Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Mike,

Opinions vary on this. Local Search godfather, Mike Blumenthal, refuses to pay the BBB. See:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2010/10/07/google-better-business-bureau-ratings/

Others point out the authority of the BBB in the world of SMBs:

http://moz.com/ugc/the-best-link-your-clients-may-be-missing-12889

My feeling on this is that, if a client has money to throw around, having the BBB link won't hurt, but I'm not convinced that it really helps a ton, either. Provided your core business NAP (name, address, phone) is correct on the listing, then that is, in my opinion, the main thing.

Hi Mike,

If the businesses you're searching for are local in nature, then EMD one-boxes are a known, documented phenomenon currently troubling the SERPs. This is fallout from the Hummingbird update. Read more about this here:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local-important/10000-attack-bad-google-local-one-boxes.html

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

I'm positive that Google is aware of this unintended outcome of the update in which weak, spammy or even closed businesses are ranking in one-box fashion, but as to when Google will tweak the dial to fix this, we just don't know. Hang in there. Lots of people are writing about this, because it is creating such a blatantly poor user experience.

Hi Gavo,

While what Marcus points out is true (you can prompt local results for web design companies by adding 'in' to your query), it's important to understand that Google does not view web design companies as being truly local, hence their lack of inclusion in the results for the most common service + city or city + service queries. To my understanding, Google's thinking on this is that most web design (and SEO) companies operate virtually (don't meet with clients face-to-face).

So, you can add your web design company to Google's local index, and you can build citations for it, but it's likely that your overall organic rankings will hinge more on other forms of marketing in which you engage. Think content development, earning links, social outreach, etc.

Hi SearchParty,

I definitely vote in favor of the latter - a single website with landing pages for each of the physical locations. With this method, the marketing you engage in will go toward building the authority of all locations. Mini sites with exact match domains tend to be candidates for thin and duplicate content, so I'm not a fan. Beyond this, I think they overly-complicate the scenario, when a single domain with strong content for each location keeps things simple for human visitors and the bots.

Hi SearchParty,

If these are all real physical locations to which customers come to do business or from which staff goes to serve clients, then my rule of them is to include up to eight of them in the footer, properly marked up using Schema. There should also be a unique page on the website for each location.

Glad to hear it!

Hi Abe,

So, for the trophy shop, my 6 point list, above, is a good blueprint. For the virtual sites, however, Google+ Local is not an option as these business models will not be eligible for local inclusion. Important to understand this difference.

Hi Bob,

Yes, I think your suggested order of operations would be fine. You'll have to keep double-checking the Google listing to be sure it isn't reverting to old data or getting duplicated while you work on cleaning up the other citations. Good that you are setting the client's expectations correctly from the get-go. So important. Good luck!

Hi Timothy,

The purpose of building citations on local business directories (whether manually or via a paid service like Yext) is to build up the authority of your basic business data (your business NAP - name, address, phone number) so that people can find your business in a variety of places and so that all of the data proves that you have a consistent, specific brand name, physical location, local phone number and website.

I am not aware of a list of which directories, specifically, pass page rank, but trying to look at this from Google's perspective - Google would be aware that most directory listings are built by the business owner. In other words, the links they contain are being intentionally built by the business itself. Thus, I would assume that even those directory links which do pass page rank are not going to be as highly valued as links you earn in other ways (voluntary mentions, guest posting, etc.).

Because of this, I don't consider citation building to be equivalent to link building. The latter requires additional and different efforts.

Hi OOMDO,

I'm not sure I'm fully understanding the work model you are describing here. Let me share some info in hopes that you'll see an answer in it, but if not, please provide further details.

Regarding the number of Google+ Local pages you may have, the Google Places Quality Guidelines state:

Departments within businesses, universities, hospitals, and government buildings may be listed separately. These departments must be publicly distinct as entities or groups within their parent organization, and ideally will have separate phone numbers and/or customer entrances.

So, in the case of an auto dealership, the business could technically build one Google+ Local page for its service department and another for its sales department, if these have different front doors and separate phone numbers. Is this what you are asking about?

Hi ThinkCreativeGroup,

If the restaurants have different names (i.e. Bob's Pancake House vs. Bill's Burgers) then you should keep them on separate domains and do all marketing completely separately without making any effort to link the two to one another.

If there is some shared history, you could put it in a non-indexable infographic along the lines of "The Jones family opened Bob's Pancake House in 1938. In 1950, they invented their famous buckwheat cake stack. In 2012, son Bill opened Bill's Burgers across town". If, for reasons of pride, the owner wants to highlight something like this, that's fine, but I wouldn't do it in indexable text.

If the restaurants are two branches of the same brand (i.e. both of them are Bob's Pancake House) then, yes, you could develop a single website with a landing page for each physical location. You would then be linking to each of these landing pages from the citation building campaign for each location.

Hope this helps!

Hi Abe,

I want to double check here that we are talking about local businesses in all of these cases. Do each of these businesses you've mentioned have:

1. In-person transactions with customers?

2. A physical address at which mail is received and a local phone number which matches this address?

While a trophy shop is a typical local fixture, I wanted to be sure that the electric wheelbarrow and sump pump concerns are actual, physical local businesses.

For the moment, let's assume that they are. In such a case, the niche nature of these three businesses should make it fairly easy to become locally dominant. My bet is that competition would be modest for all three businesses. So, a moderate amount of work in the following areas should yield good results:

1. The development of an excellent, optimized website

2. The building of citations in various places

3. The earning of reviews

4. Earning of a modest amount of links

5. A content develop strategy designed to make each business the most active authority in its local region

6. Social outreach on a modest scale

You're not working with personal injury attorneys in Los Angeles, here, so my broad assessment would be that a moderate effort in all of the above should generate quite a bit of visibility for these businesses, provided that they are local and not virtual.

You're very welcome, Ruben.

Hi Bzmark,

Thanks for the clarification. The reason I asked is that it isn't permitted to create a Google+ Local page for a non-staffed vacation rental. Sounds like you're in the clear, as far as that's concerned, with this lodge.

I feel that Tim has correctly assessed this situation. There are multiple issues here.

1. P.O. boxes are not allowable addresses, so at some point, someone created a Google+ Local page (and likely other citations) for a location that is in violation of the Google Places Quality Guidelines.

2. Google's local product is mailing address-based - meaning that it is intended to feature data about businesses with physical addresses at which mail is received and to which humans come. While humans do come to this lodge, mail apparently doesn't come to it, taking it outside of Google's definition of a true local business and making it an unlikely candidate for local inclusion.

3. Since the lodge doesn't receive mail at its remote location, it would be impossible for it to receive a postcard for the purposes of verification, again, making it ineligible.

So, I think where you are at right now is that your client's business name exists within in Google's local product when it should never have been included in the first place, lacking a mailing address that would be legitimate in the eyes of Google. The client's location is being misrepresented by Google, and there isn't a clear path for cleaning this up, because there is no genuine mailing address to substitute in a cleanup campaign.

If the wrong location is misrepresenting the business and misleading customers, you could try to get the page deleted, but I think the best thing to do here would be to go through the Google MapMaker and Google And Your Business fora to see if you can make direct contact with Google staff for guidance with this matter. Typically, I would be sending you through a troubleshooter like this one (https://support.google.com/places/) but as you don't have a legit mailing address, it won't get you very far.

I think your only hope is direct contact with Google staff, who may either help you remove the listing or may allow you to edit it in some way. They won't be happy about the P.O. box, of course, but they may have some solution for you that will ameliorate the fact that the business is currently being misrepresented and is potentially misleading customers.

In the meantime, I do like Tim's suggestion of creating a custom Google map to embed on your website so that, at least, the website is properly directing guests to the location.

In sum, the business model is not appropriate for inclusion in Google's local products and your task is to do all you can to prevent potential guests from being misdirected.

Hi Abe,

Good question. While I believe that the two most important places for most local businesses to earn review are Google+ Local and Yelp (because of their obvious dominance), these are not necessarily the best places for you to request reviews, namely because it's forbidden by Yelp's quality guidelines to solicit reviews, as Keri has mentioned.

When you have the opportunity to steer a customer towards leaving a review, a Google-based review is likely to have the most ranking-oriented impact, if the customer already has a Google+ account. If he doesn't, there's a chance the review may be filtered out.

If the customer is an active Yelp user and leaves you a Yelp review without being asked, then this can have a good impact on conversions. I know many local business owners swear by Yelp as a major driver of phone calls.

Clients in certain industries may see next-best benefit from niche directories, rather than generic ones.

I highly recommend that you read Phil Rozek's extremely awesome post/infographic comparing review sites in 2013.

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/10/24/comparison-of-local-review-sites-where-should-you-focus-now/

I think you'll find it's just what the doctor ordered!

Hi Ruben,

Yes, there is a chance that the very fact that a Google account is new may cause reviews stemming from it to be viewed with suspicion by Google and potentially filtered out. Unfortunately, there is no way around this. Does this mean you shouldn't ask non-Google users who are clients of yours to leave a review? No - some of the reviews may make it through the filter, but this should not be your only strategy. It may be that a client who doesn't happen to have a Google profile may be an active user of some other type of review website. Letting clients know you have profiles at websites A, B, C and D where you'd love a review may help them see that they can review you on a website where they are already active.

Alternatively, if you are dealing with clients who just aren't Internet-savvy at all, they can still be great resources for testimonials that can be marked up on your own website with good markup, building a different kind of authority and potentially getting you stars in your Google results.

Have you checked out Get5Stars.com at all? It's a paid service, but it's one that can be a big help in situations like this in which you've got customers at different levels of engagement and want to help them take a positive path towards leaving you feedback - whether in the form of testimonials or reviews.

I also recommend you read:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/06/27/the-afterlives-of-filtered-google-plus-and-yelp-reviews/

And, remember, no business should set as its goal getting a ton of Google-based reviews at once. This, in itself, can trip filters. A very modest, slow-paced acquisition is the best way to go about earning Google-based reviews, and building a diverse profile of reviews and testimonials across multiple sites should be the ultimate goal.

Hi Bzmark,

May I ask for a little clarification on the business model. By 'lodge' do you mean a hotel (i.e. a staffed location to which guests come) or is this a one-off vacation rental (i.e. a single, un-staffed cabin out in the woods)? Please clarify.

Hi Ricky,

Egol's suggestion regarding interviews is really a good one and, if done with care, would produce some very high quality content.

Another suggestion: if the medical practice has a blog, how about a weekly or monthly roundup-type post of local women's health/fitness events? Things like marathons, free yoga classes, healthy cooking classes, free lectures on relevant topics, volunteer opportunities, breast cancer fundraisers, etc. If the blogger can set up alerts on things like this, he/she can aggregate the data and then go a step beyond this by adding something fresh to each roundup - a personal perspective on the week's/month's opportunities for better living for local women.

Just one idea, but something that could be added into the mix to improve the usefulness of the website to local women.

Hi C2G,

While each directory has its own rules, Google is quite clear about their stance on this, in the Google Places Quality Guidelines:

Businesses that are under construction or that have not yet opened to the public are not eligible for a listing on Google Places

So, at the very least, until your client has moved, you cannot update his Google+ Local page. I will add to this that, because you should never publish anything but the current NAP (name, address, phone) of a business on a website or its citations (for fear of clouding the record and harming current rankings) you probably should not do advance work on this of any kind.

Instead, this would be a good time to be sure you've created a spreadsheet of all of the client's current citations, so that as soon as the move is official, you're working off an organized document doing his citation editing. And, if it's in your job description to do so, the coming months would also be a good time to come up with the content you'll be publishing once the move happens. This could include both editing of current content, including on-page SEO, and the development of new content announcing the move.

So, in my opinion, the next 3 months will be a good time for organizing and planning, but the actual 'doing' should wait until the move actually happens. Hope this helps!

Hi Bob,

Andrew Shotland wrote a good piece on this topic a couple of years ago:

http://searchengineland.com/the-smb-guide-to-changing-business-names-seo-128939

Basically, any local business that rebrands itself is in for a mountain of work (hence, Andrew's warning to just not do it!) and as your client has dozens of locations, the amount of work involved is going to be enormous. You are going to need to perform citation cleanup for each of the locations. I would start with the biggies in the local search ecosystem:

http://moz.com/blog/2013-local-search-ecosystems

Once you've tackled the big 4 outlined there, move on to cleanup all other citations. At the very least, you have some months of work ahead of you, and hopefully your client understands this. Rebranding is definitely a huge task, and it will only be when you've corrected every single listing for all of the dozens of locations that you can begin to feel like you're back on the safe side - letting the new data pulse through the ecosystem rather than being hampered by the bad data that will necessarily be everywhere the moment the business rebrands. Good luck!

Hi Mandy,

The second part of Keri's question is important. To create a strategy, you must first answer these questions:

1. Does the client meet face-to-face with customers or is business done virtually?

2. Does the client have a physical office/s in cities within the states you are mentioning? Do customers come to these offices or do employees leave from these offices to serve customers at their places of business?

Your opportunities for promotion are based on the business model (physical vs. virtual). Please provide as much detail as you can so that you will receive the best possible answer from the community.

Hi Alex,

Dana is correct - it should have no negative effect, provided you maintain efforts in both areas (organic and local). You can build authority both ways, simultaneously, without conflict.

Thanks for asking such a good question. Glad to help!

Hi Taysir,

This is a good question and one for which there is no 'right' answer, in my opinion. Taking the approach suggested by your spreadsheet, your chief danger would be thin or duplicate content. After all, your services in Oakland are likely to be identical to your services in Fremont, or in the multiple cities in your service area. You can go this way, of course, provided you can find a genuine reason for creating this type of content and have the resources to make each page totally unique. Often, I've found that this is not the case, so I prefer to recommend this approach in most SMB cases:

You create 3 types of pages.

1. City Landing Pages, one for each city, talking about the location and summarizing services. These pages would be optimized for your CORE service phrase + city name.

2. Service Pages, one for each service. You can link to these from the city landing pages. These would be optimized for the individual service, but not for a particular city.

3. Future Pages. I like best to give the client the ability to blog about their projects and news on an on-going basis, giving them the opportunity to begin building up content that covers a variety of keyword combinations, over time.

I find that this approach makes projects with SMBs manageable. We get really strong pages for each of their cities and each of their services onto the website, and then give them the power to begin showcasing their work in various cities via an on-site blog.

So, that's my typical project structure. I'm not saying that you can't go the other way - the way you've mentioned - just that there is an inherent danger in that approach with small, local businesses because they may be tempted to create a ton of content at once that is of low quality instead of being exceptional.

Hope this helps!

Hi Jonathan,

The best way to start looking for duplicates is to go to Google Maps and type in current phone numbers and any past phone numbers to see if more than one listing surfaces for them.

It sounds like you are making major right steps in many areas. Bringing us back to the concept that these things take time. Once all potential negatives can be resolved, then there is only going forward with positives including content development, review acquisition, social outreach, link earning, etc. Your original thread from October dates the start of your cleanup to about 2 months ago. While everything is dependent on the competitiveness of a business' local market, you should begin to see positive outcomes at some point, but when that will be can't really be estimated. So basically, your path to success will look like this:

1. Resolve negatives

2. Build on-going postives

3. See results once Google catches onto the fact that there are no negatives and that a positive effort is being made on an on-going basis that is superior to the efforts of local competitors.

Pretty much all Local SEO campaigns follow this general pattern and, from your description of your efforts, it sounds like you are on the right track and just need to give things time.

*I will make one proviso to this. Let's say 6 months go by and you are still not seeing the client become a chief player in the results for their local market. If this was happening to me, I'd try to find someone more expert than myself to audit the site in case I've overlooked something I'm not trained to spot.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for referencing your October thread. As I recall, your client was experiencing multiple issues with citation/NAP inconsistency and you had not yet engaged at that point in cleanup or forward-going citation building. You had also yet to implement a content strategy (separate pages for the 2 physical locations) If you have done so in the intervening weeks, you are on the right track, but it will take time to see results from this work. Check out his infographic:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/26/infographic-citations-time-to-live/

As you will see, some changes take many months to go into effect, so patience is important here. However, if you suspect you may have outstanding issues that are preventing you from ranking, I would look into the following:

• Have all previous citations been discovered and cleaned up?

• Are citations being built appropriately for each location?

• Is the Google+ Local page for each of the 2 locations violation free?

• Could there be duplicate Google+ Local listings or merged listings?

• Does the website appropriately reflect the 2 locations, or could there be anything on it that is confusing the bots as to the accuracy of distinct NAP for each location?

• Is robots.txt setup correctly on the site, ensuring that it is fully crawlable?

• Has the site been submitted to Google Webmaster Tools?

• Has their been a previous issue with spammy linkbuilding that could be harming the site?

• Is there a duplicate content issue on the website?

These are some of the things a professional audit would cover. All points are worthy of investigating, for sure.

I would not be concerned about E. Kentucky vs. East Kentucky. This does not represent a NAP inconsistency - just an unimportant difference of abbreviation.

Hope this helps, and glad you are following up.

Hi Titan552,

The fact of the matter is that there is little research to support a rock-solid conclusion on this. Here is a list (partial, I think) of the business types supported by specific Schema:

http://schema.org/LocalBusiness

Here is my thinking on this - if specific schema exists for your category of business, you should use it. After all, the whole point of Schema markup is to make information as explicit as possible. If it's possible to 'label' a business as being a physician, then that is more descriptive than simply calling it 'organization', 'local business'. I just recently discussed this with some colleagues and this is the conclusion we reached. This conclusion, as I've said, is not based on studies of any kind. I don't know of any that have been done. It more of a common sense approach. Hope it makes good sense to you!

My pleasure, Dmitriy!

Hi Kevin,

Good thoughts from Kevin Ramirez regarding content development and Richard Horvath regarding ensuring that the content you develop is unique!

The challenge here is that Google is biased toward physical location. Thus, an SAB (service area business) must typically plan to go after local pack rankings for its city of location and organic rankings for its location-less service cities. The type of content you will be developing is typically known as city landing pages. You can read more about this here:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

Hi Taysir,

Both P.O. boxes and virtual offices are forbidden by the Google Places Quality Guidelines (see: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en)

Unless your client is an area of very low competition or in a very rural area, then he should not expect to rank in the local pack of results for anything but his city of location. It's important to set his expectation about this, so that he understand that this is simply how Google works. Let him know that the use of P.O. boxes or virtual offices will only harm his trustworthiness in the eyes of Google at the same time as confusing his customers.

So, he can go for local rankings for his city of location, and then go after as much organic visibility as he can for his other location-less service cities by developing content that reflects his work in these places. I think you will find some good inspiration for this in this article:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landings Pages

All SABs struggle with this situation, but it is totally possible to earn good core local visibility for the location city and additional organic visibility for the service cities with the right strategy. Good luck with the work ahead!

Hi TheGoatMan,

This is an interesting topic. My guess is that you're asking this question because you know about the EMD penalty of recent times. Curiously, this penalty did not appear to affect local business rankings as much as virtual business rankings. That being said, the EMD penalty did indicate to all business owners that Google is not a fan of optimized website URLs being coupled with low quality websites.

If you are just starting a new business, choosing to name it with your service/geo keywords in mind is a smart idea. So, instead of being The Back Relief Doctor, your might name your business Boston Chiropractic Center (provided that doesn't already exist, or course). Thus, your domain name could be bostonchirorpacticcenter.com and both your business name and URL would be an authentic representation of your business.

If, however, your business already exists, it wouldn't be my first choice to go with an EMD domain that doesn't reflect your business. I'd rather have The Back Relief Doctor reside on backreliefdr.com than on mybostonchiro.com, simply because I feel that all of Google's moves in recent years have been towards authenticity. You'll find differing opinions on this, but this is mine

What you must not do, of course, is to misrepresent your business name anywhere by adding keywords to it. Use your legal business name or DBA at all times - on the website, building citations, social media, etc.

Finally, there is the option of re-branding a business, if you feel there would be significant benefits in renaming The Back Relief Doctor 'Boston Chiropractic Center'. However, this is not a choice to be made lightly, as re-branding of a local business requires a massive citation cleanup campaign to edit all existing references to the old name so that they reflect the new one. This can result in temporary or long-term ranking loss and other problems, so this is a choice that deserves very careful consideration.

Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for your patience. I did get a chance to speak with my colleague - Nyagoslav Zhekov of NGSMarketing.com, and he feels that Google will be sophisticated enough to handle this issue, especially given that this is par for the course in your country. Likely Google handles this the way they do shopping malls here in the U.S. Just be sure your business name and phone number are unique to you, and cross your fingers that no problems arise.

Hi Shaycw,

Sounds good to me...just make sure the font is a regular size (not too small!). So glad to have helped.

Hi Bruce,

This is quite interesting, what you've described regarding New Zealand addresses. I'm going to ask a colleague who has done quite a bit of local work in NZ if he has any info about Google's ability to handle this. I will hop back in if he is kind enough to respond to me. One would presume that Google gets this about your country (love those little kiwi birds, btw) but I'll see what I can find out!

Hi Shaycw,

Thanks for the further clarification. With a client like this, I like to group my page types into 3 different categories:

1. City pages

2. Service pages

3. Future pages

To start with, I create the first two sets of pages. So, in your case, you would be building an Austin page, a San Antonio page and a Houston page. These pages would open with the complete NAP of the business at the top, encoded in Schema and would feature unique content about the unique locations. These pages would be optimized for the respective city and the MAIN service term. The second set of pages would be the service pages. You would build one for each unique service, and while the content of the page could reflect the three cities, your main optimization would center on the service, itself.

At this point, once I've got the basic pages created, I like to develop a blog for the client so that he can begin writing up his projects in the various cities. His blog posts will be titled things like 'A Tough Water Restoration Job In Houston, TX - Before And After'. When you've got 8 different services in 3 different cities to cover, the combination of possibilities really adds up, and I've found that a blog is the best way to begin tacking content development for all possible keyword combinations, while also accomplishing the task of adding fresh content to the site on a regular basis.

This is the method I've found works best. You may come up with some other way that works best for your clients, but I hope my explanation of how I do this makes good sense.

Remember, too, that because the client has 3 legit physical locations and phone numbers, a big part of your marketing will revolve around building unique citations for each location in a number of places. Coupled with a good content development strategy, you should be able to earn a lot of visibility for the client.

Hi DigitalWorkboots,

Yes, put both complete NAPs in the footer, preferably using Schema markup. Also put them both on the contact us page, as well as having a separate landing page for each office.

Hi Anthony,

So glad the resource helped!

Hi Shaycw,

Does your business have three physical locations or one physical location from which you serve three cities? Please, describe as fully as you can. I'll be happy to come back and read your answer.

Hi Pugh,

Good question. Unfortunately, no, you do not qualify for inclusion in Google's local index or use of their local products. In order to do so, you must have face-to-face transactions with your customers, which is not how e-commerce companies operate. You can read the Google Places Quality Guidelines, which cover eligibility, here:

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

Hi Ruben,

Thanks for the screenshot! Okay, so GetListed.org has been able to surface this as a possible duplicate because of the identical phone number. What you need to do is:

1. Go to this troubleshooter: https://support.google.com/places/

2. Click the red 'contact us' button

3. Choose 'my listing has incorrect information'

4. Choose the option mentioning duplicates

5. Then provide all of the information regarding the correct Google+ Local page and the duplicate one, being as clear as possible.

6. In addition to this, you need to find any other instances on the web where your phone number is connected to this other business name and/or address and have them edited or removed. If you skip this step, Google will continue to find information about your business that is incorrect and will not have sufficient trust in the good information. Given the spammy title of one of the listings shown in your screenshot (the keyword stuffed one), you may already have some trust issues with Google, so the road ahead may be a little long. Citation cleanup will be an important part of improving things.

7. If, after reporting the duplicate via the troubleshooter and cleaning up your citations, you continue to see that there is a duplicate listing (I'd give it at least 4 weeks) then I would post your issues in the Google And Your Business Forum at http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business, giving a full description of exactly what you've done and when you've done it. To that end, I recommend you keep a personal log of the actions you take so that you can track your progress and report your efforts to Google, if needed.

Hope this helps!

Good Evening!

The core problem with call tracking numbers is that they create data inconsistencies across the local search ecosystem which can result in a loss of trust on Google's part, a loss of rankings in the local search results and confusion on the part of customers.

Google wants each local business to have a business name, address and local area code phone number (NAP) that is published with absolute consistency across the web. Call tracking numbers can completely mess up this consistency and are normally considered taboo in Local.

Here are some good articles for you to read that talk intelligently about what you should and shouldn't do with call tracking numbers:

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

http://localu.org/blog/truth-about-seo-call-tracking/

Stick by the advice these two authors provide and you should be in the clear. Hope this helps!

Hi Beytznet,

Some questions:

1. Is your national business virtual (like an e-commerce website) or does it have actual, physical locations where face-to-face business is transacted with customers?

2. If you have physical locations, does each have a unique address, not shared by any other business?

3. Does each physical location have its own local area code phone number?

Some advice:

If you do have staffed physical locations at which in-person transactions happen at unique addresses with unique local phone numbers, then you qualify for inclusion in Google's local index. Think of a chain store like Whole Foods. It has a corporate website, but also has a local listing for each of its locations. This would be the model any such chain would follow.

Appearing the local results will depend first on the fact that Google already shows local results for your queries. If Google doesn't already provide a local pack of results for your queries, there is no way to prompt them to do so. If Google does show local results for your desired queries, then you must pursue high rankings via a variety of efforts including, but not limited to:

1. Running a strong, excellent website that works to build authority

2. Creating a unique landing page on the website for each of your physical stores, with the complete name, address, phone, preferably encoded in Schema markup

3. Creating a violation-free Google+ Local page for each of your stores and linking each listing to its respective landing page on the website

4. Creating citations for each of the stores on third party local business directories.

5. Earning reviews

6. Earning links, doing social outreach, video marketing etc.

If you do not meet all of the requirements I've mentioned, you do not qualify. You can read the complete Google Places Quality Guidelines here: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en

Hope this helps!

Hi Ruben,

I'd like to make sure I'm understanding what you are describing. Are you saying that you found a duplicate Google+ Local listing or a listing location on some other directory, such as Yellow Pages or Best of the Web or something like that. I want to be sure to offer the best possible advice.

Hi MisterG,

Because of Google's bias toward physical location, your client is unlikely to rank in the local pack of results for his service cities where he has no physical location. He can pursue local pack rankings for his city of location but must work to earn organic rankings for his services in these other cities. Foundation work in this area surrounds the development of city landing pages. For a detailed description of this, please see:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages for Local Businesses

Hope this helps!

Hi JohnWeb12,

Sounds like an exciting project! So, here's the deal. The guidelines you are dealing with are these:

• _Individual practitioners may be listed individually as long as those practitioners are public-facing within their parent organization. Common examples of such practitioners are doctors, dentists, lawyers, and real estate agents. The practitioner should be directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours. A practitioner should not have multiple listings to cover all of his or her specializations. _
• _Departments within businesses, universities, hospitals, and government buildings may be listed separately. These departments must be publicly distinct as entities or groups within their parent organization, and ideally will have separate phone numbers and/or customer entrances._See: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en

• The separate 4 locations MUST have unique phone numbers, because they are going to be associated with unique physical addresses.

• With the practitioners, this is a subject surrounded by grey area. I highly recommend that you read the discussion on Mike Blumenthal's post in which there are many interesting points raised surrounding this very topic in the comments:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/02/14/google-local-quality-guideline-update-allows-for-multiple-departments/

I recommend you read the entire thread to pick up on some of the nuances surrounding the doctors having an identical phone number and the concerns about merging. Mike's advice on this:

"I think having the same phone number is OK by the rules but unfortunately the algo may merge the listings. I have some that are the same that have stayed intact and others that have merged."

My feeling is that each of the 4 offices should have a unique phone number, and that the guidelines do not require that each doctor have his own within the practice, but that there is some risk of merging if they don't. The guidelines are not 100% clear on this, as is the case with many points of order surrounding Google+ Local. I hope the post I've linked to will help you consider the ins-and-outs of this topic!