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I think you've made a smart choice, Nolan! Thanks for letting me give you my feedback and good luck with the Local SEO. It should be fun doing this for your brother. If I can be of any further assistance, please just let me know.

Miriam

Hi C2G,

Is the legal business name, street address and local area code phone number for the law firm COMPLETELY distinct from that of the insurance business? I ask this question because Google does not permit the creation of additional Place Pages for specialties within a given business. For example, a company that washes windows cannot have a separate Place Page for their gutter cleaning services. This is only allowed if the 2 things are separate legal business with separate offices and phone numbers. I thought it was important to jump in here and ask this vital question.

Greetings, Nolan!

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Definitely read the article Itsvan linked to. It's a super resource.

In my opinion, the hyphens are not optimal. As the aforementioned article states, hyphenated domain names can look somewhat spammy.

Here's something for you to consider: when I do a Google search for just 'north brunswick', Google immediately shows me a map of New Jersey. I am not finding any other North Brunswicks mentioned in the top 10 results of the SERPs. I wouldn't consider the mention of NJ in your URL necessary at all, given this point. Because of this, I would consider northbrunswicklaundromat.com to be a better choice than any you have listed.

24 characters puts this on the long side, but it's certainly optimized and at least it isn't hyphenated.

I was tempted to suggest nbrunswicklaundromat.com to cut out some of the letters, but a search for that is bringing up references to NEW Brunswick.

At any rate, I think the mention of New Jersey is unnecessary. The strength of the optimization of your website is going to count most in terms of displaying strong geographic data for the bots and human users. Google should have no problem understanding where you are.

Hope this helps, and do read that article!

Miriam

My pleasure - sounds like your experience will be your most powerful asset! Sincere wishes for success!

Miriam

Hi Fidelity One,

Thank you for clearing that up for me. I misunderstood your business as a virtual one. Your questions is one I have seen commonly asked, and one for which no Local or Global SEO firm that I know of has every published a firm answer. Google certainly hasn't. You can see a small discussion on this topic in the comments on a post of Rand's from last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local

Here is what I can tell you, but please take this advice in the form of an opinion rather than a hard fact. Local and organic SERPs are running on two separate, distinct algorithms. Let's think, for example, of a franchise like McDonalds. They have a national headquarters and are an international business, but they also have Place Pages for each of their storefronts. Google is not going to think McDonalds is located at 21 Center Street SmallTown USA because they've got a Place Page for a storefront there, right? Granted, few businesses have the fame or clout of McDonalds, but the same factors should ostensibly apply to any business.

In your shoes, I would view Local as something I was doing in addition to my traditional SEO. In fact, you could start this out extremely small as an experiment (with, of course, stat tracking software in place). Instead of going the typical route of a purely local business, implementing geographic data sitewide, you could create just one page on your website with a locally-optimized URL, title, header, content, business name, street address and local area code phone number. In creating your Place Page, you could do what franchises do and link the Place Page directly to this URL instead of to the homepage of your website. Then, you could watch over a period of, say, 6 months to see what actual effect this has had.

Does your organic traffic drop in any way? How about your rankings?

Are you getting new visibility and links thanks to your local promotion? New traffic? New phone calls and business?

My guess is that you would NOT see any detriment to your organic standings, but because of the unwieldy and honestly unpredictable nature of Local in Google, you should treat your case as a distinct experiment. If you are new to Local, you need to know coming into this that Google Places/Maps is notoriously buggy and that folks like myself and Mike Blumenthal have been blogging about the crazy bugs in the system for years now. Stats were recently published that 8 million users have signed up for Google Places, but Google continues to pursue their policy of not offering real, meaningful customer support. When things go wrong (and they often do) getting help can be virtually impossible unless you've got an in with Google.

I don't want to scare you off, but do want to be sure to add this cautionary note if you are entering Local for the first time.

The other thing to remember is that Places is not actually an opt-in venue. If your address exists anywhere on the web (such as in a yellow pages ad or other directory), Google can create a Place Page for your business without any action on your part. So, if your address is already out there anywhere, this is all the more reason for you to actively participate in Local so that you have at least some control over your data.

I hope my thoughts have helped you to reach a decision about this important step! Thanks again for coming to Q&A to ask your question.

Greetings Fidelity One!
Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. If am correctly understanding your description of your business as being a virtual one, then this is not a question of rankings but rather one of appropriateness. Virtual businesses are not deemed to be Local by Google.

In order to qualify as local, you must have a real physical street address (not a P.O, box or virtual office, a unique local area code phone number and a legal business name. Clients must either come directly to the street address to do one-on-one business with you or your staff must depart from the physical street address to do business with clients (as in the case of chimney sweeps, carpet cleaners, etc.)

If any of these criteria do not fit your business model, then Local just isn't the right space for you.

Hope this helps!

Greetings, Matt!

Thanks so much for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Your assessment of the situation is an honest one - how much can one say about auto insurance over and over again? Member, Ressler Motors, has gotten you off on the right track here, thinking outside the box to discover creative types of content that could make each page different.

I would further recommend discovering how you can personalize the pages in a meaningful way. For example, each city page could tell a real story about insuring a real driver there. This would take some doing - you would need the company to identify a happy customer who would be willing to tell their story and you would have to arrive at a level of privacy for them that meets their comfort at the same time. So, you might not publish photos or full names, but getting a driver from City X to describe why he needed to come to your client's company would make this page different than your page for City Y.

Similarly, you can mine the staff at the company for other stories. Get them to describe what is most common in different towns in terms of the types of issues that make for high risk drivers. Does town X have a lot of DUIs, while the highway passing through town Y engenders a lot of speeding tickets?

Does the company offer any type of seminars about improving one's driving record? Could these be featured on certain pages?

How about interviews with highway patrol officers explaining their side of the story?

How about advice for parents whose teens have already racked up a bad driving record? When should they take the keys away? When will the law take the keys away in these cities, towns, counties?

Ressler's idea about photos is excellent, complete with good captions, of course, and I definitely think there is room here for videos. Statistical videos (with text descriptions) showing worst traffic areas in town with stats of the numbers of accidents and violations would be unique and very local.

How well your client is funded and how invested they are in the creation of quality pages vs. squeaking by with the least possible effort is likely to determine how far you can take this. Assuming that the client has only one main office, I would expect the pages to have to be pretty strong to break into the organic SERPs because the client is likely to be outranked by companies with actual physical offices in the neighboring towns in the Local SERPs.

I think the overall picture needs to be one of telling a compelling story about what happens in each of the towns in terms of driving problems, who these issues affect and how the company can help. You may want to engage a creative copywriter to manage the project, but I do believe your richest data sources for whatever is written or produced will be the company's clients and the staff.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

Miriam

Hi MLC,

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. The requirements for your client having a local listing are that he has a:

-Legal Business Name

-Real street address (not a virtual address) where people come to him for services or from which he leaves to render services for clients

-Local phone number.

If he does not have all three of these things, he is not appropriate for inclusion in Local results.

If he does have all three of these things, then a local SEM campaign for him is typically going to include having strong geographic hooks in his site + good local-focused content + inclusion in Google Places and any other local business indexes that are relevant to his country + the acquisition of links, citations and reviews.

In addition to this, you will be implementing traditional SEO techniques for his national SEO campaign.

I want to be sure I am correctly understanding your question regarding making queries from other locations. I believe what you mean is that you are located in a different city in Spain than your client and, thus, you are seeing different results than he. This is true.

However, it is critical for any Local SEO to understand that ALL Internet users see different local results (and organic, results, too) based upon factors including IP address and past user history. Because of this, Local SEOs must educate their clients to understand that no results are set in stone. Even the person living next door to the business owner may be seeing slightly different results because of his past user history.

Now, that being said, in North America, when I do a search for something, the results come complete with a left column that shows my location and asks if I want to change it. Do a search for something like tapas restaurant and see if you get this same column on the left side of the results in Spain. If so, you can change your location from Madrid to Barcelona. Sorry that I'm not 100% positive which options there are in your country - I'm most familiar with how things work in the USA. Try this and see if it works for you.

But bear in mind, no matter what your settings are, there is no such thing as a set of local results that are the same for all users. Because of the way Google now handles relevance for individual users, we all see personalized results.

Hope this helps, and I would appreciate you returning to this thread to let me know if you have the change location capability in Spain. I'm interested!

Miriam

You are very welcome, John!

Hi John,

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. In my personal experience, I have seen listings marked as 'personally closed' eventually drop out of the index if no further changes are made to them, but as to how long this takes, I can't give you a firm answer. Mike Blumenthal's in depth post on this topic comes to the same conclusion regarding unknown length of time, and you might like to read it:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/09/28/google-places-what-does-the-new-business-permanently-closed-process-look-like/

The alternate route to sitting around waiting to see when this would happen would be to reclaim the business back into the client's account and then follow the steps for reporting the problem of the business having moved and having another, authoritative Place Page.

At the beginning of 2011, I wrote a post about experimenting with reporting a closed business:

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=926

4 weeks later I heard from Google and wrote about their marking the business as closed and emailing me

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=958

At that point, I could still find the flagged-as-closed business in the index. Your question here prompted me to go and see if this was still the case. I discovered that the shop I reported as closed now appears to have disappeared from the organic and Places results, a year later. Wish I could tell you exactly when this happened, but I didn't keep following up on this. At any rate, it did happen eventually.

Hope this helps, John!

Miriam

Hi Robert!

Nice to see you. I would recommend that you read this post from Mike Blumenthal from a couple of weeks ago if you haven't already:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/11/10/8-tips-to-maximize-your-branded-presence-in-the-google-local-search-results/

Some of Mike's readers found the advice regarding the use of geomodifiers to be controversial and this led to an extremely long discussion between Mike and readers on this topic. I think you will find it to be relevant and extremely interesting, but you'll have to make up your own mind what you think!

Greetings!

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your important question. This interview with Eric Enge is over a year old now, but his advice holds true, in my opinion:

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

The part of the interview relating to your scenario is this:

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.

Now, bear in mind that Eric was stating this as an opinion of best practices rather than an official statement from Google, but barring having a distinct website for each of the franchise's locations, yes, having a unique page for each business will be a good idea. And, of course, each location must have its own local area code phone number and street address. This will qualify each branch to have a unique Place Page which can then link to its respective landing page on the website.

Parting advice - do make an effort to make the landing pages unique. Don't just cut and paste copy, changing the address and phone number. Write unique copy about each business!

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Greetings Ian,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I want to be certain that I understand your client's situation. You mention the queries

First Aid Training in Cornwall
First Aid Courses in Cornwall
Health and Safety Training in Cornwall

These are not, per se, local queries. Google Places (and most of local search) is a city based application. If the client is in Victoria, Cornwall, then 'Victoria' is actually his true local term. I am in the U.S., so things may be slightly different here, but at any rate, I would expect the client to rank well in Places for Victoria-related queries and that efforts to go after the county of Cornwall would need to be chiefly organic in nature.

Is this correct or am I misunderstanding what you are describing?

In general, in North America, the website is an extremely important part of any local campaign. One applies all traditional SEO techniques + the strong usage of geographic data. So, good onpage SEO, lots of local-focused content and linkbuilding are all going to be party of your work with local-focused clients to achieve high Places rankings for their city of location.

At the same time, they need to have a clean, complete Places record (no violations!) and work to accrue citations and reviews within Google. Simultaneously, they need good records in the major 3rd party local business indexes in your country. All of this comes together to create a winning Internet presence.

In closing, there was a shakeup here in N. America some weeks ago. My friend and colleague, Linda Buquet, has dubbed this change the 'proximity algo lockout'. I don't know if this happened overseas as well, but I recommend you read about Google's apparent new narrower circle from city center in their results:

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-algorithm-ranking-drop.html

Did this happen in the U.K. as well, and could it have affected your client's rankings? Just a thought.

Hi Rahul & Robert,

If I've understood your questions correctly, you want to know how one becomes a third party image provider in Google Places so that linked images are showing up on Place Pages from your body of data. I want you to both know that I have researched this and have also spoken with Mike Blumenthal (imo the top Local SEO in the country) to be confident that my facts are correct.

As I mentioned before, it is up to Google to decide with whom it partners for this service. There is a form somewhere for submitting a request to become a Google partner, but for the life of me, I couldn't find it and Mike wasn't sure where it was either. It may be somewhere within this set of pages:

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mapcontent/

I spent about 10 minutes hunting for it to no avail, so it seems it's not very obvious, but maybe with some more searching, you can turn up the form.

What you can typically expect is that Google is only going to partner with very huge companies able to provide a huge set of data. If you are small, it won't hurt to contact Google (if you can find that dratted form) but I would not expect to become a partner.

Other than being a partner, there appears to be a more random sourcing of data from various sites using rich snippets, so that is something you both might want to investigate further. I sincerely hope this answer helps.

Miriam

Hi Robert!

I want to make sure I understand your question. Can you define what you mean by an 'affiliate'? Obviously, Google allows UGC from anybody on Place Pages (any user), but I'm not quite sure this is what you mean. Thanks!

Hi Rahul,

Google has certain sites from which it draws third party photos (such as Panaramio, Yahoo, etc.). In order to get links like that, you would have to be considered one of Google's trusted third party image sources. Does this answer your question?

Miriam

Hi Adam,

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. I'm the SEOmoz Local SEO associate, but I'm actually going to ask one of our traditional SEOs to step in with a reply. It looks to me as if you are offering a virtual service, so this is not, per se, a Local SEO question.

On a side note, one thing I did notice is that I see no physical Australian address in the footer of your website. That would certainly be a place to start. Please hang in there while I ask some of our other mods to help.

Miriam

Hi All!

I want to be certain I'm understanding your query correctly. Are you saying that you want the client to rank organically for 'insurance' or that when you search for 'insurance' local results (with a grey pin) are coming up but that your client is not included amongst them? Please, explain. Thanks!

Miriam

Hi Again OCsearch,

If they've got just one office, then yes, having one Place Page would be an accurate representation of the business. I sympathize with how inadequate a solution this is for clients with business models like your client's. The alternative to this is for the business to change the way it thinks about its employees and assign one in each district as a sub-branch of the business. Let me explain this a little more thoroughly:

• Let's say the business is located in San Francisco. They create and claim a Place Page for their home office.

• Then, let's also say that the business sends out truckers from Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento and San Diego.

• Let's say that the business is willing to create a new position for one employee in each of those cities - let's call him the city manager.

• The city manager's duties involve overseeing the job assignments for each of the truckers in his city. And, his home address is now viewed as a local office for the main company. He is given a unique local area code phone number and mail relating to operations in his city is now to be directed to his home instead of the company headquarters in San Francisco.

• If this were the business model, then I think it would be conceivable for each city manager to have his own Place Page for his sub-branch of the company.

It's a big workaround, but not an impossible one.

Barring this, then, yes...one Place Page for the main office and the rest of your work will have to be organic. And, the client should understand that he should not expect to outrank businesses with physical addresses in other cities.

Does this explanation help? I hope so!

Miriam

Hi Erica,

It is my understanding that any address which is not a legitimate street address is prohibited and this would include UPS addresses. This has become especially problematic in parts of the country where mail has never or is no longer being directly delivered. I have heard from business owners in Colorado and Maine who live in such communities and they are out of luck. I find this to be a very unsatisfactory oversight on Google's part. They are excluding legitimate businesses because of the way the post office functions in many, many places. Perhaps we will one day see a fix from them for this.

What qualifies right now as a legitimate local street address is one to which customers can come to do business or one from which the company goes out to its customers. So, this automatically rules out any type of box because no one is working in the box

How good is Google at catching companies that bend this rule? Not terribly, but once they get onto a violation, they act swiftly and the offending business has little recourse to right things beyond requesting re-inclusion which is an iffy bet.

Hope this helps to further clarify things!

Miriam

Hi Ocsearch,

Keri is correct. The use of P.O. boxes and virtual offices is prohibited by Google's Places Quality Guidelines which you can read in full here:

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

Here is the portion of the guidelines that speak specifically to your query:

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

• Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed.
• Use the precise address for the business in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
• Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
• Businesses that operate in a service area, as opposed to a single location, should not create a listing for every city they service. Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.
• Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the hospital or clinic at large.
• Do not include information in address lines that does not pertain your business’s physical location (e.g. URLs, keywords).

So, basically, the business in question needs to make a critical decision: will they be willing to publish a legitimate address in order to receive the benefits of participating in Google Places? If not, then Google will not consider them to be appropriate for their index.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Gareth,

I've been asked to pop by this discussion. You've asked a great question, Others have contributed sound advice here. Your client is encountering some of the limitations of Google Places. Yes, you are restricted to 5 main categories, and in a sense, this system favors businesses with a narrower focus over those with a much broader one (like your client). The method that you have undertaken of focusing the Place Page on the business' 5 most important categories is correct, and then using organic SEO to pursue what else you can. But, because of the heavy slant towards local results in the SERPs, those things for which your client is not getting a mapped result will be at the bottom of the page or even further down than that. There isn't really a way to get around this that I know of, and I don't see Google changing this layout for some time to come.

Regarding the additional details field, it's my own practice with my clients to keep this pretty brief. I do believe that a stuffed additional details section could send a danger signal to Google, but what the threshold is, nobody knows. In any case, I do not believe these details carry a huge deal of weight as compared to, say, the contents of the website, particularly in competitive verticals. Now, if the business was the only one of its kind in a rural area about which Google had a paucity of information - then, yes, I wouldn't be surprised to see those additional details gaining a little traction. But in a competitive vertical in a suburban or metropolitan area, I would not expect anything you put in there to enable the client to outrank a competitor who has chosen one of the phrases as one if his top 5 specialties.

This is one of those areas in which it is critical to correctly the set the client's expectations. If they offer 25 different services, they should not expect to be #1 for all of them unless they are the only game in town. Google's results are more democratic than this, so the client is forced by the system to zone in on what their most popular services are with their Place Page, and do the best they can with organic for the rest. Don't forget, traffic comes from video marketing, social media and other forms of marketing, too! If the client wants to highlight other services, a creative approach to finding ways to promote them beyond Places deserves some thought.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Miriam

Hi Bjolley,

Thanks for coming to the forum to ask your question! I'm glad to see Members contributing their thoughts, but think a point needs to be clarified here.

This is not a case of claiming the 'best' profile and making it your client's authoritative Place Page  - it is a case of claiming the CORRECT profile - the one for the business' legitimate location.

At this point, if this were my client, I would not be worrying about losing a few reviews on his phony Place Pages. I'd be sweating whether his account would be penalized before I could report the bogus listings through Google's report a problem link.

Now, that being said, I have seen cases where Google has accidentally displayed the reviews for one geographic location on another location's Place Page, but so far as I know, there is no way to save the reviews. Tell the client they are lucky you are trying to clean up the mess and that going forward, they will need to work on building up new reviews over time to replace what has been lost.

As a final thought, before you report the incorrect Place Pages, why not copy the good reviews and use them as testimonials on the client's website? You might even try doing this with hReview markup code to see if Google will eventually pick them back up again and display them on the authoritative Place Page. But first things first...tell the client you've got to get that record cleaned up as best you can, and fast!

Good luck to you!

Miriam