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Aviva - good luck, and yes, I'd love it if you could update this thread if you get a response. Maybe title your forum thread something like: Whole Parts Of Israel Excluded From Places? That might get a rep's attention.

Hi Aviva, I see you started a thread at the Google Place Help Forum about this, which is exactly what I would have recommended doing. I cannot find any documentation of a situation similar to yours. You are either dealing with a bug, or a possible penalty of the account - that would be my best guess. I know my neighbors to the north (Canada) frequently bemoan the fact that they are under-served by Google Places, in comparison to the U.S., and the fact may be that non-US businesses are dealing with even more problems, bugs and exclusions than we are here. I'm really hoping you can get a Google rep to respond to your question as the scenario you are describing does not appear to be common. Good luck!

Greetings, Pablo, You are allowed to have one Place Page for each city in which you have a unique physical address and unique local area code phone number. Some people do choose to list a few service area cities by name in the Additional Details section of the Place Page, but don't go overboard with this. There is no 'legal' limit, set by Google, but there is some thought that if you do too much of this, it can result in a drop in your rank. I would advise you to remember that it is your website, and not your Place Page, that has the greatest impact on rank. Because of this, I would keep the Place Page simple, and use the pages of your website for optimizing for multiple cities in which you serve.

Hi Storwell,

Thanks for being a good sport, and it definitely sounds to me as if you are experiencing heavy lag time between citations being created and being imported into your Place Page. It can take months for this to happen. Given the vagaries of Google's Local product, your other citations could show up tomorrow, next month or never. I know how frustrating this is. I wonder, have you started a thread about this at the Google Places Help Forum to see if you can trigger a response from a Google rep? It doesn't always work, but sometimes it does and you may either get A) a response or B) a spine tingling mysterious edit. I've seen both happen.

If you do decide to create a thread there, make it as simple but thorough as possible. Obviously, give your business info and link to your Place Page. Then, I would suggest that you cite the 5 biggest citations sources where you are cited but which aren't being shown on your Place Page. I would put them in a simple list, with links to the citations.

My bet is that you will get other forum members chiming in over there with, "it takes patience, just wait it out." But, if you could ask a rep for a general idea of when you might expect to see these appearing on your Place Page, you just might get a response.

Good luck!

Greetings, Cane,

Not understanding exactly what the service is that your company and its agents provide, I'll use an example from another industry: the real estate industry. You will know from my example whether what I'm describing applies to your business model.

Let's start with Google's Places Guidelines. The language in the guidelines applicable to the real estate agency (and I'm hoping your own business) is this:

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

(emphasis mine)

So, a real estate office with 10 realtors working with in can have 1 listing for the business itself, and one for each agent.

These are the official guidelines.

That being said, due to weaknesses and bugs in Google Places, there has been a historic problem with multiple listings sharing the same address but having different data in areas like the business title, phone number field, etc. Merging of the listings can happen so that you might end up with the main listing having the phone number for Agent #6 instead of the direct office number. Reviews for Agent #3 may end up on Agent #4's Place Page. And, yes, you might encounter your main office being outranked by the individual agents' listings.

Your task is to develop a company policy regarding how to handle this, knowing that merging is indeed a real danger, but that the benefits of each agent having his/her own Place Page can also mean increased overall visibility for your whole business. You need to determine whether you will allow agents to have their own Place Pages and whether these will be controlled by you (within your own Places account) or whether every agent will be given the keys to create their own listing under their own steam). Both routes have potential benefits and pitfalls. For example, if you control the listings, you control their data and will also be able to realize if anything becomes penalized or problematic. On the other hand, managing a large number of listings (especially for an International business) is a very big job, indeed. Do you have the time to do this, or would it be better to make it company policy that each agent control his own listing?

I can't make the decision for you, but these are the issues you need to consider in coming to a final decision as to how you want to handle this complex scenario.

Hope this helps!

Hi Storwell,

Google's decision as to what qualifies as a citation source is not in your hands and Google has not given a definitive public explanation as to how a website becomes deemed appropriate as a citation source. It's an interesting suggestion that if enough people linked back to a certain source, Google might eventually come to recognize that source as a trusted citation provider. This might be a factor in their determination process (i.e. if enough links are indicating that a source is of importance, some type of consideration might be triggered  at Google). Interesting idea, as I've said, but I have never read or heard anything to indicate that this is true or correct.

Your best bet is likely to devote your time to getting your business cited by those entities that Google already considers to be appropriate for your industry and region. Using Whitesparks' Local Citation Finder tool will get you off to a very strong start with this process:

http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/2-using-the-local-citation-finder

My feeling is that your results will be most effective if you focus on what Google feels are the best citation sources, rather than trying to find a way to convince them that some other source should be included. Hope this suggestion is helpful to you.

Per your response, to Tyler Fraser, let's keep the conversation positive and friendly here in Q&A. Everyone is here to learn and help and we appreciate everyone's participation.

You are very welcome, Denis, and good luck!

Hi Dennis,

Google's policy is that you are allowed to claim 1 listing for the business and one for each partner within it. It sounds to me as if you haven't created a Place Page for medical center itself (linking to the homepage). You are allowed to do this.

Regarding Yelp - I'm not 100% sure, but I do believe you can link to a page other than the homepage. However, I'm not sure of the value of doing this at this point. It may be smarter to just go with the homepage and a general overview listing of the medical center.

Good luck!

Hi Tom,

Both Richard & TomCraig are giving you some good ideas here. There is no reason your website can't be optimized for both National & Local SEO and the suggestions being given are ones I would agree with. In addition to this, you should properly optimize the footer site-wide for the local address/addresses using hCard microformatting and make sure your contact page is rich in content and well-optimized. Best of luck!

Greetings, MozMan2,

As you know, Google's take on local is that it is address-based. Thus, if you have an office in San Francisco, you can create a Google Place Page and shoot for rankings in San Francisco, but not in neighboring Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose etc. Google's picture of Local has proved problematic for all go-to-client businesses (lawn care, tree removal, nannies, chimney sweeps etc.) because there is a genuine bias towards those businesses which at least operate out of their own storefront or at least within their own town. Service area businesses receive less specific solutions from Google Places.

So, what can a business like your client's do? You are on the right track with creating landing pages for the cities/counties/neighborhoods/regions in which you client serves, but you have to take the creative route with this. Don't simply duplicate content from page to page, and definitely don't just stuff a bunch of keywords in the footer. Make these pages interesting for your clients (and for the bots) by making each one a profile of the work the company does in that location. Tell stories, use photos, videos, talk about special concerns for that region (floods, droughts, watering, laws, maintenance). By taking this approach, you will be creating legitimate content that showcases what the client does in the areas where he serves.

You cannot count on this content enabling you to outrank competitors who have physical locations in the neighboring cities, but it is the strongest move you can make towards improved visibility for these secondary terms. After this, all traditional off-page SEO tactics apply (linkbuilding, Social Media, etc.)

Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Hi JimmySEO,

Some good responses here. I also thought I'd throw into the mix SEOverflow's competitive analysis toolkit:

http://www.localsearchtoolkit.com/

I think you might find that very helpful.

Cheers!

Miriam

Hi All,

I thought I'd jump in here. Some good and creative discussion here, and Martin's comment regarding David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors is an important one. Definitely, though, a ton has changed since the 2010 study (which I had the fun of participating in) and I can hardly wait to see how the 2011 turns out. The rollout of Place Search last October has really shuffled the deck.

Tbone, I know the hope of your question is to find a workaround for this client whose franchises have no address, and while weaknesses in Maps/Places certainly have created some rather staggering loopholes, I'd like to throw a question into the mix:

Have you explained to your client that his business does not fit Google's definition of Local and that, rather than gaming the system and incurring the potential future wrath of the bots, he may need to do what other business are: changing his business model so that it is an authentic Local fit?

When the phone book was invented, you had to have a phone number to get listed. Local is equivalent, and the requirements are a unique local area code phone number and address. I genuinely believe that the quality of everyone's user experience is dependent upon business owners following these two guidelines, rather than attempting to come across as having a physical location where none exists.

Eric Enge did a great interview with Carter Maslan a while back that dealt, in part, with franchise businesses (http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml), and while your client cannot legitimately claim a Place Page for his non-physical locations until he changes his business model, he can at least follow the lead of creating a Place Page for his headquarters and city landing pages on his site for his service areas.

In my own work with Local clients, I try to teach them a civic-minded approach to the scenario. When they don't fit Google's definition, I encourage them to follow Local news to see if Google's rules change to include other types of business models than they currently do. I get phone calls every week from people who either don't understand the definition of Local, or do understand it and want to bend the rules, and I see these calls as a great opportunity for educating folks.

Good luck with your client. He's in a tough spot until such time as Google decides to broaden its definition of Local.