Hi Again,

Thanks for clarifying your question. Regarding Yelp, I recommend you read Phil Rozek's recent piece:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/08/23/yelp-ranking-factors/

And don't miss the comments section on it. Really good discussion there.

As for YP.com and any other IYP, it's a matter of buying your way to the top.

Hope this helps!

Hi Ian,

Yes, what you are experiencing is well-documented. What is happening is that your previous organic rank has been subsumed into your new blended local rank, which takes your on-page/off-page SEO factors into account in addition to other factors like your Google+ profile, citations, reviews etc. So, you haven't 'lost' your organic ranking exactly...it's gone into the mix in creating your local ranking.

In the past, it was very common for powerful businesses to dominate the first page of the SERPs with multiple listings. For example, as single business might be able to achieve a local listing, one or more organic listings, plus directory listings of his business and even image and video listings all on page 1 of the results.

Around the time of the Venice Update (see: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update), this type of dominance changed. Google began showing a greater variety of businesses in the results, and the instance of multiple listings for a single business became quite rare.

Now, some months ago, some articles were published by some excellent Local SEOs who had managed to achieve double listing for clients by using a tactic of optimizing a second page on their site in certain ways. Here are some examples of this:

http://www.nightlitemedia.com/2012/05/organic-and-google-places-ranking-on-page-1/

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-search-general-discussions/719-lqqk-incredible-shrinking-local-serps-traffic-drops.html

However, there has been some talk that this tactic isn't working the way it was a couple of months ago.

Also on this topic, past heatmap studies have shown that it's better to have the blended local listing than the organic one:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eyetracking-google-serps

However, recently, I have bumped into conversations in which people are stating that their businesses' CTR rate went down after they were transition from an organic listing to a blended local one, opening discussion as to whether it's really better to achieve high local inclusion if it means losing your previous organic listing.. I don't have a source to quote on that. It's just rumblings I've heard.

So, as you can see, there is a lot of discussion going on about this, and you are not alone in what you're experiencing with your listing. Hope these thoughts and resources help!

Hi Kim,

So far as I know, neither Bing nor Yahoo has ever taken a public position on this subject. You could try live chat with Bing here to ask about it:

http://www.bing.com/businessportal

But, I have some doubts as to whether they will be able to quote you a rule on this. I've never seen one.

These are Yahoo's guidelines, but they make no mention of this factor:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/ll/guidelines/local-01.html

Miriam

Hi Robert, I am not quite sure I'm understanding your question. Are you asking: 1. How to make your listing appear higher within YP.com and Yelp or 2. How to make your Yelp and YP.com listings appear higher in Google's search results? Please, let me know. Thanks!

Hi Chris,

As Andy has correctly stated, virtual businesses are not eligible for inclusion in Google's local products. In order to qualify, a business must:

1. Have a unique, physical street address (no PO boxes, virtual offices or shared addresses)

2. Have a unique, local area code phone number (not a toll free number or a shared number)

3. Have in-person transactions with its customers, either at the place of business (like a restaurant), or at the customers' locations (like a plumber).

If your company doesn't meet all 3 of these criteria, then it doesn't qualify. Thanks for asking a good question.

Hi Jaco,

It sounds to me like you may be dealing with duplicate listings, if there is no place to enter the postcard code you received. If you do a phone number lookup at maps.google.com, to do you see more than one entry for the business in question? Look up any previous phone numbers you know of, too, and you can also look up the exact address and see what comes up.

If you can't figure this out, I highly recommend that you do start at thread at the Google and Your Business Forum (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business) where you can get direct technical help from a Google employee or TC on this. They may well recommend that you start a troubleshooter ticket. Sounds to me like you may have run into either a complex problem with duplicates...though there is a slight chance you've encountered a bug. Google's staff and volunteers will have the ability to verify this by looking under the hood, if you can get a response to your thread.

Hi Jared, I recommend you take a look at these two articles by local search godfather, Mike Blumenthal:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/08/03/step-by-step-guide-to-the-google-businesslocal-merge-verification-process/

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/08/10/google-business-pages-to-merge-or-not-to-merge-that-is-the-question/

I think you'll find these really relevant!

Thanks, Robert. Hope business is going good for you this fall!

Welcome to Q&A, Kristopher.

We're so glad to have you here. Sounds like you are making lots of efforts to do the best you can for your business. As Chad says, above, this will take time. Hang in there!

Hi Ron,

What you are seeing here is just Google's current choice of display. If you search for 'Austin Restaurants' you will see all of the restaurants in your area being displayed in the same manner you have cited. Don't worry about this, and don't be surprised if Google changes their display layout again soon. They are always tweaking the information they choose to display in the local listings, so we all have to roll with the punches (and try to smile while doing so )

Hope this helps to know you've not been singled out!

Hi Kristopher,

The more information you can provide us, the more helpfully we can answer your question. Please, tell us as much as you can about scenario. As you've chosen the Vertical SEO category for your question, is your business a local business? Have you been starting to work on citations? What else can you tell us about your site?

Hi Konstantin,

Is your client located in 20 cities, or serving 20 cities from 1 physical location?

In either case, I definitely do not recommend putting a static list of cities anywhere on the site. As Casey has guessed, Google is indeed setting their sights on this practice of listing cities in big chunks. There has recently been an update to the Webmaster guidelines (see: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66358)  that sent some buzz through the Local SEO community.:

Keyword stuffing

"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

Examples of keyword stuffing include:

• Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
• Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for
• Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural, for example:
  We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com.

(Bolded emphasis mine)

So, regardless of whether you client has 1 office or 20, avoid this practice of placing chunks of city names on the site. The appropriate approach is to create unique content on city landing pages dedicated to each locale. Don't take any short cuts in this work. Be prepared to write creatively and uniquely for each city you cover. I can't overstate the importance of this work.

Good luck!

Hi Terry, As Robert has correctly stated, if you're going to take this approach, it's critical to take the time to do it right. Adding city landing pages to your site could potentially drive a small amount of organic traffic your way, but adding duplicate pages will only harm you. So, the task at hand becomes to figure out whether you've got something distinct to say about the services you offer in each of the target cities. The creativity of your thinking and approach will be so important here! Depending on the competitiveness of your niche and the locales you are targeting, organic SEO (like linkbuilding) may be able to take you to a certain point in the SERPs with these pages, though as you have noted, you cannot really hope to compete with true local businesses with real, physical locations.

You're very welcome!

Hi KLLC,

As EthicalInternetMarketing has correctly stated, having one phone number for multiple local businesses is not a good idea. Apart from it causing potential merging of your business details on the different listings and harming your ability to rank, Google can become very confused by citations listings 6 different business names with a single phone number. You must have a unique phone number and unique physical address for each business you list in Google+/Places.

So glad to be of help, Kim. Thanks for using Q&A!

Hi Jason,

As for as the bots are concerned, there is no difference between subdomains or subfolders in terms of SEO. I've always gone with subfolders, myself, as I find them easier to manage than a bunch of different subdomains, but you are free to use whichever format with which you are most comfortable.

Just make sure you are creating really good, unique content for these city landing pages to avoid looking manipulative. Remember, true Local rankings hinge on physical location - not service area - so these city landing pages will need o be thought of as more organic than local, and all traditional SEO tactics apply.

Hello JPretz,
What you are experiencing is a common phenomenon in which your former organic rankings get subsumed into your new blended/local rankings. These blended/local rankings are made up of many factors, including organic ones.

It used to be common for strong businesses to dominate page 1 of the SERPs. They might have several organic rankings, a local ranking, citations from 3rd parties, video sources and etc., all on one page. Around the time of the Venice update in March (see: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update), I and many other Local SEOs noticed this had changed. For the most part, if a company had a local listing, they no longer had an organic one and vice versa. There has been some fluctuation in this display, but I still find this to be the way of things for most businesses, even in tiny niche verticals in rural locations.

That being said, a couple of the Local SEOs I know have managed in the past to secure a double ranking since Venice. Linda Buquet of CatalysteMarketing is one who comes instantly to mind, as she published a post about getting a double ranking for a dentist:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-search-general-discussions/719-lqqk-incredible-shrinking-local-serps-traffic-drops.html

And here's a similar piece from Adam Steele:
http://www.nightlitemedia.com/2012/05/organic-and-google-places-ranking-on-page-1/

Basically, the concept of double rankings revolves around the optimization of a secondary page. I've never engaged in this, and I believe Linda actually recently saw the double-ranked dentist results changes. She and I work together in her Local Search Forum, and I believe she mentioned this to me, so this may all have changed again. I know she was offering training on this in her Advanced Places Training course, but am not sure of the status of this tactic/training at this point. You might like to get in touch with her.

At any rate, what you are experiencing is common and there is even discussion going on in the local sphere as to whether local inclusion causes traffic drops (making it preferable to remain organic). The thing is, this stuff changes almost daily, so the best we can typically due is keep up with the news and changes.

Hope the articles I've linked to will be helpful.

Sure thing!

Hi Again C Smith, Regarding this: "I bet there's a "best practice" implementation out there - perhaps an "Areas Served" channel, with the cities as sub-pages, and then some truly unique content on each page with some keywords seeded in." I recommend you take a look at this other discussion I'm having with a marketer whose client is a contractor in a service radius. View my very long, most recent comment toward the bottom of the thread to see my advice on how to do this legitimately (without being spammy): http://www.seomoz.org/q/use-schema-on-service-areas-page-for-local-business-2#post-123244 This is applicable to your business model, as well:)

Hello C Smith,

Like your avatar.

Okay, so here's the thing: 'web design' is not actually a local query, due to Google's handling of this niche. I believe it was in January of 2010 that they stopped showing true blended/local/pack-type results for web design queries, so your approach to this is basically going to be organic, in terms of SEO, rather than what you'd be doing if you were a shoe store in Birmingham.

If you're located in Birmingham and your goal at this point is to attract Birmingham-based businesses, then I would imagine your whole website (not just a landing page) would make frequent mention of Birmingham and the businesses you serve there.

But, as Owen has rightly pointed out, it is better to use a light hand in this. Don't go overboard. Write titles, tags and text that read naturally. Remember, you don't have to string your phrases together every time. In other words, you don't have to write:

Birmingham Alabama Website Design Services

over and over again.

A paragraph might contain the words 'Birmingham' and 'Website Design' and 'Services' and 'Alabama' within it, of course, but they don't have to be stuck all in a row with glue:)

Between Panda, Penguin and EMD issues over the past year, Google is very clearly moving towards a preference for naturalness. So, using a gentle touch is going to serve you better in the long run, both as far as human users and search engine bots are concerned.

Hi Alex,

It's my pleasure, and thank you for using Q&A!

Hi Alex,

So sorry for the acronym.

NAP stands for Name-Address-Phone Number. These are the core factors in your local business data. Everything in local hangs on NAP.  It's a standard Local SEO best practice to put the complete NAP of each location on a Contact Page and, typically, in the website footer sitewide.

To further strengthen the signals your NAP is sending to the bots, you can choose to encode your NAP using Schema. Here is the definition of Schema from Schema.org:

What is Schema.org?

This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.

A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, search engines have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.

Local businesses can use Schema to markup their NAP. Here is a generator to help you with this:

http://schema-creator.org/

*Be sure to choose the 'Organizations' tab from the left menu.

You might also like this:

http://raventools.com/blog/free-schema-creator/#explanation

Hope this helps!

Hi Alex,

Thanks for sharing your client's identity. My honest opinion on this is that you need to find a top notch Local SEO in the UK to work with, because a full assessment of this is going to be necessary, and I can't really provide that in the scope of Q&A (plus, I'm most familiar with North American Local SEO). But, here's a few things I've noticed:

• The website really needs some help!

• It lacks traditional Local 'hooks', so far as I can see. What are these?

• There is no NAP in the footer. All 3 addresses should be in the footer, preferably coded in hCard or Schema.

• I know you've got the 3 city landing pages, but you should have a traditional Contact Us page, as well. My opinion is that the bots look for this, and you should have all 3 NAPs again, coded in hCard or Schema.

• The content on this site is so thin. Only a few words on the homepage, a few on the Roker location page and zero on the 2 other location pages. This truly deserves work.

• From a traditional SEO and UX viewpoint, the navigation on the site needs quite a bit of work. It is not good that any time I get onto a page, I have to hit the back button to return to the menu that's on the homepage.

• Also puzzled that of the 11 items in that menu on the homepage, only 3 are links? More evidence that a copywriter needs to be engaged or the owner needs to get writing so that the site has good, unique, rich content for every service.

• Regarding your question - no, having 3 locations should not have any effect on your rankings, provided you are taking the proper steps to distinguish them from one another. Right now, with the lack of NAP and content, you're not making ideal efforts to do so.

This is just a start, typed up from taking a brief look at the client's site. A full investigation of the client's site, plus citations and other factors is definitely advisable. And, you might also like to check out 51 Blocks' competitive analysis tool for Local Search, though I am not 100% positive it works for the UK yet. It's brand new and I'm not sure in Michael Borgelt (the creator) had included the UK yet. Check it out:

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

Hope my straightforward response on the issues I am seeing at first glance will actually give you and your client hope. There are far more efforts that can be made here, giving you a possibility of moving up in the rankings if you can assess all areas of possible improvement, implement new work and see if it's enough to nudge you up in the rankings. Good luck!!!

Hi Greenhornet77,

Good question. Schema and hCard both work. I used hCard for several years on all my local clients' sites, but I've transitioned now to Schema because of the agreement between all search engines that it's readable by them. If Schema is new to you, check out this generator:

http://schema-creator.org/

For local businesses, be sure you start by clicking the 'organization' tab in the left nav. You have a choice of course, and to date, hCard still appears to be working fine, but a lot of SEOs were ticked when Google stopped supporting geoSitemaps (see: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/28/google-still-supporting-kml-files-but-not-the-use-of-geo-sitemaps/), and perhaps they may be less inclined in future to abandon schema because it's supported by multiple engines. Just a thought.

Hi Seth,

Provided your client has legitimate physical offices and unique local phone numbers at each of the 6 locations, there is nothing spammy about having a unique page on the site for each office and connecting those up with your Google Places/+ profiles.

There is no reason to put these on subdomains. This structure is fine:

www.lawyers.com/divorce-lawyer-san-francisco

The challenge is to create unique, valuable content for each of those pages. If you take a cookie cutter approach, then that does end up looking spammy, but if care is invested in making the content different on each of the pages, this is an excellent enhancement to your ability to rank well for each city. Let's kick some ideas around.

Keyword+City A

On this page, you've got 400 words of unique text, plus testimonials from 10 local clients in City A

Keyword+City B

On this page, you've got 600 words of unique text, plus 3 videos

Keyword+ City C

You take an FAQ approach to this page, giving great answers to the top 20 question clients who are considering divorce want answers to.

Keyword+ City D

You create an infographic detailing the typical steps in the divorce process, from filing for divorce to being granted divorce. You add text testimonials from 15 clients in city B.

Etc...This is just an off-the-top-of-my-head example of planning the content strategy so that each page is offering something different. You will plan this more carefully. What will be the same on each of these pages is a unique opening sales statement (unique for each page) and the complete NAP (name, address, phone number) for each office. Work with the designer to create a cool way to format the opening statement and NAP so that visitors hitting these landing pages know they've just been invited to call the divorce lawyer in city X, before you get on to the other data on the page, such as detailed copywriting, videos, infographics, etc.

My advice, basically, is to take the most creative possible approach to these client scenarios. Educate the client that the more he invests in these city landing page (in terms of creativity, time and funding) the better his chances of dominating in the SERPs.

Hope this helps!

Hi Kim,

So glad you came here to ask this question.

Yes, it has been standard best practice to ascribe unique categories to each practitioner within a practice, however, things got really wacky with Google's new behavior towards businesses like doctors, dentists and lawyers. Let me link to some resources here that I think are must-read for anyone dealing with this type of business:

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-duplicates-doctor-dentist-lawyer.html

Note in the above Google's announcement that they will no longer delete duplicate listings for doctors and the advice to mark them as 'permanently closed'. However, also note, that since Linda Buquet wrote the above post, Google changed the 'permanently closed' message so that it reads, "This Places Has Closed or Relocated". So that's a bit different.

Next, read this other post about Linda Buquet's experiment with managing to get a duplicate doctor listing removed:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-search-general-discussions/861-dr-dupes-google-local-user-edits.html

I recommend you read the initial post and all follow-up posts on the above  thread.

These days, because of the issues with exactly this scenario, there is no way I would recommend that a new multi-partner practice set up a listing for each practitioner. I would simply set up a listing for each location and forget about listing the individual partners. Hope the materials I've linked to will help you understand the latest issues with this complex scenario.

Good luck with the work ahead, Catherine. And keep these handy to refer to whenever necessary:

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

You might like to share those with the client, as well, so that what you are explaining to them about what needs to be done can be backed up with direct facts from the Google Places Quality Guidelines.

Hi Catherine,

I would not heed this advice:

"I have also heard that if you have enough citations that give your business' address some credit and show that it's not spam, you may  not have an issue."

It's important to understand that no matter how many citations you get, you are at risk of their 'power' being split between you and any other business sharing the address, and simply confusing the bots further. It might be helpful to visualize being a bot here. If you see 50 references around the web to Jane's Hair Salon, 23 for Jenny's Yoga and 72 for Bill's Martial arts all stating that they are located at 123 Main street, who do you believe?

Therein lies the problem and it's not going to be a winning situation for any of the businesses mixed up in this.

Google has never handled the concept of shared addresses well. Unfortunately, in the real world, people do share addresses, but Google's system is not designed to cope with that, so either one abstains from participation in Google's local products, or finds a way to comply with them.

You mention getting a whole new address. Do you mean the client would move to a new building? That might be an option, but it's an awfully extreme one to go to (having to move your whole business). So the client getting a unique suite number is likely what he/she should do, but yes, you may encounter some fallout when you change the address. This could be minimal or severe. And, yes, they definitely need to be using their local area code phone number on any listing of the business, as well as in crawlable text in the NAP on their website.

I really sympathize with local business owners who are trying to understand Google's non-intuitive system. It's really easy to violate their rules and make mistakes. This is why it's critical to educate yourself as much as you possibly can about this constantly-changing system. And, if you are an SEO selling services and you are really new at Local SEO, I would suggest you advise your client to hire a Local SEO who can bring specialized knowledge on board. It's just too easy to create bad outcomes for the client if Local isn't your area of specialization...and it's even easy to end up with crazy results if you eat, breathe and live Local every day :)!

Your client is in a very bad situation. It may take some months of one-on-one care to get them out of this mess. Set their expectations correctly about this so that they understand the process is going to involve time and money.

Hope this helps!

Hi Catherine,

In order to qualify for local inclusion, avoid penalties and prevent merging, your client must be able to answer yes to the following 3 points.

1. Does the business have a unique, dedicated physical address (not a virtual address, P.O. Box or shared address)?

2. Does the business have a unique, dedicated local phone number in the city of location (not an 800 number, not a call tracking number, not a shared number)

3. Does the business have in-person transactions with its customers, either at its own location (like a restaurant) or at the customers' locations (like a plumber)?

If the business does not meet any one of these 3 criteria, it does not qualify for local inclusion. I don't know where your client is at on points 2 and 3, but if they can't say yes to point one, Local SEO will be nothing but problematic for them. Here's why:

If 2 or more businesses share an address, suite address or phone number (or even if their names are too similar), Google will frequently merge the business details of the listings. This means that Joe the Barber can end up with Jim the Plumber's business name, phone number or reviews showing up on his listing. Merging is one of the most difficult issues to deal with in Local, and one to be avoided at all costs.

Here is a Google help file on this issue: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=175290

Your client's best hope is to:

1. Secure a unique suite number in the building at which he/she works and at which mail can be received.

2. Search for all citations of the business web-wide to correct any existent citations so that they include the new suite number.

Hope this helps!

You are very welcome.

You are very welcome, Taysir. I care about this topic of user reviews quite a bit, and have written a couple of articles on in the last few weeks that you just might like to peruse if you're looking for further reading on this topic:

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1273

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1278

Thought you might enjoy those.

Hi Glen,

Can you provide further detail as to what you mean about 'bouncing around'? Please, describe that behavior more thoroughly.

Now, without actually investigating your listing, my response will have to be pretty general. Here are some factors to consider:

• Proximity to city centroid

• Age of domain

• Consistency of NAP (name, address, phone) in citations

• Age, authority, pace and number of citations

• Optimization of website

• Compliance with the 'hide address' rule, if appropriate

• Existence or lack of duplicate listings

• Compliance with all other guidelines

• Authority, number and pace of reviews

These are some of the core factors. One thing you might like to do is run your site through 51 Blocks' local competitive analysis tool which lets you compare your site to the top 10 on some of the top local ranking factors:

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

This is a new tool and I'm really excited about it. It's getting good press in the localsphere, and right now, it's free. Why not check that out and see if you notice something important, as well as considering all of the points on my list. Hope this helps!