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Hi JohnWeb12,
You've received some good advice on this thread. In a situation like this with eight doctors with a single phone number, there is a strong possibility of creating NAP confusion and the thread John Scheidell has linked to regarding doctor duplicates is something both you and the client should read before taking a step in this direction.
Hi Genkee,
website.com/butchers-in-mytown is perfectly fine, provided it is a reflection of the content of the page.
Hi Bryan,
In order for a business to qualify for inclusion in Google's local pack of results, it must meet the following criteria:
2. Have a unique local area code phone number. Not toll free, vanity or call tracking numbers.
3. Have face-to-face transactions with customers, either at the place of business (like a dentist) or at the customers' locations (like a plumber).
If the business can say 'yes' to ALL THREE of these things, then it qualifies, and it's time to read the Google Places Quality Guidelines to become acquainted with all of Google's various policies. See: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en
If the business cannot say yes to any of the above or fails to meet any of the criteria in the Google Places Quality Guidelines, then it should not pursue Google local pack rankings.
It's very important to understand Google's bias toward physical locale. Most businesses can strive to achieve local pack rankings only for their city of location. In other words, a plumber located in San Jose, California can hope to achieve local results for searches that include the term 'san jose' or that stem from San Jose-based devices. He cannot typically expect to appear in the local pack for his additional service cities where he lacks a physical location. Instead, he must pursue organic rankings for these location-less cities.
There are exceptions to this in scenarios of low competition. For example, if your business is one of only two chimney sweep companies serving 5 different cities, there is a chance that Google may surface you in the local pack for more than one city, simply because their is little competition and there are few choices. This is typically the exception rather than the rule, however.
Pursuing organic rankings for your additional service cities involves the creation of city landing pages. You can read more about this here: http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403
Pursuing high local rankings involves a ton of different efforts. You might find these resources helpful:
http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide
So, the first step is to determine how the business model fits in with Google's view of local businesses and then proceed accordingly.
You are likely right, Tony. Just need to be sure!
Hi Taysir,
If they are staffed, physical offices, yes. If they are not, then, no. You'll need to focus on Local SEO for his physical location and organic SEO for his service cities where he isn't physically located.
Hi Sangeetac,
With the new dashboard, I believe most/all verifications are now postcard only. So, simply follow through with postcard verification and then you'll be able to complete the process by entering the postcard pin number into the dash. Takes a bit longer, because you have to wait for the postcard, but typically only 1-2 weeks these days.
Hi Scott,
I am not aware of a process for what you describe, unfortunately. Obviously, you would want to make sure the info has been manually corrected at Google+ Local, Axciom, InfoGroup and Localeze, but I'm not sure even these major providers will ensure that a closed business message is replicated across the board. You've asked a really interesting question and maybe others in the community will have new feedback on this. In the meantime, I recommend you read:
Sounds like a great idea. I would, of course, put some unique static content on the page, as well, explaining what you do in Orlando, and then have a constantly refreshed section of lead-ins for your blog posts. I think that makes sense!
Hi Noah,
I think the first issue here is actually going to be that Google+ Local doesn't consider rental properties as appropriate candidates for inclusion. Here is the language regarding this:
Ineligible Business Models
Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments, are not eligible to be listed on Google Maps and should not be verified. Instead, verify the listing for your sales or leasing office or offices. If you have a property with an on-site office, you may verify that office location.
Does the company have an on-site office? Otherwise, they will not be able to fully participate in typical local search activities.
They should definitely not be using another company's phone number. Google will be aware that this phone number belongs to the booking agency, and actually, having the client publish this in index-able text on their own website will harm the NAP consistency of the booking agency.
In order to fully participate in citation building, the client needs a physical, staffed office and a unique phone number at which the person who answers the phone answers with the company's name - not the name of a third party business.
I think you've surfaced a really interesting case here. You've made me wonder how many vacation rental companies are in this same boat!
Hi AJ,
It sounds like there is some potential here. Are these involvements in Orlando something you can creatively write about? If so, I think you've found a resource for highlighting a true association with this city.
Hi Peter,
Thank you for the additional info. So, do not be worried about earning a penalty of any kind from having directory listings. Citation building is one of the core disciplines of Local SEO and is perfectly fine. Whether you want to pay money for directory listings or stick with free ones is completely up to you. I would thoroughly research any paid directory before investing in being listed on it.
Regarding having people review your products - if the sites are a good match for your subject, that can be a good thing. If it's just on blogs that review everything under the sun, it may not be worth the time/effort.
Hi Peter,
I want to be sure I'm understanding something you wrote here:
The last thing I need is to be penalized when I appear several times on page one of google for a local search. ie 1 as yell, 2 as an organic listing, 2 my facebook, 3 places listing
I want to clarify - did Yell offer to build you another website? That would be the only thing that would cause you problems. There is no reason you would be penalized for having multiple directory listings. A branded search for your business should, in fact, bring up lots of citations for your business, including your Google+ Local page, Facebook page, directory listings, etc. There is nothing taboo about this, so I want to be sure I understand what it is, precisely, that Yell offered you and what you think might be putting you at risk for a penalty.
Hi George,
You are 100% right that the client cannot cause this feature not to appear, nor can they influence what appears in it. As to why the 'people also searched for' is appearing on your client's results, and not on their competitor's, that a good question for which I know no answer. For some reason, Google feels it's important to show the 'people' feature on one result and not the other. Could be that it will appear tomorrow or in six months on the competitor's search, too. The feature is still pretty new and may not have been rolled out for everything it eventually will be.
I know business owners hate this. Google has had a history of showing the competition for local results in a variety of ways over the years. One just has to live with this and work hard on all of the things that can be controlled.
Hi AJ,
I think of this as a double-whammy situation: you don't have an Orlando office and you're not a service area business that goes to Orlando to serve (like a plumber). If the business had either of these attributes, the solution would be easy. In the absence of this, my question would be to ask if the firm has any connection at all to Orlando. For example, a general practice doctor in the suburbs might:
Be on the hospital staff in Orlando
Give lectures in Orlando
Attend conferences in Orlando
Give clinics in Orlando.
Sponsor something in Orlando, like a little league team, a women's shelter, etc.
Can the firm come up with some real world connections of these kinds that would provide things to write about/blog about?
If not, then there is no real connection between your firm and the major city, and the website has to reflect this. Obviously, you can state that you are 10 miles from Orlando or something along those lines, but that in and of itself is unlikely to earn extra visibility for the practice.
Hi Chris,
I would suggest that you highlight each of your main services on the homepage with a small amount of text and a link leading to the individual page for each service. At the same time, each service should be in the main menu of the website as well. So, you might have an area on the homepage which reads: What We Can Do For You.
Beneath this, you would have a set of little lead-ins like kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, fence building or what have you, each with maybe 2-3 sentences summarizing a service and then a 'learn more about this service' link for each one.
Hope this helps!
Brant - You are welcome. Check this out:
http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tool-185532
Seems like that may be totally relevant for you right at this moment!
Yep - that could certainly be hurting. Duplicate content of this type can definitely harm Google's ability to trust your data. I think you've uncovered a big piece of the puzzle. Hopefully, you can also take a look at the list of other issues mentioned in my reply.
This still wouldn't be my first choice, but if the new website does not reference the business in any way, then hopefully it will not create issues of consistency or trust with Google. I still think it's a better idea, however, to put the promo on the website itself.
Hi SEOSarah,
Duplicate content on multiple pages is not the same as repetition of something within a single page, so I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question.
You've got it. This is businesses attempting to be listed first in alphabetically-organized directories, like the Yellow Pages. Doesn't work for Local, unfortunately:)
Hi BCB1121,
Troubleshooting local ranking failures and fluctuations typically requires several hours of work. As I can't offer to do this within the space of the forum, I'd like to share a simple list with you of things I initially check for:
1. Violations on the Google+ Local page
2. Duplicate Google+ Local listings, including old listings, main listings, partner listings, etc.
3. NAP consistency issues across the Internet
4. Thin or duplicate content on the website
5. Known bugs or penalties reported in the Google And Your Business Forum that date from around the time you saw rankings change
6. An inequality of reviews (competitors have more than you)
7. Location of business in respect to the local business cluster (are you near the cluster or far from it)
8. Resolution of the Google MAP changing from search to search so that some businesses are showing when the resolution is broader and some are falling out when it narrows (learned this one from Linda Buquet!)
9. Are you standing still while competitors are moving aggressively forward with their marketing?
10. Sheer citation count of your business vs. competitors.
These are good places to begin your research. Hope this helps!
Hi SCW,
But wouldn't the new site at least have the business name on it (the N in NAP)? This would be my concern.
Hi Jonathan,
Can you please give an example of the discrepancy to ensure that you receive a good answer?
Hi Jonathan,
While this should not be affecting you locally, yes, there is some chance that this could be affecting organic results if these searches for this person are popular. So, on a local front, no don't worry about this. On an organic front, this is one of those weird things where there are similarities or even synonyms from which Google is drawing incorrect intent.
Hi SCW,
Good questions! My response will be in 2 parts.
Part I:
Are you avoiding the use of a call tracking number in the radio campaign because such numbers are taboo on the Internet for local businesses due the NAP consistency issues they create? If so, I want to clarify that it's okay to use call tracking in offline campaigns - just not online ones. Thought I would mention this because it's such a frequent concern.
Part II:
I do not recommend creating a second website for any local business. Why? Because if Google finds the complete or partial business NAP on a second website that does not match what you've entered as the URL in your Google+ Local page, it can create a loss of trust in their own data about your business. You don't want this to happen. Because of this, I return to the suggestion of a call tracking number for offline campaigns. But, if this is not possible for some reason that has nothing to do with NAP, then could you possibly set up a page on the authoritative website tied into the radio spot to help you track conversions?
Hi Trevogre,
Thanks for the further details. My advice is not to create blank pages on your website, regardless of nofollow. Similarly, my advice is not to create pages with nothing more than a form and call to action on them. If I saw a website with 10 pages on it consisting of nothing but a form and a call to action, I would consider that to be of low quality, regardless of nofollow.
Regarding Google's search results, unfortunately, our personal beliefs about what makes a high quality result do not always match Google's beliefs. I get what you are saying about making queries with the hope of being returned the highest quality page, regardless of location. The problem is, if Google doesn't understand your intent, they will show you things you weren't looking for. There isn't really any way for you, on your own, to influence Google's take on quality and relevance, apart from the fact that Google may personalize results for you based on your past search habits. So, I do get where you're coming from on this. There just isn't really anything I know of that you can do about it. Hope this helps!
Hi Sarah,
That's a good question. To my mind, a block of text would just be a big chunk of city names, zip codes or what have you. You see junk like this on homepages and in footers all the time on over-optimized websites. I would, personally, consider this to be different than something like:
Our painters are centrally located in San Jose and will come to you in Dublin, Berkeley and San Lorenzo, too. Check out our latest projects in Mountain House and Cupertino.
There's probably some grey area here. If you've got 30 service cities, I wouldn't try to list them anywhere but the nav menu. If you've got five, I can't imagine it would cause any problems to mention them in the text of a page.
This is, of course, my take - not necessary Google's.
The local community involvement is an excellent jumping off point for this. Totally agree!
Regarding evergreen vs. fresh content ... as we know, Google does love frequently updated pages, so where possible, that's a great way to go, but having a static, unique page is definitely an excellent start! Go for it!
Hi SEOSarah,
Therein lies the major challenge of this type of content development. You've got to define something unique about each service city in order to have something important and legitimate to write about. This is easier for some business models than others. For example, a house painter could show his beautiful work in San Jose on one page and his beautiful work in Santa Cruz on another, along with writeups of his projects. He could also do city-specific special offers, interviews, tips, etc.
A large company that is doing a good job of this is REI.com. Search for a location there and you'll see how they are putting different content on their different landing pages. Pretty good example.
But, as I've said, this can be harder for some companies than others if every branch of their business is an exact duplicate of all others. Something to consider for an industry like the one you've mentioned might be interviews with key staff members at the branch - people that the local customers could then meet in person to talk to about their finances. Putting a personal face on a "bland" business might help differentiate this company from competitors, and would simultaneously give you unique content for city landing pages.
Hope this helps!
Hi Trevogre,
So glad to have you here in the forum. I'm not 100% sure I'm understand your initial question. You write:
So if I create a services areas page, with links to landing pages for each county/city that is serviced. And then I create the pages for each area, and leave the content blank but then pursue filling out the content. Is the absence of the content considered duplicate content? Would you get penalized for the essentially blank pages.
Why would you take the approach of creating blank pages to be filled out later? There is no benefit I can see in publishing blank pages. Don't create a page until you've got something to put on it. While I don't believe Google would see blank pages a duplicate content (simply because there would be no content on them), I do not recommend creating links in your navigation or pages to pages that don't yet exist. That could look spammy - like you're just putting up blank pages so that they can have service/city URLs/titles, but haven't bothered to put anything on them. So, I don't see why one would do this. Have I misunderstood what you're asking?
Regarding this:
Ultimately I think this leads to poor organic search results, because the ability to determine the quality of a small business has nothing to do with its location
It's important to understand that the local and organic algorithms are separate. Local rankings are those that appear in the local packs of results. They are determined by a combination of factors including geography and authority. Location, as a ranking factor, is only relevant to local businesses...not virtual businesses. I totally agree with you that location has nothing to do with quality, but this should only concern true local business models - not businesses that aren't physically based.
I feel like I may be failing to comprehend your exact concerns here ... do you feel that local businesses located outside the borders of neighboring cities are being dealt an unfair hand? Or is it something else? Please, feel free to provide further clarification!
Hi Rodney,
What you are experience is pretty much what all non-local businesses have been experiencing since Google began displaying local packs for queries even if they don't include geo-terms. There is nothing you can do to influence whether Google feels your search terms have a local intent or not. If Google has decided that they do, then the local pack is probably here to stay for your core search terms. As you are not a local business, your best hope lies in the following:
Building up enough organic authority so that you are ranking alongside the local pack - but not in it
Paying for visibility via Adwords
Option one will likely take a great deal of time an effort. Option two can be instantaneous, but will require an outlay of money. Hopefully, you can find a feasible strategy that combines both of these efforts and gets you as much visibility as you can achieve without being a truly local business model.
Hi Mike,
Thanks so much for clarifying the business model! So, the client is an SAB, and, yes, developing geo landing pages would be the right way to go. Typically, such landing pages are built around city terms. I believe what I'd do in this case is build one landing page per town/city and then encourage the client to continue on with narrowing down this subject by blogging about their projects in neighborhoods like Riverwest and Oak Creek.
The main thing, of course, is to be sure you've got something unique and important to say on each landing page you build or blog post you write. Covering completed projects in the various cities is a good way to go with this. But as for a tool that's going to reveal what you want to know regarding whether people are using neighborhood names to search for services, I'm afraid I just don't know of anything reliable. Between 'keyword not provided' and the loss of the old Google Adwords Keyword Tool, it does seem to me that one has to rely mainly on common sense these days. No tools were ever very good at providing geo data, because the data centers were seldom local, but with the recent changes in what's available, I think the situation has gotten even tougher.
I think you are right about trying different things and seeing what works, once you've built the core landing pages for the major service cities.
Hi Mike,
As I mentioned to Bill, I think it might be helpful if you clarified what the business model is. Is the client a franchise with multiple physical locations (like a fast food chain) or an SAB (service area business like a plumber) with only a single physical location but multiple service cities?
Unfortunately, regardless of the business model, there is no tool that I know of which is going to show you how someone in Oak Creek might search for a plumber vs. someone in Bay View. Likely, if they are all in the same part of the state, their language usage is going to be similar. One runs into differences across the country with things like attorney vs. lawyer or international differences like french fries vs. chips, but within part of a state, I would expect people have a relatively common vocabulary.
Google's new keyword finder tool does have the ability to set local parameters, but personally, I find the resulting statistics to be a bit useless. I've heard other Local SEOs complain of the same.
Would you like to provide a bit more info about the business model and what you're trying to accomplish?
Hello Bill,
It's great to have you here in the forum. Totally agree with you about making sure the site is optimized for the physical locations a business has, but thought I would add that for SABs, creating landing pages on the website for service cities is considered a best practice. Hopefully, Mike can clarify his business model for us a bit.
You're very welcome, Patrick. Sounds like you've got a busy day ahead! Good luck with everything you're doing.
Hi Perfect Pitch,
I agree with Patrick - don't touch anything. I would, however, report the issue via the Google Mapmaker Forum:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/map-maker
See if you can get one of the RERs there to help you get the map corrected before you make changes to anything else. Clearly, there's an important discrepancy here that could be causing problems, not just for your client, but for everyone doing business on that street and everyone trying to come there to do business.
Hi Bob,
If there's NAP consistency issues that you've discovered, they are almost certainly harming the business' ability to rank well locally. If the client has a very small budget, perhaps the best thing to do would be to offer her an hour or two of consulting to teach her how to find citations and correct them on her own. If a business owner doesn't have budget, they have to be able to invest time if they want to have some ability to compete, right? So, offering to train her to discover and correct her citations wouldn't require much of your consulting time and would really empower her to take control of her presence on the web. That would be my thinking on this.
Hi CyberAllen,
Please check out the Moz infographic for the Local Search Ecosystem 2013:
http://moz.com/blog/2013-local-search-ecosystems
This will show you the many places from which Google pulls data. Often, Google will automatically create a local business listing for any business it finds information about. But, if you're looking to get a business listed that you are promoting, follow Moosa's instructions, provided that the business in question is compliant with all of the following guidelines:
Hi Bob,
Within the space of the forum, I can't offer to do a full analysis of all of your client's competitors, which is what you'd need to do in order to begin getting a picture of the competitiveness of the citation building going on in her city and industry. It can be good to do this type of research for your clients, but I don't really think you can hit on an exact number, because the situation isn't static. More importantly, perhaps, remember that number of citations does not equal where a business ranks. It's only part of the picture.
I took a quick look at the website you've linked to and it does not seem very well optimized for Local SEO - and this is such a BIG part of the ranking picture.
So, my advice here is to use a tool like GetListed.org to be sure your client's core basic citations are built in the 10-20 basic places. Then, look at articles like this one, http://www.leanmarketing.ca/lean-top-50-best-local-citation-sources-in-the-usa/, for additional citation building ideas. Look at the competitors' citation profiles to see if there are additional opportunities you've missed. And, don't forget to look for hyperlocal sites and professional sites that will not be listed on these top 50, top 100-type articles because they are too niche-focused.
But be sure you're covering your other bases, as well, including great on-page local optimization, review acquisition, content development, social, etc. Local rankings stem from a variety of factors and you've got to be on top of them all. Hope this helps.
Hi Lee,
My own guidelines for content development are pretty much ruled by a the question, "Does it make sense?". Typically, for service-oriented businesses, it's a good idea to have one page per service. It makes sense to do this, because, for example, someone looking for a contractor will search for 'fence building' if they want a fence built and 'deck building' if they want a deck built. So, having a unique page for each topic on the site makes sense as a way to welcome each customer to a really well-matched landing page that features information about the unique service they are looking for.
Some grey area arises, though, with a service like 'car wrapping' vs. 'van wrapping'. I'm not familiar enough with your industry to know whether this really qualifies as two separate services or not. You would know better. If wrapping a car represents a separate user need than wrapping a van, I would create two separate pages, provided I had totally unique things to write about the two services. Some businesses might even be building pages for different models of cars, if they discovered that people were searching that way (Toyota Wrapping, BMW Wrapping, etc.), but they should really only do so if it make sense for the user.
So, I guess the answer to your question lies in whether these different terms are just synonyms for an identical service or whether these really are different services people are searching for that require their own page to fully describe the offering. Hope this helps!
Hi Lee4dcm,
It's great to have you here in the Q&A forum. If you plan to create one large page covering all terms, it does seem like good sense to build it on a URL that is already ranking highly. Can you incorporate 'car wrapping' into the page's optimization along with the other keywords as you create the new content? If the page is for a local service, you should definitely also optimize it for the name of the city in which the company is located. The website plays a major role in your local rankings, so it must be optimized for local and service terms, both. Hopefully, you have plans for an on-going content development strategy, too, such a blogging, in order to continue to publish new content surrounding core keyword phrases.
Does this answer your question?
Hi Chris,
Mgordon is actually correct - Google's custom categories are on their way out and do not exist in the new Google+ Local dashboard. You might want to look into this further in case it will affect any of your clients.
Hi Mgordon,
Google is completely doing away with custom categories, and I have come across other threads with business owners expressing concern that their most important categories do not exist in the new pre-set category taxonomy. There are three thoughts I can share with you on this.
You might want to do some more searching around the Google forum in case there was a discussion of this I happened to miss. Google staffers do sometimes start threads to address concerns like these, but the custom categories are definitely going away, so they can't be part of your marketing strategy.
http://blumenthals.com/Google_LBC_Categories
Sorry not to have a solution here. I do suggest searching around Google's forum for more discussions started by people finding themselves in your same situation with the new category system.
Hi Varun,
You can put your complete NAP (name, address, phone) on every page, but most typically, local business websites put this in two major places: the sitewide website footer and the Contact Us page. It can also be a good idea to have it in the site masthead to help visitors instantly know that your business is local to them. I would only put it on the rest of the pages of the website if it made sense to do so. It certainly won't hurt you if you want to put it on every page, but I don't think it will be of more help than simply having it in the places I've specified, above.
Hi Kevin,
Building a Google+ Local page should not have a negative effect on your business. I did want to ask a question, though. I'm looking at your website and don't see the typical hallmarks of a local business such as a local area code phone number or street address. I see a vanity phone number (Google doesn't like these for local) and a toll free number (also not right for local) and I can't find your physical address. Do you have these things and are you serving clients face-to-face? Does your business comply with all of these guidelines:
You're so welcome, Blair. Yep, no shortcuts. This isn't work most people adore doing, but it's so important.
Paul,
Your answer was incredibly helpful - so much so that I'm going to endorse it. You not only pointed me in the right direction, you really helped me to feel confident that this will be a good solution for my client. Sincerely appreciate it!
Hi MatterSolutions,
What you want to avoid doing here is claiming the second listing, because it's a violation to have two claimed listings. Instead, I would recommend going through the troubleshooter as this opens a line of communication with Google about the problem. Here's the link (click the contact button on this page):
https://support.google.com/places/#topic=1656871
I realized the guidelines Chris has correctly quoted state otherwise, but my own choice would be to use the troubleshooter instead.
Hi Everybody,
A client has asked me to take a look at Google Enterprise Search for them. It has been a few years since I last fooled around with implementing a Google search box on a website, and that was the free version which included off-site results in the results.
This appears to be the main page describing the paid product:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/
I have three questions:
The search testing function on the above page doesn't seem to be working. I'm typing in a URL and search term, as prompted, and the page is simply refreshing. It never provides me an example set of results. Is it working for you?
This client has a moderately large e-commerce site (about 200 products). Have you implemented Google enterprise search on such a site and are you happy with its performance? The goal here is to let users search for a topic and be returned both product and informational pages. How well does this tool do this?
Am I going to need to know any special types of coding (beyond html/css) to implement this? If so, what are they?
If you have experience with this product, I would surely appreciate your feedback. Thank you!
Hi Blair,
One of the inherent tasks of manual citation building is ensuring that verification takes place. There is no way to get around this. It goes with the job. Pre-set your clients' expectations that they will need to be part of the process - forwarding you verification emails that come in, being by the phone at a certain time when phone verification calls come in, being on the lookout for postal mail verification and letting you know when it comes in. Yes, this can be time consuming, but it's what clients pay a professional citation builder for.
In regards to things like security questions, go ahead and make up your own answers to them. Then, at the end of the project, be sure to present the client with a document for their files that lists all of the questions and answers so that they have them on file. This is very important for their future needs - they may need to edit their profiles or may work with other marketers who need to and they must have a record of the work you've done.
I create a simple spreadsheet that tracks all of this information, including listing status, passwords, security questions, etc. Once you've built citations for a few clients, you will become familiar with which sites have which requirements and can build a templated spreadsheet for this so that all you have to do is fill in the blanks as you progress through the work. This will help you with keeping track of your own tasks and the sheet can then be given to the client at the end of the project so that they have a simple document to refer to that contains all of their citation info.
Hope this helps!