Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Avalanche,

If it happened automatically, then it does sound like part of the automatic upgrade. I do, however, recommend that you investigate and resolve the business title inconsistency. Google's guidelines specifically forbid anything but the legal business name or DBA in that field. If an internal edit doesn't work, I'd go through the troubleshooter:

https://support.google.com/places/

Hit the red 'contact us' button to begin documenting the problem, which is quite a serious one, both because of Google's guidelines and the fact that citation consistency is considered to be one of the top local ranking factors.

Hope this helps!

Hi Silkstream,

Yep - it's almost always a relief to know what you're experiencing is part of a mass bug rather than an individual problem. Google tends to respond to system-wide problems with more speed and care than they do to edge cases. So glad I was able to answer your question and give you some peace of mind!

Hi Doug,

In my experience, the client has to be convinced on his own that there will be value in the investment. Part of this comes from his realization that he must get this work done in order to compete and see returns from being visible on the Internet. If he is under-educated about the power of the web, he may not realize this and you have the chance to teach him. Sometimes this works out well! Sometimes, however, a potential client just doesn't grasp the value of being visible and is unwilling to commit resources to it. Often, he ends up going with some quickie/cheapie deal instead and winds up blowing what money he has on services that either won't help the business or will actually harm it. I've had small business owners come to me in a state of a disaster after going down that path. Business owners who are ready to learn and willing to rely on the expertise of the marketer are my favorites. Those who come to you with bad information they've learned elsewhere and who are not willing to learn better ways of doing things are seldom good clients.

It's quite common for Local Search Marketing contracts to cover at least a few months, sometimes even a year or more. The difference between a big budge project and a small budget one will be the amount of work you are able to do for them per month. But even the smaller amount of work will have cumulative value over time.

Bottom line: the client must believe in the value of what is happening. If he doesn't, the project will likely either not happen or will be a stressful one. You can help shore up their belief, but it's my feeling that there has to be some measure of faith on their side in the marketer they've hired that will keep them going until results start to become apparent.

Hi Rusty,

That's great that you're considering amassing the skills you need to begin offering Local SEO to clients. It's a huge, ever-changing form or marketing that requires on-going study. If Local SEO is new to you, I recommend you access the following free resources to kick of your learning process on steady feet:

First and foremost, study the Google Places Quality Guidelines, here:

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

Here is a recent Moz post I wrote which takes the Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors and illustrates each:

Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors - An Illustrated Guide

The above post features ranking factors that are deemed to be most important by the annual Local Search Ranking Factors Survey which is the premiere annual survey in the Local Search industry and must-read stuff for every aspiring Local SEO.

Here is my post on the psychological mindset behind a strong, good Local SEO campaign:

The Zen of Local SEO

And another on the more technical tenets of a Local SEO/SEM campaign:

The Rudiments of Local SEO

As you are also working on the design end of things, I recommend your read Matthew Hunt's article on local on-page optimization:

How To Do Onpage Optimization for Local SEO – The “Perfectly Optimized Local Page” ExampleAnd here's a great one from Darren Shaw on the art of citation building:How To Identify Quality Citations SourcesThere are many other great, free learning resources out there, but I've highlighted here some that will get at the heart of basic good practices for you.Moving along to the specifics of your question: directory submissions - called 'citations' in Local SEO - are one of the key components of any local search marketing campaign. Citations must feature completely consistent data about the business and follow all guidelines for each given platform. Where phone verification is necessary, the best thing to do is to alert your client that he must be ready to answer his phone within a given time window. Do not attempt to redirect the phone number as redirecting numbers are against Google's guidelines (linked to above) and could cause major NAP consistency issues for your client.You can choose to build citations manually. This is often the best way to go. On an agency level, however, you may be so busy that your clients' needs will best be served by you using a third party resource. Yext is such a service. I personally recommend WhiteSpark's service, which is conducted manually and is very highly thought of in the industry. Here's a link:https://www.whitespark.ca/citation-building-submission-serviceIf you do choose to hire a citation building service, be absolutely sure that you are carefully researching your options. Some work better than others and some have known problems. Thankfully, there are various option to choose from!One last tip: success as a Local SEO often depends heavily on knowing what NOT to do, as well as what to do. Studying guidelines and making daily reading of top Local SEO blogs part of your job is going to be a smart way to get started. In this industry, one never stops studying and learning, and changes happen overnight on a regular basis. Exciting stuff!Good luck and happy reading!

Hi SilkStream,

What you are experiencing is almost certainly the dread attack of the bad Google one boxes. This is a documented phenomenon going on right now, believed to be fallout from the Hummingbird Update. Instead of showing a complete pack of results for queries like this, Google is surfacing single spammy results with forbidden, spammed business titles. Some listings are for businesses that don't even exist anymore! It's an extremely poor user experience, obviously, and hopefully one Google will fix with another tweak of the dial.

I recommend you do some reading on this. Here are some great resources:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/09/28/hummingbird-local-knowledge-graph-shitty-search-results/

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

Hang in there. I really hope Google will fix this soon!

Hi Denis,

In addition to marking up your complete business NAP (name, address, phone number) using Schema.org, as referenced by Federico, your website should have a unique page for each of your two locations. These pages should feature the schema-encoded NAP and unique, strong content about each of the locations. You should also be building separate citations for the two locations, provided they are both public-facing entities to which customers come or from which your workers go to serve customers. They must have separate phone numbers and each qualifies for a unique Google+ Local page if it meets all of the criteria I have just described.

There's a good chance your rankings are dropping because of Google losing trust in the location data they have about your business after you replaced one address with the other in your footer. Your website is an extremely authoritative source for NAP info, in Google's eyes. If they think you've moved, and what they are finding on your website doesn't match what they are finding web-wide about your location/phone, then rankings can definitely suffer.

Put both addresses in the footer and on the contact us page. On the two office landing pages on the website, put only the NAP for the respective office. Do a citation audit to be certain that all third party references to the business NAP are featuring totally consistent information and linking to a consistent designated page on the website. For example, if you have an office in San Francisco and another in Los Angeles, all citations for the SF business should link to the SF page on the website, and the same goes for the LA location. Consistency is absolutely vital.

For more reading on basic Local SEO practices, you might like to take a gander at my recent post here on Moz:

Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors - An Illustrated Guide

For more on the topic of building city landings pages, read:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages for Local Businesses

Hope this helps!

Hi AvalancheSearch,

Thanks for the link. That looks like a merged, verified Google+ Local page, as it has both reviews and social features. Interesting. Are you saying that this change to the type of Google+ Local page you have happened only last Friday?

There is currently a major upgrade going on in which all old Google Place Pages will be upgraded to the new Google+ Local dashboard. SABs have been advised for some time not to merge their social and local pages. See: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-business-pages/12261-there-way-verify-service-area-google-plus.html

Did you take merging action? Or are you saying this happened automatically?

Also see: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local-important/9928-google-begins-auto-upgrade-g-local-listings.html

And:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/business/I0Royu8V9x8/-vc1j0CD_74J

The wrong name on your business may be problematic. Can you figure out where it's coming from?

My pleasure, Doug. Could agree more about setting expectations correctly. It's really important to do this upfront. One thing that I've found over the years is that the smaller the business and budget, the slower the pace of work may need to be set so that they can reasonably accomplish all that they need to. Better an awesome campaign at a snail's pace than a poorly-conducted one at lightning speed, right?

Hi Doug,

You are quite correct that Service Area Businesses (SABs) fall into their own category in many ways when it comes to local search. I'll try to provide some helpful tips here.

Tip #1 - The most important thing for SABs to understand is that Google is heavily biased toward physical location. SABs must have at least one physical location in order to seek inclusion in Google's local index. This can be a home address - that's just fine! But it cannot be a virtual address, P.O. box, etc. And it should not be shared by any other business.

Tip #2 - Because of  Google's bias towards physical location, the SAB should set the goal of ranking well in the local pack of results for the city in which they are physically located, but not in the surrounding cities they may serve. There are some exceptions to this, as in the case of highly niche business models or in rural areas wherein one business is the only one or one of very few serving a number of towns. In such instances, you might see these businesses surfacing in the local pack of results for more than one town, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

Tip #3 - Once the business has set its goal of ranking well in the local pack of results for its city of location, there are a number of steps that can be taken. The most important is to build a really strong website with the main pages optimized for this city of location geo term. If possible, complete NAP (name, address, phone) should be included in the footer and on the contact page, preferably in Schema markup. Content should be strong and be optimized in a natural manner for the service + geo terms. You will follow this up by creating a Google+ Local page in which you will enter but hide the address to comply with Google's guidelines for SABs. Then, citations should be built in a variety of places that highlight the business.

If, for reasons of privacy, you need to hide the NAP, then you can build citations only on those directories which allow you enter but hide the address. See Phil Rozek's article on this: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/ There is more you can do in this vein, such as earning reviews and links, video marketing, social outreach etc. All steps serve to build the authority of the business on the web.

Tip #4 - Do not put a list of cities served on the website in the manner you've observed. Google updated their webmaster guidelines in 2012 to specifically denounce this practice. They consider this keyword stuffing, and you can read about it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

Tip #5 - Next, the business owner will want to make every effort he can to rank well for all of his service cities. Remember, the goal here is not to get local pack rankings, because he typically won't. Instead, he can go after organic rankings by the process of creating city landing pages on his website for each city he serves. The article I've linked to describes all of the ins and outs of this. Basic rules: you must have unique, strong content on each page you create. No thin or duplicate content. The authority of these city landing pages can be built up via the usual methods (earning links, social outreach, video marketing, etc.). Your chances of outranking competitors who have physical locations in your service cities are very slim, but you can frequently earn some visibility organically and some is way better than none!

Tip #6 - You will not be building citations for your service cities, because you lack a physical location. But, you can create a content development plan via which you will be adding to the geo-specific content of your website on an on-going basis. A blog is a great way to do this, continuing to build content on your website that showcases your work in your non-physical-location service cities, as well as in your city of location.

Hope these tips set you on a good path!

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the kind mention!

Hi Jonathan,

In regards to the business title on the +Local page, nothing has changed. Think of it this way: McDonald's is just McDonald's over their infinite number of locations. You should do the same. This is not the same as your custom URL, to which Google will append the city name in some cases. So, leave the titles the same.

Hi Jonathan,

Yes, I've seen reports of similar things in the past. Example: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-plus-discuss/HFmNW-LJAYI

Typically, these seem to have come in waves for a ton of people at once. I haven't seen anything about this in the past couple of weeks, though. Might be worth reporting to the above forum to see if a bug is going on.

Hi Jonathon,

You will often see NAP referred to as NAP+W. The W stands for website, and it is often included in this acronym because of the importance of consistently linking to the same page from your citations. What you did is right, in my opinion, to create a landing page for each of the two locations. Where you may have issues is in not consistently linking to the respective page for the given city. Always link City A to landing page A in citations, and the same with City B. Don't link some of them to the homepage. If you've identified consistency issues like this, definitely clean them up.

Regarding your lost Google+s, I'm afraid I don't know what the cause is. Perhaps one of our members will have encountered something similar.

Hi Kristy,

So glad to help. I'm a fan of Whitespark's FAQ page. Helps you to see how their service stacks up to others:

http://www.whitespark.ca/citation-building-faqs

Worth a read.

Hi 1akal,

Drilling further down into the GetListed.org page vzPRO linked to, you will find two sections that will help you:

https://getlisted.org/static/resources/local-citations-by-city.html

https://getlisted.org/static/resources/local-citations-by-category.html

I also recommend that you check out the Local Search Ecosystem 2013 infographic to understand the relationship between data providers:

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

Adam Steele wrote a very good post on US citations earlier this year:

http://www.leanmarketing.ca/lean-top-50-best-local-citation-sources-in-the-usa/

However, if you are not located in a major city, you may not find a lot of preexisting lists of things like classified, local blogs, news sites, etc., for your city. You will likely need to do your research beyond the broad data provided by resources like the ones I've linked to, above. In that event, you will need to learn how to judge the quality of a citation. There is no standardized way to do so, but I really like Darren Shaw's article on this topic:

http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/12-how-to-identify-quality-citation-sources

Hope these resources help you!

Hi David,

Typically, your main landing pages are going to be those that represent the city of location, as in:

www.site.com/orlando

www.site.com/miami

etc.

What I'm trying to understand is if you are saying you have more than one office within a single city (as in orlando office A, orlando office B, orlando office C) and are trying to hash out how to distinguish these same-city offices from one another. Is this the scenario, or am I not getting it? Please feel free to provide further details.

Hi Kristy,

I want to preface this by stating that I have no personal experience with eLocal 'reach the web'. The only page I could find describing this service is here:

http://www.elocal.com/reach-the-web

I don't see a mention on this page of citation cleanup - just citation creation - but perhaps you found other documentation or were contacted by a salesperson indicating that this is part of the service?

There is nothing blackhat about using a citation building service like eLocal, Yext, etc. Rather, there are other considerations that need to be taken into account in determining whether this is the right move for you. A few of these include:

1. Whether the product has the ability to find ALL citations and correct them, including duplicate listings.

2. Whether terminating the contract at some point in the future will result in loss of citations or other problems.

3. Whether the citations are being held 'hostage' by the provider instead of being under the control of the business owner.

You need to research each of these components thoroughly and be certain you are not being given misleading information by sales representatives.

My personal preference is to have citation cleanup handled manually by a pro. A manual approach for citation building is often best, too, but if it won't scale for an agency, I'd recommend they go with a paid service like Whitespark's Citation Building service, which is highly regarded in the industry: https://www.whitespark.ca/citation-building-submission-service

Different companies will find different methods work best for them. The main thing is not to be sold on any product that may fail to catch problems or generate future problems.

Hi Dmitriy,

Glad you asked. Vacation rentals are ineligible for inclusion in Google's local index, as stated in the Google Places Quality Guidelines, which state:

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.

Because of this, your efforts will need to be organic rather than local in terms of marketing the individual vacation cottages. Hope this helps!

Hi Jonathan,

Google's guidelines regarding this are pretty short:

Website & Phone: Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.

• Use a local phone number instead of a call center number whenever possible.
• Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or “refer” users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.

So, provided the page you use as the landing page on your website represents the actual business, then you're pretty much free to choose what you want to do. Commonly, for a single location business, the landing page provided will be the homepage. But, for multi-location or multi-partner practices, it's a best practice to create a landing page for each entity and link each Google+ Local page to its respective landing page. Does one of these strategies represent what you did for your business, or did you do something else?

Hi Stacey,

If you the Google+ business page you created was not created in the local category, you cannot merge it with a Google+ Local page. See Google staffer Jade W explanation of this here:

productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/3R1-XOGvVzE

Also recommend you read:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/2U2NmtIi0Xg

Hope this helps!

Google updated their webmaster guidelines about a year ago to specifically frown on lists of keywords like this. See:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

Hi Nick,

If you can take the business owner through door number one, I agree that will be the very best choice. Good luck with the conversation with him.

Hi Ruben,

Agree with Alex. Provided you have unique content for each page, you should be okay.

Hi Mark,

No, not stupid at all. Integration of Google's products is definitely a work in progress that has left tons of people confused! I hope the TCs in the Google forum may have some guidance for you. Good luck, and if you get an answer, I'd appreciate you coming back to update this thread with what you've learned.

Hi Nick,

Good question! Unfortunately, you are correct to suspect trouble. Imagine you are a Google bot. You go out to search the web for data about ABC Auto Pros and you find not one, but two, websites containing this identical business name, and also the identical address and phone number. You don't know which is the authoritative website (abcautosales.com or abcautorepairs.com), because the core NAP is identical. NAP may best actually be thought of as NAP+W (website) and this business' decision to have two websites means that they are creating confusion for Google. Also, because organic factors play so big a part in local rankings, this business is essentially splitting the authority they should have in half.

As I see it, there are three possible routes here.

1) The safest route: get the business to combine their two websites into one. Use appropriate 301 redirects so as to maintain as much authority as possible. This method fully remedies the situation and the business can then move forward with a totally clean and powerful approach. This is the approach I would most strongly recommend, despite the fact that it will involve a big change and lots of work. Fixing this now could save years of future headaches.

2) The patch-up: If the business wants to engage in Local Search Marketing and insists on maintaining two websites, only one should be optimized with the business NAP. The second website should contain no crawlable references to the businesses name, address or phone number - not in the masthead, footer, copy or tags. Essentially, this will make the second website something of a dead zone, but this is the only way I can think of to try to prevent Google from associating website #2 with the business. You would need to go through the website with a fine toothed-comb to remove any mention of any part of the NAP and also do a citation cleanup campaign to attempt to remove any references to that second website anywhere on the web. Even with this work , there is a chance that you won't be able to control all references to the complete or partial NAP out there on the web. Google just has to find one mention of ABC Auto Pros referencing website #2 to begin to become confused. So, while you could go this route, it's not sure to work and would involve constant vigilance of the SERPs to be sure that this association hasn't arisen.

3) The iffy idea: Note that I'm calling this iffy. There does exist a precedent in the Google Places Quality Guidelines for a business with multiple departments to be eligible for more than one Google+ Local Page. The language states:

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, here, if the business had a separate phone number for the two departments and separate physical entrances for the sales department vs. the service department, they might be eligible for this approa_ch._ I say 'might' because this approach is most commonly associated with entities like hospitals and educational institutions. Google has long dealt with a history of heavy spamming in the auto sales vertical and, because of this, there is a chance that they would look with suspicion on this approach being taken by an auto-related business. I'm not sure. I would say that if the business does have separate public facing entrances for the two departments and can get a distinct phone number for the second department, then it would be worthwhile to go to the Google and Your Business Forum and ask the TCs there if they feel Google would be suspicious of an auto business taking advantage of this nuance in the guidelines. I would suggest you go by what they tell you there, because they see the problems and takedowns on a daily basis.

If you get an okay from them, then this would resolve your issue, as it would be okay for the business to maintain the two websites, optimize and promote both.

Long answer, whew! But this is one of those complex issues that requires careful thinking and good planning. Hope my thoughts are helpful!

So glad to help! I'll number my recommendations for easiest reading:

1. Use only the legal business name for each dealer. Do not add keywords of any kind, nor change the legal business name in any way. If the company is ABC Plumbing, this is how it should be listed in all cities. Use the legal business name with absolute consistency on the website, the Google+ Local pages and on third party citations.

2. Each dealer must have his own local phone number. Do not use a toll free number, a vanity number, a call tracking number or a shared number. If you want to put a toll free number in an image on the website landing pages, that's fine, and you can list a toll free number as the secondary number on the Google+ Local pages, but always put the unique, local number first.

3. Yes, the complete NAP will exist only on those website landing pages that relate to the cities in which the business is physically located. You will not be putting NAP on the 'location-less' city landing pages. That's good that you have the resources to create unique copy for these pages! You can optimize these pages for the service cities and the business name, but do not put the address and phone number of the physical office in the neighboring city on these pages.

That should cover it. Good luck with the work ahead!

Hi Mark,

No wonder this is driving you nuts. I'm not sure what you want to do can currently be done, and I've spent the last ten minutes trying to find recent documentation of this and am coming up without clear guidelines. It would be super if someone within our community has recently accomplished what Mark wants to do and can describe the process, or describe that it's not possible.

Mark, given the lack of apparent documentation of this from recent times, I think your best bet is to post your question in the Google And Your Business Forum in hopes that one of the TCs there will be able to dig up something that offers guidance here. Go to:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business

This is a search I did. Maybe you'll see something in it that I didn't notice:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/youtube$20and$20google$2B$20local

You might also try:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/google%2B local youtube

I hope this offers some help, and I'm sorry not to have a clear document to point you to. It could be that I'm simply unaware of it.

Good Morning!

If I'm understanding your question correctly, you are saying that you have 100+ dealers. The term 'dealer' may be confusing to me, as I'm associating it with something like car dealers (brick-and-mortar businesses without a service radius). Do your dealers travel to cities to have face-to-face transactions with customers, like a plumber would? As you've mentioned that you're using the service radius tool on the Google+ Local page, I'm going to assume that these employees do travel to various cities within their service radius to give service. If I'm wrong, please do explain.

So, back to the equation here. You have 100 dealers, and let's say that each of them has a 50 mile service radius with 20 towns and cities in it. If you went the route you're asking about of creating a page for each of these cities, that would mean developing 2000 pages on the website (20 X 100). While this is not an impossible task, it is an enormous one, and the chief danger in it would be the creation of thin, duplicate content that could lower the quality of the website. So, if you were to use this strategy, the requirement would be the manpower and money to create 2000 excellent pages on the website. These city landing pages would need to feature unique content, perhaps showcasing each dealer's projects in a given city.

A half-hearted approach, however, would do more harm than good, so if the business lacks the resources to pull this off, then a better strategy would be to create 100 pages (one for each dealer) optimized with the complete NAP encoded in Schema and featuring an overview of the dealer's work in his city of location. I would not recommend optimizing these pages for the other cities in the service radius. Google's Webmaster Guidelines frown on lists of cities served, so this would not be something you'd want to put on these pages. You could include some type of map on these pages illustrating the service area, to get the point across.

If you are forming a long-term strategy under a long-term contract with this business, then once you've got the 100 pages developed, you might create a plan for beginning to develop service city landing pages for each dealer over time, at a rate that is commensurate with the client's resources to get this work done correctly. It would likely be the work of many months or years to cover every town and city, so finding a way to scale this would likely be the chief challenge in such a project.

Again, if I've misunderstood the business model, please do clarify.

Good Morning!

Unfortunately, the results you are seeing are consistent with a tweak Google made a few weeks back that has brought up some extremely low quality one boxes. The tweak is surfacing many old, spammy results like the one you've highlighted. Here are two good discussions of this weird phenomenon:

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

The above forum thread in 8 pages long, and I recommend you read the whole thing, as it includes many examples and, also, some things people have tried in regards to reporting the bad results.

Then, I would also suggest you read Mike Blumenthal's article in which he ties this tweak to the Hummingbird Update. Very smart:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/09/28/hummingbird-local-knowledge-graph-shitty-search-results/

And, if you'd care to read more on this topic, you might want to take a glance at:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/NMh_bk5MXX0

The problem is very widespread. Google is aware of it and I expect they will turn the dial again at some point to improve what is currently a very poor search experience. There may be some hope in reporting a specific instance, as you will read about in Linda Buquet's forum thread, but for the most part, this may just be one of those sit-tight situations that we have to endure until Google takes action. Hang in there.

Hi Ben'J,

As Peter has remarked, the community can't make specific suggestions without actually seeing your client's website. It's perfectly fine if you can't share this information, for client confidentiality reasons, but the advice you'll get here will perforce be generic rather than specific.

If your client is running a local retail shop, then your efforts for them could include:

1. Ensuring that you are optimizing the tags and content of the website not just for product/service terms, but also for the city name in which the shop is located.

2. Ensuring that the complete NAP (name, address, phone) is in the website footer and on the contact page, encoded in Schema markup.

3. Using Schema markup for a testimonials page to begin publishing user generated content in the form of testimonials.

4. Creating an ongoing content development plan which showcases not just products/services, but also local geography.

5. Linking the website up to a Google+ Local page for the business.

6. Building citations for the business on appropriate third party local business directories and review platforms.

7. Other forms of marketing including social outreach, linkbuilding and video marketing.

The website plays a major part in local rankings, and thus, local traffic. Ensuring that the site reflects not just what the business is and does but WHERE it does it is extremely important. You want neighbors to immediately recognize that this is a local business, serving the local community, and the imagery, text and overall optimization of the website must be organized to reflect this.

Hope this helps!

Hi GBKevin,

Unfortunately, the term 'custom' may be a bit misleading. To my knowledge, these URLs are assigned. Mike Blumenthal recently wrote an excellent post on this topic (see: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/10/31/google-custom-urls-facts-tidbits-and-concerns/) in which he states:

“Custom” is a misnomer. Assigned is more like it. Custom implies that you have some input into the process which is fully automated. You pretty much have to accept the URL given or keep your number.

Recommend you read the whole post. It's a good one. Hope this helps!

Hi Anthony,

Back again. You might like to check out the good examples of multi-location businesses in this article from Local U:

http://localu.org/blog/designing-business-location-website-pages-part-2-multiple-location-business/

I'm still pretty much sticking to my original suggested URL structure, and I think these examples may be useful in your planning.

Hi Anthony,

You've raised an interesting point. I've asked some of our traditional SEO experts if they would weigh in on this with you. My clients typically have just a handful of locations, in which case, it's been a no-brainer for me to go with the /service-city url structure, but I think what you're asking is a valid question. It might still be the best choice to go with this structure, but if you're really concerned about it, you could go with just a /city URL structure for the office landing pages. On the other hand, the URL is only one step in your optimization work. Even if you did just go with the /city structure, wouldn't you be optimizing the tags and text of the pages with the core service phrase? Another thought, too, would be to go with /business-name-city, but when one considers that many business names may contain the core service phrase (Superior Driving Lessons, for example), this brings us back to square one.

When things become messy like this, I try to step back and ask myself if what I'm doing is natural. In this case, I think having pages on your website that specify that driving lessons are offered in X city is totally natural. It's not like you're trying to game anything with explaining this. You're giving an honest representation of what the business does and where it does it. Sometimes, I can over-think things about my clients, in which case, coming back to what is natural and honest can often provide a guiding light.

As I've said, I think your question is worthy of an answer. I've shared my thinking on this, but I really hope you'll get feedback from some of our other staff on this as I believe several heads may be better than one in hashing out the technical specifics of this.

My pleasure, Silkstream. I can understand how what you are doing feels risky, but in fact, you are likely preventing fallout from worse risks in the future. SEO is a process, always evolving, and helping your client change with the times is a good thing to do! Good luck with the work.

Hi Silkstream,

Thank you so much for clarifying this! I understand now.

If I were starting with a client like this, from scratch, this would be the approach I would take:

1. View content development as two types of pages. One set would be the landing pages for each physical location, optimized for each city, with unique content. The other set would be service pages, optimized for the services, but not for a particular city.

2. Create a Google+ Local page for each of the physical locations, linked to its respective landing page on the website. So, let's say you now have 25 city pages and 46 service pages. That's a fairly tall order, but certainly do-able.

3. Build structured citations for each location on third party local business directories. Given the number of locations, this would be an enormous jobs.

4. Build an onsite blog and designate company bloggers, ideally one in each physical office. The job of these bloggers would be something like each of them creating one blog post per month about a project that was accomplished in their city. In this way, the company could begin developing content under their own steam that would meet the need of showcasing a given service with a given city.  Over time, this body of content would grow the pool of queries for which they have answers for.

5. Create a social outreach strategy, likely designating brand representatives within the company who could be active on various platforms.

6. Likely need to develop a link earning strategy tied in with steps 4 and 5.

7. Consider video marketing. A good video or two for each physical location could work wonders.

I'm painting in broad strokes here, but this is likely what the overall strategy would look like. You've come into the scenario midway and don't have the luxury of starting from scratch. You are absolutely right to be cleaning up duplicate content and taking other measures to reduce the spaminess and improve the usefulness of the site. Once you've got your cleanup complete, I think the steps I've outlined would be the direction to go in. Hope this helps.

Hi Easigrassne,

Coming up in Google's local pack of results is dependent upon you having a physical location in the city you're hoping to rank for. If you want to rank in the local results for three cities, you must have a physical location in each. You can then build a landing page on your website for each of your three physical locations and link your three Google+ Local pages to the respective landing pages on your website.

If you do not have physical locations in each of the three cities to which customers come to do business, then you must go after organic rankings via developing content surrounding these locations and your services there. If your business is an SAB (service area business) like a landscaping company, a blog is a great platform for publishing this type of content. For example, you could write a post about lawn installation in City A, perennial border landscaping in City B, and pond building in City C. You can continue to showcase your projects on an ongoing basis, devoting a new blog post to each completed project and developing a library of work that can begin ranking in Google's organic results.

Hi Van,

Good question! I'll do my best to answer.

There are two forms of customer feedback:

1. Reviews published on third party sites. This would be reviews customers are publishing directly, themselves, on your company's profiles at places like Google+ Local, Yelp etc. This content belongs to the platform on which it is published. It does not belong to the business owner and should not be republished on his website. Many review platforms have guidelines specifically prohibiting the re-publication of reviews elsewhere.

2. Testimonials published on the company's website. This would be praise the business owner receives from customers via email, filling out a rating card at the time of service or by some other means. In this case, the business owner chooses to publish this content on his website. He can use Schema markup to format these testimonials so that they are ideally crawlable, and may even earn the business stars in Google's SERPs. In this scenario, the business owner owns the content and is free to publish it on a Testimonials page of his website or something similar.

These two forms of user generated content should not be confused. They each exist in a separate 'box' and each have distinct uses.

I'm very excited these days about a recently launched tool, GetFiveStars.com, that makes it super easy for any business to earn both testimonials and reviews, keeping within the guidelines I've mentioned, above. Using GetFiveStars, the process for the business owner will look something like this:

1. At or near time of service, business owner asks customer to use GetFiveStars to leave feedback.

2. The tool is programmed to judge if the feedback is positive, based on a 10 point rating scale. If positive, the feedback is automatically pushed to a designated testimonials page on the website in Schema-encoded format.

3. The customer is then prompted to go further in the process to leave a review on their favorite review site.

4. But, if the initial feedback is not positive, this gives the business owner the chance to go back to the customer to try to rectify the situation, hopefully lessening the chances that the customer will go leave a negative review somewhere on the web.

Really, it a pretty brilliant system. You could replicate this process yourself, but GetFiveStars makes it so easy. I recommend you check it out!

Hi Silkstream,

I think we need to clarify what your business model is. You say you have a physical location in each of your 25 towns. So far, so good, but are you saying that your business has in-person transactions with its customers at each of the 25 locations? The confusion here is arising from the fact that e-commerce companies are typically virtual, meaning that they do not have in-person transactions with their customers. The Google Places Quality Guidelines state:

Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.

Thus, my wanting to be sure that your business model is actually eligible, given that you've described it as an e-commerce business, which would be ineligibl_e._ If you can clarify your business model, I think it will help you to receive the most helpful answers from the community.

Hi Anthony,

Are you saying that your business has a physical office in each of these cities? I am assuming this is so, as you are only allowed to create Google+ Local pages for physical offices. If there is some chance that you've done so, lacking physical offices, then you could expect Google to remove these listings if they become aware that they don't represent physical offices.

I see no problem with your URLs. I'm curious as to what you read. Those look like perfectly fine URLs for local landing pages to me.

Are you aware that there is currently a shakeup going on in Google's local results? It's possible that this could account for any fluctuations you are seeing.

If not, it sounds like you may have had some link problems in the past. Is there any chance that you might have run afoul of the Google Places Quality Guidelines in some way? Here's a link to them: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en

Ranking fluctuations happen in Local. Sometimes they are caused by tweaks to Google's algo. Other times, they occur when you are surpassed by a competitors' efforts. And, in some cases, a business drops because of engaging in bad practices. Consider these three scenarios and see if one of them fits your business most closely. Hope this helps.

Hi Herlamba,

What you are seeing in your screenshot is an iteration of Google's knowledge graph for a local business. In order to qualify for such a display, your business must meet Google's requirements. These are:

1. You have in-person transactions with customers, either at your place of business (like a restaurant) or at their homes or businesses (like a plumber)

2. You have a physical address that is not shared by any other business and is not a virtual location of any kind.

3. You have a unique local phone number that is not shared by any other business. This should not be a toll free, vanity or call tracking number.

If you can say yes to ALL THREE of the above requirements, then you qualify for inclusion in Google's local index.

Your first step should be to acquaint yourself thoroughly with the Google Places Quality Guidelines:

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

You will then be pursuing local visibility via a variety of methods, including:

1. Developing a strong, crawlable, locally-optimized website

2. Creating a Google+ Local page for your business

3. Building citations for your local business in a variety of local business indexes like Yelp, Best of Web, HotFrog, etc. You can use a free tool like GetListed.org to make this process easiest.

4. Earning reviews on a variety of platforms, including on your Google+ Local page

5. Other forms of marketing including, but not limited to, linkbuilding, Social Media, video marketing, etc.

If Local SEO is totally new to you, you might like to read my article on the Rudiments of Local SEO.

You will want to study Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 to see a worldwide industry survey that organizes which factors have most influence on Local Rankings. http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

Once you have built a clear enough cluster of data about your business on the web, Google will be able to index it all and is likely to display a knowledge graph like the one in your screenshot for branded searches for your business, or within the local pack of results.

You are very welcome, Catherine.

Glad to hear it, Kevin!

I've experienced similar. I'll try the cookie solution, and I hope one of our Help Team members will stop by to comment on this, as well.

Hi Again,

I figured that must be the case, with the fictitious name. Totally respect your NDA, but need to mention that this makes it impossible to research nuances that might be affecting the firm uniquely. There could be so many factors involved.

Regarding the comma, best practice is to use a single format across all listings of the business, whether with or without the comma. I've never seen this issue formally addressed by Google, so we have to go with a 'it's safe to say' stance here. In other words, it's safe to say that keeping your business title formatting identical will free you of the possibility of problems, while any discrepancy might put you at risk for problems. Upshot: aim for total consistency here.

Hi Nick,

I would say you need to accomplish:

a) Getting the company to get a new phone number

b) Getting the developers to put a landing page for each location on the site

c) Building new citation for the new location, not piggy-backing onto citations for the old company. After all, despite the fact that The Car People occupy a building that was previously occupied by another business, there is no relationship between the two (or, at least, there shouldn't have been, if not for that decision to keep the other company's phone number)

d) Tell the client that some of the decisions that have been made are going to make it essential to have a lot of patience here while you try to create a data cluster out there on the web that Google can trust. Right now, it's unlikely that they have this. It's going to have be created over time with a lot of care.

Thanks, Chris!

Hi Catherine,

In my opinion, the very best thing you can do for this client is to tell her, "No way, don't do that!". If the client chooses to build a second yoga business at the same location with a new name/new website, she will be creating a citation consistency nightmare that will almost certainly lead to lost rankings for her original business. She may find herself dealing with merged listings or suspension of her account. If she chose to use a neighbor's address, that would be an obvious violation of the guidelines, so that's not an option either.

I've run into situations like this with incoming clients I'm consulting with. My job in such cases is to warn them that a plan like this is not in line with Google's vision of Local. Of course, a business owner should be able to make any moves she wants to with her company, but if what she does is going to create problems with Google, then she needs to realize that Google will not be a viable option for promoting her business. The hard fact is that, these days, few people can do business without Google's help, so creating business models that fall outside of their guidelines will seldom be a plan for success.

You will be doing this business owner a major favor by steering her away from this idea, I believe. If she wants to close her original business and start a new one with a new name with the 5 other Yogis, that's fine. Your job will be a major citation cleanup campaign. This is the only option I see open to her that will not result in a huge headache for this business owner. Hope this helps!

Hi Kevin,

Interestingly, the Google Places Quality Guidelines (https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en)  were recently update to approve the listing of ATM machines. Here is the language:

Business Location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.

• Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations.Your business location should be staffed during its stated hours.
  • Exceptions to the above are self-serve businesses such as ATMs or video-rental kiosks. If adding these locations, you should include contact information for customers to get help.

Should be just what you were hoping to hear!

Hi BBuck,

You've received some thoughtful replies here. I'm going to throw in a monkey wrench, however. Regus offices can, indeed, be problematic. I recommend you read through the threads pulled up in a Google And Your Business Forum search for the term 'regus' and you'll quickly see what I mean:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/regus

Here's a good example of what I'm referencing:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/regus/business/4WCI624GamE/xQtCLQw4HSMJ

And here's a good discussion of Regus offices, including the comments of a Google And Your Business Forum TC and a Google MapMaker RER:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local/1810-using-toll-free-main-any-chance-rank-2.html

I'd look into this further before going down this road. Hope this helps!

Hi Nick,

Whoa - yes, this is messy. You are right about that. The business should have gotten a brand new phone number and I'd suggest that they do so and edit all existent citations to reflect the new number. If your client's company is The Car People at both locations, and their competitor is PAC, (I think this is what you're saying) you should not have attempted to edit or claim PACs citations, beyond reporting them as closed. You should have built new citations for the new business. My guess is that Google is now confused about which business is located on this street as it is seeing not only 2 business names hooked into it, but an identical phone number. Basically, it sounds like a citation confusion catastrophe

I'm not sure what you mean by:

"Is it worth trying to get the site in order to build separate landing pages for each location?"

Which site? Do you mean buy out the competitors' website? Something else? Your client should be in control of their own website, and have a separate landing page for each location on this website.

Whether what is going on with the one location is affecting the older location, I can't say. It is possible for Google to be mistrusting of an overall profile if something wonky is going on with part of it, but there is also a big shakeup going on in the Local results that could be the cause of what you're seeing with the older location.

You may need to get a professional audit of the situation, Nick. There's a good chance I'm not understanding certain nuances of the situation (such as whether both companies are named The Car People or whether one is PAC, and what you mean about 'getting the website'). Sounds like you've got a really tough client who did not go about things in an optimal way, and it's my best guess that a high level Local SEO would need to do a sort of case history to get all of the details sorted out on something like this. Tough one!