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.

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 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 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 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!