Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Michelleh,
You will find differing opinions on this. Most of the Local SEOs I know use Localeze over UBL these days. I have seen doubts expressed regarding the current value of UBL. I have not used Yext, personally, but recommend you read Mike Blumenthal's recent review of their product:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/01/yext-local-seo/

I'll quote from Mike's post here:

"Pluses:

-From a management and process point of view for the local SEO the service makes sense. Its fast and efficient and provides some tracking. What would take 6 or 7 hours is done in 15 minutes. If outsourced it would cost in the range of a $100 but the quality and consistency would not be as good.

-It seems to generate between 5 and 6 additional citations that Google thinks are important. Why that should be the case with listings that have already been claimed is not clear.

-The service allows for specials to be easily created and disseminated quickly and things like hours to be changed in a timely fashion.

-There is some reporting and there is decent multilevel management so an SEO can allow clients to access their own reports.

-If a business were to move or change phone numbers it provides a very efficient way of grappling with that issue.

-Whether you use the service or not, Yext’s Local Search Scorecard is a great way to assess NAP consistency across a wide range of sites.

Negatives:

-The reporting is lame. Although in conversations with Yext’s Howard Lerman, they will be adding additional features and color. One of particular interest will be review tracking.

-The cost in and off itself is expensive and it is an annual recurring cost. There is a small reseller discount that starts at only 5% and with enough volume goes up.

• Web traffic from these sites is small compared to Google and even comparing to Bing or Yahoo. But that isn’t Yext’s issue."

I think the main concern with Yext's product is its cost. If you can afford it, it might be a good choice, but as I've said, most of the Local SEOs I know appear to continue to favor Localeze.

And, there is the alternative, as pointed out well by ITRogers, of doing this manually and making your own spreadsheet to keep track of your work. I don't consider this inferior to any product being offered because you have total control over exactly what you are doing. In many cases, manual submission might be the best choice, and if you do it yourself, it is certainly the most affordable!

Hi Zach,

Welcome back to the Local jungle! The most significant change in Local that has taken place in the last year is how significant a part the website plays in a business' overall ranking abilities. If you were doing Local SEO a few years back, the SERPs were filled with business ranking highly (in the old pack-style rankings) that didn't even have websites. This is rare now. Instead, you've got to have a great website, a clean Places record, review acquisition, citation acquisition, and in competitive verticals or populous regions, good links.

Local business index listings are the first place to start with linkbuilding. I recommend that you read David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors Report from 2011 to catch up on some of the top local business indexes. Also, read Myles' Anderson Top 50 Citation Sources for the USA and UK at Search Engine Land. While not all citations sources are link sources, many of them are.

Beyond this, what Matt Williamson is describing is pretty much what you'll be doing: building quality content that earns links. And, definitely take the time to memorize the current Google Places Quality Guidelines which have changed rather significantly over the past few years. Check back often because they keep changing them!

I hope this gets you off to a good start. Good luck and have fun! Miriam

And one of the chief difficulties between the local business crowd and Google arises, I believe, from Google's founding mindset of secretiveness. While understandably essential to protecting their mystery algo, it's quite another matter to publish such critical data about real local businesses while keep one hand behind one's back. I don't believe I've ever had a local business owner tell me, "I love Google." They know Google is important, but they don't love them.

I find that Google's review policies are sort of normal, in that they are similar to the policies of others, but Yelp's are sometimes off in a corner by themselves. For example, here's a line from Yelp's TOS:

Violate our Content Guidelines, for example, by writing a fake or defamatory review, trading reviews with other businesses, or compensating someone or being compensated to write or remove a review;

(emphasis mine)

So, Yelp would explicitly frown on the hypothetical strategy Leo has put forward, whereas, Google is less clear on this. Interesting stuff.

Hey Egol,

If for Google, yes. For others (read Yelp) this is a weird no-no. Nice to see you here today!

Hi Leo,

I second Alan's very well-stated concerns on this. Google has this habit of letting things get by them for months or even years, but it's my opinion that they are quick to spot odd looking activity when they actually take the time to look. I believe what you are considering could look odd.

It's perfectly fine for a business owner to use his Places account to leave reviews of businesses with which he has enjoyed transactions, but I, personally, would steer clear of making some sort of organized, reciprocal effort out of this. In Google's dream world (and Yelp's, etc.) reviews are a spontaneous and voluntary action on the part of the customer. They are not the outcome of an organized deal. That being said, I do understand how critical reviews have become, including their number and quality, to the visible reputation and bottom line of so many businesses and it's truly tempting to team up with other business owners who are grappling with this powerful and still-relatively-new monster to give business a boost in a tough economy. In the long run, though, I think the worry probably wouldn't be worth the potential benefits. At least, it wouldn't for me.

Thanks for asking such a good question.

Thanks:)

Hi Bob,

I agree with the advice others are giving you. Definitely, break these topics up into individual pages. While not every page may not be a highly searched for term, I've done copywriting and Local SEO for dental practice clients and I know that many terms related to dentistry are real winners.

You'll want to start with a session or keyword research for each page, and create an article of 400-600 words in length, fully describing the benefits of each service. FAQs the dentist has noticed his patients have asked are a help in this. For example, if the dentist offers Sleep Dentistry, what has he noticed his patients most frequently ask about it? What are their concerns? Do they need someone to drive them home after the appointment? Are there any medications they shouldn't be taking if they go with this option? Can they eat the day of their appointment? And focus on the positive...how will this service allay their fears?

Be creative and you may well end up with articles that exceed 600 words...I often find that. And don't forget the dentist's geo keywords, too. Those are important!

If the dentist is willing to invest in really good copywriting, he will be greatly strengthening his ranking potentials for many terms, as well as offering very helpful information to his current and prospective clients.

Miriam

Glad to be of help, Cindy. Good luck!

Miriam

Haha - I didn't notice that, actually. Here are a couple more links, too, David, that might be good to look at:

http://searchengineland.com/mediative-eye-tracking-google-maps-study-100783

http://results.mediative.ca/Mediative_White-Paper-Google-Places-on-the-iPhone.html

So glad the first one was helpful.

Hi Cindy,

I would definitely suspect either a penalty or a bug of some sort in regards to the drop from #1 to not in top 50.

What happens when you do a direct business name or phone number search within maps.google.com for the business? Are you able to find their Place Page, or, possibly, getting a 'Do Not Support' message.

Check out this thread at the Google Places Help Forum to see if you recognize your problem in it:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/technical-issue/9JszqkewMVU

Regardless of this, you have clearly identified problems with the business that need to be fixed ASAP. There is no question in my mind that the data confusion could be precisely what has caused the ranking drop. Data consistency is the number one requirement of a good Places record, but, a business can get by for months or years with high rankings and bad data. Then, one day, it all goes away. This is something I see being reported constantly in the Google Places Help Forum, and the major lesson is that if you find problems, make every effort to clean them up as swiftly as possible. Then, once you've cleaned up the record to the best of your ability, you need to wait for the effects of what you've done to settle in. So, it becomes about patience.

Hopefully, the client will give you the go-ahead to get cracking on this. Good luck!

Hi David,

While I don't have explicit CTR data to share with you, I do believe you will like this eyetracking article:

http://connect.icrossing.co.uk/eye-tracking-experiment-google_7109

In one of the screenshots, you can see the greater heat in the local area of the page, vs. the upper organic results.

Does this help with your query?

Good to know this helped, Arthur. Thanks for using Q&A!

Hi Arthur,

As others have mentioned, if you're talking about 2 locations for the same business, there's no problem with using the same email address for Places. Go right ahead.

Hi Bob,

While I'm not sure while you've not had success with this type of work with your other website, it's definitely possible to rank highly for two locations with one website. Be sure you are following best practices for onsite Local optimization and adhering carefully to the Google Places Quality Guidelines, which are here:

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

You will need to build reviews, citations and, possibly, links separately for both locations as well as creating great, unique copy for both locations.

*You probably already know this, but just in case you don't, I'll mention that it is essential that you're using 2 different phone numbers for the 2 locations, in addition to the unique addresses. It occurs to me to mention this, because I talk to many Local SEO clients who think they should be redirecting to a single phone number and this hinders there ability to create two unique NAPs.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

In addition to Malcolm's suggestions, just be sure you follow the guidelines to the letter to avoid penalties. That's very important.

Hi Aran,

If your business is going to operate 10 or more locations, I believe this is the page you're looking for:

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178024

This page describes the process of creating a bulk upload spreadsheet.

Alternatively, you can do each listing manually. Just be sure you follow all of the guidelines that Malcolm has linked to in the Google Places Quality Guideline page.

Does this answer your question? Please, just let me know if you intended something else.

Hi Leigh,

Have to agree with Catalyste on this. While using a nom de plume has historical precedent in the publishing world, online, people are very into being 'real'. The last name of 'Bloggs' is a dead giveaway that this is not likely a real person. If they'd gone with Joe Jones, that could be a real person, but Joe "Bloggs" would instantly look odd to me.

I ghostwrite for business owners and tell them it is fine to use the business owner's name on the content they purchase for me for promotional purposes. This is likely the route your client needs to go with, too, using his/her own real name for the content he/she is paying to have written for his business.

Hi Nick,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'll take a step-by-step approach in my reply.

• The first thing to do is to determine whether your company qualifies for inclusion in Google Places. In order to qualify, you must have a business name, a dedicated local area code phone number (not a toll free number or redirected number) and a dedicated physical street address (not a shared address, not a PO box or virtual office).

• Additionally, in order to qualify, you must do business face-to-face with your customers. So, for example, if your business was a virtual business like an eCommerce store or a virtual directory, you would not qualify for inclusion. But so long as you meet all of the above criteria, you do qualify.

• Next, go to maps.google.com and search for your business name and phone number. See if anything comes up. Many business owners discover that they already have a Google Place Page because Google populates their index from much 3rd party data. If you already have a Google Place Page, you will want to claim it by clicking the 'are you the business owner' link on the page. In such cases, look carefully at all of the information published about you to see if Google has made any mistakes so that you can correct them when you claim the business.  If you do not have a Google Place Page, you will be creating one from scratch and must have a Google account (such as gmail, etc.) in order to do so.

• The next thing to do is to carefully study the Google Places Quality Guidelines. Read them closely to be sure that you will not violate any of the guidelines in creating your Google Place Page. The Guidelines are here: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 The guidelines will explain to you exactly how to list your business, and most especially, what NOT to do. The reason that this is so important is that if you violate the guidelines, your account may be penalized or banned and getting back into Google's good graces can be next impossible to do after you've erred.

• Due to a recent change in Google's guidelines, it is now critical that you determine which of 3 types of business models describes your business.

1. All customers come to your place of business. In this case, you simply allow Google to show your address and need not take any special steps.

2. Some customer come to you and you go to some customers. In this case, while creating your Google Place Page, you will choose to have Google show your address, but you will also be selecting a service area radius showing the extent to which you travel to customers.

3. You travel to all customers (chimney sweep, landscaper, taxi company would be businesses like this). In this case, you must choose the 'hide address' function while creating your Place Page in order to be in keeping with Google's new guidelines on this.

• So, basically, read all the guidelines and comply with them. Consider uploading up to 10 photos and 2 or more videos while creating your Place Page to make it more complete.

• Then,at the end of filling out your information, you will be required to verify it. Sometimes Google offers you the option to verify by phone, in which case, they will call you with a pin number you have to enter. At other times, Google offers verification by postcard, in which case, you will be receiving a postcard with a pin number that you have to come back and enter in. Sometimes Google offers both options...sometimes only the postcard option.

• Once your Place Page has been verified and indexed, the work ahead of you will involve gaining citations and reviews for the business. These are things you can learn about as you go along. If your business fits the local criteria described at the beginning of this post, you will also want to be building other profiles in other local business indexes. Here is a link to an excellent SearchEngineLand post on the top 50 citation sources for the USA and UK:

http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938

• Finally, getting your Place Page filled out and verified is just one important aspect of a Local SEO campaign. The Local optimization of your website is critical to your rankings. So, this is another area of study ahead of you.

Hope this detailed summary of steps is helpful. Good luck!

Great, Steve. So glad you found the explanations helpful. Good luck with your campaign!

Hi Robert,

Unfortunately, call tracking is taboo in Local SEO. Here are some articles on this I think you will find helpful:

http://searchengineland.com/be-wary-of-call-tracking-numbers-in-local-search-26895

http://searchengineland.com/for-local-seo-lack-of-call-tracking-solution-spawns-cloaking-70198

The thing is, the phone number is one of your key trust metrics with Google...equal to or greater than street address. Getting this mixed up can have pretty severe consequences, making it not really worth it to even go down the call tracking road.

I understand the frustration with this, especially given how useful call tracking can be in paid search campaigns, and etc., but the best you can do with call tracking is to train the business owner and his/her phone staff to do this the old fashioned way. Train them to ask, "How did you hear about us?" Not very high tech, but it does provide some data to you to see how your work is benefiting the business.

I hope the articles help, Robert. Your questions is a very important and valid one.

Hi Steve,

The important thing to understand is that there is not currently a KW research tool that gives accurate data on geographic terms. Maybe someday, but for now, the KW research process involves mainly searching for your product/service/informational terms and then adding in the geo phrases. Because you are in Denver (a major city) you will get some KW data with 'denver' included, but I wouldn't consider it totally accurate.

That out of the way, yes, the results are typically slightly different for people searching from a Denver IP address vs. people using 'Denver' in the search phrase. They are not usually wildly different, but there is definitely some variation.

If your clients are in Denver, you need not be overly concerned about this, because Google will typically identify them as Denver based and show them Denver results regardless of whether they use a geo-modifier or not. In optimizing your website, follow the basic example Ben has given. Include 'Denver' in the titles, headers, copy, etc. of your core pages and city landing pages and you will be doing what is customary. You are not attempting to compete for IT Support nationally; you are trying to compete locally, so those geo terms are critical for you.

Hope this clarifies things, but if my answer brings up more questions on your part, don't hesitate to ask.

Hi Tim, That's awfully nice of you to say. Thank you! And yes, Localeze is a big help in the right situation. Good suggestion! Take care, Miriam

Hi Adam,

I second Tim's suggestion of thoroughly reading David Mihm's 2011 Local Search Ranking Factors report. Some things have changed in the past year since the report was published, but the basic information remains the same.

I like to approach Local SEO from a mindset of healthy, thorough promotion rather than manipulation. This will stand you in good stead for the long haul. If you are a beginner at this, I can offer some rule-of-thumb tips to get you started off on the right foot.

1. In order to qualify for inclusion in Google Places, you need a business name, a unique local area code phone number (not a toll free or redirected number) and a dedicated street address (not a shared address, not a P.O. box, not a virtual address. These three elements are commonly referred to as your NAP (name, address, phone number).

2. The number one rule in Local is not to violate any part of the Google Places Quality Guidelines. See:

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

Learn the guidelines by heart and revisit them often to check for Google's not infrequent updates.

3. Be absolutely consistent in your publication of your NAP. Make sure it is identical on your website, your Place Page, other local business listings and any reference to you anywhere on the web. Inconsistent NAP can lead to duplicate and merged Google Place Pages, which are a giant pain in the neck. At the outset of any Local SEO campaign search for existent listings and make sure the data is accurate. If it isn't, try to get it fixed.

4. Your website is your top Local Search ranking factor. It needs to be beautifully structured and properly optimized for Local Search. Put your major effort into creating the best site you can.

5. Get listed in the major local indexes including Google Places.

6. Once you've gotten your business listed, work on citation building and review encouragement. These things help you to rank, too.

7. Depending on the competitiveness of your industry and locale, you may also need to engage in some linkbuilding to help with your rankings.

8. What I have found to be one of the major areas of time/money investment for most local businesses is in quality, creative copywriting. Because of the power of your website, its words are of great value. Initial and ongoing copywriting will need to be part of most Local SEO strategies.

Your probably already guessed this, Adam, but basically, Local SEO involves a lot of creativity and hard work. There are no tricks or shortcuts. Just genuine effort. With the right mindset, you can outrank your competitors and serve your customers well.

Hope this helps!

Hi Bob,

If you're working as a Local SEO for your clients, I think it's essential to develop a relationship of trust in which the client is willing to give you access to his account (just as he would give access to his hosting to his design team). To make you more comfortable, you can always tell the client to change his password after you've completed your work. I would not recommend trying to claim his account into your own. The client should maintain authority over his own account at all times, and should understand that if he wants to bring on an pro to work with him, the pro needs access.

I have been working in Local for the past 6 or so years and have never had a client express concerns about this. Just let them know they can alter their password at the close of work and they should be fine.

Hi ITrogers,

I think it's important to note that the strategy you are recommending is forbidden by Google's Quality Guidelines. Please see:

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

Specifically:

Business Location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.

Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist.

It's critical to be totally up-to-date on the guidelines because they aren't intuitive, making it very easy to accidentally violate them. The strategy your are describing of renting virtual offices where the business doesn't actually exists puts the business at real risk for penalties or banning.

Also, because of the Savvy Panda's industry, (website design) he does not have any chance of ranking for his core terms in the local SERPs. Google doesn't handle website design, SEO or certain marketing firms in this way.

I hope this helps to clarify things for you and others on this thread.

Hi Savvy Panda,
Thanks for bringing your good question to Q&A.

It's important to understand that, by nature of your business, seeking inclusion in Google's local search results is actually out. If you do a search for 'web design firm milwaukee wi', you will see that Google does not display local, pinned results in its main results for this query, nor do they handle website design firms in this manner anywhere in the US. Google stopped displaying local results for web design and SEO firms in January of 2010, as I recall.

This doesn't mean you can't create a Google Place Page. You can, and it will be somewhere within the Maps index, but it will not be displayed in the main results and is therefore unlikely to ever be viewed my many people. You are allowed to create a Google Place Page only if you do some business face-to-face with clients. If all of your business is virtual, then a Google Place Page is not right  for you.

If you do serve some clients face-to-face and you should you decide to create a Google Place Page, only create 1 of them if you've only got one office. Do not purchase virtual addresses/p.o. boxes in an attempt to look like you are local to areas where you aren't actually located. Only utilize your own legal business name, your dedicated local area code phone number and dedicated local street address. Depending on your business model, you will need to go 1 of 3 routes with your Place Page.

• If your business serves all clients at your office, choose the show address path in Google.

• If your business serves some clients at your office and some clients at their locations, again, show the address and use the service radius tool to indicate the geographic region in which you serve. *There is some evidence that you should go easy on the tool. I can't share any examples with you, but I never advise my clients to set a service radius of greater than 30 miles because I have seen some indication that setting a wider service radius than this may actually harm your profile.

• If your business serves all clients at their locations, choose the 'hide address' function.

For more on this topic, see: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap

Regardless of whether you create a Google Place Page or not, by dint of Google's choice not to display true local results for web design firm queries, your efforts to gain visibility for different geographic terms are going to have to be organic in nature.

What you don't want to do is this: create duplicate pages of content that simply switch out geographic terms. You are quite right in guessing that this will not impress Google (nor will it be of much value to human users).

A better approach is this: find a real reason to write about your work in those cities. With my own local SEO clients, what I find to be a natural approach is a showcase of projects in specific cities. A combination of project details, client testimonials from the city in question, videos + transcripts, interviews of the employee/employees who undertook the project in that city and similar data gives you something unique to write about. Your page about the design you accomplished for a car dealership in Chicago can be completely different from your page about the work you did for a restaurant in Madison, with good planning and creativity. I have found this to be a winning strategy repeatedly for my clients.

You can then undertake whatever promotion you want of the page (linkbuilding etc.) to help it work its way up in the SERPs.

Perhaps there are other types of geographic-oriented content you can create as well. For example, you might host a seminar in a certain city or attend a conference, and you can write about that. You can blog about the business scene in various Midwestern cities. You might volunteer at something in the cities or sponsor something there for goodwill and publicity.

Basically, what it boils down to is thinking creatively and then being willing to expend the time/money/effort to write creatively about your genuine involvement in different local communities. This sensible approach is one you can feel proud of for years to come, and that's not something you can say when the approach is to game or manipulate the system. The writing is on the wall that Google has lost patience with a manipulative approach and I believe they will continue to move in that direction in the coming years.

Hope these tips are helpful to you!

You're very welcome. Thanks for participating in Q&A!

Miriam

Hi Corey, "My initial thought was to build out a single page for each of the locations he wants to rank for, and then build deep links to those pages. Obviously I would make the content as unique as possible, but there would certainly be some overlap." Yes, this is the way to go, but keep the overlap to a absolute minimum. Thinking about this from a keyword perspective, each city term = 1 keyword. Obviously, you can optimize any page for 15 keywords, so while it won't hurt to mention your service cities in a few places (homepage, about etc.) you shouldn't think of this as optimizing for them. Rather, think of this from a user perspective. The user will want to know if you serve in his city, so it is good to list all the places you serve in a few prominent places, but the actual optimization work really needs to hinge on individual content about those different cities. Hope that helps! Miriam

Hi The SEO Wiz, You are definitely not paranoid, and there are several real dangers here. I'm thinking hard about the best advice to give here. Let me start jotting down some notes for you.

1. The part of the Google Places Quality Guidelines that allows multiple practitioners within a practice to have unique Place Pages is this:

"Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the hospital or clinic at large"

So, a typical scenario for this would be a law firm with 3 lawyers. The law firm can choose to have 1 Place Page for the practice and 1 for each lawyer. But, typically, all Place Pages are going to be pointing either to the domain name or to the lawyer's landing page (ie: goodlawfirm.com/brandon-jones-attorney-at-law). What is complicating your scenario is the fact that some of your trainers have their own websites. So, not only are they linking to different websites while using the same street address, they are being inconsistent in their publication of the address.

2. The address MUST be the same across all citations. So, for starters, you need to send a memo to every trainer at your gym telling them that they have X amount of time to insure that all Internet references to them, including their own site, review sites, and directories, are correctly displaying the address of the gym, suite number and all.

3. Another point of serious concern is that I would bet that your trainers have duplicated categories. It's a little known fact that in the scenario described in point #1, none of the lawyers can use the same Place Page categories as one another or as the the main office Place Page. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that your trainers are using at least some of the same categories.

So, one guideline would need to be that they cannot duplicate categories on their Place Page and this is where this gets really hairy. How are you going to organize this? If you've got, let's say, 10 trainers, do you get them all together for a meeting a plan out who gets what categories, while being certain that the gym's main Place Page gets to use the main categories that are important to the business. You can use a category tool like Mike Blumenthals at:

http://blumenthals.com/index.php?Google_LBC_Categories

...but this is really going to be tough because of the fact that... It's a best practice to use at least 2-3 of Google's pre-set categories on any Place Page. So, if the main office gets to use 'gym', 'health club' and 'sports club', what do your trainers get to use? If 4 of them teach yoga, only one of them can be allowed to use 'Yoga Studio' and 'Aerobics Instructor'. Great potential for unhappiness between them, and in fact, if Yoga happened to be one of your gym's biggest draws (it's so big right now) you might want to use that 'Yoga Studio' category for yourself. So, you can see that this is messy. You could run every search you can think of in the category tool and figure out if there is are any pre-set categories that could be uniquely used by each instructor without taking anything away from the gym's ability to take advantage of the 5 most important categories, but it's going to be tough to organize an implement. The balance can be made up with non-pre-set categories, but be sure they adhere to the guidelines about this...categories describe what a business IS, not what it DOES. So, trainers can't use things like 'pilates instruction'. They'd have to use 'pilates instructor'.

4. And this still leaves us with the initial problem of the multiple websites at the same address. If you could get point #3 sorted out, then this might be the solution:

• Tell instructors that if they wish to use the gym's address, their Place Page must link to a landing page about them on the gym's main website. You would create a unique page for each instructor and link to it from the Place Page, ensure that the street address is consistent across all sources, assign available main categories for each instructor and allow them to upload their unique photos and videos to personalize the page. This would reduce your risk of merging and the risk or Google losing trust in your overall data and profile.

• If the instructors do not find the above appealing, you must revoke their rights to use the street address of the gym on their Google Place Page or anywhere else on the web, including their website and their citations. They will need to be certain to remove all references to the gym's address from all possible sources. They can then, of course, go ahead with the promotion of their own websites, but not under the gym's name or address. They would need to have their own street address to qualify for inclusion in Google Places.

Unfortunately, neither route is going to be simple to organize or implement, but given the current competitiveness of the fitness industry, it's vital that you take serious steps towards protecting the gym's ability to be trusted and rank. I would actually be surprised if merging hasn't already occurred. I've done my best to define your potential options within the scope of Q&A, but this may be one of those areas where you're going to need to work with a Local SEO to hammer out all of the details, due to the complexity of the scenario. Hope I've gotten you into the right mindset about this. Good luck! Miriam

Hello Taso,

While there isn't really anything you can 'do' to get Google to pick up notes on third party reviews, you mention Yelp in your question and that is a special case. Google stopped showing notation of Yelp reviews in mid-2010, so if this is the source of your 3rd party reviews, you will not see them show up in G. Places. Here is a good article from Lisa Barone at that time:

http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/08/yelp-reviews-out-of-google-places.html

So, you will need to be sure you're getting reviews in sources Google does use. Look at your competitors' websites for a quick picture of what those include. It can take Google some time to pick up new reviews, so be prepared for that, but do go ahead and start planning to acquire them.

And, definitely, work on getting Google-based reviews. Those are very important since Google stopped displaying 3rd party reviews from any source but their own. Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Andy,
I've just replied to your PM. Hope it helps!

Andy, Don't suppose you're at liberty to actually show me the result, are you?

Hi Andy,

Really interesting question! For all intents and purposes, you're right, this really shouldn't be happening. I'd like to do a little research on this and return to this thread. Thanks for asking about this here in Q&A!

Hi Kerplow,

Bede has hit the nail on the head with this:

Yext is more about listing management and control. Localeze and UBL are more about hitting upstream data providers and getting full coverage. They're best used in some sort of combination, so I don't think this is an either/or choice.

Yext's tool is about management, whereas Localeze and UBL are primarily about the creation of profiles. If management is your goal, then you'll probably want go with the Yext for that...though many Local SEOs object to the price tag.

Spot on response from WebBizIdeas! Buzzwords - here's a good little article about this from Mike Blumenthal from when this change happened:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/28/google-still-supporting-kml-files-but-not-the-use-of-geo-sitemaps/

Everybody's a newbie at some point. You're doing the right thing taking steps to learn! Good luck!

Hi Again Howard,

While I haven't yet rec'd a response from the TCs, I have heard from two top Local SEOs that their clients have lost a bunch of reviews over the past week. So, yes, could be something going on, and it could possibly be that Google is doing a cleanup. The tough thing is that legit reviews often get dumped with spammy ones when this happens. And there appears to be a significant shakeup going on in the local SERPs right now. The reviews you've noticed might return after things settle down or they may be gone permanently.

Google's handling of reviews continues to be most unsatisfactory, in my view.

Hi Jbstr13,

Oh, boy, I haven't seen one of these come up in awhile, but they do happen. Ryan has linked to the right starting point for you. Be advised - these things can really take some time to change. I'm actually dealing with a similar, though not identical, issue myself with a client. The roads were significantly changed in his part of Virginia 5+ years ago and the maps reflect the old roads...plus, the client is pinned in the wrong locale. For the sake of interest, here's my recent blog post on this in case you'd care to read it:

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1228

Also, Mike Blumenthal did a good series of posts back in 2010 about the 'lost' town of Rogers, MN that you might find interesting:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2010/03/17/google-maps-what-happens-when-you-loose-a-town/

Start at the link Ryan placed here and good luck!

Miriam

Hi Bob,

I'm getting a 'server not found' page when I tried to access your demo site. I guess I don't know what theme you're using, but I would imagine you can create whatever kind of pages or  you'd need to. If you're using something like the All-in-One SEO-Pack and permalinks, you could even make the 2 city landing pages as blog posts and just link to them from the main menu. But, I don't know what challenges you are facing with your theme, obviously.

Hope you can figure it out. I know it's sometimes tough when clients are on a tight budget. You've just got to let them know what you can do for their investment. The nice thing about websites is that they can always grow as budget becomes available. Good luck!

Hi Bob,

Thanks for answering my question. Given what you've described, I don't see the necessity for the complexity of subdomains, though others might see this differently. What I see is this:

• She has one business. This logically equals one website.

• She can create a city landing page for each of her offices on the site (mytoothdoctor.com/torrance and mytoothdoctor.com/wilmington). Yes, you can link to these from the homepage as well as from the main menu. Be sure that these pages are not simply duplicates of one another with the city name changed. They need to be unique, helpful pages of copy for the user, as well as being locally optimized.

• She can optimize her contact page, footer and other areas of the site for both of her offices...it's not like you're dealing with 20 locations here. Only two of them.

• She can offer a Spanish language version of the site as well. No problemo so long as you follow best practices on this.

• She can claim a unique Google Place page for each location, plus other local business directory listings because of the distinct location data.

In your shoes, I would be looking for the easiest-to-manage plan for this client, and unless I'm really missing something, I don't see a need for subdomains in this scenario, and certainly not for multiple websites. Build a single, powerhouse site for the client and both you and she will find it easy to manage for the long haul.

Hope my suggestions help! Miriam

Hi Howard,

I will ask a couple of Google Places Help Forum TCs if there has been any unusual upswing in reports of lost reviews. Looking at the forum, myself, it looks like business as usual there, which unfortunately means that people are constantly grappling with disappearing reviews.

Justin has linked to the document I would have pointed to, as well. I'll let you know if I hear back on this from the TCs. So far as I know, nothing unusual is going on.

Hi Bob,

I want to be sure I understand this correctly. When you say the dentist bought a second practice, are you saying that she now has 2 physical offices with unique local are code phone numbers and street addresses, though they share the same business name? Is that right?

If they are in 2 distinct locations with unique phone/addresses, then it is up to the client whether she wants to be running 2 different businesses, or simply be a multi-location business.

If she wants that practices branded differently, then, yes, I would vote for 2 websites, with the proviso that nothing is duplicated from one site to the other. All content must be unique for each site if she really wants to be running 2 distinct practices.

If she wants to have a single practice with different branches, I vote for building one well-optimized website and utilizing Local SEO best practices to ensure that her geo information is being correctly featured for the two locations. Again, landing pages for the two offices will need to feature unique copy (hire a copywriter who knows Local) and the footer, contact page and other elements need to be appropriately optimized in accord with best local practices. Lots and lots of businesses have more than one location, so this would just be a typical Local SEO project. Get the dentist to consult with a Local SEO if this isn't your area so that the new design has the right stuff baked into it from step one.

Regarding duplicate content on multilingual site, this is not a major concern. I recommend reading this earlier Q&A thread on this topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/site-with-multiple-languages

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi JustDucky,

I've been working in Local for 5+ years and yours is a question I have seen asked frequently, but for which I have never seen an official study performed, the question being: does being local make you less national. All of the informal discussions I've ever had on this topic indicated a big no on this. Local is better thought of as an addition to your traditional, national SEO, rather than a detractor from it. So, my guess is that your ranking drop is unrelated to you claiming local listings (most of which take more than a couple of days to go into effect and ripple out onto the wider web anyway).

I do know that there have been some big changes reported recently...potentially an algo shakeup of some kind that has nothing to do with Local. I'm going to ask one of our expert traditional SEOs to pop by this thread to help you investigate possibilities for your loss of traffic. I would be very surprised if the local listings had anything to do with this. Hang in there!

Miriam

Hi Mark,

Thanks for contributing to this question. I would recommend that you read and memorize the Google Places Quality Guidelines, which specifically forbid the use of virtual addresses. Here they are for your perusal:

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

Specifically, the guidelines state:

Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. If you operate from a location but receive mail at a mail box there, please list your physical address in Address Line 1, and put your mail box or suite number in Address Line 2.

If you don't conduct face-to-face business at your location, you must select the "Do not show my business address on my Maps listing" option within your dashboard. If you don't hide your address, your listing may be removed from Google Maps.

Hope it helps to read those. It's not fun to get in hot water with Google if you violate their policies!

Hi WebFeat,

Yes, it is forbidden by the Google Places Quality Guidelines to use virtual office addresses, so don't to that.

I have had Local SEO clients in a similar situation to the one you've described. To be totally honest, if the client has once office, he should really only have one local area code phone number, but I'm aware of the fact that many service providers have multiple regional numbers, in part for the totally above board reason of saving their clients long distance phone charges. Looks like this might be the case with your clients, as his numbers are in two different states, right?

So, let's say that the client wants to keep his regional phone numbers. I would suggest that he put them on a page of his site, couched within an image to prevent them from being indexed. The one number that he should keep in real text and use as a local hook on his contact page, footer, about page, etc., is the one that matches his physical street address. So, if he's located in Cincinnati, his real text phone number should be the one with the Cincinnati area code.

And, this should be the number used on his Google Place Page and on all of his directory listings and other citations. Consistency in this is critical.

Explain to the client that should Google find and index half a dozen phone numbers for they same business, they are likely to become 'confused' and lose trust in the validity of his business and profile. He definitely does not want that to happen!

Regarding 800 numbers...yes, that might be an alternative to his having the other regional numbers if his goal is to save his clientele long distance charges. But the advice is the same here - put the 800 number in image text, not real text, on the site, and honestly, I don't recommend putting it anywhere on the Google Place Page. Google does offer the option to provide a secondary phone number on the Place Page, but given their history of automated duplicate creation, merging and etc., I think treating the Place Page (and Google) as simply as possible is the best route to go.

Regarding rankings, my advice unchanged because failing to earn Google's trust outweighs and potential (unlikely) rankings the client might earn from publishing regional phone numbers., If the client needs to gain visibility for cities in which he isn't physically located, you have 2 tasks ahead of you.

1. Discern the client's business model to understand how to optimized the Place Page. If the client serves all customers at his brick-and-mortar address, then you simply input his physical address and allow it to be displayed. If the client serves some clients at his brick and mortar business and others at their places of business, you can show the address and also use the service radius tool. However...this is something to be a little careful about. The distance between Columbus, Ohio and Indianapolis, Indiana is apparently 175 miles. I would not recommend using the service radius feature to indicate a distance like that. In fact, I have seen some indication in the past that choosing a service radius greater than 30 miles may have a negative impact on your rankings. What I've noticed about this pre-dates Google's major policy change regarding the use of this feature, so I don't know exactly how circumference of service radius is affecting rankings these days, but it's something to consider carefully. I think if I had to use the radius tool for a client with locations like yours, I'd check out the miles between his Ohio cities (if he's located in Ohio) and see if any of them fit within the 30 mile radius, just to be safe. *I am having to guess about this here, because of the new policy change. I haven't seen any new mentions of possible effects since that change was put in place.

2. If the client is serving his customers in a variety of cities, utilize copywriting and linkbuilding to build secondary organic visibility for the cities beyond his city of location. He is unlikely to achieve actual local rankings for these other cities if his vertical is at all competitive because Google will typically view his competitors actually located in these other cities as being more relevant results. That being said, you can achieve good organic visibility for the client if you can showcase his work in these secondary cities with creative copywriting and targeted linkbuilding.

Hope I've covered everything you've asked about. Your question is a good one, deserved of a complex answer because there are so many ways to go at this wrongly. It's easy to make a mistake, but with good advice from you and good planning, the client can approach his goals the right way, without risk of penalization. Good luck and thanks for coming to Q&A with your question!