Welcome to the Q&A Forum

My pleasure! Good luck!

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question Madd Dogg!

I wonder if this article on the recent Venice update in Local describes what you are seeing:

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-venice-update-local-seo.html

If not, could you return to this thread and provide a little more detail about your situation, please? Thanks!

Miriam

Hi Arthur,

I'm glad my response was helpful and - ouch - I hear you on the merging headache! Don't forget, help has improved in the Google Places Help Forum, which is actually moving to a new location. In case you don't have the new link, here it is:

http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!forum/maps

You may already have tried this, but if you haven't, the Top Contributors there or even Vanessa Schneider of Google might be able to manually help you with troubleshooting the merging issue. Note - I say 'might' because merging issues are really hard to remedy and you can get them fixed only to have them come back again.

Here's some good news. There is a chance that with the recent Venice update in Local, your organic rankings may be becoming even more powerful. You might like to read this:

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-venice-update-local-seo.html

I sincerely wish you luck with disentangling merges. I do Local SEO, but I confess, I don't take on merges because they are such a pain in the neck. If you get into a position where you need help, you may be able to hire a Local SEO who specializes in dupes and merging. Just a thought.

Cheers!

Miriam

Hello Llsa,

Thank you for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum, and will do my best to give you helpful answers.

1. Email addresses

Yes, it is ideal to claim/create a client's Google Place Page with a domain-based email address, but if this just isn't possible, you'll have to settle for doing it with a gmail address or other address. As WrightIMC has stated, you should not experience any actual penalty for this, but I believe that it's best to do it with the domain-base address whenever possible because of its ability to send a stronger trust signal to Google that you are the owner (or that the client is the owner).

2. Radius

It's vital to understand that Google will always view the actual physical address of the business as its key signal of relevance. Yes, for go-to-client business models (like carpet cleaners, landscapers, etc.) this isn't ideal because they may serve in a wide area. But, if the carpet cleaner is in San Francisco, Google views him as most relevant to San Francisco. His competitor in Oakland will be viewed as most relevant to Oakland. When I work with clients like this, I develop a strategy with them for getting high organic rankings for their service area, while the main local results must surround their actual city of location. That's just the way Local works.

Exceptions to this: if you have a client in either a rural area where there are few businesses, or you have a client with an unusual business model creating a situation of low competition, the client may well show up in results outside of his city of location because he is one of the only providers of what he does. This does happen...but not in metropolitan locations, busy suburbs or industries with heavy competition.

3. Tips

Study exactly what the competition is doing. Duplicate their strategy. And then go one better!

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hello Arthur,

Thank you for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to give you my thoughts on this.BTW, nice website!

I want to clarify with you your statement: "but all the advice has been about organic search". You are clearly very conversant with Local, so I'm just making sure we're talking about the same thing, namely, the blended local/organic results. I did a quick search for 'laptop repair ny' and see you at #1 in organic, though not in the A-G blended results below. I'm searching from California. I switched my location to NY and saw basically the same thing - you are #1 organically for what I'm assuming is one of your key terms, but not appearing in the pinned results below. So, are we talking about your organic rank or your local/blended rank here? Perhaps you can provide a little more information on that.

That aside, let's get to your questions, some of which I'll have answer with more questions :)!

1. Are the two new locations going to be equal in importance to your original office? Or, is your original office going to remain as headquarters for the business.

If the first, I can see why you would consider taking location info off the homepage, etc., because you are then dealing with 3 different geographic terms and may not be able to get equal 'bang for your buck' if you try to optimize for all of them on each main page. That being said...I would be loath to make this decision, because you have achieved a level of organic dominance for your main location. (As an aside...are all 3 locations in NYC or are you branching out into other parts of the state?)

If the second scenario, the choice becomes much easier. If the original office is your headquarters, then I would leave things as they are, build onto the site with new content for the new locations and also make a few mentions of your other locations on the main site pages. You would be doing this with the intent to keep the main thrust of your site's overall SEO focused on that original location, while building out new stuff as your two new locations grow.

Even if your business model dictates that all 3 businesses are of equal importance, I think I would still be inclined to go with this plan. I would hate to see you lose what you've gained. And, as you are dealing with just 3 total locations (not 20 or 100) I think you can effectively optimize the site for all three without taking away what you have already established for office #1.

1a. This question is one I've seen asked and argued over frequently. People take different sides. Matt Cutts basically said years ago that Google doesn't see much difference between subdomains and subfolders. See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

I really don't think the situation has changed since then. In my opinion, subfolders offer greater ease of use for the site owner/web master. So long as your code is crawlable, I honestly don't think Google cares what you do in this regard and I wouldn't worry about confusing the bots. I would personally go with subfolders if given a choice between the two...but again, this seems to be a personal preference thing rather than a genuine SEO issue. ***A confession: I've gotten local landing pages to rank just fine putting them all on the root directory, so really, don't sweat it!

2. Do not, not, not make the content on your city landing pages duplicate. Yes, this is something to sweat! Devote the funding/energy/time to writing excellent unique copy for each landing page. If no one in the organization can do this, hire a copywriter with a strong knowledge of Local. Pay handsomely for this service if you have to, because it is your best bet for getting Google to see the pages as relevant, useful and distinct. To read more about this, checkout Eric Enge's interview of Carter Maslan:

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml

Specifically, read this part:

Eric Enge: Let’s say you have more than one location, 100 for example. In your view, is it helpful to have individual pages on the website for all of the locations? Also, is it helpful to have the Google local business center linked to each of those individual pages rather than having 100 locations that point to a single web address?

Carter Maslan: I can tell you what I think the ideal end state is, and there are various levels of getting there. Ultimately, we would like to have the store-specific page known so that people can just click through and see today's specials and any kind of adjustments for that particular day. We would love to have all of that information on a direct click to the most specific page for that location.

That’s what we encourage, but there are still a lot of chains and things that just link to their top-level domain. I guess it's a split answer. We want to get to a store specific page, but we are not uniformly there across all of the businesses.

Eric Enge: Could that potentially be encouraged by making it a ranking factor, for example?

Carter Maslan: Yes. I guess there are two sides to it. If you create a store-specific page that really just has an address, it wouldn't be as helpful as having some genuinely good content on the page that the user would really appreciate having as the first click-through experience. That’s what I think we need to work through.

We don't want to arbitrarily tell people that they must create a store-specific page, because we are really just trying to find the most useful page for that business. That’s why I am not so definitive on the store-specific page or not. I really just want what’s best for the retailer, store or businesses, first and foremost giving the user what he would want to see when he clicks on that business.

Eric Enge: Say you have a store-specific page that lists specific and individual things about just one store location. Depending on the kind of business that could be an inventory list that shows you've got extra stock?

Carter Maslan: There is a chain of stores that carries yoga equipment that my wife really likes. They have special yoga instruction, carry special brands, and host lectures on some special days. There are all kinds of things that the retailer does that relate to that specific store location, and there is also a general corporate catalogue page. So this is not black and white, and even though we want to encourage it, it's not that there is a definitive guidance saying companies need to have that page.

Eric Enge: Obviously it’s good if there is a quality page with information unique and specific to each location.

Carter Maslan: Yes, that's great. If we know that there’s good information about that page, then that helps on search and the snippets that we can show on the search results, because we know that the page is referencing that place. It does help even if it ends up not being the page that you list as your primary homepage. If there is good content that we know is content about that place, then it helps us do a better job with query results.

If a company has a page that's store-specific and talks about its class schedule, and there is one that says its holding Tai Chi class tonight and someone is searching for places to do Tai Chi, then that helps us to score it. If a lot of people have found that page helpful about the Tai Chi class, then when people search for Tai Chi we would know that that location has something to do with Tai Chi.

Hopefully, Arthur, these tips will get you off to a good start. Congratulations on the expansion of your business. That's really exciting, and don't skip my advice in question #2. This, plus correctly claiming your local business profiles for the news locations, is going to be totally critical to your success.

Good luck!
Miriam

Hello A Abdahad!

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to answer your question.

I believe you are asking where you carpet cleaning company needs to get links from. If so, John Taylor's link is a good resource. Also, I would recommend that you read this article if you located in the USA or the UK:

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

That article, by Myles Anderson, will give you a list of the 50 most common citations sources for local businesses in those two countries. Citations are often referred to as the 'links of Local Search'.

Also, you might like to go to GetListed.org and type in your company's name and zip code. This tool will show you some of the places you are already listed, and some of the places you aren't and there are other pages on that site with suggestions of where to list you business.

Finally, if you are looking for just regular links, you might look for directories not in those lists that list businesses in your community and you might see if there is something you can do to get local bloggers in your city to take notice of you. And don't forget the important role that building out your website will play in your local rankings.

Coincidentally, I have two Local SEO carpet cleaning clients in the United States and we spend a lot of our time writing great articles. This is very, very important.

Hope this feedback helps!

Miriam

Hi Kenoshi Creative,

Unfortunately, due the the fact that I'm in the US, Google isn't allowing me to change my location to Calgary, so I'm unable to produce the sitelinks display you are seeing for the terms you've mentioned, but I do understand what you're talking about. To my recollection, these displays started getting attention around the middle of 2011.

Here is a blog post on this subject, but I'm afraid it may not be of much help to you because it sounds like you're already implementing most of these things:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2011/08/17/google-places-sitelinks/

Perhaps of more use to you will be Linda Buquet's piece on this + the discussion that follows it:

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-one-box-local-sitelinks.html

And this post by Matthew Hunt:

http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/seo/google-displaying-new-sitelinks/

Are these of any help to you? I sincerely hope so!

Miriam

You are welcome Jastos,

This is one of those points on which I wish the guideline language were slightly clearer. If, as you say, your client appears in the offline world just as 'Joe Plumber' then going the route you are going should be within the guidelines. Does the client have a DBA record of their name without the Inc?

To me, I read those guidelines to mean that the name should be the legal business name (Inc included) but that's an interpretation. I agree, you could equally interpret that to mean what you have decided.

But back to your original question - if you've decided to go with the name without the Inc., then I feel it would be wise to make the effort to make that consistent across the web.

Miriam

Hello Brant!

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your excellent question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to give a helpful answer. I'm going to respond in reverse order to the questions you've put.

On your second question - should you add the additional cities to the current content - the answer is, yes, probably, in a modest manner.

So, for instance, let's say your client's homepage is optimized for San Francisco, because this is where he is physically located. Let's say he is a plumber. In addition to serving San Francisco, he also serves clients in neighboring Oakland, Berkeley and Mill Valley. In such a case, there is no problem with including a mention of this on his home page. Something along the lines of: We Come To You in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Mill Valley.

There might be a few other pages on the site where such language would be appropriate and not detrimental.

But, this leads to your first question.

On question number one, I would encourage you to discuss with the client whether he is truly committed to going about this in the right way. If you simply put up pages for each of this service cities but don't make the effort to write truly unique content for each of the them, then it's not something you could really call a user-centric, commendable effort. One or two elements might be the same (as in the case of the plumber, a list of services such as septic backups, appliance overflows, clogged drains, etc.) but apart from that, everything should be unique if the client's heart is in the right place about this. I like to teach my own Local SEO clients to make their efforts for the benefit of their clients. Recognition of effort from the bots usually follows hand in glove with this if the person doing the writing understands Local SEO.

So, ideally, what you'd be looking at is a combination of simple mentions of the service cities on a few pages, and then a strong page of original writing for each of the service cities. These can then, of course, be added to main menu of the site, increasing its overall optimization for a wider set of terms.

Hope this makes sense.

I'd like to finish with a note and a question. Note: the client needs to understand that Google will always see him as most relevant to his city of location. Unless he is in a rural area or an industry with little competition, he should not be expecting these efforts to help him outrank his competitors in other cities in the local results. The point of this type of content development is most typically to gun for organic rankings, typically below the local results. Important to let the client know that.

And, finally, I did want to verify with you that the business model I am describing (along the lines of a plumber) matches that of your client. Does he want to rank for other cities because he goes to clients in them to do business, or is this not that type of business?

Cheers!

Miriam

Hello Jastos, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your good question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to give a thoughtful answer. In the simplest possible terms, a company's legal business name should be the name it is publishing in all places across the web including its website, local business profiles, review sites and etc. Google's exact language on this from their Places Quality Guidelines reads: Business Name: Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. I take this to mean that if your business is Joe Plumber, Inc., then that's how you should consistently appear on all web records. Now, as it happens, your question is one that I've actually discussed with my colleagues in Local. The smartest Local SEO I know says that Google is typically sophisticated enough to understand that Inc. and Incorporated are the same thing....kind of like the difference between Ave. and Avenue. They get what it means. So, is this a huge issue for your client? No. That being said, I think most Local SEOs would agree, putting the time into making the listings and references consistent would be a best practice. It might not be your #1 task to accomplish, but, yes, I think it would be worth it to do the job when you can. Hope this helps! Miriam

P.S. Sorry for the run-on paragraph. Having a little trouble with line breaks tonight in the forum. Hope you can still read that sensibly.

Hello Kye,

So glad this has gotten you off to a good start.

I should add, if you do end up needing to go start a Google forum thread on this....big news today. Google has just launched their NEW forum:

http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!forum/maps

All local SEOs and local business owners: update your bookmarks!

Miriam

Hmmm, that's troubling, Andre.

I honestly don't have an answer to this. May I recommend that you try submitting a thread to the Google Visualization API forum:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-visualization-api

I would love to be able to help you, but am afraid I don't know how to resolve the error messaging you are receiving. Maybe someone over there will have encountered it before and will be able to tell you what's up? Good luck!

Miriam

Hi Kye,

Thanks so much for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to help you.

Just to confirm, I am seeing in your screenshots and link 2 variants of your address:

805 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1K1 (604) 220-7490 ‎

507-805 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1K1 (604) 220-7490 ‎

I had to tap a Canadian colleague on the shoulder to confirm that this order of 507-805 is a typical format in Canada (here in the US, suite numbers always come at the end of the street address - never at the beginning). So that seems typical.

Next, in an attempt to troubleshoot this, I looked your business up on YellowPages.ca as they are Canada's major local data provider. I searched for 'Vuppie Real Estate Team Vancouver BC' but could not find your company listed there. So, that's a dead end, but also a useful note to you that your company should probably get listed there as Google Places relies heavily on that source in your country for accuracy and confirmation of data.

Next, I searched Google Maps for your phone number. It signals that there are 8 listings with that address, but , rather annoyingly, when I click the link to show me what they are, it won't show me. Can you account for 8 listings for the phone number - perhaps 1 for the office and 1 for 7 distinct partners in the realty office?

A G Maps search for your business is only turning up your one listing, so perhaps that mention of 8 listings is nonsense.

Next, I did an address search within maps for your address of 805 West Broadway
Vancouver, BC V5Z 1K1

Looks like there are a ton of businesses at this address. I see:

Ainsworth Geoffrey Dr‎ -Balevi Ben Dr‎ -Bergman James H Dr‎ -2 reviewsBuffets Vancouver‎ -12 reviewsDr. Belinda Weltman - ClearView Orthodontics‎ -Dr. E. Dwayne Karateew‎ -1 reviewIntegral Dental Lab‎ -Millenaar Diederik W Dr‎ -Pharmasave‎ -Platinum Denture Clinic‎ -1 reviewRoss William H Dr‎ -Taylor & Blair Personal Injury Lawyers‎ -TD Bank Financial Group‎ -3 reviewsTony's Coffee‎ -1 reviewVancouver Dental Spa‎ -2 reviewsVancouver Dentist Dr Ara Elmajian & Assoc.‎ -Vancouver Dentist on Broadway Dr. B Kwoo‎ -3 reviewsVancouver Hearing Centre‎ -Vuppie Real Estate Team‎ -9 reviewsWillow Dental Care Vancouver‎ -10 reviewsOut of curiosity, I began mousing over these and saw that about 8/10 of the do not have suite numbers/unit numbers of any kind attached to the address. Only a few do. So that's interesting. Why is Google recognizing only a small portion of suite #s for all of these businesses? Is it because the business owners didn't realize they needed to list a suite number to differentiate themselves from other occupants of the building or because, as is the case with your listing, the number has abruptly dropped out of sight? Don't have an answer to this, but it's a good question.

Now, when an issue like this occurs, I typically run a quick search of the Google Places Help Forum to discover if there is a rash of reporting of a similar error. Again, Google drops the ball as the functionality of their search tool is down. This is the case at least 50% of the time with what should be the most useful tool for searching for common current issues.

This leaves me with two comments that may be of some or no relevance to what you are experiencing:

1. In the United States last week, a bunch of us saw our client's addresses which were formerly listed with Suite 205 or what have you change in formatting to #205. This was remarked on and we wondered if Google was experimenting with a change of the way they are handling suite numbers. I wonder if something similar could be going on in Canada and if the number has gone missing in action only temporarily? You didn't mention when this change occurred.

2. The other recent suite-number-type news is that Google just updated their Google Places Quality Guidelines to state that if you have a suite number, it needs to be listed in the second line of the address. This was a big change, and I bet many business owners have no knowledge of it. Here is a link to the guidelines where you can read the language yourself:

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

I find myself wondering what would happen if you edited your listing to include the suite number in the second address line. It might trigger re-verification which would be a pain in the neck. I wonder, too, about the fact that because it is common in Canada for such numbers to come first, your updated listing would then look funny to Canadians. So, the question really is - is it worth it to do this?

My questions for you are:

• Have you noticed any drop in rankings?

• How old is the listing?

• Do you know when this change actually happened?

My one concern, really, is that the listing may become merged with any of all those other businesses showing at this address which are not differentiated by a suite number. Do your reviews look okay? Anything there that shouldn't be?

My Advice To You:

Open a thread at the Google Places Help Forum on this topic and see if you can get Vanessa to reply to it. It's a very good question and my normal methods of troubleshooting have not yielded any reliable clues. You should point out that a number of the businesses at your address are also not showing a suite number at this point and that you are concerned about a) merging and b) clients not knowing which suite to visit when they come to what must be a very busy building.

On a final side note, Kye, I would recommend an edit of your Places description. It's not considered a best practie to put geographic info in your description...Google might view it as spammy. The description currently reads:

Pete Shpak is a Top Vancouver BC Realtor/Real Estate Agent focusing on Condo and Home sales in False Creek, Yaletown, Kitsilano, Fairview, Coal Harbour, Downtown, Gastown, West End & Lower Lonsdale

I'd edit that.

Please, feel free to return to this thread with further info/questions.

Miriam

Hi Storwell,

Unfortunately, there is no tool that I know of that does this. I was actually discussing this recently with some other good Local SEOs and the consensus was no, this doesn't exist. It would be nice if it did!

One fellow suggested making a rough estimate from the number of Adwords impressions that actually trigger local results in the SERPs, but we agreed, that was kind of a tough approach.

Sorry not to have a can-do answer for you on this one. There are many local research tools that have yet to be developed. The market - though giant - is still new-feeling to many, and rather under-served.

Kind Regards,

Miriam

Hi Sat13,

Just popping by to say I think you are being given the right advice by members who have contributed to this thread.

It kind of all comes down to effort. If you want to publish two distinct blogs, you need to be prepared to create separate content for them. Think of it from the perspective of the end user. Why should he read two different blogs if they duplicate one another in terms of the information they provide?

For example, SEOmoz has its own blog, and Rand Fishkin has a personal blog. Rand might choose to cross excerpt a post from one to the other if he thought it was really important, but he wouldn't simply pick up a blog post from one and put it on the other. That wouldn't be in the best interests of Rand's readers, right?

If you are dealing with a multi author blog at your business and would like readers to have the option to get to know more about the author's personal writings, create profile pages for each of the authors that link to their personal blogs. That will achieve your goal of letting readers know more about the authors' other publications.

But, bottom line, what you are reading in this thread is steering you in the right direction. Make distinct efforts for the two blogs. And, don't forget, you can use RSS feeds if you really need to have snippets going elsewhere.

Good luck!

Miriam

Greetings Andre,

I'm sorry your question didn't receive a prompt response.

Does this link help?

http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/spreadsheetsmapwizard/makecustommap.htm

Is that what you are trying to do?

Please, let me know.

Miriam

Hi Nikos,

I think it would help members here if you could describe what, precisely, you are asking for input on? Do you have a goal the site is failing to meet? Is there something about the site that doesn't satisfy you? In what way are you hoping to improve. Provide whatever criteria you can and hopefully that will help members to give you helpful feedback.

Cheers!

Miriam

Hello Jon,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. You've asked one of those questions for which there still isn't a 100% percent satisfactory answer, but I'll do my best to provide you with some excellent resources here.

The trouble is, that unless you are doing KW research for a pretty major area, tools are often likely not to actually show you appropriate geo modifiers. However, I was recently speaking with Darren Shaw of Whitespark (awesome company) about this and will quote his advice to you, which is about as good as it gets on this topic.

Use Google Adwords tool without the location modifier, supplement with data from Google Insights, Suggest, and Related. Build a huge list.

Then, remove all location-oriented KWs from your list and set them aside temporarily.

Then, go through the list again and remove any KWs that don't trigger local search results in the search engines, or don't bring up your competitors in the search engines. Set those aside, too.

Next, go through the list again and identify all main keyword terms. These are keepers. So, if you're in the vacation rental business, then 'vacation rental' would be in this list.

Then, go through the list again and identify plurals, more descriptive terms, combined terms, etc. So, here, in the same business, terms might be 'pet friendly vacation rentals'.

At this point, you should have a really big list of main terms, plurals, longer terms, combined terms.

Now you can add back in any geo terms that came up. So, you can have Vacation Rentals Boise, Idaho, as well as Pet Friendly Vacation Rentals Boise, Idaho and so on. At this point, your list will be quite huge because for every possible geo term, there are all of the non-geo keywords you have identified that you can add the geo terms to.

Finally, if your research hasn't turned up any geo terms, it's likely that they aren't being tracked. Add them. Also, look at your analytics for any geo terms that didn't appear during your research. Add those to the list, too.

From this step by step process, you should end up with a really good list.

Also recommend you read these:

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/local-keyword-research/1787/

http://www.expand2web.com/blog/tips-for-using-google’s-keyword-research-tool-in-a-local-context/

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hello Greg,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. As Delive has mentioned, there are a number of common reasons that reviews go missing. In fact, in my recent interview of Google Places Help Forum Top Contributor, Mike Blumenthal (see: http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1128) I asked Mike what the most commonly reported issue was and he responded:

Mike: Reviews, Reviews and Review issues.

So, that's how big of a problem this is.

Right at this moment, there is a known shakeup going on. See this thread in the Google Places Help Forum and read Vanessa's response:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Places/thread?tid=30598b3a81e58555&hl=en

Read Mike Blumenthal's Google+ post on this:

https://plus.google.com/106412255733219697839/posts/1ZwuWSYZhR9?gpinv=AMIXal8te4CtF6Uf6-5c1u71P5AfxzdlluVrLJXRwTB-FzahblJnPA_m71tyIsNgZ-NG_-oxbiYrxx7N1ljZSi9fIBtHZFfRr1yhXF2Zuh4OogV36Ws2Dgc&hl=en

So, your clients' vanished reviews may well be part of this work going on. Sit tight. Don't touch anything. Monitor what's going on and keep checking the G. Places Help Forum to see if someone posts an update on this. If, after a few weeks, the reviews have not returned, it will be soon enough to suspect another problem.

Hope this advice and up-to-the-minute news helps!

Miriam

Sounds like Robert's advice was on-target. Good luck, Jakob!

Excellent! Good luck Derek.

You are very welcome, Todd. I hope this works out for you and your client.

Miriam

Hi Derek,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum.

Now, my answer to your question is going to be of the it-depends type. Does your business have:

• A physical street address (not shared, not a virtual office)?

• A local area code phone number?

• Face-to-face interaction with clientele, whether at your office or at their homes/businesses?

I ask these things because they are the requirements for inclusion in Google Places, which is pretty much the big cheese in Local. If you can say yes to all 3, then we're good to move forward. If any of those items is missing, then Google will not consider your business to be local.

Moving along, I want to mention that this is one of the most common questions I see being asked. Business owners want to know if having a local campaign will decrease their national or international presence in the eyes of Google. To date, I have only ever seen and given common sense answers to this question and have never seen:

• An official study on this, with actual stats

• An official pronouncement from Google on the subject

So, the advice I can give you here is going to be the general advice given on this topic, and should not be considered as though it is based on studies or words from the horse's mouth. The general consensus of opinion on this is that it is fine to run a modest Local SEO campaign at the same time as doing your National/International SEO.

What this might look like:

You put your complete local contact info in the footer of your website site-wide and you add it to your contact page. You devote a page or two to talking about your local office, local services, etc.. You get your business profiled in Google Places and other relevant local business directories, being sure to carefully adhere to the guidelines. You seek and manage your reviews. Finally, depending on the competitiveness of your market in your geography, you may do a little linkbuilding to give you a boost over other local competitors.

It is my belief that the percentage to which you engage in local SEO efforts should be commensurate with the percentage of local business you do. So, if 90% of your business is international and to 10% of it is local, then it makes sense for 10% of your efforts, content, linkbuilding etc. to be devoted to local. In such a case, you would NOT want to go and rewrite all of your title tags to include your city name in them or otherwise highly optimize for your local geographic terms, but a modest campaign, at least in the collective wisdom of the Local SEO community, should not harm your other rankings.

I do wish some company with good Local skills and extra time on their hands could do a thorough study of this FAQ so we could have some more visible conclusion to cite, but I hope this general advice will be helpful to you in making up you mind. Good luck!

Miriam

You are very welcome, Daniel. Good luck to you!

Hi Todd,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your good question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum.

Interestingly, your question comes in at a time when Google has just made a rather major change to their guidelines. This update happened just a week or so ago. In 2010, Google's guidelines for physical address read this way:

Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed.

So, P.O. Boxes were totally out.

Then, on Feb 10 of this year, they published this new guideline (actually, they published a new guideline on the 8th, but then changed the wording of it on the 10th):

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.

So, according to most interpretations of the new guidelines, you are now allowed to put a P.O. Box as the second line in your address. Presumably, this means that if Google's verification postcard will reach you there. Now, this just happened, and I have yet to hear from anyone that they've successfully done it, but this would be the right time for you and your client to give it a shot. For the first time, there is a chance it will work.

You can read more about the guideline updates in this good article and discussion at Mike Blumenthal's blog:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/02/10/google-places-rescinds-po-box-rule-change/

Hope this helps! The very real problem of areas of the country not receiving mail delivery is one I have blogged about in the past, and I'm glad to see Google trying to offer some type of solution. Hope it works!

Miriam

Hi David,

Thanks for clarifying this about the suite number. Interestingly, I've been seeing reports of 'suite' being changed to '#' in Places this morning. Sounds like your listing is being affected by what may be a widespread change in Google's handling of spelling/punctuation of suites. Thought you'd like to know that.

The guidelines you are quoting:

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."

To my understanding, your client does not fit this scenario. He is not a practitioner within a business. He is running a separate business than the other businesses at the same address. Now, if he were one of four partners at a legal firm, then, yes, each lawyer could have his own Place Page + the main Place Page for the firm itself. But, at least as far as I've understood, this is not your client's situation, right?

I can see how you would arrive at the understanding that separate businesses at the same address would deserve the same treatment as partners within a single business, but in my experience, this is not how Google sees it. I have to stick by my original feeling on this - your client needs to have a unique suite number in order to avoid trouble down the road. I think your fears of future merging are appropriate. In your shoes, I would tell the client that they are going to have to set the record straight now, deal with the hassle of this, and hope to get things straightened out in the coming months with a great deal of elbow grease on your part.

And, don't forget: the Google Places Help Forum is now staffed. You can always open a thread there in hopes of getting individual attention paid to your listing. Don't cross your fingers...but it is happening more and more these days.

Hope my opinion is helpful to you on this.

Miriam

Hi David,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your excellent question. I'm going to respectfully disagree with the conclusion that you should advise the client to keep going forward with the shared address. Clearly, this has worked relatively well so far, and that's the way things are with Places...you can go along with things that don't fit the guidelines for months or years...but if a penalization or merge happens, getting it fixed is truly daunting. Having a unique street address is part of the magic NAP combination that should be the basis of every Places record.

I think the client's greatest possible peril here is a merged record with the other businesses that share the office. His details, reviews and citations may get mashed up with those of the other businesses and the strength of his record may be a) sapped or b) disqualified.

My advice is to have the client set up a suite number with the post office or whatever authority is in place in his community. Definitely understand that this will involve a great deal of work in getting all of his citations/listings corrected, but it is work that will almost certainly have to be done at some point and putting it off only means more work later after more citations have accrued. And, I would much rather engage in this work now, before a negative action happens to the Place Page than after something bad has already happened.

What I am curious about is this: you state that the client has no suite number but that Google is listing one (400). Where is this coming from? Was there ever a suite number associated with the business? Could this be evidence that merging is already going on and that one of the other businesses has submitted a suite number but that it has become attached to your client's record as a result of conflation? I'm a little concerned about that.

At any rate, I would recommend that your client follow the standard procedure in this situation of getting a legal suite number assigned to him in the building to which he can receive mail. It may seem counter-intuitive to do this while things are going relatively well, but the client should be told that the happiness could end suddenly and drastically if Google takes any special notice of the situation going on in the building.

Hope these thoughts are helpful. Good luck!

Miriam

Hi Again Qlk,

So, this does sound like a bundled deal with a variety of services. Not knowing what these services in the local campaign specifically are, it's not possible to say whether they are of high or low value.

None of the other Local SEOs I queried commented with any knowledge of CBS' local pages.

I think your associate should have a talk with the CBS rep who sold them to this so that they are absolutely clear on what they are paying so much money for.

Miriam

Robert has given you good advice. I can only add that sometimes these things take awhile to actually go through. Patience is very important when dealing with Places. Don't forget, you can also start a thread at the Google Places Help Forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Places?hl=en

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your good question. I'm the Local SEO associate here in the forum. I have a few resources and thoughts to share with you and hope they will be helpful.

Read this post and discussion at Andrew Shotland's blog. It's old, but still worth reading:

http://www.localseoguide.com/geotargeting-location-by-ip-address-seo-death/

Here is a 2010 Webmaster World discussion on a similar topic:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4201741.htm

Unfortunately, I have never implemented this type of IP-based serving and if I had to do so, I'd really, really study the matter to make sure that what I did wouldn't kill my SEO/Local SEO or possibly be viewed as cloaking. It's rather daunting. I'd like to ask one of our traditional SEOs to step in to see if they have a more experienced opinion on this subject.

Now, on another note, I think you are struggling with organization here. Remember, Google views your city of location as the city to which you are most relevant. If you are in San Francisco, then 'San Francisco' is your most critical geographic keyword. Because of this, you are going to want to make the main thrust of the local optimization of your website focus on San Francisco. So, if your homepage, contact page and main content pages are geared towards San Francisco, then this is correct.

Then, if you need to drill down to talk about neighborhoods like the Sunset District, the Castro or Russian Hill, you can build out content about these, but it will always be of secondary importance to your main geo term, 'San Francisco'. You can certainly mention these neighborhoods on your homepage and elsewhere on the site if it will be helpful to users, but your main tags for your main pages and your contact page and footer should stick to San Francisco in most cases. The same rule of thumb applies if you are creating city landing pages, too.

Hope this helps, and sit tight here. I will ask one of our other SEOs to chime in regarding serving different content to different users.

Miriam

Robert,

It's very good to have your opinion on this, based on your experience, though as you say, not with this particular entity. The bottom line of this kind of deal is whether it is actually generating business for the business owner, of course, and if the QLKASDJFW's associate is left wondering whether there is any value in it, I would begin to suspect that they aren't seeing an obvious benefit.

I have put a question out to a number of my colleagues and so far have gotten one response...the person who responded (an excellent Local SEO) had not heard of this service either, and like you, Robert, he wondered about the value-added component.

I will certainly follow up if I receive more responses. Glad you liked the SEL link. That was a terrific piece. Hope you are having a nice weekend.
Miriam

Hi Again QLKASDJFW,

Quick question...are you sure your friend's monthly fee isn't including something like TV advertising, a radio ad contract or other expensive features like that? I am really having trouble understanding the pricing if all it adds up to is a listing and directory submissions. Can you get us some more info from your friends about exactly what they fee includes? I'm very curious.

Miriam

Hi Again QLKASDJFW,

I had heard some talk at the end of 2011 regarding CBS ramping up a local program, such as this blog post by Peter Krasilovsky:

http://localonliner.com/2011/12/19/cbs-goes-deeper-with-local-content-via-examiner-com-deal/

I haven't had time to look into exactly what they are doing, but frankly, I am shocked by the price you were quoted. $1500? A month? I can't think of ANY service that would be worth a price tag like that, and exactly as you say, you can pay UBL or Localeze a fraction of that for automated local directory submission. I don't have all of the facts about what CBS is offering, so I'm going to decline to make a broad pronouncement on this, but the price tag alone has definitely made me say, "what the heck?" and I think reading Robert's story is a very good idea.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I can't find any documentation from any of the sources I commonly read either praising or condemning this offering. I do know it's not listed among the top 50 citations sources in Myles Anderson's 2011 Search Engine Land article:

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

I'm going to ask around amongst my colleagues on this and see if any of them has an educated opinion on CBS Local Pages to share.

Again, very good question, and Robert, thanks for sharing your frustrating story.

Hi Jared,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your good question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to understand and answer your query. Here are my thoughts:

• Firstly, don't trust SEO companies who cold call you. That's just one for the ages

• Secondly, here are Google's complete written guidelines for categories:

Categories: Provide at least one category from the suggestions provided in the form as you type. Aim for categories that are specific, but brief.

• Categories should say what your business is (e.g. Hospital), not on what it does (e.g. Vaccinations) or things it sells (e.g. Sony products or printer paper). This information can be added in your description or as custom attributes.
• Categories should not contain location-based information (for example, Dog Walker Los Angeles is not permitted).
• Only one category is permitted per entry field. Do not “stuff” entry fields with multiple categories.

• Thirdly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with picking categories that represent your practice areas on your Google Place Page, provided they meet the above guidelines of saying what your business IS instead of what it does. So, this means you are a DUI Lawyer...not just 'DUI'. This distinction is important, and I believe the categories you have given as examples will need to be edited so that they list you as 'bankruptcy attorney, personal injury attorney' etc.  *I strongly recommend that at least the first two categories you choose be Google's pre-set choices. If you'd like to see what possible pre-set category choices there are, use Mike Blumenthal's Google Places Category tool at:

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

Be sure that your categories meet all of the guidelines and that you have listed no more than 5, and you should be fine.

• Thirdly, I have no idea why the cold-calling SEO said it was 'black hat' to optimize a local campaign for more than one area of practice. This is not logical. Perhaps there was a communication breakdown, or perhaps the caller simply didn't know what they were talking about. At any rate, it is very common for local business owners, be they dentists, lawyers or restaurant owners, to have different areas of specialization, and while it isn't okay to create a separate Place Page for each area of specialization, it's perfectly acceptable to categorize yourself in a variety of ways, so long as you are adhering to the guidelines.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Dear Russel,

Thank you for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. I should start by mentioning that there are some differences in Local depending on the country in which you are operating. You may need to look for extra tips specific to your country (I'm in North America) but here are the essential steps a local business needs to take.

1. It is critical before embarking on a local campaign that you understand that the heart of local in NAP (name, address, phone number). Nearly everything is dependent upon the consistency with which you publicize your legal business name, physical address and local area code phone number. You only qualify as a local business if you have these three things (NAP). Whether you are on your website or off your website listing yourself in local business directories, you must consistently list your NAP in all places without variation.

2. Create an excellent, strong website with terrific content that has been written from a geographic perspective. In other words, if you are a dentist, you will be writing about the city and state you are in as well as the services you offer. You want a great homepage, great service pages, great city landing pages if you have more than one physical location and a strong contact page. Make sure that your title tags, meta, alt tags are locally-optimized and make sure that your complete NAP is in the header, footer or side navigation on every single page of your website. Make sure that your complete NAP is the first thing you put on your Contact Page.

3. Once you have your great locally-optimized website up and running, you will begin the process of getting your business profiled in the various local business indexes. In most countries, the most important of these is Google Places. It is absolutely vital that you read Google's Places Quality Guidelines and not violate any of them. Here is the link:

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

You are allowed one listing per physical location, unless you run something like a medical clinic, in which case each doctor may have his own listing in addition to one listing for the whole office. Do not attempt to keyword stuff your Place Page or misrepresent your physical location. Pay special attention to each of the rules in the guidelines. Failure to comply 100% with the guidelines can lead to penalization or banning of your account. Each of the different local directories has their own set of rules that you must acquaint yourself with, and there are many, many places you can list your business. In the USA, many people choose to create their Google Place Page and then pay either Localeze.com or Universal Business Listings to automatically submit their business to a large number of local directories. Or, you can choose not to pay these companies and do it manually yourself. Here is an excellent post from Myles Anderson at Search Engine Land regarding the top 50 citation sources for the US and UK:

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

4. Beyond inclusion in the major local business indexes mentioned in step 3, there may be other niche directories specific to your industry in which inclusion would be valuable. For example, if your business restores vintage cars, there might be some vintage car directories where you would want to be included. These niche resources you will need to hunt for yourself, depending on your industry.

5. In addition to getting profiled in directories, local business owners must also tackle the subject of user reviews. You will want to be listed at review sites and you will want to actively manage your reviews. Yelp is very major in the USA. TripAdvisor is international for travel-related sites. Essentially, you want to keep track of when and where people are reviewing you and then, if possible, thank them for their praise or attempt to help them feel better if they were dissatisfied with your service. Here is my oft-cited article on which review sites allow you which powers of response:

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=502

It is essential that you develop a healthy approach to dealing with negative reviews. You must learn to respond gracefully and wisely so that you don't escalate a situation from bad to worse. There are numerous good articles out there on the web about responding well to negative reviews. Apart from responding to voluntary reviews, you will want to put a process in place for encouraging reviews from your happy customers. But remember - do not write fake reviews for your own business, do not pay any marketer to write fake reviews for your business and do not pay any marketer to post reviews that have been gathered from real customers. Reviews must ALWAYS be posted by the user directly - never by you or anyone else.

6. Once you've got all this going, what you do next depends on the type and competitiveness of your industry. In some small towns with low population and low competition, you may never need to do any more than what's already been covered, but for any business that has to compete a little harder, your next options might included beginning a blog on your site to improve your content and keep it fresh, getting involved in Social Media, video marketing, email marketing, linkbuilding or other forms of marketing. Don't forget, local businesses often need to make plans for offline marketing as well. What you do depends on how hard you need to work to get to the top. Lots of choices! I hope this response will get you started in local with the right understanding and a pro-active mindset.

• Miriam

Hi Ayetti,
Josh has given you one resource. I can give you some more.

Here is an excellent article by Myles Anderson at Search Engine Land on the top 50 citation sources for both the USA and UK:

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

Also, read David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors Report from 2011. This is the premiere survey in the Local Search Industry. Good comments and data about citations/directories there:

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

Finally, go to GetListed.org (also a David Mihm product) and go through the process of entering your legal business name and zip code to see what results you get. Then read through the further information on the site about other places to list your business.

You essentially have 2 choices - to do all submissions manually, or, to create your Google Place Page manually and then do a paid submission via either Localeze of Universal Business Listing. If you go the paid route, they submit the business to a ton of directories (can't remember the exact number off the top of my head but it's quite a few). If you do it manually, you have more exact control over where you list yourself and the details you provide on each listing.

Then, beyond the regular local business indexes, there may be important industry-related directories where it would be good for your specific type of business to be listed. Those you will have to hunt for yourself. For example, if your products were Made-in-the-USA, you might want to find some little directories that focus specifically on that.

Hopefully, these resources will be helpful to you. Good luck!
Miriam

Hi Again, No, I don't believe it makes any difference whether your hCard is in the header, footer or nav, so long as it is sitewide.

Good to hear how hard you're working on this. Way to go! I like to use hCard in 2 places: in the footer site-wide and on the contact page. If you have multiple physical locations, you could also use it on each city landing page.

Hello Tyler!

What an interesting question! Not one I've seen asked before and I don't have an authoritative answer for you. I did find a couple of mentions of this out on the web.

Here's one from http://www.tastyplacement.com/6-best-free-local-business-directories-for-backlinks-customers-hits

4. Yelp.com. Yelp is popular (a fair number of visitors) and its pages rank well in the search engines. So, a listing here might earn you some supplemental results in a Google search. It’s review-based, and there are a lot of “interactive” features you’ll want to skip if you just want to list your business. Valuable and free. One limitation: Yelp does not give dofollow (a link that passes valuable pagerank to the target site) backlinks.

And a discussion at Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/jburq/acquiring_citations_from_directories_yelp_hotfrog/

I tend to think of the value of sites like Yelp as being in their quality as a citation and their ability to host conversation (hopefully positive) about your business. I am going to ask one of our super SEOs to step in and give you an opinion on this. It's a very good question!

Miriam

Hi Joshua,

I was speaking from a Local SEO perspective, but I didn't make that clear. Sorry about that. You write:

"I just have a feeling that Google may see the subfolder landing pages as an attempt to game the Local listings"

Now, typically, when dealing with local clients with multiple locations, I simply create a unique page for each of the locations - just a file, and no need to build out with subdomains or subfolders. It sounds like perhaps you are dealing with a client with more complex needs than this?

I have searched to no avail for any reliable documentation which states that Google would view either subdomains or subfolders with suspicion or favor. I have never seen any discussion of a preference on their part. I'm not sure anyone but a Google Places rep would be able to offer you a reliable answer on this

A final note - be aware that when you designate any URL other than the homepage URL of a website as being appropriate on a Place Page, Google's display is likely to show only the homepage URL, but when you click on the link, it takes you to the page specified.

I'm sorry not to have a better answer to your question. I guess my answer is that there is an absence of data that Google would view either subfolders or subdomains as spammy in relation to Places.

Hi Josh!
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. You have gotten some excellent feedback on this thread so far. To recap your original question, you are asking whether it's better to use sub-domains or sub-folders for city landing pages.

According to Google Places Help Forum Top Contributor, Archie Watt, there is simply no difference from and SEO perspective. I have never seen any data to the contrary. It's somewhat akin to the concept that Google doesn't care what language your website is coded in so long as they can crawl it thoroughly. Here is a thread on this topic at the Google Places Help Forum:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=3f77dd134ba635b2&hl=en

My advice - do what makes most sense for the user to use and webmaster to manage.

Best of luck!
Miriam

Hi Gary!

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I second Vahe's excellent response. It is in the client's best interest that you help them set up their own account, and be sure that they have in writing what their email/pass is for it. Chances are, they will work with many different marketers over time, but their properties should always belong solely to them.

Cheers!

Miriam

Great, Robert! I'm glad my comment was useful in this way and I hope putting it in writing will at least give you the peace of mind that you are offering written guidance to the clients on this. Your care for their welfare is evident and I applaud that!