Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Wendy,

Will is correct on all points. Manual profile creation is still considered to be best by the majority of top Local SEOs, but Google will certainly not penalize you for using an automated service. That being said, if you do need to go with an automated service, be advised that you may run into issues with the service not identifying possible duplicate listings and correcting them. So, for that, you would be back to manual again. It's important to understand this, because of the power of duplicates to sap the strength of a profile.

Hey Don,

'Growing pains' is a good description. I agree with you on your assessment. There are things that just aren't working well yet and Google is aware of it. Hang in there.

Joe, agree, that's a good model to live by, but you are right to be a bit nervous. Google behaves oddly about edits, and I was less than thrilled to read this tweet from the Local SEO track at the recent PubCon in New Orleans:

Greg Gifford @__GregGifford__

from Google's point of view, when you move locations, you're starting a new business @__marybowling__ #pubcon

8:51 AM - 24 Apr 2013

On the one hand, I can 'get' Google's mentality behind this. Joe's Cafe on 1st Street may have had lousy coffee and lousy service, but the new Joe's Cafe on Center Street may have turned over a new leaf and have great drinks and staff, meaning that the business has been re-born. I think that is Google's rationale. But, honestly, for most businesses, a move of address does not  represent some major changes in products, policies or quality. It's just the same business in a new building. I wish Google would be a bit more flexible and understanding about this, but right now, moves can be a big headache. Good luck!

Hip hip hooray, Bob! So glad to hear that.

Hi Matt,

Oh dear, this is a problem I have seen reported several times, and the feedback from Google about it is kind of ridiculous. Here's an example of Googler Vanessa Gene's response to an issue like yours:

We're pulling that photo in from your website's homepage. If you'd like it removed from the Maps listings, the easiest way to do it is by removing the photo from your site. http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=142916_On your business's Place Page, you may see photos from other sources as well, including pictures from the web and from Google users. _- Vanessa

(source: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/pulling$20photo/business/eQTOtQOEG8w/StgwtDj6dowJ)

It does appear that the image being displayed on the SERPs side of your result is coming from a blog post about sailing on the website, here, http://www.audiparramatta.com.au/au_partner/p_au_21540/en_home/experience/sailing_sport/sailing_news/2010_victoria_week.detail.2010~01~olympic_sailor_winner.html

I find it rather silly that Google's solution is to remove the image from your website, thus diminishing your website's content quality. Honestly, I want to blog about this because I think it's such an odd scenario, with Google pulling totally random images for businesses. They could be of anything!

What I do see is that it appears you haven't made the effort to upload any of your own photos to the Google+ Local pages. Perhaps there is a chance that if you do so, you might eventually see the current image replaced by one of your choosing. However, be advised that it is still taken weeks for images you upload to appear live in many cases. I've seen reports of 4-6 weeks. So, this isn't an issue you can fix quickly, if you can fix it at all. Sorry not to have an easy solution, but I hope you feel brought up to speed on this, in regards to the being a phenomenon affecting numerous businesses.

Hi Joe,

I consulted once with a photo booth rental service in the past. Does your client's business model work like this: from a central location the business delivers booths to customers - customers do not come to the photo booth rental service's office. If that is an accurate description, then the address should be hidden on the listing regardless of what the business' address is. In other words, your client's address should always have been hidden and a service radius or cities served selected on the listing. If it isn't like that right now, it's in danger of being penalized or removed.

Now, regarding the transfer of ownership, I am understanding that this will mean the main office will now be at a new physical address. In that case, yes, the Google Place Page/+ Local page should be updated to reflect the new address. This is very important, not only because it's always important to list a true and correct address for any business, but because, in future, the new owner may need to re-verify the listing for some reason and if the postcard is sent to the old address, he won't receive it, making it impossible for him to verify.

Regarding the process and possible fallout of moving, both your client and the new owner should read this article from David Mihm:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/local-search-moving-locations

I think that will really help you to understand the work ahead. *Be prepared to possibly lose reviews because of the move. This happens.

Hi Don,

If you mean that you are in communication with Google reps, then yes, wait to hear what they have to say, but I strongly recommend that you do not attempt to merge your Google Places and Google Business Page. Pretty much every Local SEO I know agrees that merging is still too buggy to make it a safe action. For more on this, read:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/11/28/having-issues-with-your-glocal-social-merge-my-advice-dont/

Bob, yes, it matters if your suite number is missing. You need to find out why Google dropped it from the postcard. I recommend you try to call the Google verification issues phone number.

http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1399021&page=ts.cs

Hi Rachel,

Unfortunately, this is one of those questions in which terminology confusion can get in the way of a clear answer. Even Google is confused about what they are calling their various products. I'm not totally clear about your business model and your Google products from your description.My advice will be general here:

If your business is truly local (has a name, a physical address, a local phone number and face-to-face transactions with customers) then you are entitled to a single Google Places/Google+ Local page for the business. You should probably not attempt to merge because of the huge problems still surrounding Google's merging situation.

If your business is truly local and has multiple locations, you can create a Google Place page for each location, but should not attempt to merge, as this is unsupported for multi-location businesses.

If your business is not local (doesn't meet the parenthetical criteria I mentioned above) then you can create a simple Google+ page for the brand, rather than attempting to utilize the more local features of the Google.

Does this help?

Hi Peter,

All local listings hang on NAP (name, address and phone number) and the phone number aspect must be a local area code phone number. You should not be listing a toll free number as your main number - not on your local business listings, website or anyplace else. I have not personally run across a report before of Google manually changing a toll free number to a local one, but number changes can definitely take place because Google is scraping data from a variety of sources. If they find instances of the web of your NAP with the local phone number, then they would certainly prefer to use that, as toll free numbers aren't viewed as local.

The Google Places dashboard provides you with an option to list an alternate, secondary number, so if you want to put your toll free number there, that's acceptable, but don't list it as your core number. That's not what Google wants.

Hi SEOAspirant,

The truth is, Google does not have published guidelines for businesses with models like yours. Because of this, you must view some of the following in the light of an experiment rather than an accepted practice.

Typically, for SABs (service area businesses) one is dealing with something like a plumbing company located in city A, but serving cities A, B, C and D. In such cases, the guidelines are clear. You create a single listing for the location, hide the address and choose a service radius or, in the new Google Places for Business Dashboard, select a couple of service cities. You never create additional listings for the service cities.

Your business model is more complex, however, as it appears that you have a location in San Diego but that your employees offer services nation-wide. I'm not very familiar with the auto transport industry, but I'm presuming this means your drivers deliver cars to dealerships or individuals all over the country, and have face-to-face transactions with the recipients. If so, I think there are 3 possible paths open to you.

Path 1:

This is in line with Stephanie's comment. In some cases, business models like yours will establish a representative in a target city and use the home address and phone number of that person. *Note that you must not use a toll free or re-directing phone number. The representative of your business in that city must be the one who answers the phone there, at the location. And, the number he/she uses must not be shared with any other business. For example if the driver shares his home with his wife who runs an accountancy firm out of their home, they cannot share the phone number.

The possible downside to this is that Google is quite capable of seeing that the address you've listed is a home. Google is fine with home based businesses, at this point, but it is not impossible that in the future they might decide that national businesses who have taken this path of using a home address to establish a location in multiple target cities are gaming the system. Tons of businesses currently operate this way and, from what I have seen, appear to be surviving in the system, but I would not rule out the concept that Google might decide they don't like this at some point.

Path 2:

This is in more line with Ian's comment, with some slight refinements. In this scenario, your national business realizes that you must invest in a small office in your main target cities and staff that office with someone who answers calls and takes orders from clients. This scenario is completely without a downside, because you are then like any other truly local business with a clearly accepted physical location in each of your target cities. You can proceed as any local business would, without fear of reproach.

What you should not do is attempt to get a virtual office, P.O. box or any similar faux location in your target cities. This is a shortcut attempted by many businesses with models similar to yours and it risks penalties and worse.

Path 3:

You decide you can't yet afford to accomplish the Path 2 plan. In that case, you could determine to set up a single listing for your single physical location and determine that this is the sum of your local efforts for now. Beyond establishing this, you determine to go after high organic visibility in your service cities via a combination of content development, linkbuilding and other traditional organic SEO practices. In this scenario, you are hoping to achieve high organic rankings for a wide number of cities, but are not going after LOCAL rankings due to a lack of legit physical locations. This is a completely risk-free path as well. In future, should you develop funding to open new offices in new cities, then you can begin to follow Path 2.

Long answer, I know, but your scenario is deserved of very careful consideration before you proceed. Hope this helps!

It is my pleasure!

Hi Ron,

Good to know your city landing pages are doing well organically. Regarding SM, yes, things like Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube could all be good ways to generate visibility for your business. You can create a local Facebook page, tweet about your local appearances in different cities, optimize your videos for different cities, etc.

Regarding your trumpet player's home address, honestly, I feel if you had to defend this to Google, they might not go along with the reasoning. You might argue that this is a place your band practices and from which you all head out to engagements in that city, and I can kind of see stretching it to that, making me hesitate to say 'delete it'. Provided that the trumpet player's listing also has a unique local phone number, you could leave things as they currently are and if all stays well, then fine, but should you notice a drop in rankings for your main listing at any point, that second location might be something to view as a culprit. Now, if the second listing is sharing a phone number with the main number, then that is a different story and it is definitely putting at risk your main listing rankings.

Hi Ron10,

This is completely correct from Chris:

"In your case, I'd avoid anything that might look inappropriate--no additional accounts, no trying to rank in local in other cities--nothing. As a business model, you fall outside of what's normal and you don't want to trip any flags. Period."

You should set up a single Google Places for Business page (if you don't already have one). If it's brand new, check out this visual guide to the very new dashboard: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/04/02/visual-guide-to-the-new-places-for-business-dashboard/. Your single local listing should center on your core NAP (name, address, phone). If this is your home address and phone number, that is fine, provided they aren't shared by any other business. You should choose to hide your address in the dashboard and then use the service radius function the dashboard will show you.

You can certainly build out citations, but they must focus on your city of location, not on your service cities. That's just how Local works.

As Chris has suggested, for your service cities, developing content on the website, videos, and strong social profiles will be the best efforts for your band. Reviews will be important, too. I highly recommend you consider the practice of creating city landing pages on your website. Suggest you read an article I wrote on this topic a few months back (see: The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages; http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403). Happily for you, you are going to have a ton of options for creating cool content about the your performances in the different cities. Lots more exciting than a carpet cleaning company has for cleaning rugs in Cities A, B, C and D.

Go for high local visibility for your city of location, and high organic and social visibility for your service cities and you'll be on the best track!

Hi Again and Happy Monday,

Since the Venice update about a year ago, yes, it has become much less common for any business to have both an organic and a local listing on the same page. If one manages to get into the local results, their organic ranking is typically subsumed into the blended local listing.

There are some exceptions to this, usually in areas of low competition for which Google has less data, and there have also been experiments done in which Local SEOs have managed to optimize an interior page of the website in such a way that they've picked up double page one rankings (see this: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-seo-ranking/5180-double-ranking-organic-maps.html), but this is not what I'd call a run-of-the-mill scenario.

So what is the answer to the phenomenon you are experiencing? Why does Google consider you more organic than local for those particular keyword variants? I don't believe this can be resolved with the general advice we can give here without investigating the actual business in question. I think you have 2 options:

1. Run the site through the 51 blocks tool, as I've suggested and see if you can discover some areas in which the competitors included in the local pack are outdistancing you.

2. Hire a really good Local SEO and give him/her the keys to the website so that they can try to uncover the nuances specific to your business.

*One thing I will point out, however, is that if you are managing to rank organically above the local packs for these variants, you may want to consider carefully whether you've really got a problem at all. Over the past couple of years, I have read so many comments (like this one: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/business/Tq4DsCCth7s/2Z-MyLEc2mMJ) in different places from business owners who have stated that their transfer from an organic to a local format resulted in a drop in traffic. This is an issue you might want to read up on further while making up your mind about whether something actually needs to be 'fixed'.

Hope this helps!

Hi Tyler,

Kyle has provided some good advice here. I will add, it's hard to know the nuances of your client's exact situation without 1) seeing the Google Places Listing, 2) seeing the website, and 3) understanding the actual keywords/categories the client is going after. There could be nuances specific to your client and his market that I can't speak to without knowing the above.

Generally speaking, though, these things contribute to high rankings:

1. A really great website that contains all the right local hooks, awesome content and, yes, definitely excellent optimization for all target terms.

2. A violation-free Google Places/Google+ page. Correct choice of categories is very important here.

3. A variety of citations with consistent NAP (name, address, phone), well written descriptions and proper categorization.

4. Traditional SEO factors like linkbuilding and ongoing content development.

5. Social factors like active review profiles and other activities.

Sorry not to be able to give more specific advice. This is a general picture of what goes into high rankings.

Something you might want to consider doing is to figure out which of your client's competitors are managing to succeed in multiple local rankings for the targeted keyword variants and then do a competitive analysis to see if you can discover where and how they are surpassing your client. I like the free Local Competitive Analysis Tool from 51 Blocks:

http://www.51blocks.com/online-marketing-tools/free-local-analysis/

Check it out!

Hi Bob,

To be honest, I'm unfamiliar with the designation 'room number', though 'suite number' is highly common. To me, a room number sounds like something in a hotel or school. Is a room the same thing as a suite? I'm curious.

At any rate, yes, if you are in a multi-business building, it is vital that your business is differentiated from the others with a number or letter of some kind. If your profiles and citations lack this, then the danger is that your NAP signal is being partially shared by other businesses. This could lead to duplicates, merging, penalties, etc., that could sap the strength of your listing.

Your job is going to be to clean up as many possible citations as you can so that your business is correctly listed at the address (including the number or letter) at which mail gets delivered to your business.

I highly suggest doing this:

1. Yourself, manually.

2. Hiring an expert to do this for you manually.

I would not recommend using any type of automation in this situation as tools may fail to turn up all instances of listings with this NAP discrepancy. Create a spreadsheet, fill it with links to your citations, work to correct them and check them off the list when you see that the change has gone into place on the various citations. Lots of work, but worth it to secure and clarify your NAP signal.

Hi Greg,

In order to qualify for inclusion in the local results, your client must:

1. Have a physical street address in the target city (not a P.O. box, virtual office or shared address)

2. Have a local area code phone number matching the target city (not a toll free number, call tracking number or shared number)

3. Have face-to-face transactions with customers, either at the place of business or at the customers' homes or businesses.

If your client can answer yes to all 3 of these criteria, then you can create a strategy including some or all of the following components:

1. A high quality website with excellent content optimized for both his services and his geo terms. Optimize title tags, meta description tags, header tags, alt tags, internal links and copy so that they reflect both what he does and where he does it. Build a unique page on the website for each of his distinct services (water heater repair, sewer repair, septic service, etc.). If the business model is go-to-client (like a plumber), build a city landing page for each of the main cities he serves (see: http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403). Be sure that every page you publish is unique. No cutting and pasting from one page to the next.

2. Put the business' complete NAP (name, address, phone number) in the footer of the website and on the Contact page, preferably encoded in Schema.

3. Consider having an onsite blog to continue publishing local-focused content over time.

4. Create a Google Places for Business Page, adhering strictly to the Google Places Quality Guidelines (see: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528)

5. Begin building citations on a variety of indexes and directories to strengthen and diversify the number of places in which your client is being profiled. Be sure NAP is totally consistent everywhere it is published.

6. Work to earn reviews from happy customers.

7. Consider linkbuilding and social media efforts that will build authority.

This is just a brief summary. Every step has its nuances and there is more you can do, but this should get the client started with building a Local presence on the web.

Sounds good, Donovan. Just be sure the client meets all three of those points on my list of must haves:

1. A physical street address (not a mailing address, PO box, virtual office or shared address)

2. A local area code phone number (not a toll free number, call tracking number or shared number)

3. Face-to-face transactions with customers.

Wishing you tons of good luck!

Hi Donovan,

I would say that, typically, if you can't find a business in maps.google.com via the business name+ city search, it's likely that a Place Page/Google+ Local page doesn't exist, but I would not say that this is utterly sure. If you know there is an active Place Page and it isn't showing up, I would suspect a penalty of some kind. Regarding the address, just to clarify, this must be a physical street location, not just a mailing address. On the contact page in question, I believe I saw the address labeled as a 'mailing address', which made me question whether this is a physical address or not.

Hope this helps.

Hi Donovan,

Got your PM. What you linked to is not a Google+ Local page. It's just a Google+ page. I visited the company's website and question their eligibility for inclusion in Google's local index. There is no physical street address and the business looks virtual (does not do face-to-face business with clients). What can you tell me about this.

Also, referring back to your original question, if you attempted to merge a Google+ Local page with a Google+ Business page, that can cause problems. Additionally, if you attempted to create a Google+ Local page for a non-qualifying business, Google may have deleted it. In order to qualify for Local inclusion, a business must have

1. A physical street address (not a mailing address, PO box, virtual office or shared address)

2. A local area code phone number (not a toll free number, call tracking number or shared number)

3. Face-to-face transactions with customers.

What I see on your Google+ page you PMd me is a toll free number and no address. I see a mailing address on the company's website but no physical address. This is what is making me question whether this business qualifies as Local in Google's point of view.

Hi vzPro,

Absolutely. Schema for local is a very good thing to use whenever a physical address exists. Also, thought you might like to read a fairly recent article of mine on the topic of city landing pages. A lot of folks have told me it helped them to understand their opportunities.

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403

Hope this helps!

Hi Donovan,

I received your PM and see you asked this question here as well. If you know a listing was created and claimed and it isn't showing up, I would suspect a penalty, suspension or deletion of the listing. Are you in control of the account? Can you see a listing in the Places dashboard? If so, what is the status of it? Active, pending, suspended, needs action? An issue like this can be tough to diagnose without actually seeing the listing/knowing what to look for.

Kyle's advice is correct regarding doing a business name+ city search in maps.google.com. That's typically a good way to discover if a listing exists, but if you're working on this client's Local SEO, you need access to their Google account so you can see what's going on in the dash.

Hi ThinkCreativeGroup,

Great discussion going on here. I'll try to add a bit.

• Yes, have a unique page for each of the locations on the website. Make sure that the content on each of the pages is unique. Do not simply change out keywords from page to page. Take the most creative approach you can to each location and find something of value to the user to write about.

• Optimizing the website footer with the NAP (name, address, phone) for each of the locations is a best practice if the total number of locations isn't too large. I would say 6 or less would be fine.

• You can also put all of these locations on a main contact page.

• Yes, having the name of the city in your legal business name or DBA may be of some value, but be careful that:

1. You are listing it identically in all places across the web. In other words, don't be Bob's Chicago Taco Shop in some places and Bob's Taco Shop in others. Unless the business is utterly new and has absolutely no footprint (including offline Yellowpages), then chances are the name of the business has already been indexed in a variety of places. If the business chooses to change its name, all citations must be updated to match so that only one form of the business name exists everywhere. Also, be advised that if your client has already built up a good rep on the web around their existent name (with local listings, reviews, citations, etc.) then a change of name can be catastrophic. You can expect to lose all reviews and many citations by changing the name of an established business, as a new name will be a signal of a brand new business. So, be careful with this!

2. You are not over-optimizing your title tags. A few months ago, Andre Weyher (formerly of Matt Cutts' search quality team) said in an interview, "Don't put more than 2 commercial keywords in your titles or Google will frown on it." This statement led to an interesting theoretical disussion over at CatalysteMarketing's local search forum in which it was suggested that a city name not appear too many times in a title tag. (see: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-seo-ranking/984-local-search-engine-optimization-warning-city-title.html)

I mention this here because, if you are Bob's Chicago Taco Shop, and you're putting your business name in your title tags, then your name represents one usage of a city name. So, be aware of that and don't over-do it.

Hi Whmgatx,

I'm no expert at linkbuilding, but I would suggest you make double sure that nothing that was done could have caused a penalty of the Google Places/Google+ Local pages. For instance, make sure that as part of your optimization work, no one on the team over-optimized a listing, created a duplicate listing or created new listings that share items like phone numbers. Just a thought.

Matt,

Cody has given you some excellent replies. Just want to be sure this point hits home. Do not write your title tags like this:

Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - Home

Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - About Us

Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - Rates

Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - FAQ

Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - Etc

These are nearly duplicates. Title tags appear as the first line in many search engine listings and should read in a manner that engages the user, as well as incorporating your keywords. Be sure you are writing a unique title, header and meta description for every page on the website.

Further, if you are planning to work with mainly local businesses, it will be critical that you understand not just traditional SEO best practices for on-page optimization, but also Local SEO best practices for on-page optimization. There are special opportunities and best practices both on-site and off for Local business that your website design firm will need to master in order to be helping clients achieve the visibility they will be hoping for.

Hi Echo,

Hmm, I'm not happy to hear about that. What about the Local SEO I suggested to you? Sounds like you chose someone else? No one should be advising you to put geo terms in the categories. Not good.

Hey David,

Yes, it will be exciting when the new dash is fully rolled out! I do wonder if the upgrade from local to social will be as easy as they say. With Google, few things are easy, right?

Hi Echo,

Yes, I understand. You have an existent listing, and still have the old dashboard. But new listings are being given the new dashboard with the new category fields in many cases.

No, never put geo terms in your custom categories, business title or business description. That's a short road to a big penalty.

Hi David,

Yep, Mike is pretty much 'the man'

What I am so interested in seeing is the ultimate effects the rollout of the new Places for Business dashboard will have. For new businesses, verifying the listing in order to acquire full social features and such is supposed to be just a click a way (so they say) but I haven't gotten to experiment with this with a new listing yet. Mike got to create a test listing. We'll see what happens. Good you know about Mike's blog as he has written a ton over the past couple of weeks about the new dashboard.

Hi David,

Unfortunately, Mike's reply is right on the money. The rich text feature of merged pages is really unreliable and I don't know of any solution to this. For some time now, none of the Local SEOs I know have recommended merging to clients, because the whole thing is so wonky. Sorry to hear you're having trouble with this, but I'm not surprised. The ball is in Google's court now to improve their product so that the things they offer actually work.

Hi Echo,

You're getting some great feeback here. I will only add...be aware that Google is revamping their whole category stance. In the new Google Places for Business Dashboard, there will be no custom categories, and instead of 5 possible categories, you will be able to choose up to 10. But all 10, if you use them, have to be pre-selected categories and the new category wizard seems to take care of the longstanding issue of ensuring that all categories describe what a business is rather than what it does.

For more on the new category landscape, see:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/04/02/categories-in-the-new-places-for-business-dashboard/

Mike has just actually updated his own, awesome category tool in an effort to reflect that Google has just added a ton of new categories to their taxonomy.

What I don't know is what will happen to the custom categories previously selected by business owners once the new dashboard is fully rolled out. Very curious about that and don't have an answer.

Hi Matt,

I spoke with Local Search Godfather, Mike Blumenthal, about your issue. He remarked that in cases like yours, whomever claimed a listing last controls it, and that if too many listings for this client's franchise locations have already been claimed, there's a strong chance your request for a bulk upload will be denied. He recommends that the business owner reach some kind of amicable agreement with the different store owners/managers. Also, Matt, you are aware that Google+ Local still isn't set up to allow multi-location dashboard management yet, right? So, yes, you could have multiple listings in the Places dashboard, but you mustn't attempt to merge them at this point, because the system doesn't support this yet.

Hope this helps!

Hi Matt,

I've not personally encountered this scenario hands-on, so I am going to ask around in the Local community and see if someone I know has. Hang tight.

Hi AllieMc,

Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure what the status of the rollout of the new dashboard is at this point in New Zealand. In the United States, the top Local SEOs have been advising against merging for some time because the outcomes could be so wonky. Not sure if that is the same in NZ. Now, however, Google has rolled out a completely new Places for Business Dashboard. They way this will work will be that you can either just have a local-type page or you can upgrade the page to have the social features. Mike Blumenthal explains this well (http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/04/02/google-local-rolling-out-places-for-business-upgrade/)

"Once an account is transitioned the dashboard account will be automatically redirected to the new interface. If that account has a Plus account the option to edit the Google+ page will appear in the interface. But a G+ profile is not required to interact with the business profile. All that is needed is the existing Google ID/email. The business will be required to obtain a G+ personal profile if they want to add the additional features (social stream, videos) of a full G+ Local page.

When this rollout is complete there will be only two types of local pages: verified and unverified. Each business can decide whether they need the social and video features or not."

I'm not sure if this has rolled out in NZ yet, but if not, you might want to wait until it does to make any changes. Here is another good post by Mike explaining some of the features of the new dashboard, so you can be prepared:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/04/02/analysis-google-places-for-business-or-g-pages-lite/

You are very welcome, Amber. I think you've made the right decision!

Hi Echo,

Sorry I didn't see this question earlier. I agree with Chris. For SABs, this really wouldn't have value.

Hi Andrew,

I've alerted the staff to your feedback. Thanks so much for letting us know what would make our tools more useful to you!

Hi Amber,

This is one of those grey area businesses. I can understand why you'd want feedback on this, for sure. I think the answer lies in this statement from you,

This client does occasionally conduct face-to-face business at the location

(emphasis mine)

Given that the bulk of the business model is go-to-client, your client will be safer hiding their address. Now, should they choose not to do so, and should a penalty occur down the road, they could potentially argue with Google staff that the business has a showroom and good reason to have their address shown and you might be able to win on that, but, if you'd prefer to play it safer, then hiding the address is definitely the easiest route for this client.

So, this isn't a totally clear scenario. You could choose to go either way with this client, realizing that one route may lead to a penalty that would then require a potentially endless dialogue with Google, whereas the other route will likely be problem-free. In my opinion, different Local SEOs I know might handle this situation in different ways, so you'll have to make a gut-feeling decision on what you, as the Local SEO on this project, feel is the smartest route for your particular client, weighing all potential outcomes of the 2 choices.

Hi Thomas,

That's not a good idea. You should publish your client's business name identically across the whole web. So, if they are Trusty Tax Preparation, list them exactly that way with no additions or subtractions every single place you list them. If you are using Schema to markup the business, for instance, on the website, rely on the address fields to differentiate Trusty Tax Preparation in Miami from Trusty Tax Preparation in Los Angeles. Remember, local rankings are founded on the clarity of NAP (name-address-phone number) so be absolutely consistent everywhere you list NAP.

Hi David,

Yes, it's fine to have unique Place pages for the partners in a legal firm - you are correct. But, you are saying that they are unverified? Then, yes, I would recommend that the firm verify any listings that belong to them. This will bring the listings within the control of the account and offer a measure of protection against hijacking. I also recommend that you read some of the recent posts by Mike Blumenthal on the new rollout of the Google Places for Business so that you are aware of changes going on in the system that effect different business models in different ways. Here are a couple of links:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/04/02/analysis-google-places-for-business-or-g-pages-lite/

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/04/02/google-local-rolling-out-places-for-business-upgrade/

Hope these resources are helpful!

Hi TheCTC,

Thanks so much for your feedback. I will bring it to the attention of SEOmoz staff. We appreciate hearing your ideas!

Hi James,

On the YouMoz blog, posts that tend to be accepted and do best are those that contain the most actionable information and teach how to do something that is of value to the community. Opinion pieces are typically not the type of content our community wants, but posts that teach are super. We carefully consider every submission YouMoz receives and will look forward to reviewing your submission if you decide to write your article!

My pleasure! Hope it works out for you.

Hi David,

Unfortunately, there is a big ongoing issue right now with the upload time of photos. A lot of people are blogging about their frustration with this. I would recommend you use a friend or family member's Google+ account to do a user upload of a photo, as this apparently will be published faster at this time than the owner publish option will. Kind of silly, I know, but Google is aware that this is an issue going on.

Hi TVinson,

You mention that you've attempted to contact Google. Have you actually phone them? I'm hearing quite good things about the speed at which some issues have been resolved after a successful phone call. Check out this post from Matthew Hunt:

http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/google-places-support-live-real-person-2-minutes/

Also, you need to be sure that you are cleaning up any references to the call tracking number, not only because they are taboo in Local, but because you don't want anything but clean NAP (name-address-phone) anywhere on the web for the client. If the bad phone number was published or aggregated in multiple places, you need to clean up those citations to prevent them from being picked up again by Google.

Branagan's suggestion is a good one. You might also want to consider blogging in a manner that highlights geographic terms associated with your target audience.

Hi Bob,

My take on this is that the part that needs to disappear from the various service pages is the 'richardson-tx-cosmetic-dentistry', but, I will beg to gently differ regarding total removal of the city names. I would recommend URLs like this:

http://koooskidental.com/teeth-whitening-richardson-tx

http:/kooskidental.com/invisalign-richardson-tx

http://kooskidental.com/dental-implants-richardson-tx

etc.

Those URLs aren't too long they are highly localized, which I feel is totally the way to go for a local business website.

Hi Echo,

I don't have an exact answer for this, as I imagine there would be a variety of factors involved. However, over the past year, we've had tons of questions from local business owners here in Q&A wondering why their organic ranking had 'disappeared'. Pretty much every time, it was because they had claimed a Google Place/Google+ Local listing, resulting in the previous organic rank being subsumed into the new local one. So, their rankings hadn't really been lost; they had been converted into a new local listing, the rankings of which depend, in part, on organic signals.

And, of course, Google only shows a set number of first page local results for each query (be that 3 or 7 or what have you) and so other businesses will fall outside that limited number and may only have an organic rank on the page.

Hi Echo,

Double and even triple first page rankings were common for dominant businesses prior to the Venice update about a year ago. Now, it is extremely uncommon for any local business to have more than one page one ranking. If they have a local ranking, they probably won't also have an organic one for the same keyword and vice versa. There are some exceptions to this, but they are very few and far between.