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Hi Cyrus,
You might like to check out a couple of our Whiteboard Fridays that relate to your question:
https://moz.com/blog/optimizing-for-rankbrain-whiteboard-friday
https://moz.com/blog/blog-post-length-frequency
And also look at the discussion in the comments on this blog post post; it's a good one: https://moz.com/blog/10-things-do-not-affect-rankings
Hope this helps!
Yep, something seems to be afoot, Phil.
And: https://www.semrush.com/sensor/?date=2018-05-24&db=US&category=
And we're so glad to have you here, Ed!
Hey Oleg,
Ed has provided an excellent answer, and while I don't recommend outsourcing linkbuilding, I do highly recommend that you check out ZipSprout's sponsorship finder product: https://zipsprout.com/
It's a great way to help you build local relationships. Recommended reading: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-local-sponsorship-marketing
Hi Luke,
I'm sorry ... I've never used doofinder. I think you might find this article from Yoast on internal search engines helpful, as a staring point for evaluating quality: https://yoast.com/internal-search/
And I hope you'll get some more feedback from our community with likes and dislikes of different options.
Hi Ali!
H1s aren't really viewed as a strong ranking factor anymore. They just don't correlate very clearly with improved rankings (see: https://moz.com/blog/which-page-markup-tags-still-matter-for-seo-whiteboard-friday) though they provide VERY important signals to human visitors. I'm not sure why the site you are optimizing would have this tag at the bottom of the page. That's not really standard, so I'd advise rethinking this usage, for the comfort of users.
Regarding SEO, in general, if you've identified a top phrase your client needs to be ranking for, yes, you definitely want it in the tags and text of most important pages. But, beyond this, modern marketing is moving towards the understanding of building topical authority to help you rank for a variety of interrelated terms.
So, for example, let's say that the most important phrase to your client is "organic flower seeds". Of course, you'll have this phrase in your tags and text, but you must figure out how to move beyond simple on-page optimization if you want the company's brand to become authoritative in Google's eyes as relevant to this subject. So, in addition to simply having a page called "organic flower seeds", you'll be striving to:
Cover everything that can possibly relate to this topic that customers need to know. Why choose organic seeds? What does "organic" mean? How do you plant organic flower seeds? How do you know how many seeds you needs? How much do you need to water them so they germinate? How do you package your seeds to keep them fresh for successive plantings? Etc, etc.
Build recognition of your brand as synonymous with your most important search terms. In other words, I say "Mexican-style fast food" and you say "Taco Bell". I say "organic flower seeds, and you say "Seeds of Change". Linkbuilding, word of mouth marketing, old-school PR, content dev, paid advertising and a ton of other elements factor into becoming an authority. Google seems to be particularly swayed by this, as you will see very large brands getting away with very poor practices and still ranking, while small, unknown companies struggle. So, you've got to aim to become as "known" as you can, so that you become one of Google's go-to resources for queries relating to that phrase you've identified.
Hope this helps!
Hello Alexander!
What a cool business you have! And barn doors have definitely become the "in" thing. I'm looking at your website right now. I'm going to recommend that you hire a very good SEO company to do a one-time audit for you, Alexander. If two years of effort have not resulted in you seeing the rankings you believe you deserve and know you need, then you are almost certainly falling behind in your profit goals. While I can't match here in the forum what a real audit could do for you, I want to give you a couple of first impressions in case they are of help. Your products are really beautiful, but I see some things I'm not liking on your website, including:
The moving masthead, that when clicked on, makes your branding disappear and shows wood. This is likely slowing down your site speed, and doing anything that makes branding disappear alarms me. Never choose fancy features over usability. Never.
The feature that shows numbers loading between page clicks. I'm not sure if the idea there was to make things look fast, but, in fact, it's just drawing my attention to the fact that I'm having to wait for something to load ... even if I don't have to wait long, I feel like I'm waiting.
Lack of text on your homepage. It's a common mistake of visually-oriented businesses to think they shouldn't have text on their homepage. I know that minimalism can be appealing, but it's also giving you almost nothing to tell search engines or people, and nothing to optimize.
The product descriptions on your website show that you're taking time to be thorough, but I recommend some polishing here. I think it's awesome that the site is selling "German quality", but if the text is in English, the English needs to be error-free to ensure it's meeting Google's quality guidelines.
The navigation may not be ideally usable. I don't know how I did it, but I got onto a page somehow that I couldn't get back to the main site from. It was a dead-end. I'm also finding the font color of the horizontal menu a bit hard to read. I didn't notice it at first.
So, this is a start. A real audit will look at everything, but at a glance, I'm seeing some areas in which you could improve. Wishing you so much luck with your business. I really like your inventory!
Yes, as Casey says, the accuracy of GMB Insights is pretty questionable. I don't think it's a case of Google intentionally skewing those numbers. It could even be a longstanding bug. The numbers I see make no sense.
Interesting discussion of this here, if you'd like to read more on this topic: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2017/05/06/how-accurate-is-google-my-business-insights/
Hi There!
This is an older post, but there are some good suggestions about foreign language keyword research:
https://moz.com/blog/so-you-want-to-know-about-foreign-language-seo-mozinar-q-a
Hope it helps!
Hi Lucywrites,
That's a great question. The best advice I can give is to:
Qualify the type of traffic you want. Traffic, in and of itself, is fine. But, traffic that leads to a goal is much better. If you get 1,000 visitors to your blog, what do you want them to do besides reading your content? Sign up for a newsletter? Make a purchase? Join a community? Fund you? Ask yourself: Is my content bringing qualified traffic to me, enabling me to meet my specific goals?
Discover the needs and desires of the audience for whom you are writing. What are they interested in? What bothers them? What amuses them? What would make their lives richer, more interesting, more successful, happier?
Then, look at your competitors to discover what types of content they have developed to fulfill this audience. Do you see ways you can go one better than your competitors? Is there opportunity they've left on the table? Are you a more interesting writer, more educated, more thorough, more insightful, better at graphics? What can you do that your competitors aren't?
Begin to build relationships in your industry/geography. When my favorite bloggers create something really good, I'm almost sure to mention it socially, and I might even include their content in the newsletters I write. When I write something really good, my favorite industry influencers often do the same for me. Figure out who you admire in your industry and be generous in sharing their very best content with your own circle of influence. Over time, perhaps you can get to know your favorite writers, and they, in turn, can get to know you and come to depend on you for quality publication of a certain kind.
Hope these suggestions help!
Hi Wick!
I'm sure our Moz Local support staff can get to the bottom of this with you, looking at your account. Please, email them at help@moz.com. You should receive a reply quickly!
Hey Jack,
I recommend that you tell the client that the first step is the create a really good landing page on the website for each of the locations. You can then link from each citation set you build to its respective landing page. The alternative is to link citations for both locations to the homepage, but statistics indicate this may decreased conversions.
So, yes, you build a unique citation set for each location.
In terms of linkbuilding, if the locations are in the same city, it's likely your links will be relevant to both, but if they are in different cities, then it would be smart to begin developing relationships in each locale that can lead to good, local links for each branch.
You should be doing Schema markup for each of the locations, yes. I recommend you read Schema expert David Deering's explanation on this page: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/lULikkVHVRo
Regarding on-page SEO, the difficulty typically lies in the fact that a business that formerly had a single location (and optimized their whole website around the single location) now has two of them. You're left asking if you should just add in the second city name to optimize core pages (home, about, etc.). With just two location, you can often go this route (e.g. "Serving Dallas and Sugar Land" instead of just "Serving Dallas" in your tags and text). Then, you'll have to see how far that approach gets you with the second city. More often than not, though, you'll come back to the concept that you really do need a unique landing page for each locale so that you have at least one, very focused, fully optimized page on the website for each branch. This article can help you get going with this: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
The client you are marketing is at a turning point if they've just recently expanded. Now is the ideal time to consider their strategy, to determine to create strong landing pages instead of duplicative/weak ones, to base their citation building on the existence of these well-created pages and to go forward on a strong, clear path, instead of giving only a half-effort now, only to have to come back and correct it later.
Hope this helps!
Another thing I noticed about the original search is that there is heavy filtering going on at the automatic zoom level of the map. Once you zoom in, tons of other companies appear. So, this could point to Google lacking confidence in these results.
I found this pack interesting enough to share with Mike Blumenthal, who smartly pointed out the Google has no category for "drone company". Just a theory, but this could possibly be leading Google to have to rely on the signal of what is in the business title, and the company ranking #1 has added the keyword "drone" to their title (though it doesn't appear to be part of their legal business name, and is, of course, then not allowed). So, this could have something do do with the mysteriousness of this pack.
To see the centroid of a city, look it up in Google and click on the map. The spot where Google has placed the city name is the centroid. In this case, the centroid of LA is in the extreme east of the city borders. The company we're looking at lists no address on its GMB listing or website. The website just shows a map of LA. The GMB listing describes the business as being in Glendale, which is a bit to the north of the centroid. You could compare this to the revealed locations of the other two companies and see what you think. It's a good question you've raised.
At any rate, there seems to be a lack of Google confidence in these results.
Hey, that is a good mystery pack! Something seems odd about it. Do you notice that even when you click through on the map, there are only 3 companies, total, showing in the local finder view? Are there really only 3 drone companies in LA? I find that very hard to believe. For some reason I can't identify, Google is acting like it only knows of 3 such companies that match the query. I was expecting to see dozens of them upon clicking through to the local finder view. So, something is odd there.
Hi SEO1805,
Without seeing the actual result, this is shooting in the dark, but I'd look at filters (Possum), factors like domain authority, and the possibility of spam either positively or negatively impacting the results.
If you can share the SERP you're looking at, that might help us dig down a bit deeper on this.
I also recommend doing a complete competitive analysis between the site ranking #1 and the one you are marketing. (See: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit)
If there's a local component to the business, building real-world community relationships can be the best way to earn links. For example, joining local business organizations, sponsoring community projects, teams and events, or hosting events.
Good question! So, replying to reviews doesn't directly correlate with increased rankings, if this is how you define SEO. But, reviews have a massive impact on your reputation and your revenue. And both of those elements then indirectly impact your SEO, in terms of what people are saying about you (and linking to) regarding your brand, and the financial picture you achieve, which enables you to invest more in your SEO. So, think of it as a circle, if you can.
Given the importance of closely managing your reputation, owner responses have become a critical vehicle for contributing to how consumers feel about your company. Negative reviews, in particular, need responses to defend your reputation and revenue, and also, to keep existing customers happy instead of having to spend so much more in replacing them with new customers.
So, owner responses do not = any known, direct ranking benefits.
But, owner responses definitely do = core benefits to the health of your brand.
You might like to read: https://moz.com/blog/mastering-owner-response-quintet-google-my-business-reviews
Good morning!
Great question and good discussion happening here. I have two recommendations for you:
Harness all possible features of the Google Knowledge Panel, including description, posts, photos, reviews and review responses, Q&A, etc. Set up UTM tracking wherever you can to assess which particular activities and features are driving traffic and conversions. Google is slowly but surely on a path the replace your website as the interactive level your customers experience for more and more searches. While your website still definitely matters, viewing the Knowledge Panel as a secondary, quite powerful mini-website is appropriate in 2018. Experiment and analyze.
Focus on in-store experiences that drive consumer content (reviews) and loyalty. Take advantage of the fact that, for many businesses, Google is still driving new customers their way, basically for free, except in those verticals where free packs are being replaced with paid packs. If Google gives you a customer once, it's up to your in-store staff to turn them into a repeat customer. Emphasize building a loyal consumer base now, while Google leads remain "free", as a preventative measure against the future in which less and less of these leads will be free. What can your business do to create the kind of consumer experiences that win customers for the long term, and prompt word-of-mouth recommendations to their network of family and friends?
Hope these two ideas help!
Good morning!
Thanks so much for bringing your question to the community. This is what I'd recommend:
Instead of having a landing page for each city + a contact page for each city, I suggest you combine them. The landing page should contain the contact information, as well as the content. No need to make visitors go to two different pages. So, simplify here, and 301 redirect the 10 contact pages to the 10 city landing pages.
Definitely don't recommend building out yet another set of pages for this additional content you've described. Make the single landing page for each city as comprehensive and unique as possible. Put all of the relevant content about your services in a given city on that city's landing page.
It is important to avoid weak, duplicate pages, for sure. Hopefully, you can tell different stories on the different pages, even if the services you offer are the same. Some good ways to diversify the narrative on a landing page include showcasing your projects in the city and including reviews from customers in the city (both text and video w/transcript). You might find this post helpful in building very strong and substantially unique city landing pages for your business: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
Hope this helps, and please feel free to ask any further questions.
Glad to help. A seemingly weak competitor could hold out good hope for your client to be able to surpass them once you've identified every possible metric that could be contributing to Google choosing them over your client. Good luck with the audit, and if you're successful, it would be really great if you could follow up here and share with our community what you did 
Hi Karma,
Thanks for sharing the URL. Notes for you follow:
(here are a few more random things I noticed while looking at your client)
The profile photo representing the business in the Google Knowledge Panel is of a Lutheran Church, rather than of your business. I'm not sure if the idea here was to show a sample of company work, but there's a chance Google could be confused by this image. I would make every effort to change it out for an image of the actual business.
When I look at streetview in Google Maps, I'm not able to see the business. It could be behind trees or something, but the location Google is dropping me in is showing a parking lot with what appears to be a furniture store in it. Where is the business in relationship to this? Do they have street level signage? Is this a public-facing location that customers come to in order to do face-to-face business with the company?
I notice that 1/2 of this brand's Google-based reviews are from first-time reviewers (folks who have never left a review for any other business than this one). Are you confident that the client is strictly adhering to Google's review policies? A majority of one-off reviews can sometimes be a signal of review spam.
Hope this helps, and that taking the time to do a local-specific competitive audit will help you start to form a plan for the client to surpass their competitor. Best of luck!
Hi Angela,
Could you offer a bit more background on this as to who made Schema a requirement for dentists? Schema is an optional technology, typically, so I'm trying to understand the circumstances in which you're hearing that it's mandatory. Thanks!
Sure thing! If for any reason, that doesn't work out for you, please feel free to come back here.
Hey There,
I recommend you reach out to GMB support on Twitter with a link to the listing, explaining that it's a stand-alone location, not located within another business.
What a kind offer, Ben. Hopefully, if Bcallegary hasn't already taken steps on this step on their own, they will see your post here with such a nice offer to help.
Good Morning!
Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. Without looking at your actual client (totally fine if you're not permitted to share) the best I can recommend is that you do a competitive audit between your client and their top competitor. This post will walk you through the process:
https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit
Yes, the spam backlinks and and pages could have hurt the company, especially if they are small, and it can take time for your fixes to go into effect, but local rankings are made up of SO MANY signals, you really have to treat each business on a case-by-case basis to discover what is holding them, specifically, back. I'd recommend doing the audit, and putting the metrics of your client side by side with the business you see doing best for the desired keyword phrase. Compare and see if you can identify your client's weaknesses vs. the strengths of the high-ranking competitor.
And, while you are doing this, keep in mind that local pack rankings are not static. Due to the factor of proximity, the rankings a customer at one end of town sees will not be the rankings a customer at the other end of town sees. So, at best, you can get a "sense of" how your client appears to rank at city or zip code level, but you can't get a set-in-stone sense of how he ranks at a personal level without actually driving around his town, checking mobile and desktop rankings to see how they are altered by your physical presence.
Good morning!
Please reach out directly to our Moz Local support staff at help@moz.com
They'll be able to look at your account and offer you customized assistance
Good morning, Wonderdome!
Great question. Very briefly:
Increasing internal links typically depends on having a vision for how the content on your website is related. Let's say you run a website selling gardening tools. You write an article about the importance of weeding around seedlings when planting a native plant garden. It's natural, in this case, to link from your page about weeding, to your page selling a stirrup hoe, which is a tool for weeding. Look at the total picture of your website content and find the relationships between topics. Linking to highlight these relationships is meant to improve user experience on your website, letting a visitor know that if they are reading the page about weeding in native plant gardens, your stirrup hoe is a really helpful tool for this. By finding the relationships, you will be enriching the navigational architecture of your website.
Increasing links pointing to your site from external sources typically revolves around two things. The first scenario relates to links you earn based on merit, without having to ask for them. Let's say you write the best article on the web about planting native California roses in the garden. You may find that the usefulness of the article earns links on its own, perhaps from garden enthusiast organizations, gardening blogs, native plant societies, and even government sites talking about water conservation through native gardening. Over time, if your article is truly useful, it may earn some very good links from third parties.
The second scenario involves actively asking for links. Let's say you're going to give a talk at a local university about native plant gardening. You could ask the university to link to your website from their upcoming events page. You could ask the local newspaper to do the same. You could ask local gardening clubs to do the same from their websites. In fact, you could create a piece of static content that summarizes your presentation and offer it to third parties and a resource that might be of help to their readers. You could earn some links from that, if what you create is good enough. I'm emphasizing this, because unless you have something of note to publicize, it's not going to be easy to get people to link to you. So, merit is still involved here, but the difference is that you are actively asking people to notice what you are doing, whether that's an event you're participating in, a video you've created, an eBook you've published, an article you've written, a graphic you've created, or what have you.
On a final note, if your business model is local (like a retail store), you'll also be building some links on local business directories like YP.com, Foursquare, Bing, etc. You'll be creating business listings on these platforms that link to your website. But if your business model is virtual (like an e-commerce site), then building links on most directories is typically a waste of your time.
If linkbuilding is new to you, please do check out the section on this exact topic in our Beginner's Guide to SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links
Hope this helps!
Thanks for coming back with further questions on this. Unfortunately, changing tags and maps doesn't make your text content "different enough" to lessen the concern that Google may view what you are doing as duplicative.
Basically, your business model is a local business with a single location. If you wish to gain organic visibility for your services beyond that single location, it's true that developing landing pages for these other locations is a best practice ... only provided that the content of them is actually useful and largely unique. You are in a similar scenario to a plumber, who has a single location from which he offers a set of services to a variety of neighboring towns. His Local SEO is going to be anchored to his city of location, but his organic SEO can branch out to represent his work in the other towns he serves. There is nothing spammy about him featuring this work in his service cities, but unless he has something unique to say about his work there, he's going to end up with a weak site burdened with duplicate content clearly designed for search engines instead of for the assistance of consumers.
I recommend taking a look at a blog post I wrote here a couple of years ago that offers tips for creating strong, diversified landing pages in a scenario much like yours:
https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
You will need to dig deep into your resources to create this type of useful, unique content.
As for your competitors, your question is reasonable. If Google doesn't like thin, duplicate content, why do we see people getting away with it? To this, my answer is:
People were getting away with all kinds of things the day before an update like Penguin or Panda. They woke up the following day to a changed world in which their lack of effort was no longer being rewarded.
If you've realized that your local industry is riddled with poor quality content, see this as your opportunity to beat out lazier competitors. If you deliver the superior experience, it may give you a very valuable edge, while also safeguarding your reputation and rankings against Google filters and penalties in future.
Hope this helps!
Hi Andrew,
I'm looking at the page again trying to make sure what you mean by product descriptions. Looking at the page you've linked to, I see an accommodation search, followed by a brief area of text, followed by TripAdvisor content.
When you mention products, do you mean the accommodation search?
What is the main term you are hoping to rank the page for?
Are other pages like this on the website ranking well for their most important term?
When did you publish this page?
Hey There,
The answer from Serge on this older thread pretty much tells it like it is, when it comes to sitelinks:
https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-get-sitelinks-in-organic-serps
Good morning, Andrew!
Is any of the content of this page unique to the page and to your business? I'm seeing that quite a bit of the page is TripAdvisor's content. Is this an affiliate site?
Seconding the opinions of Clive and EGOL here. And, particularly want to highlight EGOL's point about not imitating competitors' poor practices. It might help to view these competitors as being just one Google action away from getting dinged for this strategy.
It seems like the challenge for you here is to create something that helps customers understand the geography of your services, without simply duplicating the same page and swapping out city names. I would recommend putting some creative resources behind figuring out how to meet this challenge.
Hey Greenery,
Congratulations to you and your client on what must be a very successful marketing strategy! You've ended up with an embarrassment of riches, and that's not a bad thing, but it's certainly understandable that the client doesn't want to waste resources fielding queries from unqualified leads.
From the list of actions you've taken, I can see how thoughtful and thorough you've been in trying to limit unwanted calls. I can add just a few suggestions:
Put something in the sitewide masthead stating "Serving Cities A,B and C"
Include something similar in your calls-to-action in the main body of the pages. Something like "We'll come to you in A,B, and C. Call (XXX)XXX-XXXX today!"
Alternatively, you and the client might want to look at this scenario in another way. Consider:
Is the client getting enough interest from non-local clients to indicate that the should establish a second locale? Not it another state, perhaps, but in a neighboring region of the state? If there is tremendous demand for his service, could this indicate that it's time to consider expanding?
If expanding is out, is there an opportunity here for lead generation? What if your client formed a trusted partner network to send out-of-area customers to a trusted provider? Could this yield benefits that would justify the effort? Monetary benefits? Professional benefits? Social benefits?
I'm just saying, before you turn those ineligible customers away, you might want to look at this interesting situation from a creative angle to see if getting "too much of a good thing" could actually be parlayed into something positive for the business and consumers.
Hi Adam,
Good for you for learning something new and trying to act on it. Yes, it's critical that each business directly controls its GMB listings. The key reason for this is that client/agency relationships end, and it places a big burden on the client if the agency is the one who "owns" the GMB listings. It's just not in the client's best interest. There has also been a theory over the years that GMB listings created under the company's email extension (vs. a third party extension) are more trusted by Google, but it has been quite some time since I heard anyone mention this nuance.
At any rate, yes, you want to get ownership transferred from your agency to the client, to protect them, and also to protect your business from the headache of having to do this later when clients move on.
Here's Google's guide to transferring ownership: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3415281?hl=en
Hey Thomas!
It's good on a thread like this for the community to provide a variety of recommendations. I'm glad you shared what you like about ReputationStacker. Always helpful to have multiple choices!
Thanks for the details. So, if you have at least one physical store in each of the provinces, the best bet would be to create a landing page for each of these stores, and put content on it that uniquely serves that region, including but not limited to:
Name, Address, Phone,
Thorough driving directions
Photos
Reviews from customers for that store
Links to your local listings social profiles for that store
Content highlighting unique factors about that store (regional inventory, events, specials, tips for the region, etc.)
By creating these landing pages with each of your stores as the focus, and by ensuring that most of the content on them is unique, you should not have any concerns about duplication.
However, if there are regions you are targeting where you lack a physical store, that's a different scenario. If that's the scenario, what are your goals for those location-less regions, and what would be the reason for serving them different content for one region than you would for another?
Hello There!
Is your business model local (with physical locations in these provinces and face-to-face contact with customers) or virtual (like an e-commerce company)?
Hi There!
Good question. Basically, what you are embarking on here is the optimization of a local business website. The term for this is Local SEO (local search engine optimization).
At the outset of your work, there is one very important concept for you to understand about how Google views local businesses like your physical therapy office:
Google views local businesses as being relevant to local users. So, if you are physically located in Fort Myers, the bulk of your efforts will go towards ranking in Google's local search engine results (local packs) for users who are either physically located in Fort Myers, or for users who include the term "Fort Myers" in their search phrase. You are highly unlikely to rank in the local results for Cape Coral or any other city, regardless of what keywords you use on your website.
Because of Google's historic bias towards physical location, some businesses are frustrated because they cannot rank in the local packs for any city other than their city of location. This is especially so for service area businesses, like plumbers or house painters, who travel from a single city to a variety of other cities to serve customers. But, your business is not a service area business, if your patients all come to your office in Fort Myers for treatment. Typically, your only relationship to Cape Coral or any other nearby city is that some patients may live there and come to you, but this is unlikely to be a good enough reason to mention these additional cities on your website. If you were a house painter, you could authentically create a page on your website about the houses you've painted in Cape Coral, and you could attempt to gain some organic (not local pack) rankings based on the optimization of this type of landing page. But in your case, you likely don't have anything to say about Cape Coral that would make it sensible or authentic to create such a page.
Are there any exceptions to this? Can brick-and-mortar businesses ever optimize for cities beyond their city of location and can it do any good? The answer is: sometimes. If it's essential for you to build brand awareness in cities beyond your city of location, you have to determine if you can build a real relationship between your business and these satellite cities. For example, a doctor could mention his hospital privileges in Cities B,C and D. He could host a sports medicine seminar in city B, attend a conference in City C, and volunteer at a yoga weekend in City D. He could then write about his involvement in these communities and promote himself socially. He could also sponsor teams, organizations, and events in neighboring cities and earn links and mentions from these activities. So, yes, there are some cases in which a brick-and-mortar business in City A can build content and awareness around additional cities, but it should never just come down to putting a list of cities in a chunk on his homepage. This isn't good SEO, and is actually frowned on by Google.
Summing up: as a local business, you'll be focusing the bulk of your efforts on your city of location in hopes of gaining local rankings for it. If you need to build brand awareness in additional cities, strategies exist where real-world relationships exist, and the goal of this work would be organic, rather than local, rankings. The alternative is to invest in PPC campaigns that target neighboring communities.
Hope this helps!
Happy to have you here, Lior!
While you're diving into this topic, you might like to read:
https://whitespark.ca/blog/the-json-ld-markup-guide-to-local-business-schema/
Hello There!
I believe what you are referencing is the red "Duplicate Address" label in the Status column under Locations in your GMB dashboard. Google uses this label if there are two listings at the same address, and I know, it's frustrating!
I highly recommend reading this recent tutorial by Joy Hawkins on this topic: https://www.sterlingsky.ca/resolve-duplicate-addresses-google-business/
I think you'll find it's just what the doctor ordered!
Hi Onitamara!
Good discussion going on here. I'll add a few big picture thoughts:
How much content (whether in the form of pages or posts) the therapist will want to build should be determined by 3 things:
If she likes to write, this is a good start, and if she is a good writer, it's an even better one. And, of course, she needs to have the time.
The true usefulness of the content will determine how much it impacts both the lives of the readers and the financial bottom line of the therapist. The true usefulness will also gradually impact Google's perception of the website as an authoritative source on its topics.
The happy medium being aimed for is to publish enough content to attain the bookings and rankings the therapist ideally desires, but not going overboard beyond that. So, for example, if the therapist is located in a small, rural area, she may discover that writing two blog posts a month is all it takes for her to become competitively ranked and to have a full patient roster. But, if her practice is in a metropolis, the effort she'll need to put into being ranked and booked is likely to be much, much greater. Because of this, it's smart to assess the competitive landscape the therapist is entering, and to implement as much tracking as possible to help determine how much content (pages or posts) is needed to meet goals, and how that content is assisting in those goals being met.
Finally, as Ed is mentioning, it's important that your most important pages are the easiest to find, by means of your internal linking structure. In other words, the therapist's page on "Couples Therapy" will likely be one you're internally linking to more prominently than a single article she wrote about "How to Apologize Sincerely" or something like that.
In the long run, though, the decision to create a blog or a library of static articles should be based on the therapist's desire to share, the need to use content as a vehicle for client education and conversion, and the unique competitive landscape in which the practice is operating.
So glad to help, and wishing you good luck!
Good, Ed. I was sure you, specifically, understood this, but was concerned that others might not understand the distinction between being legally named something, and keyword stuffing the GMB business title field.
Hi Jon,
Unless Yelp's policies have changed, I believe they only offer bulk management of features to paying customers. If you are paying to advertise on Yelp, I'd recommend contacting a rep there to see what's possible.
Good Morning, and good question!
Yes, Google is always testing, and results fluctuations may have nothing to do with whether or not they find you worthy. For example, when the Possum update rolled out, Google simply filtered out thousands of businesses that happened to share categories and be physically near one another. Then the Hawk update happened and they dialed this filter back a bit. So, in a case like that, Google was testing something, and local businesses either weren't filtered or were filtered.
Beyond Google updates, a great many things can lead to local ranking fluctuations. These could include:
Searcher proximity. You find yourself ranking well in a pack when you search while in your office. You drive across town and do the same search, and you're not in the 3-pack any more. Local search rankings aren't static anymore.
Your competitors are competitive. They are doing things that are enabling them to surpass you in terms of authority. They are telling Google, by some combination of efforts, that they deserve one of the 3 coveted spots more than you do. Maybe they are using Google Posts and you aren't. Maybe the velocity of their reviews is better. Maybe their photos get more clicks.
You've done something wrong. You've violated a guideline and have been reported or caught for spam. You have duplicate listings, fake reviews, stuffed business titles, fake locations, malware on your site, problems with indexing, lack of HTTPs protocols, slow load times, etc.
Typically, lack of rankings are going to fall into these categories. For more on this, you might like to read:
https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures-2018
https://moz.com/blog/45-local-seo-pitfalls
Go through those two blog posts and see if you recognize any of the problems as being relevant to your brand.
If that doesn't turn up some clues, then the next thing to do is to do a full competitive audit between your brand and the brand you see outranking you. This post will walk you through that process and even contains a spreadsheet for you to use:
https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit
Hope this helps!
Hey Searchout!
Some great points from Ed here. I'll add a few thoughts, in case it helps:
Yes, local pack rankings are key and you are right that they are not static. Don't over-focus on rankings, because searcher-proximity causes so much variety. While it's nice to see rankings go up, it is far more meaningful to see actual conversions go up (visits, phone calls, bookings, in-store traffic, sales, forms, etc.)
If your brand has built enough authority (think Taco Bell) you are likely to find yourself ranking for pretty much everything with very little effort. If you're not Taco Bell yet, then, yes, you need to work on the old combo of content+links and invest whatever effort you can in wise engagement with the ever-growing list of Google Local Knowledge Panel features (reviews, photos, Q&A, posts, bookings, menus including the new service menus, descriptions, etc.) Track and see what is moving the conversion needle. No one thing is going to do it. As you mentioned, review count and star ratings do not move the ranking needle as much as you might expect. You see businesses with fewer or worse reviews outranking those with more and better reviews every day. When you see that phenomenon, it makes you realize that focusing only on reviews would be foolish, but, at the same time, you don't determine from this that reviews can be ignored. They are part of a bigger picture.
Basically, what you are shooting for is building the overall authority of your brand while implementing best practices at a location-specific level every step of the way you can. Over time, you are trying to become one of the Taco Bells of your industry, at which point, for reasons we can't fully explain, your "authority" seems to build strength on its own. On your way there, be sure you are complying with all guidelines, making use of all relevant features, investing in creative content, and most importantly, offering the kind of service that makes your customers do much of the work of building your authority.
Hope this helps!
So great you are sharing your research here, Ed!
One thing I wanted to point out. You mention:
"Also I've got the city names in the names of my business. So there's BusinessTown and BusinessOtherTown as the names of the companies. This is really important. "
Important to clarify that, unless you've legally named each of your branches X+CityA, X+CityB, etc., then it's a violation of Google's guidelines to add city names to your GMB listing business titles. Wanted to be sure this is pointed out, as the keyword stuffing of the GMB title with city names is, perhaps, the #1 form of local spam.
That's a good question, Andrew. It's true that it's no longer a best practice to build out a set of pages featuring slightly different permutations of a keyword (car repair, auto repair, repairing cars, fixing cars, etc.). That approach is now quite dated. Honestly, it never made any sense beyond the fact that when Google wasn't quite so sophisticated, you could trick your way into some additional rankings with this type of redundant content.
The development of location landing pages is different. These are of fundamental use to consumers, and the ideal is to create each city's landing page in a way that is uniquely helpful to a specific audience. So, for example, your store in Detroit is now having a special on winter clothing right now, because it's still snowing there. Meanwhile, your store in Palm Beach is already stocking swim trunks. For a large, multi-location Enterprise, location landing pages can feature highly differentiated content, including highlights of regional-appropriate inventory and specials, as well as unique NAP, driving directions, reviews from local customers, and so much more.
The key to avoiding the trap of simply publishing a large quantity of near-duplicate pages is to put in the effort to research the communities involved and customize these location pages to best fit local needs.