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Hi Robert, I hear you on this: "The difference here is that people in business are good at the business they are in. They do not have time to go out and learn SEO/SEM. They trust the person who seems to know and they hope they have not misplaced the trust." This is so true. I have been working with SMBs for about a decade now, and unfortunately, too many of them have come to me with a sad story of being rooked. The SMB is the busiest man or woman alive, and too often, they simply don't know what to look for to discern whether they are talking to someone who will help them or scam them. This has always been a facet of SEO and it has very much become part of Local. Hate to see this happen. Regarding all of the marketing being aimed at your clients by directories - I know just what you mean. This is what I do. At the time that I am setting up my clients' listings, I tell the client, in writing, that they are likely to be contacted by these companies offering additional paid services. I tell them that they are not obliged to purchase any of these services and that we do not recommend these services. I also tell them that they are welcome to forward any marketing offers to me. I am explicit about this at the time we are doing the work and if the client forgets, I simply keep repeating the same message over and over to them. It's just part of the job, I guess. Some clients eventually get it, others don't. One of our oldest clients still sends me emails from the most ridiculous sources offering to do the most ridiculous things for them. It's obnoxious, yes, but I'm glad the client is at least well-trained not to make a move without consulting me first. That's the kind of trust it takes time to build and of which one can be proud. I enjoyed reading your rant. Hang in there. You are not alone! Miriam

Hello Cakes Website,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. You've brought up a meaningful concern. I would strongly recommend that you keep your clients' emails consistent across the major local business indexes...including but not limited to Google Places. As you are a Local SEO, you are probably already familiar with David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors annual survey, but just in case you aren't, here's the link:

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

I'm referencing this so that you can take a gander at the 10 most important citation sources in the document. In these, and all of the major indexes I would consider it best to use a standard business email throughout.

And then, train your clients to either forward emails containing sales pitches from the directories to you so that you can offer them guidance, or teach them to delete them. We all have to deal with spam, unfortunately, but avoiding some of it is not going to be of equal value to maintaining consistency across all citations of the business.

This is my opinion on this, and I hope it is useful to you.

Miriam

Hello Alex,

Yes - at the very least, the NAP needs to be in real HTML text in your footer - not within an image.

Identifying your business as being in Atascadero is not going to hurt your rankings in other towns. It's going to help establish you where you are located. Bear in mind, though, that Google is always going to consider you as being primarily relevant to the town you are located in - not the towns in your extended service area. The point of doing city landing pages for your service cities is to try to compete for ORGANIC rankings - not local ones. Google will almost always show your competitors who are actually located in the other cities in their local results for these searches, whereas you will have an advantage for Atascadero searches if they are not located there. So, Atascadero is your true local city for which you are hoping to get locally ranked (with a red/grey pinned result) - your service cities represent opportunities for you to attempt to do content creation/link building for secondary organic rankings.

Your sample meta description looks more like a title tag to me. Meta descriptions should typically read like a complete sentence - a mini sales pitch. What you've written with the pipe symbols is the common format for a title tag.

Finally, regarding ALT tags, you could experiment with adding NAP to some of them, and using others to highlight some of your main keywords, such as 'carpet cleaning in atascadero, ca', etc. ALT tags should always be an accurate description of what's in the image. Perhaps the image of your company truck would be a good one to put NAP on, but images of you doing work with various machines could be good opportunities to focus on other key terms.

Hope this helps. I'd like to close with the suggestion that you consider consulting with a good local SEO at some point, if this is within your budget. I can only provide limited guidance here in the forum, but you've got lots of questions and would probably find it very valuable to seek professional consultation at some point. I'd be happy to work with you further in future, Alex.

Good luck!

Miriam

Hi Alex,

I'm delighted my input is helpful. To get you in the right mindset for approaching Local SEO, in general, it's important to understand that the whole thing hangs on NAP. Your legal business name, physical address and local area code phone number are the three most important details about your business in the eyes of all search engines. Without these three items, you don't qualify as local and don't qualify for a Google Place Page.

Because of this, you want to send the strongest possible geographic signals from your website. This means optimizing your footer (or masthead) sitewide with your complete NAP, having it on your contact page and possibly on other pages such as your home and about pages. All tags and text should also be written with your local focus in mind (your cities, regions, neighborhoods, zip codes, etc.) Approach everything from the perspective that you are A) a neighbor who needs information B) a bot that needs to understand you are local to a certain location.

I do recommend using hCard as it strengthens the signal.

Finally, I want to address this comment you've made to be sure I'm giving you the best advice. You write:

i really try and keep my address of the page as much as possible since it is not a commercial building, just my home and a shop, but I am open to it if there is a benefit SEO wise or if you feel the end user would appreciate it.

We've just addressed how critical NAP is to your entire local campaign, and lots of businesses are run out of a home office. The one thing I wanted to double-check on is your mention of a 'shop'. Do you mean there is another business (a shop of some kind) running out of your home at the same address? If so, come back to me about this as there will be different issues to consider. But, if that's not what you meant and yours is the only business running out of the home address, that is no problem. Bottom line: highly publicizing your NAP is the foundation of Local. Hope this helps!

Miriam

Greetings Alex!
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 give an honest, helpful answer.

My first impression on hitting your website is that it needs big help, both from a Local SEO standpoint and a human usability standpoint. Most critically, I have no idea when I land on your homepage where you are located or where you serve. 'Wine Country' is too generic a term to help me instantly 'get' your geography. I live in N. California and to me, the phrase 'wine country' means the Napa/Sonoma region - not Atascadero. I realize that this is your business name, and that's fine, but your header, which occupies nearly half of the screen space above the fold of your page should absolutely include your complete address and local area code phone number. This will be the very first signal to visitors that you are local, and you've got to make it super obvious.

You are on the right track creating landing pages for each of the cities in which you serve. This is a standard best practice for on-page Local SEO. I am seeing two areas of improvement you can work towards. Firstly, the decision to bury the links for these important pages down near the footer of the website is not ideal. You should be putting your location and service areas front and center on the website. Put a tab in your top nav for 'where we serve' or something like that and put the links there.

Secondly, as other members have noted, the content on these pages is thin and I also find it to be awkwardly optimized. Yes, it's good to have your keyword phrases in the content, but when you have only a couple of paragraphs on each page and they are so obviously using italics to highlight the phrases, the end user experience is not satisfying. I am not convinced, as the visitor, that real effort was put into showcasing your work in your 4 distinct service cities. I am left feeling that these pages were put together solely for the sake of SEO - not for my benefit as the visitor. I recommend looking at the pages again and asking yourself honestly whether they are displaying real care for the education and engagement of human readers.

Don't get too focused on the percentage of difference between each page. I have a copywriting client who runs a carpet cleaning company and the ONLY thing that is duplicated from page to page on his city landing pages is his linked list of services. Everything else is unique and different. Different text, different photos, different stories to share. This is what you should be shooting for - telling a story that is persuasive.

In addition to things I've briefly mentioned here, your website lacks overall Local optimization. Your contact page has not been optimized - don't let this page be nothing more than a form. Your complete NAP (name address phone number) preferably coded in hCARD or utilizing schema or what have you, and more unique text about your business will take this page from weak to strong. Don't forget hours of operation, a Google MyMap of your location and other good things like that that can be added.

In addition to putting the complete NAP in the header of your website, I would suggest that you put it across the footer, site-wide, and I recommend hCARD for this as well.

I hope my straight-shooting advice is empowering, Alex. All of these problems are actually major opportunities for you to improve. More care put into the design, layout, optimization and copywriting, coupled with your claiming of your local business profiles across the various indexes, is going to make your business a force to be reckoned with, and that's what I'd love to see happen for you!

Miriam

Hi Again, AWC

Thanks for coming back with such complete information. I've re-set this thread as an on-going discussion, so hopefully that will stick and the topic can keep going. I agree, you should get 2nd and 3rd opinions on this, and I'm going to ask one of our traditional SEOs to step in as well with an opinion from that viewpoint of expertise.

My opinion is this: by putting local information on your product pages site-wide, you are sending a very pointed signal to Google that you deem your data to be most relevant to Oklahoma residents. If you're including the city as well as the state in all tags and text, you are sending a further signal that you consider your data to be most relevant to your own community within the state. Now, whether Google abides by the signals you have sent or not is where the grey area lies.

You are selling items out of state, as you say, but you've got them all, in a sense, labeled, as Oklahoma products. A truly national site wouldn't really take that approach with its SEO. And yet, there was real sense in your approach to start out small to get business locally because that cut your competition for product keywords down considerably. What you did makes perfect sense to me.

Now, with your question as to whether so boldly labeling everything on your site with state or city/state labels is going to be a detriment to you attempting to rank beyond state borders for the product, I honestly don't know. My gut feeling can be summed up in my observation that a national SEO campaign would not include those geo terms. That being said, Local and traditional SEO do not cross one another out. If going national is now your focus, you could trim back the heavy usage of city-related terms, and stick to spelling out your city in your footer site wide, on your contact page, about us page, home page and maybe a few other pages that talk about the ability for customers to do business with you in person. And, of course, you can list the local business in Google Places, Bing Local and all of the other relevant local business indexes.

State-related terms (Oklahoma) are not local, so that needs to be treated more as you would traditional SEO. You need to determine whether potentially losing some dominance for phrases that include the 'oklahoma' in them will be worth making the site look more truly national, in terms of its SEO. I haven't done any keyword research, but I'm doubting a ton of people are searching for 'barn kits oklahoma' or similar terms. My feeling is that they would either be trying to find one locally (in which case they would include the city name in their query) or that they would be comparison shopping on-line.

Bottom line: I think the decision rests with you as to whether your main SEO thrust needs to be truly local (city+state), statewide (in which case you'd keep optimizing everything with the state name) or truly national, in which case, you don't really want geographic modifiers all over the tags and text. You know your customer base and can look at your books to see what percentage of your business is coming from where (local vs. state vs. national). In situations like these, that is the best metric I can provide to help someone discern where their main efforts need to be placed.

Let's see what our traditional SEOs have to say! Sit tight.

I'm just jumping back in here after reading your remark: "This store has been here 20 years." So, it appears you have a physical location at which you are vending products directly to people, but that you also have an e-commerce portion of your website for national/international sales. Is this a correct description of your business model, AWC?

Hello VernonMack,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. I think the most important point to respond to in your post is this one. You write:

Using the actual physical address, seems to be what google would prefer, but the address is actually on the outskirts of the city and would mean that competitors that have addresses closer to the city center would show up before us.

It isn't so much a matter of Google's preference, but a matter of adhering to their guidelines which specifically state that you must use your real physical address. Unfortunately, this means that businesses likes yours on the borders of major cities do not have the strength to overpower the rankings of competitors actually located within the big cities. As you can imagine, this is a very common issue for all local businesses located just outside of metropolitan locations. Google will always view you as most relevant to the city in which you are located, so for your company, that will be El Cajon - not San Diego. I cannot recommend attempting to mash up the city and zip of the two different locales.

You can, of course, create content on your website about any work you do within San Diego, but should not expect this to take precedence over your actual physical location.

I truly sympathize with the wish to compete for the big search terms, but the usefulness of Google Places depends on accurate representation of data. For now, you are located in El Cajon and should correctly list yourself as such. If it becomes clear to you in future that you need to move locations into the city of San Diego, you will be doing what some other local business owners have done due to Google's handling of location. For some businesses, moving shop just isn't feasible, but for others, getting that inner city address is a must and a smart move.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Hello AWCthreads,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and want to applaud the good response Nicholas has given you.

You have explained that your venture is an e-commerce site. Does this mean that the business is virtual (no person-to-person contact either at your office or at the homes/businesses of clients?). This is a critical point of information, because having a real physical location in your city/state puts you in a very different category than if you conduct all business virtually.

If you are doing business virtually, then, yes, I would say that heavily optimizing your website for your city/state is sending a strong signal to the bots that you hope to be viewed as especially relevant for 'blue widgets city state' as opposed to just  'blue widgets'. Is there a good reason for you to want to appear as most relevant locally? Does the thing you sell apply most to local people or is it a product used nationally? My question is a little vague because I lack information about what the product actually is.

Now, if the business is NOT virtual, and you have taken steps to optimize your website for it's local geographic terms, and have also gotten the business profiled in Google Places and other local business indexes, then Google is naturally going to view the business as most relevant for local searches. It is possible to run local and national SEO campaigns simultaneously, but different strategies will depend on the business model.

So, I would like to close with my question for you regarding whether there was some reason you heavily optimized your site for a local audience. What is the reason for/thinking behind this. Clarification on this point would be really help!

Miriam

Good advice again from Chas!

I think, given your situation, that the URLs you are using with the branch numbers are probably about as good as you can manage. Yes, it would be stronger for SEO if they could more keywords in them instead of just a branch number, but on a project this large, compromises sometimes have to be made.

One other item to mention - you have listed 'geosynthetic' locations. This is not a term I'm familiar with, but just in case you are talking about virtual offices, it's important to know that Google does not accept these. No P.O. boxes, no virtual offices. Each location you list in Places must have a unique local area code phone number and unique dedicated physical street address.

Hope this helps, and best of luck with the bulk upload!

Miriam

Hi Again Emerald,

I hope we are all understanding your question better after the further details you have provided. As you answered all of my 4 questions - positively - for your city in Spain, then there is no reason why you cannot engage in a Local Search campaign. When I search, from my computer in the USA, for 'travel agency madrid, spain' Google shows me local results for that city. So, yes, it is certainly possible for you to do this.

You will want to make sure that your website has basic local optimization in place and then get the business listed in Google Places and other relevant local business indexes.

On a final note, I need to mention that I would not recommend setting up any virtual offices either in the USA or Spain as this would violate Google's Places Quality Guidelines. See: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hello Ferguson!

I agree with Chas on this that it's a little harder to answer without knowing the exact content. Most typically, I write URLs for city landing pages something like this:

whatever.com/city-state-service

For example, let's say the business is a mobile notary public in Berkeley, California. The URL might look like:

joenotary.com/berkeley-ca-mobile-notary

This would be for a business, and the landing pages might be for the different cities in which the business serves. Your situation is a little more complex with a single business with multiple locations in the same city and zip. Is your site a directory website? Or are you simply dealing with a single franchise's website? Perhaps you can give us a little more information.

At any rate, it sounds to me as if the only distinct items about the businesses would be their street addresses. How long are they? Would using them make them hugely long? What I'm describing would be something like this:

directory.com/joe-notary-123-centre-st

directory.com/joe-notary-39-brown-ave

a longer version would be:

directory.com/joe-notary-123-centre-st-boston-ma

It's not horribly long...but some businesses have really long street addresses with suite numbers and the like, so you'll have to judge whether an approach like this would start to look spammy.

Would this work for you? Has your question been answered? If not, please feel free to provide further details.

Miriam

Hi Hawktv1, So glad to know you've found some helpful guidance on this topic. You asked a very good question! Miriam

You are very welcome, Tony! Thanks for coming to Q&A. Miriam

Hello Hawkvt1!

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 give you some helpful feedback.

Thumbs up for Ross for remembering the slight stir created a few weeks ago regarding this very topic. Mike Blumenthal wrote a good piece on this here:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/12/06/google-places-onsite-review-stations-aok-with-google/

Read the whole article. And definitely read the comments that follow it, too. This should give you a good summary of the issue.

Like Mike, I felt that Google's encouragement of this practice was a poor choice because of the wide door it is opening for abuse. This practice has never been viewed in the past as appropriate by any review index, and there has been some evidence that some review entities were using signals of this as a way to weed out spam.  I am not actually recommending this practice to my own clients at this point, but according to Google, it's okay.

You will need to make a judgement call on this. If you feel the benefits are substantial, you can go forward with Google's apparent sanction, but I remain wary. Hope my thoughts help!

Miriam

Hello Brian!

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question, which is an excellent one. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to give you a helpful answer.

The situation you describe is common enough for Google to actually have spoken up about it within one of the most recent updates of their guidelines (see: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528). The guidelines state:

Some businesses may be located within a mall or a container store, which is a store that contains another business. If your business is within a container store or mall, and you'd like to include this information in your listing, specify the container store in parentheses in the business name field. For example, Starbucks (inside Safeway).

This is meant to resolve situations like the ones you are describing of businesses being located within container stores, but the details you have provided throw a monkey wrench into the works. You are saying that your potential client has no physical address whatsoever at which to receive mail? Are you 100% sure he is correct about this? He doesn't have a suite number of anything like that within the mall? I would double check on this with him.

If it turns out that he gave you the correct answer the first time around, then yes, there is going to be a significant problem here. The business, if new to Google Places, is very likely to be given the postcard-only verification option. If he can't receive mail, he's out of the game. In order to qualify for inclusion in Places, every business must have a legal business name, local area code phone number and physical street address. Without any one of those 3 items, the business doesn't qualify.

Again, I would return to this franchise owner and make sure he is positive that he has no address. Having one is is only hope of inclusion.

Best of luck!

Miriam

You are very welcome. Please, come again.

Hello Brandon,

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 give you a helpful answer.

Yes, using the landing page of each respective location is a smart plan. If there is a main home office, you might send that one to the homepage, but otherwise, I like the practice of using well-optimized city landing pages.

A quick heads-up on this. Don't be surprised if the URL Google displays on the various Place Pages looks like it's going to the main domain. They often do this, but if you click the link, it leads to the landing page.

And, be sure you are not using any URL that redirects. That's forbidden by the guidelines.

I highly recommend that you read this 2010 Eric Enge interview with Carter Maslan, particularly the area in which Carter discusses multi-location businesses:

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

A few of Carter's remarks are now somewhat dated, simply due to the passage of time, but this portion of the interview is one I continue to refer to as the best advice regarding multi-location businesses:

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.

*Bear in mind, Carter was not providing this information as though it were Google's 'official' stance, but I think it's as close to a plan of action as you can get in this specialized type of work of dealing with many locales.

Hope this is helpful. Good luck!

Miriam

Greetings Tony,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. While I have no hard data to share with you (haven't ever seen a conclusive study published on this) I think your guiding light should be deciphering the relative importance of your 2 target audiences. What percentage of the business occurs nationally and what percentage occurs locally? This figure might, then, dictate how much effort you should be putting into national vs. local efforts on and off the site.

Local SEO can certainly be done in addition to national SEO. It sounds to me, however, that you have heavily slanted all pages towards geographic terms. If local business is only a small portion of the rankings, I would be inclined to simply put the complete NAP (name, address, phone number) in the footer site wide, put it on the contact page and optimize perhaps 1-2 other pages on the site with local information...perhaps the about page (visit us at our offices). Then, get the business profiled in the various local indexes.

There isn't a template for doing this. Every business is slightly different, and the competitiveness of your vertical and nature of your products/services may create nuances that simply can't be answered with a broad 'do this'. For example, a company might offer plumbing services locally, but sell plumbing fixtures nationally. Different pages would need to be devoted to the different areas of work - the planning and organization is very important, so that those pages suited to neighbors have been optimized locally, while those that have a national focus are not being presented narrowly, as if they were only meant for neighbors.

Tracking and testing how people are using the site, once you've attempted to gear certain pages towards certain audiences, will be very important. This is what will tell you whether you are getting it 'right' or not.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Tim,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question, which is a great one! I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. Members are giving you some good suggestions. I'd like to add to this.

I strongly recommend that you put more effort into your city landing pages than what you are describing. 4-5 sentences is really just a blurb - more like an intro than the content of a whole page. I recommend that you find more to say about each city in which the client serves than this. Then, if you have in the midst of this, a small list of the client's services/products, only a tiny percentage of what is on the page will be similar.

Creating city landing pages is one of the most common tasks I accomplish for my clients, and I treat each city as being deserved of a full article. It's an approach I have seen work time and again and I highly recommend it!

Hope this helps and best of luck!

Miriam

Greetings Justin,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question, which is a good one. Chas is correct in that Google is fairly sophisticated about handling slight differences, but when it comes to the accuracy of your address across the web, I beg to differ. I would put in the time to make sure that ALL mentions of your client's address are consistent across the Internet. Little stuff like 'road' vs. 'rd.' doesn't matter, but I consider suite numbers to be an integral part of the geography of the business and would recommend you correct any listings that don't state it properly.

Hope this advice helps!

Miriam

Greetings VernonMack, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. Your question is a good one and, happily, the answer here is simple. You need to use whatever your legal business name is. If your DBA uses ampersand, then consistently use this to describe your business on your website, local listings and elsewhere. If it uses and, then use that. Be consistent and you will be fine.

Greetings, Emerald!
Thank your for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. While a local campaign in highly unlikely to injure your international results, you must be able to answer yes to having ALL of these items in place in order to qualify as a local business:

1. A legal business name.
2. A real physical location in a city in the US (not a virtual office, P.O. box, shared space or any other substitute)
3. A local area code phone number in the city of location (not a redirected phone number or toll free number)
4. You must either be the sort of business to which clients come to do face-to-face business in your office in this city, or, you must have staff that goes out from the office to the clients' homes or businesses. If business is conducted virtually, it does not qualify as local in the eyes of the search engines.

If your client can answer yes to all 4 of those things, then they can certainly engage in some Local SEM. You would want to have a good landing page on the cite for the city in question, and also include the complete NAP in the website footer site-wide. You would want copy that speaks to the geography of this physical location. Additionally, you would want to get your client correctly profiled at Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local and other relevant directories.

Sincerely hope this answer helps. Good luck!
Miriam

You are very kind, Robert (any your t-shirt sounds cool! hahah) I did think those articles were awesome, but they aren't very well-known. And, BTW, my cup of tea is...a cup of tea, organic with a little maple syrup, please!

Hi Keith,

If these businesses are in the same metropolitan area, then I definitely give thumbs up to consolidation. Yes, put 301 redirects in place.

Regarding optimizing the footer, there is not a problem with listing several addresses. As long as you have 10 or less locations, consider this a fine practice. I do recommend using hCard for the the formatting of the addresses...and do make your Contact Page a good strong page featuring both addresses in hCard. Also a good idea to make a Google MyMap for each location and embed and link to it on the contact page.

Make the copy clear that you've got the 2 locations from the homepage forward.

I feel you are making a smart choice for this business. Good luck!

Hi Robert-o,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm sorry I didn't respond to this earlier - your post somehow escaped my notice. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum.

Robert has been giving you some helpful advice. I recommend that you read this 2 part article series on attempting to get a Google Places Label for your business;

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

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

This is the best writeup that I know of on this interesting subject, and while following the steps outlined will not guarantee you a Places Label, at least you can give it a try! Good luck!

Miriam

Hi Keith!

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

It's a very common practice for companies to have a single website for their multiple locations. For example, an auto dealership with locations in San Jose, San Francisco and San Rafael does not need to have 3 websites. They can simply have one and do landing pages for each of the three cities.

The main benefit I can discern of consolidating your client's 3 sites will be greater ease of management.

One thing I can imagine that you are going to need to be careful about is this: do sites 1, 2 or 3 duplicate one another's content in any way? If so, you need to avoid this. Don't have the landing page copy for the 2 different locales be the same.

Another thing I'm curious about is the locales of the 2 physical offices. How far apart are they? If they were in different states, I'd be inclined to keep the businesses on separate sites, but if they are in the same state, I think having the one site will be fine.

My only other concern would be potential lost rankings for the other sites. Are they old and established, or relatively new and low ranking? If the former, it would be a tough decision to get rid of them. If the latter, this re-organization could be a smart idea.

Finally, do realize that when you make changes in Google Places, it can cause a temporary shakeup. Even small changes like altering the domain the Place Page is pointing to can result in a time delay until Google's updates its index. Prepare the client for that possibility.

I hope my thoughts have been helpful, Keith. Good luck!

Hello MFC,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. If I've correctly understood your query, you are saying that you are seeing competitors doing linkbuilding to their directory listings. Is this right?

While I can't see a real problem with the idea, I'm also not sure it's a very good use of time/funding. Given that Local is so Google-centric, and that it is the strength of your website which is so big a factor in your rankings, building links to your own property (your website) is likely to be a much better idea than building them to 3rd party sites.

Also, of perhaps relevant interest is this recent discussion regarding building links to one's Google Place Page. I had a discussion with Mike Blumenthal about this, which he subsequently turned into a blog post. I recommend that you read it, including the great discussion below the post:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/24/google-places-myth-linking-to-your-places-page/

Hope this helps!

Miriam

I'm so glad to hear that helped! Good luck!

Hello AnkitMaheshwari, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I do feel some concerns about the redirects, as a Local SEO, but I am going to ask some of our traditional SEOs to step into this discussion to give their expert opinions. Sit tight. Miriam

Hello William, Thank you for coming to Q&A with your question, which is a good one! By coincidence, Mike Blumenthal and I just had a conversation regarding this which he eventually turned into a blog post. I think it will be well worth your reading: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/24/google-places-myth-linking-to-your-places-page/ Definitely read all the comments on it, too. If you have any questions after reading that, please do return. Miriam

Hello Shebin, I wish I had more personal experience with Schema to offer you. I wonder if this resource might help: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/10/07/a-free-tool-to-build-geo-sitemap-and-schema-org-compliant-files/ Good Luck! Miriam

Hello Gwen.imatrix, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question! NAP is basically the foundation of all Local. To qualify for a unique Place Page, a business must have a distinct address and phone number. There's just no two ways about this. Should Google notice the issue, yes, you can expect a ranking drop and considerable confusion surrounding the accounts. Hope this information is useful to you. Good luck! Miriam

Hi Schmeetz, Thanks for clarifying that we are talking about a drop of your Local Organic rankings and not your Place Page. Obviously, the biggest shakeup happening right now is what's being called Panda 3.2. See: http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-3-2-update-confirmed-109321 Is there any chance you've got thin or duplicate content on your city landing pages?

Greetings Shmeetz,

I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A. While I don't have the highest opinion of the BBB (see: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2010/10/07/google-better-business-bureau-ratings/) I would be very surprised if your ranking drop had anything to do with your signing up in the one city. I've not heard of anything like this...the BBB really wouldn't have the power to alter Google's algorithm in the manner you are describing. Your questions is definitely interesting, but I'd say what you've observed is a coincidence, and that you'll need to investigate other possibilities for your ranking drop.

Have you made edits to your Google Place Pages recently?

Are you being affected by the new 3-pack rollout/test that is just now being observed?

Have competitors hired Local SEOs who are moving them forward while you are falling backward?

Could you be suffering from a penalty due to a violation or bug?

That's just a start. I'll look forward to contributions from other members to this discussion. Good luck!

Hello Amit!

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. Both Robert and WebFeat have contributed good remarks here.

As it happens, I actually had a chance to discuss this very topic with a Google Places Help Forum Top Contributor not long ago. Here is the process they recommended:

1. Go to the spammy Place Page in question and use the Report A Problem link at the bottom of it to describe the issue you have observed.

2. Wait the requisite 4-6 weeks to see if you get a direct response from Google or if you see any action taken against the spammy listing.

3. If, after this period, nothing has happened, go to the Google Places Help Forum and open a thread there explaining the problem carefully.

4. If one of the Top Contributors flags your thread, it will be sent to Google's Vanessa Schneider who may then decide to take action.

5. However, in the case of large scale, really outrageous spam (let's say a company has 20 phony Place Pages in 20 different cities) you are better off coming directly to the Google Places Help Forum from the get-go rather than attempting to report them one by one. In this event, be prepared to show extensive documentation and to link to all of the examples. Be clear and thorough in describing what you observed, and then be patient to see if it goes anywhere.

Good luck!

Miriam

Hello Ryan,
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I want you to know that your query inspired me to ask two of the best Local SEOs in the country for their opinion on this, and they both agreed that this oft-repeated advice about building links to Place Pages is bogus. I wanted to check with some of my chums before answering your questions, because I see this advice being given all the time on websites, and it's one of those strange myths of SEO that are self-perpetuating.

The reasoning that it is not worth it to build links to Place Pages is that they are not indexed, therefore, building links to them is like throwing stuff into a black hole.

If you feel linkbuilding will be necessary to enabling your client to rank better, build links to his website. Not his Place Page.

Hope this helps!
Miriam

Hello Bill,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. The NAP is really the key, more so than the website. For the business to be able to treat each specialty as distinct, it would need to become 4 distinct companies, each with a unique legal business name, legit physical street address and local area code phone number. This scenario would enable the owner to have a unique Google Place Page for each of the businesses, instead of just one Place Page for all of his specialties (as well as having unique listings in all of the other local business indexes). As things currently are, he is permitted to have only the one listing per index.

This is the case for most businesses like that of your client and by building out his content on his website, you are doing pretty much what you can do for his organic campaign (plus linkbuilding, social media, video etc., of course).

The tough thing about clients like this one, is that they typically not only offer a menu of very varied services, but they also tend to serve in a number of surrounding cities. So an SEO/Local SEO campaign typically looks something like this:

1. Get the client listed in the major local indexes.

2. Campaign for reviews in a variety of sources.

3. Get citations for his Google Place Page

4. Build out a body of service-related content on the website.

5. Build out a body of geographic content on his website.

6. Build links every which way

7. Engage in additional forms of marketing that will be most effective at reaching the client's audience (email, video, social media, blogging, etc.)

Now, in entering into all of this work, the client must be informed up front that his chances of ranking above the fold of Google's results are mostly going to revolve around his services in his city of location, in that he may achieve grey pinned local results for these 'service + geo' terms. He may not be able to expect top rankings for all 4 services. In any service city where he isn't physically located, the client should be made to understand that he is most likely to have to rely solely on the organic rankings below the local results, as Google will be viewing his competitors with physical locations in those cities as most relevant.

Clients like these are more complicated than, for example, a dentist with an office in Denver. But, that being said, there are substantial benefits to engaging in the work. Even lower rankings for terms can lead to trickles of monthly traffic and if these convert to phone calls and bookings, it has all been worth it.

Good luck!

Hi Again WebFeat,
Thank you for your responses. I should have linked to the 2 Place Pages so you could see what I am seeing when I do a phone number search. Are you saying that these 2 Place Pages are for distinct physical addresses, both within the town of Covington:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=(800)+332-5888&hl=en&cid=6527745562403073607

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=(800)+332-5888&hl=en&cid=9396548231519875781

If these are, indeed, both active, staffed business offices with a unique street address, then each will need its own distinct local area code phone number. We've covered the 800 number issue, but beyond this, each location must have its own phone number (not something that redirects to a main number) per the guidelines.

And, obviously, you will need to remove any extra words from the business title on either Place Page.

Also, Google appears to be showing the same lack of assuredness about a 3rd location, which is also showing with the round dot instead of the tear drop.

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=1-800-Declutter&hl=en&cid=11412252685154708462

Don't forget, if you've moved to a new address, you must undertake the work up updating your records web-wide. You will need to go to every directory/index/site where the old address is listed and have it changed, or the conflict in data can lead to confusion on Google's part and lack of trust in the data.

Can you please explain this a little more. You write:

"I've been able to locate the address on google maps and when i enter it google pops up a proper format which I click. However when i update the page it just goes away"

Do you mean that when you type in your street address in Places, you are being shown a Google Place Page with the street address on it? Or are you never able to see a street address on the listings at all? Also, what part of the listing is it that you are trying to make updates to.

I have an article for you to consider. Do you find your problem described in this:
http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-update-cycle-missing-descriptions.html

Also, see this:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/10/12/how-long-does-it-take-for-a-google-places-description-update/

Further, though this Mike Blumenthal article is speaking specifically to the infamous 'we do not support this location' message, I am wondering what would happen if you followed the steps for 'sharing and update' mentioned in this post: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/07/25/google-places-work-around-we-do-current-do-not-support-the-location/

To tackle another subject, your reply regarding your legal business name has made me very curious. I can only wonder how sophisticated Google is about handling legal business names that are 800 numbers, since they have had such an issue with people using 800 numbers instead of local ones. I would like to know what they would say about this, but do not see a record of this issue being raised with them.

Finally, over the years, I have seen many, many reports of updates to listings causing the listing to lose reviews, descriptions and other data. They seem to founder for awhile, only to return weeks later. This is one of the big headaches of Google Places. My feeling is that you've got some concerning violations on your Place Pages that are part of the problem, and that this is one of the reasons Google is not convinced of the validity of your locations. I would recommend cleaning up the listings to the best of your ability and then starting a thread in the Google Places Help Forum if the problem persists after a few more weeks.

Hope this feedback helps!
Miriam

Hi Echo,

Honored to be so quoted in your post

Simon has made excellent points!

Here are my questions:

Is the office space being simultaneously used by other businesses? If so, then it is likely sharing an address, unless as Simon notes, each address is being assigned a unique suite number to which mail can be delivered. This is quite important, as the business will more than likely have to deal with postcard verification.

Additionally, is the landline located within the office? Or is it re-directing to elsewhere so that it can be answered? The truth is, if Google offers a postcard-only verification option, the whole point about what type of local phone number it is becomes somewhat moot, because they aren't calling you. But, in the event that they request phone verification, you could run into a problem if the the phone isn't a direct landline.

From your post, it is clear that much of the criteria is being met. The business owner is holding meetings with clients and employees at this location, so that is one of the key metrics for inclusion. But the business about the address on an as-needed basis gives me pause as it sounds as thought other people are using the same space, meaning the scenario could turn into a real mess if the address is not unique to the business.

Please, feel free to give more details.

Hi Robert,

Sorry - I am not making sense of this line:

why just not incorporate the new address as opposed to etelling hm in the WMT or Places dashboard??

???

Hi Robert, I have no idea who would have thumbed down your response. You make lots of great contributions here in Q&A. I'm always glad to see you here:) Miriam