit down and talk them out of, if you can. SEOs can implement best practices but do not control SERPs.

That being said, one thing I do notice looking at those two sets of SERPs is that the 3 showing up for the singular keyword phrase have selected a different primary category than your client. Your client is listed as an "herb shop" and they are all listed as "cannabis stores". So, one experiment you could do would be to see if changing your client's primary category would vary the way they are being displayed. But, of course, before you dive into doing that, you need to let the client know that changing primary categories can seriously alter rankings. So, you'd need to present this as an experiment and then track results and see how it went. If, however, Google is tied to the idea that they only want to show 3 results for that particular phrase, then you cannot guarantee that the client will be one of the 3 and you can't "convince" Google to show more than 3 results if they want to show 3 of them.

Theoretically, if your client is stronger (in all of the various ranking factors) than any of the results in that set, changing their primary category could cause them to displace one of the 3 competitors, but be sure you're setting the client's expectations properly by telling them you can't guarantee anything. If the client won't be reasonable about this, it may be time to end the contract.

Sounds like the name change might be a good suggestion, Robert, given this scenario. Good luck with this!

Hi Robert!

By BSC are you talking about the educational term Bachelor of Science? If so, then Google would almost certainly be trying to parse the intent of a search phrase containing that term. If I name my meteorology store "Weather Near Me", Google is going to have a very hard time knowing that customers are looking for my store and not for a forecast for their area. Sounds like this may be what's happening to your client ... that their name is too much like a more general search phrase, causing Google to diversify the SERPs because they aren't 100% certain about searcher intent.

If I'm not understanding, please feel free to provide more details.

A Very Happy New Year to you, too! So glad my reply was helpful to you, and good luck with your publication.

Good morning and Happy New Year!

Either way or both, with the internal links, is fine

Hello There!

Earlier this year, we had a good discussion about Cornerstone Content (a term that is widely used by Yoast though not by everyone else) here on the forum. You might like to take a look: https://moz.com/community/q/are-core-pages-considered-cornerstones.

Yoast is a very respected company, and they've created some classic products. That being said, I personally question advice like this being given on their blog:

"You’ll need to write an article of at least 900 words."

_900 words _sounds to me more like a public school writing assignment than criteria for a professional writer or publisher. Let's talk about this.

Wordstream has been kind enough to cite Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO as a good example of cornerstone content. I've contributed to that guide along with other staff here, and can attest that a specific number of words was nowhere in the plan for contributing. Instead, the plan is to cover the topic at hand thoroughly, and this is what all good writing, both on and off the web, does. Because of this, while I can appreciate that there is a desire to know if there's a word count that impresses Google, I don't think it's a good way to think about writing or publishing. If it takes 500 words to explain something, write them. If it takes 10,000 words, write them. The point is to explain a topic to a reader in a way that engages them and results in them feeling fully informed.

My best guess is that a company like Yoast is striving to offer some general guidelines for strong, lucrative publishing strategies, but when people start throwing set numbers around, it doesn't match my concept of building authority as a publication. I would rather that publishers focus on quality than word counts. The only time I can see the necessity of counting words is in offline publications that have limited paper space for an article. On the web, they sky's the limit, and the quality of what you publish is what wins readers.

Hi Scott,

Donna has offered some good advice. Something else you need to consider:

If you have a single location, then yes, most of your content should be mentioning your city. Your Herniated Disc Treatment page can talk about how you treat this problem in your office in San Diego, and that's completely natural to do so. However, if your practice expands to more than one location, then you'll have to revisit this strategy. If you have 2 offices, or 10, or 100, how much city-oriented optimization you can do of your service pages will have to be rethought, because you're not going to want to put a list of 10 cities on your service pages.

But, for now, if you've got just one location, a moderate mention of your city terms on your service pages (and other page like Home, About, etc.) is totally fine. Just don't overdo it.

Hello There!

Good questions you've asked here. My standard advice for multi-location business models is that you have:

1. A page for every location

2. A page for every service or product you offer

3. Links from #1 to #2

What you're describing here, of creating a whole set of city-optimized versions of each service you offer even though the service is identical across all locations, is an option I don't particularly advocate. You could go this route, but here are some problems I see with this approach:

1. I have 10 services and my business expands to 100 locations. What a mess it would be to have to create unique content for 1,000 city-optimized service pages that are all actually saying the same thing. It's just not going to be sustainable for most businesses to do this.

2. I can't really say to myself that I'm creating these page for people. I'd feel I was doing it all for search engines, and (like Google) I don't really feel comfortable with that approach to marketing. My customer can be served just fine if my landing page for city 1 links to my page for service 1. If the service is the same for all customers at all locations, the only reason I'd create thousands of iterations of combinations of service+city would be for search engines.

So, rather than take this approach, I'd invest the time/money in something else. I'd go with a page for every city and a page for every service and put my budget towards content development and link building for these pages. I'd focus on building the overall authority of my brand in relationship to my topics, because I feel this would result in better ROI than creating a sort of octopus of near-duplicate pages solely in hopes of rankings.

Hope these thoughts are helpful in creating strategy!

Hi Ryan,

Complex scenario, but the good news is - you don't have to reinvent the wheel on this. Look at a website like https://www.rotorooter.com/ to see how they are managing the fact that they've got 600 locations in North America. If your company is expanding nation-wide, you need some type of interface (a zip code search, map, etc.) to get clients from the homepage to their correct section of the website. I see no reason to use subdomains. They typically just complicate things. You can create a landing page for each location (or a section of several landing pages if you absolutely must), but the goal is to take the client directly from the homepage to the page that tells them everything they need to know about the location nearest them.

If you go this route, I would advise:

1. Ensuring you have a sitemap that links to all of the landing pages, just to ensure full crawling

2. Avoid duplicate content on these pages as much as possible. Make them unique and useful. This article should help: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

3. Be sure you're building out a full set of local business listings/citations for each location and that the company has a strategy in place for managing reviews on them.

That should get you off to a good start!

Thank you for documenting your experience, Matt. May I ask, is your business a service area business (like a plumber), or brick-and-mortar?

Hi Jonathan,

I wonder if Matt ever posted to the GMB forum. This seems like a bug. I would recommend reporting and would be grateful if you'd let me know what you hear from the Gold Product Experts there.