Hi SaraSEO,

Good advice from Robert. I want to add that it's important to understand that, if what you're engaging in is a local campaign, there is currently no keyword tool that will give you accurate city-related search volumes. From your question, I'm not positive whether you are looking for this (for example, looking for search volumes for terms like 'pizza chicago' or if, because you mention searching on a state level, your intent is something other than this.

Hi Petra,

As I suspected, the feedback I received amounted to a guess that it is an algo-driven thing. This just hasn't been documented, as far as I know. Place Labels are seen by many, understood by a few, but documented by a very few people. Sorry not to be able to quote you anything solid on this. If you're researching the issue and reach any strong theories or conclusions, I'm sure people would be interested in reading it.

Miriam

Hi Petra,

I agree with Robert. This is one of the most interesting questions I've seen this week, and one for which I don't have an answer because I've not seen it documented. I've put a question out to a couple of Local SEOs, but I'm not sure if I'll get feedback - again, because I've not seen this issue documented.

One thing I wanted to ask...are you referring simply to the teardrop pins or do you mean Place Labels (the little grey icons of forks/spoons, etc.)? If the latter, an interesting study was done of this in 2 parts awhile back:

http://www.iexposure.com/2011/06/16/how-to-get-a-google-places-label

http://www.iexposure.com/2011/07/26/how-to-get-a-google-places-label-part-2-update

The official Google page for Place Labels is here, and mentions zooming into a 'certain', but unspecified, level:

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=174115

However, if we're just talking about pins here, I'm sorry that I don't have a trusted resource to send you to. There could be a number of factors at play, including distance to centroid, authority of the listing, etc. I will come back if I get any feedback from my pals in Local. It really is a good question.

Hi Kris,
Thank you for giving me a clearer picture of the business model. Unfortunately, there is a serious lack of documentation as to a 'correct' use of Schema in this scenario. Presumably, you've already seen documents like these:

http://schema.org/LocalBusiness

http://schema.org/Restaurant

This is the only type of example I have seen of this, and while these documents identify elements you can use, they don't give directions for how you MUST use them.

To my mind, the branchof tag would be for something like a franchise - a fast food chain or bank or something like that which has a corporate headquarters and branch locations. Please understand, I'm saying this is just my reading of the definition of that tag, but I have a feeling every business experimenting with schema is coming up with their own definitions of what these things mean.

Before Schema, when I was doing everything in hCard, I would simply create a different hCard data set for each business in a multi-location situation. This was pretty simple, but Schema offers so many different attributes.

I'll ask the other moderators here if they can give any additional input. In the meantime, in case this helps, here is a very nice free schema generator tool I found out about a month or so ago:

http://schema-creator.org/

Please check back in. One of our other smart mods may have more to add to this subject.

Hi Kris,

How many locations are you considering putting on a single page, what type of page is it, and what is the business model? Is it a franchise with corporate headquarters, or a collection of locations with no corporate headquarters?

Please, provide a bit more detail. Thanks!