Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Kevin,

Very sound questions. Google's way of dealing with this is the permanently closed label. There are businesses all around me that shuttered years ago and are still searchable, but bear this label. So, at least for the present, this is what they feel is an adequate solution to the fact that businesses close. Google does make some efforts to hide permanently closed listings, but they are still discoverable if a user searches for the name + the old location.

What can be a problem is when businesses don't actually close, but simply move from an old location to a new one. When they do this, there are steps they should take to avoid having their old location labeled as "closed" because some studies have indicated that this can harm their future rankings at the new location if they continue to use the same phone number as was used at the old location, as well as signalling to customers that the company may have gone out of business.

If you own retail properties with tenants who move rather than closing, a nice thing to do for them would be to teach them how handle GMB so that they don't end up with that "permanently closed" listing. I outline how to do this in the "permanently closed" section of this blog post: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing

Might be something to bookmark for future reference!

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for coming back to this thread. The permanently closed listing for an unrelated business at your address should not affect you in any way. If it were your business that was marked permanently closed, that would be a problem for you. But as it's the former tenant's business marked that way, it's only a problem for them. I would not worry about this.

Hi Lee,

Typically, the best practice is to have a website with a single set of service pages (they can mention your locations in the content) and then have a landing page for each of your physical offices. Presumably there isn't any difference between the services you sell at locations A and B, so a single set of service pages will usually cover all locations' services. It's the locations that are the difference, so they get the unique page treatment. Hope this helps!

Hi Ben,

You're welcome! Good follow-up question.

If your company (XYZ) places patients in facilities you don't own (Sunshine), then you aren't authorized to create GMB listings for Sunshine. Nor would any other service that places patients in those facilities. Sunshine would need to market themselves as the owner of that location.

Hope that makes sense.

Ad Adlev,

Yes, that's a weird-looking example. As far as I can tell, it's likely stemming from the business in question setting San Francisco and San Diego as their service radius and then Google drawing the lines between that. It's a huge service area, so it looks a bit strange, but it is plausible.

Hello There!

While I'm not a Call Rail customer, I'm pretty sure they still have the option to turn your existing numbers into call tracking numbers. However, you definitely need to have a unique phone number for each of your physical locations if you want to market it fully. So, I would go get those numbers, have Call Rail port them into their system so that they become the call tracking number. Then, you can use a different number for GMB, per: https://whitespark.ca/blog/call-tracking-numbers-google-business-whitespark-weekly/

Hope this helps!

Hi Ben,

Thank you for the additional details. So, I'm seeing a couple of factors at play here that are important to your ultimate decision making.

1. If your resources are too spare right now to market 6 locations + home office, then, yes, just go with the home office and then begin marketing your other locations as budget becomes available.

2. But, ideally, you would want to market all of your locations  - if - and this is an important "if" - each of these locations genuinely belongs to the business. So if you are XYZ Rehabilitation Center, these locations must also be XYZ Rehabilitation Center. This cannot be your XYZ brand placing people at Sunshine Rehabilitation Center and then marketing Sunshine as if it were your own. So, provided all locations are branded with your brand, then yes, you'd want to market them all.

You're right that you want to strive for brand recognition and want people searching for "XYZ" to find and recognize your brand on the web. But, many people won't be searching for your brand. They'll be searching for something like "drug addiction treatment center San Diego". If one of your facilities (not your home office) is located in San Diego, you want these customers to find it. And, so, you need to market it. That's the basic rationale behind all this.

So, if you have the budget, market everything. If your budget is tight, do it one location at a time. Good luck!

Hi Ben!

May I ask for a little more clarity regarding your business description "Our site is designed to place people in different locations or houses".

Are you a real estate firm? Something else?

Wonderful! So glad I was able to point you to a good resource

Hey Jacob!

Is there any way you can email me the actual example? My email is my first name @moz.com. Feel free to shoot me the actual screenshot and the actual language of the searches you are doing. Happy to take a look.

Hi Dmitrii,

Good conversation going on this thread. I will just add, there are some industries where reviews truly aren't prevalent. In such cases, it can help to show the client their competitors' lack of reviews - conclusion being that everyone is in the same boat. Sometimes, however, you find a competitor who is spamming Google with fake reviews, and that looks even stranger! How many people, for example, write reviews about how they love how Mike the bail bondsman got them out of jail because he's the best bails bondsman in the world?

I'm just not a fan of anonymous reviews. Most credible review platforms don't allow them. If the nature of the business is so sensitive that customers aren't comfortable leaving third-party reviews, stick to what you can publish on your own website and focus on forms of marketing customers are comfortable with. Industries are different, and sometimes, we have to respect those differences and look beyond generalizations in marketing so that we're doing what really works for brands and their clients.

Hi Jacob!

This does sound totally odd. Let me be sure I have the facts straight:

1. You have an MCC account via which you are managing Google Ads and it includes both your agency and your clients Google Ads campaigns.

2. You are also managing local search for your clients. Have their GMB listings been created in their own accounts, or were they created under your agency's account?

3. When you search for "Happy Floors Orlando Florida" (fictitious name), Google is bringing up a local pack of results that shows your client (Happy Floors) but also shows your agency's listing in it 1,000 miles away?

4. The only link between the two is that you have your client listed in your portfolio?

Please, let me know "yes" or "no" to each of these.

Also, as you can't publicly share the details of the business/agency in question, please ask a friend (maybe someone at another agency) to do the search you're doing and tell you what they see. I'd like to do this myself, but understand if you need to keep that private. Tell me what comes of that, please.

You've definitely gotten me curious!

Hello there!

The best article that's been written about this topic is here: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2018/10/03/local-mobile-image-thumbnail-serps-its-all-about-context/

Hope this is just what the doctor ordered

Hey Steve,

I first learned about Pointy from the American Independent Business Alliance a few months ago, and wrote a bit about it here:

https://moz.com/blog/local-seos-guide-to-buy-local

*See the section subtitled "Digitize Inventory Easily".

It's early days yet, but the fact that founder of WordPress and co-founder of Google Maps are Pointy's angel investors makes me think it could go far.

While I've yet to hold a Pointy device in my own hands, the potential for it to enable smaller local businesses to get their inventory onto the web so easily is incredibly appealing.

If anyone is actually using Pointy, I hope you'll contribute to this thread!

Hi There!

So sorry to hear that happened to you. Facebook does allow you to disable reviews, but unfortunately, you can't do that on the other majors like Google and Yelp. Were you seeing this same phenomenon on these other platforms? What did you do?

Ah! Thank you so much for the clarification on this. I've never seen a guideline from Google regarding having bilingual language within one address on a listing, so my best thought on this is that you need to go with the version of your address as it appears in Google Maps, whether that's suite, # or local. Then I would conform your other listings to this on other platforms. However, don't worry about the difference between W and West. Google is perfectly able to understand those as meaning the same thing.

Hope this helps!

Thanks so much for confirming, and I really appreciate you letting us know you're interested in this function and already have smart plans for how you would use it. We've been watching the rollout of Query data with interest, too, but unfortunately, Google hasn't yet made it part of their API, which Moz Local relies on.

Right now, our engineers are actively following, researching, comparing it to GSC results, and otherwise evaluating it, but it will be up to Google to give this feature prime-time treatment. It's really good to know it's something you'd be interested in seeing. It's important for us to hear that, and I've shared your feedback with our team. Thank you!

Hi There!

We'd likely need to see your exact example to make guesses on this one. Happy to take a look if you're able to share your brand name and location keyword.

Hi H.M.N.!

We're so happy to have you here. Now, you'll have to educate me here on the Canadian meaning of "Local" in your address:

One street West, Local 202, Toronto, Ontario 555 555-5555

I'm not familiar with this as an address component. What does it mean, please?

Hello there!

Just to confirm, are you inquiring about this functionality: https://searchengineland.com/google-my-business-insights-adds-queries-used-to-find-your-business-301500

Please, let us know!

Hi Julie,

Thanks so much for commenting. That's actually one of theories going around - the some people might be doing this for points. There could be some cases where it's that (and albeit, that's a guideline violation in itself) and other cases where it is straight-up malicious.

In your shoes, I would watch closely for any further fake 4 point reviews. If you get enough of them, your rating will start to fall from 4.8 and you could end up with 4 stars, 3 stars, etc., and that will be the sign that the business is being targeted. A one-off case could be nothing. But if you start to see more them, I'd be concerned. Crossing my fingers that this doesn't happen to you, but if it does, do report it to Jason.

So glad to help!

Hi H.M.N!

Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. So, what you'll be doing is to build a complete set of both structured and unstructured citations/linktations for each of your public-facing offices. For each location you will:

1. Have a page on your website featuring excellent, unique content

2. Create, claim and manage a Google My Business listing

3. Create and manage structured citations on the major data aggregators and directories (Acxiom, Yelp, Infogroup, YP, etc.)

4. Create and manage structured citations on any further directories that are specific to your industry or geography (like Avvo for lawyers or Healthgrades for doctors)

5. Seek out unstructured citation/linktation opportunities on platforms like news sites, blogs, local business associations, event sites, etc. to grow the authority of each location

You'll go through this process for each of your locations.

As far your structured citations go (the ones on platforms like YP, Yelp, etc.) there is no cause for concern about listing multiple locations. Whole Foods Market must have hundreds of Yelp listings, after all, and there is no reason to worry that Google might find this suspicious.

As far as your unstructured citations/linktations go, these you will need to handle more singly. What might this look like? Let's say your business is a legal firm in the San Francisco Bay Area with 4 locations. Your office in Oakland could sponsor something like a Know Your Rights Camp event in Oakland. Your office in Berkeley could create a scholarship for law students at UC Berkeley. You have 2 offices in San Rafael. One could be cited in a news article in the Marin IJ online newspaper and another could join the local chamber of commerce. Etc, etc.

So, the difference for a multi-location model like yours would be that your structured citations for all locations can all be easily created on the same set of local business listing platforms, but that your unstructured citation/linktation development program will require more creativity and greater uniqueness. A single article in a newspaper is unlikely to cite and link to all 4 of your offices, right?

All of the above represents quite a bit of work, of course. Multi-locations typically need to automate part of this process. I highly recommend that, if you're a Moz Pro customer, you explore the Link Intersect tool to help you with the research for linktation opportunities, and if you have signed up for Moz Local, it will take care of many of your most important structured citations.

Hope this helps!

Hello to all our folks who market local businesses! I came across something this week that I felt was important enough to share.

Hopefully, if you're a Moz blog reader or a Moz Local customer, you're already well aware of the importance of monitoring your Google My Business reviews on an ongoing basis, responding to them as they come in, whether they're positive or negative. And, you know to be on the lookout for spam reviews.

But a strange new form of spam seems to be emerging that might be really easy to overlook at first. We're all familiar with the spammer who leaves you fake 1-star reviews for the purpose of harming your brand. But you might not immediately be suspicious of a 4-star review, or even a string of 4-star reviews until you realize your former 5 star rating has been whittled down by a succession of less-than-perfect, fake reviews. The worst thing, I think, about this tactic, is that it can be overlooked.

Jason Brown has captured this phenomenon in his recent post: http://reviewfraud.org/4-star-negative-review-attacks/ and I highly recommend reading it and paying extra attention to any 4-star reviews companies you market may be receiving. I'd suggest, if you find this going on with any of the GMB listings you manage, you report it to Jason so that he can continue to track this activity. He's a Google forum TC, and, perhaps, with enough evidence, he might eventually be able to make a case to Google about this practice.

Hmm, I wonder if there's a bug, Matt. How this should work is that you simply remove your open hours when you're not open and then put them back up again when you are. But you're encountering an error message? If that's right, I'd take this to the Google My Business forum: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Basics-for-Business-Owners/bd-p/Basics_for_Business_Owners

Do a search there first to see if anyone else is encountering a similar problem right now. If not, post your business details, explain exactly what you're trying to do and ask if you're dealing with a bug or are making a misstep somewhere along the way.

Hi Adam!

Yellowbook still exists and is accessible from the US. I'm sorry but I'm not sure why it wouldn't be so from your location.

As for workarounds, I can suggest two:

1. Infogroup feeds Yellowbook, as far as I know, so if you have something you need to do on Yellowbook, you might want to take that up with Infogroup.

2. If you need a citation built only on Yellowbook, get someone in the US to do it for you. Of course, if the business you're promoting is in Israel and there is some reason Yellowbook isn't accessible to anyone from there, having a citation on that platform would be of questionable value.

Hope this helps!

Hi Hamak!

Interesting scenario. Thanks for bringing it here to the forum. 75 characters is an enormous amount for a business name! Before doing anything, I would go back to this client to discover if what they're asking you to work with is, indeed, their real-world business name, as it appears on their store signage. I mention this, because I would be concerned that rather than simply using their real-world business name (example: Jones & Jones Attorneys At Law), they might be wanting me to use a keyword-stuffed version of their name (example, Jones & Jones Car Accident, Slip and Fall, Motorcycle Accident, Dog Bite Lawyers Attorneys), which would not adhere to platform guidelines. Obviously, no company has a name like the latter on the sign on their building, but you see companies doing this in the naming title of their local business listings, which generally leads to them being reported for spam.

If the client's legal name and the name on their signage is, indeed, 75 characters long, I would recommend that they get a DBA that is a shortened version of their name and use it on their store signage, website, local business listings, link building campaigns, etc. Without this, their marketing would be very difficult and their branding equally so (what customer is going to rattle off a 75 character name in speaking of the company, right?).

Consistency in naming is quite important and is a strong argument for re-evaluation of plans. Hope this helps!

Hi Virginia,

Looks like, yes, there are problematic practices going on here. I'm not an expert schema diagnostician, but I can offer you two suggestion that I believe should help.

1. Read fully through this article on schema markup best practices: https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-use-aggregate-review-schema-to-get-stars-in-the-serps/

2. If you get lost, hire David Deering's company TouchPoint Digital - http://www.touchpointdigitalmarketing.com/ - for some consulting. He's an absolute expert and can help you get your schema into guideline compliance.

I hope these resources are useful to you!

Hi Matt!

Glad you've asked, and you're right - you definitely don't want to mark your business as closed. Instructions for this are found in the Guidelines for Representing your Business on Google, which read:

Seasonal hours

​If your business has seasonal hours, use the following guidelines:

• During the season in which you’re open, set hours that reflect the current season's opening hours. You may set special hours for holidays, temporary closures, or other events.
• When your business is out of season, remove all opening hours, so they appear as unset. Set your opening hours again at the beginning of your next open season.

Hope this helps and that you have a good open season!

Hi Ann!

Great question. Each location should have its own phone number that connects directly to it. As you're just beginning your local search marketing, I think you'll find the Guidelines for Representing your Business on Google to be especially helpful in adhering to best practices and avoiding mistakes. You might also like: https://moz.com/blog/45-local-seo-pitfalls

Best of luck with your marketing!

Hi Virginia,

Could you have done something to violate guidelines, like using schema markup on your website to mark up third party platform reviews or putting schema review markup on your homepage?

Hi Jaun!

Typically, a site rebuild is required when:

1. The site isn't performing well due to technical barriers (like it's been built in Flash and can't be indexed properly)

2. The site isn't usable by humans (for example, it doesn't render properly for mobile users)

3. The site isn't usable by the business (like there is no CMS for the business to use to build out content on the website without having to have help from a third party)

Did the company that audited your website specify any of these problems in their recommendations or are you experiencing any of these issues? Did they provide details about what they meant by "modern standards"?

Thanks for the further details! The business may need to mainly rely on PPC and social outreach to reach demographics outside of their city of location. Perhaps you can do something on the website to support this goal, but, the usefulness of saying "people come to us from another city" just typically isn't strong.

Hi There!

I want to be sure I'm correctly understanding your scenario. Is your company a digital-only or a local business? In order to appear in Google's local results you must have:

• A physical location in the city of search.

• Make face-to-face contact with your customers.

If either of these factors is absent, the business is not meant to appear in the local results. Please, feel free to provide further details so the community can envision your specific scenario.

Hi There,

I'm not quite understanding the concept of "commute" here. My image of an addiction treatment center would be a physical location that patients come to, the same way a doctor's office is a physical location that patients come to. Please, correct any misunderstanding I may be having in visualizing the business model.

If, indeed, your client has multiple physical treatment centers that patients come to, then standard best practice would be to have a unique page for each of these physical facilities. Likely, you could edit your existing pages to fit this approach, unless they have very odd URLs, in which case, you might want to create new pages and 301 redirect the old ones to them.

If, however, the client has built a bunch of pages represent their patients' possible locations instead of the locations of the treatment facilities, that can verge on a spammy approach. For example, if you have a treatment center located in Mill Valley, California, but you've created a page for San Francisco saying something like "customers come to us from San Francisco", that's just not a very useful practice, as far as patients are concerned, and the whole point of it is clearly to earn search engine rankings for places the business doesn't exist. Just not a good approach.

Please, feel free to provide more detail if I've misunderstood any of the nuances here. Thank you!

Hello There!

Thanks for asking a good question. The best practice for this is found in Google's guidelines, which state

-Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible

• Use a local phone number instead of central, call center helpline number whenever possible.

So, it will be best if each of your facilities publishes its own, local number.

Hi Nikki,

Searching for "pool renovations brisbane" from the US, I am seeing your business come up 12th in the local finder view. I see that Google is marking the city center of Brisbane roughly at the corner of Albert and Queen Streets and that the majority of the businesses in the local finder are clustered right around that nexus. However, I do also see some other businesses (including yours) are on the other side of the Brisbane River from this, including one that is farther away than yours (MPR) and is outranking you. From my location, I'm unable to reproduce the filtering activity you are experiencing, but clearly, you're seeing it happen.

Scenarios like this generally require doing a full competitive audit. I would actually recommend that you do two of them, in this case. I would look at the top ranking business, and I would also pay special attention to Wahoo Pool, which is also far from the other businesses, but has earned many more reviews and is managing to rank #3, at least in my results. This article contains a spreadsheet for doing this type of audit, though you may want to look at even more signals than it covers: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit

I'd stack up my client's numbers against both the top ranked business and this other competitor to see if you can find where they are pulling superior numbers. Like your client in the legal business, it may well just be a case where you'll have to out-do competitors to convince Google that this business is the one that deserves to rank. And, of course, you'll be wanting to resolve any issues the audit turns up for the business.Typically, audits yield insight, but if your audit turns up no clear narrative that could explain why the client isn't showing up at the automatic zoom level, you are left with:

1. Something you are overlooking

2. A bug or weird behavior on Google's part that could resolve

Hope these thoughts are helpful.

Hi Nikki!

I'm so sorry you haven't received a response yet to your good question. Often, that zooming behavior you're reporting is a sign that Google is filtering out the listing. First question from me. Are there any other businesses in the same category of business located in your building or within the surrounding couple of streets? Please, let me know the answer to that.

Also, is the search term you're asking about specifically "pool renovations brisbane"? I see your business as being listed in Camp Hill Queensland. What is the relationship of Camp Hill to Brisbane, please?

Thanks!

Hi Crystal,

I apologize for not seeing your question earlier. It's a really good one. Before I reply, may I ask you a question?

Do your landing pages represent physical locations of the business, or just locations that the plumbers travel to for service?

Hi Kyo,

Please, check out the illustrated guide to the Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors, which I wrote in 2017. It provides a thorough explanation of the most important ranking factors listed in that survey. I hope this helps you out with definitions, and if any questions remain after you've read through it, please let us know. Thanks!

Hi Cristiana,

I'm so sorry, but I'm not quite understanding your scenario. Are you able to provide some further details that paint a clearer picture?

Hi Taylor,

While I don't have the necessary time to do a complete audit, let's take a quick look at a few things here:

1. Your client is at least not suspended. Their listing still exists at: https://www.google.com/search?q=orthopedic associates boise idaho&oq=orthopedic+associates+boise+id&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l3.6373j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&npsic=0&rflfq=1&rlha=0&rllag=43612266,-116292485,1&tbm=lcl&rldimm=14815419333811269136&ved=2ahUKEwiIvfWg3P7cAhUmwcQHHWPdB0sQvS4wAHoECAEQEw&rldoc=1&tbs=lrf:!2m1!1e2!3sIAE,lf:1,lf_ui:2#rlfi=hd:;si:14815419333811269136;mv:!1m3!1d15.045442483230412!2d-116.29248519999999!3d43.612266299999995!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1!2i1!4f13.1;tbs:lrf:!2m1!1e2!3sIAE,lf:1,lf_ui:2

2. On the Contact Page of the Website, you are listing no street extension and a suite number. On the listing, you have no suite number. While Google doesn't pay attention to suite numbers, I am wondering why there is this discrepancy, which at the very least, is confusing for patients. So, that's something to clean up. The website is listing your client at W. Emerald. The GMB listing at Emerald St. Which is it? Choose one and clean the rest up. Your phone number is not the same on your Contact Page as on your GMB listing. Why is this? It should be cleaned up.

3. On the GMB listing, you have listed no hours, have no photos, have only 1 review from a first-time reviewer, are not using Google Posts, or G Q&A. Your listing for this client is pretty empty and can definitely be improved.

4. You have what I'm guessing is a practitioner listing for a Jeffery G. Hessing. It also features some NAP discrepancies you should check out.

5. The fact that you have no Knowledge Panel appearing in the organic SERPs when I search for the brand "Orthopedic Associates Boise Idaho" leads me to believe that Google just doesn't feel it knows much about the business. So, I'd fully utilize all of the GMB features and put a review acquisition campaign in place to help this business start having more information for Google to dive into.

6. When I do non-branded search for just "orthopedist boise idaho" you are not being filtered out by Possum, which is good news. You are ranking in the 11th spot and likely need to invest in both local and organic SEO to start moving up the rankings.

7. On August 1st, there was a Google algorithm update released. Some have called it the "medic update", though Gary Illyes of Google says it didn't specifically target health-related sites. Have you read up on this? If the date your client's rankings dropped is around August 1st, it would be important to read everything you can about this update to see if your client appears to have been impacted by it. Dr. Pete wrote a good post here on Moz: https://moz.com/blog/googles-august-1st-core-update-week-1

8. Firing up Moz Check listing, it looks like there is a lot of work to be done with your citation completeness, and, of more concern, look at the duplicates tab. https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMk9ydGhvcGFlZGljJTI1MjBBc3NvY2lhdGVzJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyODM3MDQlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjJPcnRob3BhZWRpYyUyNTIwQXNzb2NpYXRlcyUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjg4NTQlMjUyMEVtZXJhbGQlMjUyMFN0JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyODM3MDQlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjIyMDgzNzgyODY4JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIydXMlMjUyMiUyNTVE You have a serious issue going on with duplicate Google listings both for the practice and for Dr. Hessing. Each of these must be appropriately addressed. This article may help you: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing The presence of claimed duplicate listings is a violation of Google's guidelines, and even if they are unclaimed, they could certainly be impacting your ability to rank as this client as you'd like to.

So, those are some issues I'm seeing at a glance. I recommend that you investigate all this, do a complete competitive audit for this client, and perhaps, hire a Local SEO to consult with your agency to help get basic local search marketing going for them. There are quite a few issues going on here that could directly or indirectly explain your client not ranking very well. Hope this helps and good luck!

Hi Taylor,

Are you able to share the identity of the client? If not, my best advice is to investigate

1. Filters (like Possum)

2. Hard/soft penalties.

3. Bugs

Hi Lindsey,

Wow - okay, yes, this is really a strange scenario, and after looking through the details of your reply, I can honestly say I've never seen anything quite like this before.

I was hoping that your replies to my questions would lead us both to discover that this phone number is actually listed somewhere on the website, but I can find no reference to it. I wasn't able to reproduce BrightLocal pulling this up at zip code level, but as local people have sent you screenshots of this, then clearly it's happening. It seems extremely odd that Google would pull all this together from comments including the business name on the pages of reverse phone number lookup sites, but I can't find any other website referencing the number, leading me to ask, "Can Google really be pulling this together this way?".

I have two suggestions.

1. Short term: I would suggest that the medical center change the automated phone number message so that is stating the proper number so that at least patients are being given some clue of what they should dial to reach the center. I called the number and it didn't give me the correct number to call for this particular service.

2. Long term: There could be something I am overlooking here, in the limited time I have to dig into this. The best local sleuth I know is Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky. I would recommend that the medical center gather those BrightLocal screenshots and reach out to Joy to see if you can book some of her consulting time. I would ask her to see if she can provide a clear hypothesis of why this is happening and a plan of action. Joy is a also a Google forum Top Contributor, so there is a chance she might be able to escalate your issue for you.

I hope these suggestions at least provide a path forward for you, if not a resolution of this mystery.

Hi Lindsey,

This sounds like a difficult situation. I have a few questions:

1. What is the origin of this unwanted phone number? Was it previously used by the business or do you have no idea at all where it's coming from?

2. If you have no idea where it's coming from, have you looked up the number in Google's main search engine to see which website pages it is published on?

3. If yes to #2, do you control any of the website pages listing this number, or are they controlled by a third party?

4. If a third party, is the name and/or address of your business also published on the page that is listing the unwanted phone number?

5. If yes to #4, have you contacted the third party to ask them to update the page so that your name is no longer associated with the number?

6. Where, exactly, is Google displaying your name associated with this phone number? Is it in your Google Knowledge Panel? Is it in the organic results?

It would likely be most helpful if you could share the identity of the business in question, and perhaps the last 4 digits of the bad phone number (I don't recommend putting your name and phone number in the post or it will just add to references to your name+this phone number). If you aren't able to share the identity of the business, your answers to the above questions may at least help the community to offer better advice. So sorry to hear you're having trouble with this!

Hi Ali,

Looks like others have had this problem: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/customsearch/KETyrXvRZv8/TE894ipdAgAJ

But, unfortunately, no solution was reached in that thread.

You might try reporting the result to Google via the "send feedback" link at the bottom of the particular SERP where you're seeing this, including taking a screenshot. That would be a first step, at least, and maybe someone in our community will have additional suggestions.

Hello, Sharon,

I'm so sorry to hear your blog was strongly affected by the August 1st update. From what I've read, health/fitness is one of the categories which has been most obviously impacted.

We are still in the early days of speculating about which signals Google is focusing on.

Here is Dr. Pete's post detailing what Moz has seen happen with this update:

https://moz.com/blog/googles-august-1st-core-update-week-1

Marie Haynes also wrote a blog post offering a theory that Google's focus may be E-A-T signals (expertise, authoritativeness, and trust), which I recommend that you read if you haven't already, bearing in mind, of course, that this is only a theory: https://www.mariehaynes.com/the-august-1-2018-google-update-strongly-affected-ymyl-sites/ She offers some suggestions for things you might analyze and attempt for your website.

I hope these at least offer some information, and if you wish to share your domain name here, perhaps our community can make some specific suggestions even though no one but some folks at Google can be totally sure what was targeted and how a site can attempt to recover.

Hi John,

It would be super helpful to the community if you can share the both the website you're referencing, as well as the exact keyword phrase you're trying to rank for. Also, please let us know if you're aiming for local or organic rankings. Without this information, I'm afraid we can only make random guesses, which aren't going to be helpful to your specific scenario.

Hi Anthony,

Thanks so much for answering my questions.

When you wrote, "There is other groomers that have 2.4 stars and are shown on the local pack while we aren't.. I just don't get it. They are also right next to us so location isn't the problem."

.... my first thought was that you might be being impacted by the Possum filter. This filter specifically has the effect of filtering out businesses that are in the same building or couple of blocks with other businesses in the same business category.

However, when I do a search for "dog grooming des plaines il", your listing is not being filtered out at the automatic zoom level of the map (which would be diagnostic of this being Possum). I see you ranking in the 8th position when I click on the Google Map in the local pack and look at the Local Finder view.

So, while this isn't a straight-up case of Possum, because your listing is visible but is simply ranking lower than competitors, what I do see is that you are in a location that is very densely populated with dog groomers. Google is having to choose between a whole bunch of competitors located within a very tiny area, and - for some reason - they are choosing your competitors over you. And I concur with you that the fact that you are ranking #1 organically for this term, but are not #1 in the local pack is weird.

I have some specific recommendations for you, which I'll number:

1. I recommend that you go through the exercise of doing a competitive audit between yourself and the top ranking business in the local pack. Here is a blog post of mine, including a spreadsheet, which will walk you through that process: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit

2. I just ran your business through Moz Check Listing and your citations look in great shape, with the exception of a few duplicate listings you should fix: https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1N0IlMjUyMmxvY2F0aW9uX2lkJTI1MjIlMjUzQSUyNTIyNGE1ZjJjMDAtNzE2Yi0xMWU3LTgzOWMtZjUyMzYzMTM5ZWY0JTI1MjIlMjU3RA==

3. I highly recommend that you equip the franchisee at that location to answer the Google Q&A the business received and that they start using Google Posts on a weekly basis, as both could possibly start to bump up local rankings for this location. I recommend that you look further into populating Google Q&A with some of this location's FAQs, as well as answering public Qs that come in.

4. Finally, I recommend you take a look at this post by Joy Hawkins from a couple of years ago regarding ranking highly organically but not in the local packs. Not sure it's applicable to your scenario, but it would be worth reading in case any of it rings a bell to you: https://searchengineland.com/rank-high-organically-not-locally-case-study-240692

Please, feel free to come back with further questions!

Hi Anthony!

Thanks for coming to the community with your question. Please, let me know if you're able to share your website/actual business with us here. Then we can all take a look at your specific scenario instead of just making random guesses.

In addition to that query, can you please explain:

1. How many locations you have

2. Are the locations in different towns or all in the same town?

3. Did you notice a ranking drop for this problem location, or has it never managed to rank? If a sudden drop, can you pinpoint the date? If it has never ranked, can you estimate the age of its GMB listing?

Thanks, and looking forward to your replies!