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Hi Kevin,

Did this former tenant relocate elsewhere?

Hi There!

Great question! Before I answer, I want to emphasize that without knowing the exact competitive landscape of your specific geography, no one is likely to be able to make predictions about rankings. Because of this, I'm going to base my recommendations on what would likely offer the best usability experience to your customers, which often, in turn, is what Google wants, anyway.

I recommend that you:

• Create a landing page for each of your locations

• On each landing page, include a list of the services offered at that location

• Have the services listed in the list be links to a set of service pages, fully describing each service.

• Have the service pages contain a list of the locations in which they are offered, linking to those location landing pages.

So, in other words, you have a single set of location landing pages and a single set of service description pages that interlink as needed. But, you don't create another set of pages for every possible service/city combo. That's just too convoluted to be of use to customers.

Hope this helps!

Good afternoon, and congratulations on launching your tiny house business. Those tiny houses are fascinating!

In regards to your question, I'm understanding your scenario this way:

• You do woodworking/carpentry/repairs via an existing local business for local customers with whom you meet face-to-face.

• You've now started a national business in which you will ship tiny house kits or materials to customers across the U.S.

If I've misunderstood that in any way, please correct me.

If I'm correct, read on.

Having a Google My Business listing is dependent on you having face-to-face interactions with customers. So, if your consumer base for the tiny houses is completely national rather than local, and you are not meeting these shoppers face-to-face, you do not qualify for a Google My Business listing.

But, if at least some of your customers for the tiny houses are local and you are meeting with them either at your place of business or are going from your place of business to meet them out at their houses, then, yes, you would qualify for a Google My Business listing.

In other words, you have to be meeting at least some of your customers in person to be eligible for a listing.

Moving along, if you determine that you are eligible because you're meeting some tiny house buyers face-to-face, you have a second problem to tackle: the problem of co-located businesses at the same address.

If one of your businesses was the tiny house business and other was a computer repair company, you'd have no problem having them share addresses, provided you equipped each business with a unique phone number and a unique website.

But, in your case, both of your businesses appear to be related to carpentry (houses, furniture, woodworking, etc.). Google does have separate categories for Home Builder, Furniture Repair and Carpenter, but I would have a moderate concern that Google might decide that you are a single business (a carpentry business) attempting to appear like multiple businesses with multiple Google listings. It's possible that they could decide you are trying to spam them, and penalize or even remove one or more of your listings.

Given this, you have two options to proceed with guaranteed safety:

1. Decide you are really just running one carpentry business with a variety of services promoted via a single website and a single Google My Business listing.

2. Decide you are really running two distinct businesses and locate one of them at a different physical location, as well as ensuring they each have their own website and phone number, and completely unique branding (a different name, etc.).

The first option should be no sweat. The second option, if all of your woodworking tools are in a single shop, could involve some difficult structural business changes, such as opening up a second workshop. You will be best able to determine whether that's possible.

Please let me know if anything I've written needs further clarification. And good luck with your new work!

Hi Crystal,

No, the purpose of building the landing pages would be to gain an organic presence, not a local pack presence. Without a local business listing in these other locations, she's not going to be included in the local packs, and from your description, she's not eligible for these other listings. So, the goal of creating content surrounding her affiliation with other institutions in other locations would be organic rankings for these topics.

Hi Crystal,

You're welcome, and from the additional details you've provided, I would recommend:

1. Just one GMB listing at her central location with her single phone number

2. Build content on the website and socially around her privileges at other clinics

Hope this helps!

Hi Crystal,

I might need a bit more info on this to offer best guidance. Am I understanding this correctly:

• Your client is Dr. Jones.

• Dr. Jones has her own office at 123 Main St.

• Dr. Jones does not own any other offices, but she sees patients at the local hospital and at the local health care clinic, as well as seeing them at her office.

• You want to know if Dr. Jones is then eligible for 3 Google My Business listings since she sees patients at 3 locations, one of which she owns, and two of which she doesn't.

Is this the scenario, or would you describe it differently?

Hi There!

You might like to check out our list of recommended companies here: https://moz.com/community/recommended

Hi Ben,

So, Google's guidelines 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.

Given this, sharing a phone number between locations should be avoided. A unique phone number for each location of a multi-location business should be considered a necessary investment. However, the implementation of this (or lack of it) may or may not be the cause of ranking problems. It would be a good idea to do a complete audit of the second location to document all of the factors that could be causing that business to rank lower than its competitors in its city of location.

Hi Scott!

Good question! When you operate a local business, it's extremely important to incorporate your city name in your optimization of your text and in many of your tags, too. Don't go overboard, of course. Be sure you're writing in natural language. But, definitely do include your city name where you can, particularly in the title tag of your home page and contact page, and then wherever else it seems relevant. This will help both your potential clients and Google understand the locale of your business.

Hope this helps, and please do follow up with any further questions you may have!

Hey Jeff!

Great topic. Let me number by responses for easier reading:

1. First of all, important to be clear here that regardless of how you think of the business location, their name on all their local business listings must simply be their real-world brand, as it appears on street signage. So, only Apexnetwork on all listings. Not Apexnetwork North Madronna, Apexnetwork South Madrona.

2. When franchises operate in cities where there are distinct, known districts (like San Francisco with North Beach, the Sunset District, Bernal Height, etc) this would be my favorite way to differentiate branches on the website, it terms of what I would put in the URL, the tags and the text. People actually search this way (pizza North Beach, pizza Sunset District). But, in other cases where the public doesn't strongly identify different neighborhoods of a city, I recommend following Taco Bell's lead and just going by street address. Here's a example: https://locations.tacobell.com/tx/dallas/3127-inwood-rd.html?utm_source=yext&utm_campaign=googlelistings&utm_medium=referral&utm_term=001331&utm_content=website

So, unless you have two franchise locations on the same street (unlikely), the above model can work. Just remember, this is for website use ... not for differentiating the names on the listings.

3. Finally, if you're needing to separate out a variety of locations for something like a spreadsheet, or Google My Business, or Moz Local, you can assign a store code to each of the locations.

Hope this helps!

Hi Kevin,

I've never actually gotten to implement a beacon, but my understanding is that the data is pulled from Google's Places API. Looks like this gives the full scoop: https://developers.google.com/beacons/get-started

Happy travels to MozCon!

Hi KylieM!

Thanks for bringing your question to the forum.

While I'm not sure what the findings of your research were based on, I believe what you've decided may be overly-complicating your task. A business with 2 locations can simply have a landing page for each of its two branches. You don't need a subdomain, you don't need to recreate the website. Just be sure your core pages (home, about, services, contact) are in good shape, and create a unique page for OKC and another for Dallas. This post might help: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

Hi Kate,

If you're talking about the delete account page I'm thinking of, it won't delete the listing. It will just unverify it. So, the listing will continue to exist, just outside of your client's ability to control it.

In your shoes, I would:

1. Explain to the client again that their only option is to mark the business as closed, which is equivalent to going out of business. Google My Business is not really an opt-in opt-out platform. If you're in business, you have to deal with it, because even if you don't create a GMB listing yourself, Google can automate one for you, based on their pull of data from around the web. So, educate the client once more that "hiding" from this reality isn't an option. In terms of Google Analytics, that's a separate product from GMB. Whether or not you have a listing doesn't affect use of GA, but, certainly, if the business marks itself as closed, I would expect that to impact their traffic, which will then be reflected in GA.

2. If the client isn't able to face the reality of how Google works, I would end the relationship. As a marketer, it's your job to offer information to the best of your ability. But if a client is unable to act on that information, success is unlikely for you or for them. So, I'd take one more shot at educating this client about basic local business operations, and if they're unable to work within the realities of that, I would walk away.

Hope this helps!

Hi There!

We have two nice resources here on Moz that should help you feel totally clear on Hummingbird vs. Rankbrain:

https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-hummingbird

https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-rankbrain

Hope these help, but please let me know if you have any questions remaining after reading through those! I'm pretty sure I wrote both of them, so if anything isn't clear, just ask

Wishing you luck, Ben, and totally see how scaling can be difficult, particularly if some of the managers are a bit tech-wary. Little by little, more companies are becoming aware of the need for local expertise that can be translated into marketing outreach. If you can get this business on track with that, you'll be doing them a big favor.

Thumbs up, Sean!

Hey Sean,

Hope you reported the fake address listings. Those are the ones that Google will actually remove!

My pleasure, Brooks. I always enjoy your contributions here very much!

Hi Kate,

So long as your company remains in operation, it is likely to have a GMB listing (whether you, Google, or a member of the public create it), and there is no way to avoid reviews. Last summer, I wrote this guide to dealing with various types of GMB listing problems: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing but unless your company is going  totally out of business and wants to mark the business as permanently closed, simply trying to delete the listing for a live business isn't really an option, as there's every chance your listing will get created again, and once again, be open to reviews. While doing something like marking the business as closed won't automatically shut down your Google analytics or close your gmail account, or anything like that, this is not a workable marketing plan.

I don't know all of the nuances of your client's scenario, but it has some of the hallmarks of one I commonly hear in which a  company is embarrassed by its GMB listing because it has negative reviews on it, and the business wishes it could just hide.

But, that's just not the way the Internet works. From the BBB, to Yelp, to Google My Business, all operating businesses are open to both professional and consumer reviews. Because of this, all businesses have to come up with a strategy for meeting this reality head-on. For local businesses, such a strategy typically looks like:

1. Offer the best possible consumer experience as the very best way to avoid most negative reviews.

2. Proactively seek reviews in compliance with the guidelines of the various review platforms.

3. Respond to all negative reviews in hopes of winning back the client with graciousness, accountability, empathy, and style.

4. Respond to all positive reviews with thanks.

5. Continuously monitor reviews for emerging problems and fix them quickly.

If your company can take this route, then chances are good it will begin to have a GMB listing and attendant reviews it can be proud of. Given that the only alternative is to pretend that the company has gone out of business (which will likely lead to it going out of business in actuality), there's not really any other advice I can give here.

If I've in any way misunderstood the nuances of what your company's situation is, please definitely let me know and provide any further details you can. I know it's really hard to deal with negative reviews. It can help to remember that all businesses are in the same boat, and that excellent customer service is the very best solution to maintaining an excellent online reputation.

Very fine suggestion, Chris!

Hi There!

Unfortunately, as both Ben and Pau are mentioning, this absurd practice is still hanging around the web. While it's very unlikely the stuffed footer is actually helping this competitor to achieve high rankings, it is aggravating to think it isn't preventing them, either.

Your post doesn't mention whether this is actually a business model with physical local offices or is fully virtual, but what I have seen in cases like these is that big brands tend to get away with a great deal of stuff I would never recommend to a smaller brand. It begs the question: how can we explain this phenomenon?

In the past, I've seen folks asserting that Google is soft on big brands. There could be some truth in this, but we've all seen Google take a massive whack at big brand practices with various updates, so that really makes this an unsatisfying assertion.

Another guess is that big brands have built enough supporting authority to make them appear immune to the consequences of bad practices. In other words, they've achieved a level of power in the SERPs (via thousands of links, mentions, reviews, reams of content, etc.) that enables them to overcome minor penalties from bad practices. This could be closer to the truth, but again, isn't fully satisfactory.

And, finally, there's the concept of Google being somewhat asleep at the wheel when it comes to enforcing guidelines and standards, and whether or not that's kind of excusable given the size of the Internet. They can't catch everything. I can see this in this light, but at the same time, don't consider Google to have taken a proactive stance on accepting public reporting of bad practices. Rather, they take the approach of releasing periodic updates which are supposed to algorithmically detect foul play and penalize or filter it. Google is very tied to the ideas of big data and machine intelligence. So far, it's been an interesting journey with Google on this, but it is what has lead to cases exactly like the one you're seeing - with something egregiously unhelpful to human users being allowed to sit apparently unpunished on a website that outranks you, even when you are trying to play a fairer game by the rules.

In cases like this, your only real option is to hang onto the hope that your competitor will be the subject of an update, at some point in the future, that will lessen the rewards they are receiving in the face of bad practices. Until then, it's heads down, working hard on what you can do, with a rigorous focus on what you can control.

Hi Brooks,

This is such a good topic. It's one I've encountered previously.

So, the issue is that your particular business model has national applicability. Digital marketing is a topic of national/international interest, vs. if you were creating content for something like your local farmer's market association or something along those lines.

Despite this, as you've realized, the national interest your content is earning (congratulations, by the way) is building your authority relative to its topic. In a RankBrain environment, this is definitely a good thing. Appearing as a result for national searches means you are also appearing as a result for your target clients in South Carolina when they do those same searches. Remember, too, that organic authority underpins local rankings. So, there is no negative here, if Google is more and more associating your domain with expertise on a set of topics.

Basically, you are in an enviable position here to turn a good thing into a better thing! The leads you are getting from non-local clients could actually be a wonderful opportunity for you to create some goodwill, both B2C and B2B. Hopefully, Brooks, as an active member of an industry, you've gotten to know some other good folks at quality agencies. Instead of just turning these leads away, why not refer them to people you trust? And, ask friendly colleagues that if they ever get leads from businesses in SC, they think of you, as your business thrives on serving these particular customers. I have found, over the years, that potential clients sincerely appreciate being referred to a trusted source. It's such a confusing world out there, sadly littered with scammers, and you can help out a business owner in an important way by doing more than just saying "no".

Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Just wanted to update this thread with a little note that I've created a blog post about this very topic, published this afternoon on the Moz Blog: https://moz.com/blog/lost-anonymous-google-reviews

Great topic, Ben! Thank you for bringing your question here.

Coincidentally, I've been working on a document regarding scenarios like this one. Unfortunately, it's far from ready for publication, but I can share some suggestions with you.

1. Does each location of the business, or at least each region, have something akin to a local community expert? If so, this is the person you need to be in contact with. If not, you'll have to do this research yourself. Find out what the major events of the area are (fairs, expos, conferences, events, concerts, workshops, celebrations). Next, find out what the most cherished and most influential local entities are (schools, organizations, associations, teams).

2. Now that you have this data, determine where the opportunity lies for a specific location of the business to sponsor, host, speak at, attend or otherwise support these happenings and entities. This could run the gamut from supplying the charcoal for the 4th of July BBQ, to sponsoring a little league team, to offering a scholarship at the community college, to hosting a seminar on a topic relevant to your business. Be SURE the landing page for the location showcases this information.

3. In return for participation and philanthropy, request that online recognition links to the desired landing page. If the local news, local bloggers or other community media can be nudged to promote the company's giving/involvement, and they are linking to the homepage instead of the landing page, follow-up and request that the link be edited to go the page that features your own story about what the business is doing (again, be SURE this exists on the city landing page).

4. If all these seems like too much work, given the scale of your client, I recommend you check out ZipSprout's sponsorship tool, which does much of the research for you.

Hope this helps!

I totally understand, Laura. It's really dreadful to see your hard-earned reviews just disappear, at the stroke of a pen from Google!

Something I hope will help to think about ... it's consistently found by surveys that well over 1/2 of customers will leave reviews if asked. It's just finding the best way to ask that's the challenge. If your consumer segment is particularly tough, you might want to consider checking out software like GetFiveStars, that will help you systematize review acquisition.

Hi Pau,

Thanks for contributing to this thread.

I do want to offer a very serious warning against ever buying reviews. Doing so can lead to:

1. Legal action against the brand

2. Public humiliation and irreversible brand damage

3. Removal of local business listings

Purchasing reviews is an act that has the intention of deceiving the public. It's not an honest business practice, and any potential reward will never be worth the risk of lawsuits and loss of the public's trust.

The good news is, good businesses need never purchase reviews. Deliver a quality experience to customers, follow the guidelines of the various platforms as to how you can/can't ask for reviews, and you should be just fine.

Hi Laura,

I agree with you that there hasn't been a ton of buzz surrounding this. I'd put it down to the fact that when Google makes a decision like this, there's nothing you can really do about it. You can't get the reviews back. What a pain, I know. My suggestions:

1. Be sure you have an active review acquisition strategy in place so that you are continually earning reviews at a moderate pace.

2. Be sure you are earning reviews beyond Google on the other platforms your customers are most likely to use.

These are the best insurance policies I know of in an environment in which Google can make policy changes at the drop of a hat.

Good tip, Sean! I wouldn't say that content on the homepage will completely resolve David's question, but it will certainly help! David's scenario is one that every multi-practitioner or multi-location local business has to grapple with: how to ensure that a set of pages that basically share a topic are uniquely useful, as well as optimized. It takes some doing!

Hi David,

Excellent topic. My rule of thumb in judging the optimization of title tags goes something like this:

1. Does the title tag accurately describe the page's contents?

2. Could any modifications be made to the tag that could improve it, while strictly maintaining its accuracy.

So, in your case, it sounds like you are marketing a multi-practitioner legal firm. It's helpful to remember that tools are meant to provide suggestions, not lay down the law.

While I'd be concerned if you said that the title tag for every page of your website was identical, I wouldn't be concerned if the tags for each of the practitioner pages are similar, if each of the attorneys provides the exact same service. I would recommend that you look at the findings of the keyword research you are doing and see if there are some variant ways in which people search for tax attorneys, and see if you can somewhat diversify the tags for the group of practitioners using this information.

For example, the title tag of Bob Jones' practitioner page might read:

Tax Attorney Bob Jones, Proudly Serving Atlanta since 1987

And Sally Jones' title tag might read

_Atlanta Tax Lawyer Sally Jones, Founder of Jones Financial _

And Frank Jones could have:

Call Atlanta CPA, Frank Jones at (404) 222-2222 for prompt service

In other words, be as creative as you can, but never stray from accurately describing page contents. And do be sure the other pages of the website are making as complete use of your keyword findings as possible. Doubtless, people have all types of questions about tax attorneys that you can create content around. And this content, in the RankBrain era, will all help with your goal of building the client into an authority (in Google's eyes) for a particular topic (tax law in the city of location).

Tools are helpful. They alert us to potential problems. But they should be seen as good assistants rather than as dictators. Do what is real first, and then use tools to discover if there are nuances that can improve the presentation and optimization of any business you market.

My pleasure, William! We're happy to have you here!

For sure, Kevin! Real estate is definitely one of those verticals (like hotels) that has long since been chiefly taken over in the SERPs by directories and rich features. Hard-to-impossible to outrank TripAdvisor if you're marketing a hotel, or Zillow if you're a realtor. Likely, you'll just have to make sure you're listed on the directories, go after the longer tail organically, and then rely on social, WOMM, etc. to bring in those leads.

Thanks for the additional details, William.

Two years ago, I wrote this piece on the eligibility of coworking spaces for GMB inclusion: https://moz.com/blog/are-coworking-offices-eligible-for-google-my-business-listings

I recommend that you read that to get a sense of local SEO surrounding these types of locations.

I will add an update, though. Three months after I wrote the above article, Google rolled out the Possum filter. What this means is that, if any other business at your WeWork location is in the same category as your business, you will be struggling to rank at that address, because one of the chief outcomes of Possum was the filtering out of listings that share category + physical proximity.

So, if after reading the above article, you determine that you would be eligible for a GMB listing at the coworking building, but you are finding you're not ranking for your most important phrases, you may be running into the Possum filter. The only way to overcome the Possum filter is to build your "authority" to the point that Google chooses to show you and filter out your competitors. This can involve a great deal of work if you have active, motivated competitors.

Because of this, you really do need to consider what is best in terms of address for the business. Options I am seeing for you (with an imperfect knowledge of your entire business scenario):

1. If you don't have any same-category competitors at the WeWork building or within a couple of blocks of it, determine your eligibility for a GMB listing at that location. If you find you are eligible, use that address.

2. If you determine you are eligible, but DO have same-category competitors in close proximity, assess whether you have the time/funding to do a full competitive audit and then put in whatever work necessary to become the un-filtered result.

3. If you are either ineligible to use the WeWork address because of nuances of your business, or lack the resources to become the un-filtered result in a Possum-affected scenario, but you still have an office on 34th Street, use that address and list yourself as an SAB. Or, if you no longer occupy the 34th street location at all, you may need to use your home address (or the home address of the business owner, if that's not you), and, again, list yourself as an SAB.

Don't focus on whether being brick-and-mortar or an SAB helps/hurts rankings. Focus on representing your business accurately, as failure to do so can lead to listing suspension.

My apologies if, not having a completely clear vision of your business scenario, I'm missing any important details. From what you've described, this is what I see. Hope it helps!

P.S. Obviously - once you've settled on your address, you need to update all your assets and citations to consistently reflect the chosen address.

Hi Kevin!

I'm so sorry, but I'm not aware of a preexisting study of this kind.

I see things like: https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/real-estate-seo/

But as to a study stating "It's gotten 10x harder to rank for 'house for sale' in San Francisco in the last two years" - no.

If you're in the real estate market, Kevin, are there any bloggers in that space you follow? Any targeted publications? Maybe they would have some statistics that would prove/disprove your theory that real estate SEO is harder than it used to be?

You're welcome!

Localizing this makes it a bit more difficult, Kevin, as competition varies so widely by geography. There are 41,000 Chinese restaurants in the US (sounds ultra competitive), 400 in San Francisco (ouch! competitive) but only 1 in Valley Springs, CA (zero competition).

Hi Kevin,

Google recently put out a "Think with Google" piece talking about the rising trend in searches like "Toyota that looks like BMW", "handbag similar to Gucci", "furniture that looks like Pottery Barn", etc. Google reported a 60% rise in these types of searches over the past two years. I managed to dig up the article for you: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/shopper-research/

Basically, the implied intent here is that people are looking for a more affordable version of a desirable product. If this scenario applies to your business (you have a product that's like something better known but is more affordable or has some other distinguishing improvement), this is an interesting and legitimate angle for content dev and optimization.

*The one thing I'd want to research before embarking on this, and that Google doesn't mention in their article, is the legalities surrounding use of trademarked brands in your own publication. I've always wondered about this, actually. How can Pepsi and Coke talk about one another in ads? How about Burger King vs. McDonald's? Here's another article talking about this, exactly: https://www.smartuplegal.com/learn-center/can-i-use-a-competitors-name-in-advertising/

So, I'd research this first, and then, if there's no concern that use of a competitor's name might lead to legal trouble, consider how your brand can be compared to better known brands, and base copy/optimization on that. Hope these are thoughtful suggestions!

Hi There!

Good topic, and I'm sorry to have to say that, no, you can't directly tell Google that their radius is too small. You've done a good job of documenting what sounds like an interesting and recent shrinking of the radius, but when Google decides to do something like that, it's because they've determined it's "best", or are doing some kind of test.

Important to mention here that local search is traditionally city-specific. I can imagine it's frustrating if your clients were formerly enjoying local rankings for a regional search and, as a result of this change, they no longer are. Basically, they are now in the same boat as most local businesses ... having to compete locally for searches related to their physical location in a specific town/city.

My advice would be to go hard after the organic rankings for these terms, and continue to monitor Google. The radius could change again at some point.

Hi William,

Good finds from both Donna and Nicholas. Please especially pay attention to Donna's query regarding your address.

I have two additional questions for you.

1. Are you meeting face-to-face with your customers?

2. At your address, within your building, or even within the same couple of city blocks from you, are there any other video production companies?

Hi Kate,

If you are marketing a business in the payday loans industry, your challenge is more complex than many other business categories face, due to Google taking punitive action in the past.

If the business is virtual rather than physical, you cannot do Local SEO. Unless the business has physical offices where staff make face-to-face contact with customers, you cannot build out local business listings on platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, etc. Instead, you'll have to focus on organic SEO and PPC. Here's a recent article specifically about your industry: https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/05/22/a-review-of-the-payday-loans-algorithm-in-2018/

Hi Kate!

We're so happy to have you here. I want to be sure I'm clearly understanding your strategy. When you say you are building local listings, do you mean you are building local business listings for the state of California? Local business listings are address-specific. So, if you are marketing a plumbing company with a physical location in, say, San Diego, CA., you can create local business listings surrounding this, but what you cannot do is create a local business listing for a state. Please, provide a little further detail here about how you are handling local business listings.

Also, can you let the community know whether you are referring to organic or local rankings in terms of your goals?

Thank you!

I like that Pete gives 4 possible suggestions in that post, not all of which are having to go back a shorten your meta descriptions. Be sure to consider all 4 possibilities

Hi There!

Yes, Google has been making some changes. Please read Dr. Pete's post on this for complete background and tips: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-write-meta-descriptions-in-a-changing-world

Sounds like a good plan, Ed!

Hey Ed,

I know just how you're feeling about this, and sometimes, you can be so deep in the weeds of a project, you can begin to feel a bit lost. I think this happens to everybody now and again.

Yes, remove that review schema from the homepage. It could possibly be a spam signal. Not 100% positive about that, but I think it may be so.

Another suggestion: I know that rankings are important. I get that. But I've had clients in the past who overemphasized this beyond what was reasonable, narrowing their focus so that they lost sight of the bottom line: conversions. Yes, you have to have visibility to earn conversions, but it could be that you need to turn down the dial on the rankings focus for a bit and see how well the current rankings you have are converting to appointment bookings, or some other valued metric. Could there be usability improvements made that could take the same amount of traffic you're getting right now and increase the phone calls it is yielding, or the time spent on the site, or the links your content is earning? Maybe focus on that for a bit, and then come back to the rankings picture.

Hiring an expert for some consulting might also be a bright idea, if you hire someone truly qualified. I'm thinking along the lines of a Joy Hawkins, here ... not just a run-of-the-mill Local SEO. A true expert will often notice things a brand is overlooking, and from what they notice, a picture emerges of what is and isn't possible for the business. That can be very valuable.

Wishing you best of luck!

Hey Ed,

I'm not sure if you realize this, but you're never supposed to use aggregate Schema review markup on your homepage. More on this: https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-use-aggregate-review-schema-to-get-stars-in-the-serps/

So, skip that goal of stars showing up from this in relation to the homepage.

I want to be sure I'm understanding your goal here. I believe you're saying that you homepage isn't ranking for your core term. It's only ranking for branded searches. And this is making you think you need to make a landing page for your core term. If you only have one location, that really wouldn't be a best practice. Rather, you have to figure out what WILL move the needle for you and this core term (if anything). Some things (like proximity or filters) will be a brick wall you can't easily pass through. Others (like building authority) are what you're going to typically run into as recommended strategy. There is something about your competitors that is holding you lower than that coveted #1 spot, Ed, and a competitive audit is going to be the best solution to find out what that something is.

I did a post here on the Moz blog about doing a competitive audit to analyze local rankings, but you're talking about organic rank, right? That would be a bit different, though related. Either way, you've got to find that secret something. It could be proximity, it could be links, it could be content, it could be spam!

Am I understanding your topic correctly?

Hi There!

The link you've provided is to a dashboard login. I'm so sorry to hear you're having some trouble. Please, contact our Moz Local support team directly at help@moz.com and share the name and zip of your business with them so that they can quickly troubleshoot this with you one-on-one. I want to be sure you get the help you need!

Hi Gavinn!

Good question. This is an "it depends":

• It depends on how diverse/broad your service menu is

• It depends on how much authority your brand has built in relationship to its topic

• It depends on how much you can reasonably optimize your homepage for your services

Ideally, yes, you want your homepage to rank for your most important services, but it's typically not possible to cover them in-depth there. So, you'll have multiple types of supporting content (service description pages, videos, blog posts, images, etc.) supporting your goals of search visibility for each service.

Enjoyed that WP article, EGOL. I'd be pleased to see MQ make a comeback, but it would take an ingenious idea on their part.

Hi there!

Yes, your sense that MapQuest has decreased in importance is correct. They were a very early mapping product and enjoyed some years as an early adopter. I believe MQ is still pulling data from Infogroup, but basically, they handed over the keys to Yext and their help documentation is all about using Yext instead of using MapQuest. Kind of sad, honestly. There was a time before Google Maps was the be-all-end-all in mapping.