Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Mash,

I recommend that you definitely link to these three office landing pages from your top level menu. You could link to them from your contact page, as well. Absolutely want those links to be high-level and crawlable!

Moosa is correct. It's perfectly fine to have your 3 offices in structured data in the footer. I recommend having a unique page for each office, as well, with complete, structured NAP for the location at the top of each respective page, as well as including all three on your contact page.

Hi Mark,

If there is zero relationship of data between the old site and the new one (such as you've described) you should likely be okay. Regarding blocking bots from crawling the new site until it is ready, this falls a bit outside my area. I expect you could set up the robots.txt file for this, but I recommend starting a new question on this topic to get expert advice from our technical SEO experts. You have to be sure to do this correctly to avoid problems. Hope this helps.

Hi Christian,

If you're going with separate branding  - no. Absolutely every asset must be separate to avoid confusion. You must approach this as two unrelated companies if you choose to run two companies instead of one.

Hi Mark,

It sounds like you've determined that re-branding is essential for your business. As we're talking about a local business, I'm going to recommend against having 2 live websites at the same time. Here's why. You local rankings depend on the consistency of your NAP+ W (name, address, phone + website). Should Google begin to see 2 URLs associated with your any part of your business data, they may lose trust in what they've gathered about your business and you may lose rankings because of this.

If you're going to re-brand, I recommend rolling it all out at once and then undertaking the major work of citation cleanup. If this isn't something you've previously handled, I strongly recommend that you consider hiring a professional outfit for this task to ensure that all possible mentions of your NAP have been brought into compliance with the new information. WhiteSpark is a good company for such work and I believe Moz members may get a discount for signing up with Whitespark's citation services.

Hope this opinion is helpful to you.

Hi Christian,

You're receiving some great feedback here. I'll add my 2 cents.

• If the businesses are operating out of the same physical location and share a phone number, than presenting this as a single business would be most appropriate. Once you've merged all of the content onto a single URL, do citation cleanup to be sure that your name, address, phone and website are all consistent across all mentions on the web.

• The alternative is to get completely separate addresses and phone numbers for each business and run them without any connection between the two. Whether you go this route depends on whether you feel the market warrants it. Just remember, if you this way, there must be nothing shared between the 2 businesses - not contact data, content, links, etc. And, you'll want to be building out two totally separate sets of citations for each business, being sure the data isn't mixed up anywhere.

Hope this helps!

Hi Chris,

Recommend that you read:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/11/08/should-you-accept-a-custom-url-for-your-google-plus-local-page/

https://plus.google.com/+GoogleBusiness/posts/JVAgfxKHQ8u

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/10/31/google-custom-urls-facts-tidbits-and-concerns/

I'd recommend going with adding your city/state name to the URL only if you feel reasonably certain that the business is permanently located there. If you predict a future move, it wouldn't be a good choice.

Hi Mark,

Once you've got the website properly locally optimized, on-going activities will typically include content development, citation building and earning reviews. You may also want to pursue earning links and social mentions. I recommend that you read this article to see how you're doing on the Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors:

http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide

Hope this helps!

Good luck! So glad to be of help!

Hi Jason,

Thank you for the additional details. To be honest, I have little or no faith in keyword tools for local research these days, so I wouldn't necessarily believe that no one in Pittsburgh is searching for a magician. It just isn't logical.

That being said, yes, you must create pages optimized for Cleveland to have a hope of appearing organically for relevant searches. You do have a chance, definitely! Create great content for your target cities and you do have a chance to gain organic visibility for these terms, though it will likely never outrank competitors physically located in these cities. You are understanding this correctly.

Hi Ricky,

Google's rule of thumb has always been 'what's good for the user is what's good for Google'. They try to abide by this, and while they don't always get it right, this has been their modus operandi for many years.

I can see why the advice you've read about city landing page development is giving you pause. I think your confusion may be founded on the fact that this is typically considered a best practice for SABs (service area business like plumbers, chimney sweeps, etc.). In these cases, building a unique page for each city the business travels to for service is, indeed, a best practice. Google has no problem with it.

By contrast, what you are describing is a brick-and-mortar business that stays put while customers travel to it from various locations. This is a completely different situation. The questions I'd be asking myself is,

"Does it serve a genuine purpose (other than meeting SEO goals) to write about customers coming from different locations to mine?"

Chances are, it doesn't. Stating that "Bob comes from Fort Lauderdale to shop here' doesn't really help anybody, right?

So, ruling this out, what can you do in this scenario to help users and to meet SEO goals at the same time? For B&M businesses, this is a really tough question. One thing to consider is whether the business has any legitimate involvement in surrounding cities. For example, a doctor might have hospital affiliations within another city, or a sporting goods store might sponsor little league events in another town. These are things the business can write/brag about to show their connection to neighboring cities.

Will taking this approach enable the business to rank well locally in these other cities? Almost certainly not. Can it gain you some organic visibility in these other cities? Possibly. Whether the investment of time and effort in such content development is going to yield worthwhile returns is a question only the individual business can answer.

I think you've asked a very smart question here and I hope my thoughts on the subject are helpful!

Hi Jason,

Oh, I hate that canned message from Google! If you do a search for the language of it in the Google And Your Business Forum, you'll see it's one Google sends out in a ton of different situations. I am not currently seeing a mass influx of reports of this message in that forum, but that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't a mass issue going on. Some questions:

Did you recently make any changes to listing?

Are you still able to access the listing via the dashboard? If so, are there any messages/warnings?

If you can access the listing, have you tried performing a null edit? If not, it might be worth a try. (In case you're not familiar with this, all you have to do is log in, hit the button to edit the listing in the dash, don't change anything, but then save as though you have made a change). In some cases, this can refresh the situation and resolve some problems ... but only in some cases.

How did you receive the above message from Google? How did you report the issue?

Regarding the question in the title of your post, if you've received an email from Google, you have, in essence, already heard from their engineers. Three weeks is definitely not an adequate amount of time for things to get rectified in Google land, but that doesn't mean you can't attempt other methods of flagging their attention. Here are 2 suggestions:

1. Go through the troubleshooter that leads to a phone call. Click the Contact Us link on this page while logged into the account associated with the listing: https://support.google.com/places/#topic=1656871 Proceed via the blue 'Call Us' button.

2. Start a thread in the Google And Your Business Forum begging for help from the Top Contributors there who have the ability to escalate your issue to Google staff, if they so choose. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business

It may be that you will just have to wait this out. Without knowing the details of the business and the situation, I can't offer any more specific advice, but I do think it would be worth it to try one or both of the help options I've described. I'm so sorry you've received that dread message. What a headache. Good luck, and if you get this resolved, it would be nice if you could update this thread with how things went.

Yep Have to take that into consideration, Vadim!

Hi WMCA,

In addition to Vadim's good suggestions, you'll need to consider the possibility that you may be dealing with a duplicate listing. If the hours of operation in your dashboard do not match the hours being shown on the live listing, it could be that Google is pulling those hours from a duplicate Google+ Local listing. To see how to discover duplicate listings, read this article:

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

Hi Marco,

This is a newish, on-going issue. I recommend that you read the following:

http://searchengineland.com/google-upgrades-google-maps-business-listings-conflicts-happen-including-duplicate-listing-issues-185971

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/more$20than$20one$20authorised$20owner$20per$20business$20location/business/tzXmU3E8UIQ/vTJK5I_4Fr8J

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/business/Pdx32sVSYYQ/Cczh_52JkjYJ

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/WqaZiBWF3Ec

Hi Alex,

Regarding testimonials - no, I am not referencing testimonials from websites. I'm talking about getting written testimonials from your customers (either on paper or via email) and uploading them yourself using Schema review markup to the respective city landing page on your own website. These on-page testimonials can be a powerful way to add unique content to your city landings pages, and they also sometimes show up in the SERPs with stars (though Google's display of this keeps changing).

As to why Google is showing you results for a city 30 miles away when you're not adding a geo-modifier, I'm not sure. Could it be that there is something about that city that is particularly relevant, or, could your location possibly be set to this city in Google, causing Google to show you results for that city? Have you tried checking from other computers located in your town? Clearly, you're doing pretty well for your own local city, and this is where you can expect to rank in the local pack (not in a city where you're not physically located) so if pursuing rankings in other cities is important, they will almost certainly have to be organic rankings, not local ones.

Hi Chris,

Your post has made me curious about your competitor's link profile. If the industry is tough to get links to, what has he done to get 6,000 links. Sounds like you know the number of links he has - have the analyzed where they are coming from? Are they natural and high-quality or are they weird and potentially a red flag to Google?

I also think your industry sounds interesting. If you are doing construction for farmers, specifically, I'm guessing you're building some kind of agricultural structures. Would this be something that you could create an interesting infographic around that could be helpful to others in your industry, earning you industry-relevant links? How about videos? And I completely agree with Erwan's comments about developing great content on the site.

And here's a great WBF from Rand on earning links via social mentions:

moz.com/blog/the-top-4-ways-to-use-social-media-to-earn-links-whiteboard-friday

Also, this one from Paddy Moogan is a bit old now, but still contains some good, creative ideas:

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-get-links-in-tough-industries

Local SEO is a very interesting field in that, in many cases, linkbuilding isn't even really necessary. Yes, in really tough verticals like law, it may be, but often it isn't, provided the business has an established, excellent website, clean citations and ongoing reviews coming in. How is your competitor doing in these areas and is there a chance you could surpass him in these things?

Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Hi Chris,

It's really important to understand that Local Search is city-based, not state-based. Local SEO revolves around optimizing core pages of the website and the footer with your complete NAP (name, address, phone number) of your physical location, building a Google+ Local page for that city of location, building citations on various directories for that city of location and earning reviews on them, plus any links and social mentions you can earn.

For any city in which you serve but are not physically located, it's a best practice to build city landing pages on the website with totally unique content on them. These will not typically achieve local pack rankings, because there is no physical address tied to them, but they can achieve organic rankings for searches pertaining to these other cities.

So, if you are taking a Local SEO approach to your marketing, and let's say you're physically located in Denver, then your core pages and NAP and citations and reviews will all need to reflect the Denver location. Your title tags and content on these pages will be most geared toward Denver. Your city landings pages for cities where you aren't physically located can then reflect other cities like Boulder, Aspen, Colorado Springs, etc.

Typically, even if you serve statewide, you're not going to build a landing page for every single city in the state. I mean ... technically, you could do this, but it would be vast project. So, in general, what you'd want to do is to identify maybe 10 major cities in which you serve and build a unique landing page for each.

Then, I would recommend setting up a blog on your website and when you build a barn in another city, writing a blog post about this. If you build 50 barns a year, that's 50 blog posts and 50 chances for Google to see that you've got unique content on the website featuring your work in this variety of cities. You can add to the static city landing pages over time, too, and you can be sure that the homepage and contact page of the website reflects that you will travel anywhere within the state of Colorado to serve, but tackling the whole state at once is likely to be too big of an SEO project for any business. Taking the work in steps and stages will enable you to build great content that is highly relevant to people searching from the various cities in Colorado for the services you provide.

Hope this helps!

Hi Alex,

Good question! Google's bias toward physical location has built into local search a specific way of handling website optimization for service area businesses like yours. Typically this looks like this:

1. You optimize the overall website for your city of location, meaning that you put your complete NAP on the contact page and in the sitewide footer. You also typically optimize your core pages (home, about, service pages) for this city of location as well. You develop your Google+ Local page and your citations to reflect the NAP of your city of location, as well. You work on earning reviews on these profiles, as well as social mentions and links. The goal of all of this work is to achieve high local pack rankings for your business for queries that either contain your city of location or that stem from devices based in your city of location.

2. For your service cities where you have no physical location, you don't have NAP. But, you do have the ability to build a unique landing page on the website for each of your major service cities. Be sure that the content is unique and terrific for each page you create and then link to these pages from a top level menu under a heading of something like "Cities We Serve'. Work to earn social mentions and links to these pages. You can also work to add on-page testimonials from clients in these service cities to the respective city landing pages. Do not put the business' NAP on these pages, because it does not apply. The goal of this work is to earn secondary organic rankings for these service cities, because it is highly unlikely that you will earn local pack rankings for any city in which you're not physically located.

Having NAP on the rest of the website will not harm your ability to rank organically for your other service cities, but you have to go into this with the understanding that you're aiming for local rankings for your city of location and organic rankings for your location-less cities.

Hope this helps!

So glad to be of help, William. Good luck with the troubleshooting!

Hi Noah,

As you've chosen 'local website optimization' as one of the categories for your question, I wanted to ask if what you're talking about here is a local or an organic ranking. Is there some chance that the landing page is a city landing page on the website and does the Google+ Local listing link to this city landing page or to the homepage of the website? It would be good if you could provide some further details as it will help you get better guesses at the cause from the community.

Hi Jason,

Are you carrying out a Local Search Marketing campaign for the business? I'm assuming you travel to your clients to perform for them, right? And you do so within a certain geographic radius, I'm guessing. If this is the case, a campaign for you would typically look something like:

• You'd need to have a street address (even your home address) that you'd be using to create your Google+ Local listing and then following the options within the dashboard to ensure that the address is hidden to comply with Google's rule about SABs (service area businesses) hiding their addresses. If you're physically located in Colombus, then your Google+ Local page would display that you are based in Columbus, OH, without actually showing your street address. Google would then consider as you a most relevant LOCAL result for queries like 'magician columbus' or searches for magicians stemming from Columbus-based devices.

• You would also need to have a dedicated local area code phone number.

• In addition to building your Google+ Local page for your city of location, you would be creating listings (called citations) for your business in a number of other local directories.

• The main thrust of your website optimization would center on your service terms (magician, comedy magician, corporate magician etc.) + your city of location. So, in other words, if you're physically located in Columbus, you'd be optimizing the core pages on your website for 'Columbus Magician', 'Corporate Magician in Columbus', etc. I would consider this a much more typical way to handle the SEO for a local business than optimizing just for the state of Ohio would be. The point of all of the above is to earn high local rankings for the business where it has a physical address.

• In addition to optimizing your core website pages for your city of location, you would likely be building out additional content on the website to showcase the additional cities to which you will travel to serve. So, if you serve in 10 cities within Ohio, then that would be 10 pages of unique, terrific content, optimized for your services in that specific city. A common way to approach this is to showcase your work in those cities, which should be easy for a magician to do. Just remember, the content must be unique on each page. The point of this work is to go after high organic rankings for cities in which you lack a physical location. You're unlikely to achieve local pack rankings for any city in which you're not physically located, but you can pursue organic rankings via a combination of content development, social buzz and link earning.

• Google will personalize users' results based on their physical location whether or not they add a geo-modifier. If I search for 'pizza', Google shows me a local pack of pizza places in my city. But, this behavior is typically on a city basis - not a state basis, so that's an important distinction. On mobile devices, this type of city-based geo-personalization is even more pronounced, to the point that you'll get different results when you're at one end of town than you will at the other end of town for many queries.

So, basically, I think Local SEO is the area you need to be investigating and learning about. All Moz Members have free access to our new Moz Local Learning Center (http://moz.com/learn/local) and we have lots of great Local SEO blog posts on the Moz blog.

I hope this helps with your question.

Hi Ruben,

You've received some great feedback here. Has your question been answered or is there anything else that you're not quite sure of? Let me know!

You're welcome

Great to hear, Patrick! Good luck at your next meeting with the client. You might want to check out Get5Stars as this makes review acquisition easier and actually kind of exciting for the business owner!

Hi Matthew,

From your description, these appear to be your client's options:

1. Rank locally (in the local pack) for their single physical office via NAP, content and SEO work on the website + their Google+ Local listing and citations.

2. Rank organically for other cities in which they vend properties via content, on-site SEO and linkbuilding. PPC may be a necessary component, too, given how competitive this market typically is.

It shouldn't be a goal for the client to rank locally for anything but their city of location, and it's forbidden to list for-sale properties in Google's local product, so this isn't a way to get around the lack of location either. Basically, it's going to come down to the organic strength of the business to build a presence for the various cities in which they sell properties. You'll be cleaning up duplicate content and developing new, unique content for each of their major cities + wanting to earn links to this content. A blog could be a BIG asset here if the client has the resources to blog in a hyperlocal fashion about properties and local communities and on-topic subjects like buying/selling a home.

I think you're receiving some good advice on this thread. I hope my suggestions are helpful, too.

Hi Ant71,

So sorry for the disappointment. You are correct that Moz Local currently only supports the US. WhiteSpark's services are excellent, in terms of citation surfacing, development and cleanup. Many UK folks are also big fans of Bright Local. You might like to check them out! Hope these recommendations help.

Hi Patrick,

I'll just reel off some suggestions here for best practices.

• Yes, do be sure there is a unique landing page for each practice

• Link to them visibly from the top level menu as well as from the text of the home page

• Be sure the first thing on these 3 landing pages is the complete business NAP, encoded in Schema

• Be sure the content on these pages is unique and make it as helpful and awesome as you can

• Build a unique Google+ Local page for each of the 3 physical locations

• Build a set of citations for each of the 3 physical locations

• Create a content development strategy so that the doctors, or a designated company blogger, can continue to publish local-specific copy over time

• Implement a review acquisition strategy so that all 3 locations are earning reviews

All of these are sound techniques for establishing good local rankings for the client. Hope this helps!

Hi Kathy,

So glad you are excited about the tool. One of the features we are working on for the future will be building custom-branded and emailed reports.

Hi Aholyman,

I think it's very good that you're giving this such careful thought. So, if the keywords are identical, then yes, this might be seen as an unethical arrangement, though not a forbidden one (without a contract stating so). I'd take it case by case. Good job giving this such a thorough examination.

Hi SoleGraphics,

Thanks for the additional detail. I have not come across any reports of a massive ranking jump being a general thing. On the other hand, people are probably much more likely to report a loss instead of gain, right? Sounds to me like you are deserving of a pat on the back. Well done!

So glad to help, Christian!

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the clarification. Without actually being able to review the specific site, my bet would be that you're dealing with a basic issue of keyword prominence. How your website is optimized and how links/citations pointing to it reference the business is likely the cause of what you're experiencing. Google feels your business is more relevant to 'city + service' than to 'service + city' because of how the business is being presented and referenced. You might want to go through the website and evaluate how things like your title tags and internal linking are optimized, as well as looking at the anchor text of inbound links pointing to the website. Chances are, this has something to do with it, and it's not at all uncommon for a business to rank differently for different variations of their keywords. Hope this helps!

Hi William,

I'll start by linking to my troubleshooting post from last week here on Moz, in case you've not seen it:

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

It sounds like you have already done a ton of investigation, but it might be a good idea to go through that post to be certain that you've not overlooked something.

My bet is that there is a nagging issue underlying this. Without actually seeing the listing, it's not possible for me to diagnose what is going on, but I've run into situations like this before where there was an explanation just barely hidden from plain view. Something like a hidden merged dupe or a business centroid issue. Takes digging, but if you can find it, you can fix it.

Hi Christian,

Are you talking about local pack rankings or organic rankings for these two terms?

Hi Huisjames,

Yext and other local submission services are intended for physical businesses rather than virtual ones. They really are not a good fit for location-less businesses and your efforts would likely be better spent earning links that are relevant to your industry rather than your geography.

The BBB is a different story as they do have categories for e-commerce companies. You might like to read this Moz Q&A thread on a similar topic:

http://moz.com/community/q/at-what-point-does-bbb-accreditation-become-a-good-investment

Hope this helps!

Super! I hoped it would be, Blaine.

Hi Blaine,

Highly recommend that you read:

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

Hi Matthew,

You write:

"... my client operates as a financier. As a result, the company offers online finance applications, which are supported by an effective call centre."

I want to verify:

1. Does this business actually make face-to-face contact with its customers?

2. Are the ranking changes you are noticing in the organic results or in the local pack of results?

Hi AHolyman,

I'm going to rock the boat a little here. Unless you are in a non-compete contract with a client that excludes taking on same industry clients in the same city, there is no reason you can't work with more than one. Each client is likely to have different strengths, budgets, goals and attributes, even if they are in the same city. For example, dentist A may specialize in sleep dentistry, while dentist B is excellent with children. Unless you're under an exclusivity contract, I don't see anything unethical about helping them both.

Hi Solegraphics,

Did you have more details to provide about what you're experiencing? It doesn't sound like you've experienced any type of ranking failure, but are more concerned about some change on Google's part. If that's correct, what change do you suspect? What are you seeing that causes you to think something has changed? The more details you can provide, the better the answers you will receive from the community.

Hi Matthew,

Well, I'm fascinated! If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that the business seems to rank better in the local pack during the hours you've stated it is open for business on the Google+ Local page. This is something I've not seen documented anywhere, but I just spoke with Nyagoslav Zhekov of WhiteSpark.ca and he mentioned that he had once come across a discussion in which a business was failing to rank apparently because their stated hours of operation wrongly represented the business as only being open in the middle of the night.

I don't have any documentation or examples, but an anecdote like this does make one have to consider that Google may well take hours of operation into consideration. I am curious about what your client's business model is, if you can share. Like a retail shop, an emergency service? I wonder if it could be more of a factor in certain industries. Google must get it that people looking for certain things might want them right away. For example, if I'm searching for a pizza, I'd probably want to know which restaurants are open right now. If I'm searching for a lawyer ... maybe not so much.

I'd be interested to read any other details you can provide. As I've said, this isn't a well-cited phenomenon, so you may be breaking some ground here with what you've noticed.

Hi BCB1121,

Google probably doesn't care if a listing is sponsored or not (paid for or not) but the issue you have pointed out regarding call tracking numbers does matter very much. Unfortunately, what this service is doing is creating 'NAP inconsistency'. You want your business name, address and phone number to be identical across the web, and call tracking numbers are taboo because of the fact that they harm consistency.

I recommend that you read these articles to become fully acquainted with this longstanding issue, and to see what you should and should not do with call tracking:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/

http://blog.acorn-is.com/2013/09/the-truth-about-call-tracking-numbers-and-local-search-placement.html

After reading these, I believe you'll want to reconsider this area of marketing. Hope this helps!

Hi Radhakrishnan,

You're receiving some good advice here. I'll add some points.

1. First, determine if the business model is truly local. In order to qualify, it must have a unique physical address (no virtual offices or P.O. boxes), a unique local area code phone number and make in-person contact with customers.

2. From your description, I'm assuming that this is an SAB (a service area business). In this case, you are permitted to create just one Google+ Local page per physical location. You can also build citations on other local business directories for this physical location. What you cannot do is build them for cities where the client has no physical office.

3. Instead, for these location-less cities where your client travels to serve his customers, you must rely on organic SEO in a effort to gain organic visibility for these other cities, because you are unlikely to gain true local rankings for any city in which the business isn't physically located. Your core effort will be the creation of city landing pages on the website for each service city. Each page must be totally unique and awesome (no cutting and pasting from one page to the next. I recommend you read:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages for Local Businesses

4. Beyond simply creating the city landing pages on the website, you'll be employing other SEO techniques to promote them, such as earning links and social mentions. You may also want to encourage the client to continue blogging about his various service cities. Locally optimized videos can also be really powerful.

5. BrickTech has linked to my article illustrating the top 20 local search ranking factors. Beyond this, you can go straight to the source by reading the entire Local Search Ranking Factors annual report at: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

There is a ton to do for any local business! These steps should get you started, and just remember with the development of city landing pages, the content must be unique and terrific to avoid stamping the website as low-quality/spammy.

Hope this helps!

Hi Chris,
Definitely no stupid questions here, and your question is an excellent one.

I have to start by saying that I have pretty much zero faith in keyword tools these days. Neither Google nor Bing's KW tools work well for local keywords. It's depressing.

Moving on, local searches are typically much more refined than what you are describing, in that they center on city names, not state names. Google will return local packs of results for queries that they determine have a city-based intent, whether or not the searcher includes a geo modifier in their query. Of course, there are instances in which someone might be searching for a statewide object (like National Parks in Colorado), but are you certain this is the way people are searching for what your company offers, or could it be that they would be looking by city names instead? This plays into whether you feel you need to compete on a statewide or city level.

So, I guess I'm answering your question with another question! Is the business model truly local (city level) or is it a statewide business and perhaps, even, a virtual business?

Hi JCDenver,

Hang in there. I've asked for extra help from our staff on your question. It could be that the way it was originally phrased has caused some confusion, but you have provided good details and I do hope you'll get a helpful answer soon. Thanks for your patience!

Hi JCDenver,

I'm sorry I misunderstood your question. Let me ping our other staff members for you to see if anyone has experimented with this. I hope you will receive an on-target answer.

Hi John,

Unfortunately, without being able to investigate the actual situation, it's not possible to even begin drawing a conclusion on this. It's perfectly okay if you are not able to share the specific details of your business, but it will limit the specificity of the feedback you'll receive on questions like this one.

If you are stating that both you and your competitor have real, staffed physical offices, then you are both in the running for the same local rankings and if the search is local in nature, you can do a point-for-point comparison between your web presence and theirs to see how they may be surpassing you in certain important areas.

That being said, what you are describing is a branded search, for your company's brand name with no geo modifiers. I have run into a few situations in the past where the name of the business is generic enough that Google is confused by the intent of users searching for it. Let me give you an example of this.

Let's say you had a non-profit organization called 'Opening Doors'. Google then gets a user query using the search phrase 'opening doors'. Instead of Google recognizing this as your company's name, they think this is someone searching for a locksmith to open their door.  So, the non-profit's concept of their brand name search is being confused with Google's concept of a local search for a locksmith.

Could this be playing a part in what you are experiencing? It's a weird phenomenon, but it does happen. The fact that Google is displaying a 3 pack for your query indicates that they do already sense that there is something local about the query, but whether what I've described is the answer to your situation, I have no idea.

If you are able to provide further details, it would likely help the community provide more insight.

Hi JCDenver,

First, I want to zone in on your statement about the Hummingbird Update. When I think of this in connection with Local SEO and lost rankings, the first thing that springs to mind is this situation:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/01/08/mining-for-google-hummingbird-guano-in-so-cal/

Are you talking about this? Have the results for your target city morphed into a single one-box for a spammy listing? Wanted to ask about this first.

Regarding lawyer vs. attorney, the important thing to find out is how your regional audience searches. Lawyer vs. Attorney is a classic example of this, as apparently, people in different parts of the US prefer one keyword over another. See the comments from Linda Buquet on this post regarding this:

http://searchengineland.com/google-merges-insights-for-search-with-google-trends-134629

This would be something you would need to further investigate, as it has become a bit harder to surface these regional differences. Hope this gets you started.