Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Kevin,

I think this may be helpful on the local side of things: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

That's correct. If you don't have face-to-face transactions with customers, then you should not create Google My Business listings.

Hi There,

Normally, no, having a local presence should not harm your national marketing efforts. However, it is important that any Google My Business listing you build is guideline-compliant. Are the GMB listings you built representing real, physical addresses and do you have face-to-face interactions with your customers? If the answer to either of those is "no" then you shouldn't be building GMB listings.

If my answer hasn't quite cleared this up for you, please feel free to provide further details about your business model.

My pleasure! So glad to have you in the community.

No worries at all. Where you put the pages in the menu should not impact organic traffic in terms of people coming directly from the SERPs to one of these landing pages, but it could impact the flow of traffic through the website (someone entering on the home page and then not seeing that you have these landing pages underneath and about tab or someplace else). So, ostensibly, this could impact the depth of the visits your website receives.

The main point of giving these pages their own navigation heading is to increase on-site awareness that the pages exist. From my work with SABs over the years, I've noticed that it has become an expected standard practice to give these pages their own main menu tab, to be sure they're being found by users for whom specialized content has been created. I don't have any recent studies to prove this out, but it's always been a rule of human usability to stick with formats users are already comfortable with. I, personally, wouldn't be inclined to look for my city's landing page under an 'About' tab, but for an authoritative answer on this for your specific brand, you'd need to conduct a usability test in which you see exactly how users are interacting with your website. Sometimes, the results of those studies are extremely surprising.

So, end of the day, it's always up to the owner to decide how he wants to structure his website. What I've tried to offer here would be standard best practice advice. But, the only way to know whether having a unique tab for service city content or putting these pages somewhere else helps/harms usability and conversions is to do a formal study. If you don't want to invest in that right now, you could at least ask a few friends who aren't at all familiar with your site to use it while you watch over their shoulders. You might ask them a question like, "What would you do if you were trying to find out if we serve X city?" and then see how they try to find the answer. Things like that might lend some data to your decision about site navigation.

Thank you for the screenshots. The first thing you need to do here is to edit the GMB listing title to reflect your real world business name. Right now, the title is what we call "keyword stuffed" and is in violation of Google's guidelines (see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB) Nothing but your real-world business name belongs in the title.

So, basically, best advice here would be to clean up the GMB listing and any other citations that may have been built with the stuffed titles, and then build up the authority of the actual brand, both on and off the website. Right now, you're basically being outranked by your reputation on third party websites, which, if you're positive that no penalties are associated with the website, would indicate that the website lacks both authority and clarity.

Hi KarmaDigital,

I want to be sure I understanding this. You are saying:

• _A client's home page isn't ranking for their brand term. _
• _We have an online booking system (which isn't a good one) that originally had a booking page replacing our home page. _
• if you search the brand name the physical location appears on the right rail with accurate URL.

So it sounds like you do have a knowledge panel showing up on the right for the brand name search, but what is CURRENTLY appearing in the number 1 organic spot for this search? You said the booking page was originally replacing your home page. Is it still outranking your homepage?

Also, is there any chance you are able to share the actual search with us? If not, due to client privacy concerns, that's okay, but if you can, it will likely improve the helpfulness of the responses you get from the community.

Hi Green Web!

So glad if my answer was helpful. You've asked some good follow-up questions here. I'll number my responses to match your queries.

1. Yes, a searcher in LA looking for "plumbers" will be shown plumbers in LA, but if he looks up "plumbers Beverly Hills", then Google will show him businesses in that city, instead.

2. Your business is at an important point-of-decision here. Your options are to:

a) Skip building landing pages and just put up a map, knowing that doing so means you are foregoing any rankings, traffic or conversions you might have achieved for your service cities

b) Put up weak landing pages - which is something too many SABs do, downgrading the overall quality of their website and appearing somewhat lazy to consumers and competitors

c) Put in the time to create strong landing pages and feature them proudly in your menu. This would be a standard Local SEO best practice (not silly) and a way for you to increase conversions and improve your analytical tracking of different customer bases. But, yes, this serious approach will require a dedication of resources on the part of your brand. It is easier to create really good landing pages in some industries than in others. For example, a house painter can showcase his different projects in different cities quite easily because of the appealing visual content of before-and-afters. For a plumber it requires more creativity, but he can still strive for unique, compelling pages via user-based content (reviews/testimonials/videos/stories hinging on customers served in the different cities). He can also showcase his expertise relative to the various cities. For example, city X might have lead pipes that need to be replaced, while city B may have high iron content in the water requiring filtering. The point is, any brand in your scenario needs to put in the creative time brainstorming what these landing pages could contain that will persuade the user of the trustworthiness of the company as a service provider in his city.

Once you've got pages you're proud of, I don't think you'll have any qualms about giving them their own tab in the main menu. Putting them anyplace else (like in an unexpected place like the about tab) is going to risk that they're not being found, which would then negatively impact the conversions they might otherwise generate.

Of course, at the end of the day, the decision of how to market your brand is going to be totally up to you. If you don't feel you can create good landing pages, then you may decide to skip creating them altogether, with the understanding that you'll be foregoing the revenue they could generate for your business. But, best practice advice you're going to hear from pretty much any Local Search marketer is going to hinge on putting in the effort to find a compelling strategy for these pages, so that they are sending you good leads.

Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Hi Paul,

Okay, glad to know you were at least able to determine that GMB listings aren't right for the business model. Sounds like you will need to rely on other forms of outreach (organic, paid, social). Good luck!

Hi Sociable!

Yes, Google will show a 2-pack for a branded search (like Me Gusta Tacos) if the business only has 2 locations in a given city. From looking at your website, it looks like you have two locations about 20 miles apart, so that might be a bit of a stretch for Google to include both in the same pack. But, here are three things to consider:

1. When you perform your search, are you physically at or next to one of the restaurants? Because of the searcher-proximity factor, this could affect the results you see. If you go to the other restaurant, do you then see a different result? How about if you search from 20 or 50 miles away from both?

2. Have you built up enough authority for BOTH locations to convince Google that they should show both in a pack when someone in your area does a branded search. If not, this is something to work on that could eventually influence Google to give you that 2-pack you want. Can't promise that, but this would be a way to work towards that goal.

3. Unfortunately, your business name is of a type that may have intent problems. When someone searches for "me gusta tacos" how does Google parse their intent? This could be someone speaking Spanish declaring their enjoyment of tacos, it could be a non-Spanish speaker asking for a translation, it could be someone looking for your restaurant, or it could be something else. This being the case, you may need to build brand authority over time. Google gets it that when someone searches for "Taco Bell" there's really no question of intent and they are likely to show them a local pack with multiple Taco Bells in a city or multiple Taco Bells in nearby towns. No one typing that it is looking for a bell shaped like a taco, or a taco shaped like a bell, or what have you. The brand is so known, the intent is a given. So, with your smaller brand, you'll be hoping to build that kind of authority that signals to Google that anyone searching for "Me Gusta Tacos" means your company. Right now, you need to focus on building local authority so that local searches are shown your business. In the future, if your chain expands, you will need to build regional and then national brand recognition, so that you can get that "Taco Bell treatment" in any local pack where you have branches.

Hope this helps! It's a good question you asked.

Hey There, Green Web!

Thanks for reading my article. It's a bit of an old one, but in the main, is still pretty accurate advice. This one is 2 years fresher, in case it helps: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

All that being said, there are horses for courses, and a blog post like the one you've linked to is offering general best practices rather than one-on-one consulting about what you, personally, should do for your specific business model. You're totally right that that post (though long!) didn't cover every possible scenario.

From your description, it sounds like you have a service area business that serves within a tight radius (as opposed to having a restaurant chain with 30 locations across the state of California). Please, correct me on anything I'm not quite getting right about your model. If you have a single physical location, you are only able to create a single Google My Business listing and citation set for your business. This often frustrates SABs, because they may serve multiple cities from a single location, and can't rank in the local packs for them, because Google will only rank their physical location within a single town. So, a plumber in Oakland might be annoyed that he can't also rank for San Jose and San Francisco, because he lacks physical locations there.

It's from this dilemma, and from the desire to target content to specific user groups that the practice of creating local landing pages evolved. If you can't rank in the local packs for your service cities, you can go after organic rankings with landing pages. If you don't do anything, you have little or no chance of ever seeing rankings of any kind for these service cities.

Beverly Hills is considered a separate city from Los Angeles, as is another city like West Hollywood. These are not merely neighborhoods of Los Angeles, but actually considered separate cities. If you do a search for "plumber Los Angeles" you will get completely different local and organic results than for a search for "plumber Beverly Hills". So, clearly, Google sees these as totally distinct user bases, and if a searcher located in Beverly Hills or Los Angeles just searches for "plumber", they are going to see these totally different results, localized to their location at the time they search.

Because of this, it's not really safe to go with your assumption that people know a plumber in LA serves Beverly Hills, despite the short driving distance between them. Whether this is good common sense or not, it's not the way Google works, and relying on Google to show your LA-based plumbing company to Beverly Hills searchers will not work unless you give Google some additional reason to do so (that being content on your website showcasing your services in Beverly Hills, which may give you some hope of ranking organically for these searches).

Upshot: If you need customers from Beverly Hills to find you on the web, you must build something for them to find. Your options for this would include:

• A Beverly Hills landing page

• Ongoing blogging showcasing your work in Beverly Hills

• Paid advertising targeted to Beverly Hills

• Social media outreach targeting Beverly Hills

In a competitive market, you'll likely need to do all of this to build brand awareness in any city where you serve but aren't physically located.

I completely get your UX concerns. You are rightly perceiving that there's a real danger of putting up a bunch of weak, silly content for every city your company serves, and that this would downgrade user experience and the overall quality of your website. So, you can't take that route. Rather, you'd want to come up with a plan for making those landing pages incredibly useful and persuasive, so that they truly do serve users, while also signalling to search engines that you have relevance to this target community. Hopefully, that newer article I've linked to will provide some inspiration, but if you need further ideas, please feel free to ask here.

Hi Aquib,

Great question, with a somewhat complex answer. If your business is local, then, yes, you want to create a unique, researched and optimized page for each of your services. Write fully about each service, including its value proposition, pricing, photos, videos, reviews, etc. And, if you've got a multi-location local business, you also want to create a unique, research and optimized page for each of your physical locations. These types of pages are table stakes for nearly all local businesses.

But, once you've got these basic pages published, our thinking has to shift a bit. It's not that more pages = good for SEO. In the past, much of SEO hinged on the idea that you wanted to create a unique page for each core keyword phrase that research indicated would be a top performer for you. Sometimes this led to some kind of foolish structures, like a website having a page optimized for "car repairs" and another page for "auto repairs", and sites would end up with huge numbers of rather weak pages as a result.

Now, post-Hummingbird and in a RankBrain environment, we have to think differently, because these have signaled to us that Google is now capable of understanding the shared intent behind similar phrases. Google knows that searches for "auto repairs" and "car repairs" have the same intent, and optimized content development has shifted to think of keywords in terms of topics instead of as standalone phrases. What smart businesses are doing is identifying the most important topics to their companies and their consumers, and then mapping all of the keywords that fit within that topic to a really strong, thorough page that covers the topic.

So, let's say you own an auto garage, and one of the things you offer is repair of the new Tesla cars. You plug "tesla auto repairs" into a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, or the Google Adwords KW tool and you see a whole bunch of keyword phrases that relate to this topic, like "tesla auto repair cost", "tesla engine replacement cost", "tesla repair center", "tesla body work", etc. In the past, you might have created a unique page for each of these terms, but modern SEO would typically advocate combining all of these related phrases into a single authoritative article that covers everything a consumer could possibly want to know about getting their Tesla worked on in your shop. The goal of this page is to establish your authority and guide the user toward a conversion. We believe that Google is now identifying domain names with authority on specific topics, so if this were your business, you'd want to establish authority on this topic with a best-in-geo/industry page on this topic.

To dive deeper into Hummingbird and RankBrain, definitely look at the two links, above. If your competitors are stuck in the old ways of creating large numbers of weak pages, your understanding of how Google is evolving could be a competitive difference maker for your brand. Hope this helps!

Hi Neil,

Thanks for your reply. So, the thing is, it's typically much, much harder to rank national pages (you're competing against the nation) than to rank local ones - if the searcher is local and the search is perceived to have a local intent, because these pages are only competing locally. So, another question from me:

Are the local pages ranking well for local searchers? As in, your office in Atlanta is telling you they see the Atlanta landing page come up instead of the national page? And your office in Dallas is telling you they see the Dallas page come up instead of the national page?

Or, are you saying, you have a searcher in San Francisco (where you have no office) seeing the Dallas page instead of the national page?

Hey Neil,

I want to be sure I've envisioned your scenario clearly. Are you saying something along the lines of:

1. You have a national medical services brand, with 10 clinics on the west coast.

2. You have a permanent page on your website that deals with the topic of supporting family members with Alzheimer's.

3. You write a blog post on an Alzheimer's walk in San Mateo that your clinic in San Mateo is co-sponsoring and which gets a lot of shares and links, and suddenly, this local-focused blog post is outranking the permanent, non-local page on this disease when someone searches for "Alzheimer's support.". And you don't want this ... you want the permanent article to appear first when people look for this keyword phrase.

Is this what you are describing, or would you modify my hypothetical scenario in any way?

I like your thinking, Nicholas! Some good tips here and intriguing predictions. Thank you so much for contributing to this thread.

Hi Paul,

So glad you asked. This is one of those rather complicated Google My Business issues, so my answer is going to be a bit long to be sure I'm being thorough. Google's guidelines have long stated the following:  (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Ineligible businesses

The following businesses aren’t eligible for a business listing:

• Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes, model homes or vacant apartments. Sales or leasing offices, however, are eligible for verification.

Historically, Google has forbidden the use of GMB listings for temporary sales offices located in model homes. If you had a sales office located somewhere permanently, you could list it, but if it was temporary, it wasn't eligible.

Now, the guidelines still read this way, and you can see GMB Forum Top Contributor Joy Hawkins citing them back in 2016 in this thread in which a business model similar to yours got all of its listings suspended:

https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Spam-Policy/Platinum-Homes-Account-Suspended-having-17-locations/m-p/739193/highlight/true#M4962

*Please note that the above thread contains references to Google Mapmaker which no longer exists.

However, a couple of months after that initial thread, Joy received some new information from Google (see: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Spam-Policy/Platinum-Homes-Account-Suspended-having-17-locations/m-p/825706#M5299), which I'll copy/paste here:

"I just heard back from Google because I double-checked with them. They told me:

_ We (GMB) recently decided to allow leasing offices for model homes on the Map so I'm wondering if that is what the user is saying they see often. If it's actually just empty model homes and not the leasing office, we should remove them."_

So, it seems that if you have a leasing office within a model home, Google is now okay with this (though you still should not list an empty model home).

However, moving on with your question, Paul, if the newly built communities aren't mapped yet, you will see further down in that second GMB forum thread that this represents a problem, which Joy addresses this way:

"Since Street View doesn't confirm or show any of your sales offices, the only way for me to get these all reinstated is for you to get photos of inside and outside each of them to help Google see they exist. The easiest way to do this would be to add them to your website and let me know where they are so I can reply back to Google. Let me know when you've done that."

So, what I'd recommend, then, is that you get photographic documentation together of any staffed sales offices located in a model home that isn't yet visible via Street View, and that you then post this to the Google My Business Forum, asking that a Top Contributor like Joy please help you get recognized. Hopefully this will help you avoid the problems that the poster in the Google forum ran into with suspension, but I can't guarantee it. It's confusing when Google's public guidelines don't reflect their current internal stance, and this is one they need to update publicly if they've changed their policy. At least you now have in your hands the forum threads that document what Google told Joy, in case you run into TCs or Google staff who do not understand this change of policy.

As for what to do when a sales office closes and is finally sold to a buyer, what is the model of this business? Specifically, are different communities they build branded with the same name? For example, are multiple communities named "Golden Homes", or is one called "Golden Homes" and the second called "Oceanview Homes" and the next called "Riverside Homes"? Please, let me know, as good advice on this question could depend on how the business operates.

You're welcome, Gremmy9. Good luck with the work ahead!

Hey Brian!

Thank you so much for clarifying that you were seeing this as part of a tool's terminology, as well as some references elsewhere. Sometimes, different folks have different names for things. Here at Moz, I think we'd be more inclined to refer to this as "Evergreen Content" or even "10x Content" (see: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday). While I'm not sure I agree with the Yoast quote Roman found about needing to build another website if you have more than 10 superlative pages (if you are a local business, creating multi-sites is generally a BIG no-no), I think the main idea here is that every website should have a set of pages that are:

1. Frequently linked to internally because they provide the most authoritative answer to a question

2. Way better pages than your competitors have created

3. Perennially useful

If this can be used as a a definition of "cornerstone" or "evergreen" content, then I wouldn't limit this to having to be a landing page. It could be a core page (like an about page). It could also be a video or an infographic. It could be a landing page, or it could be a blog post.

I think the key here is not confining this to a specific format of content, but, instead, identifying your best and most useful pages and remembering to internally link to them so that they are easily discovered by consumers. Looking at your analytics, the findings of tools like Moz Pro, and listening to your customers is going to help you identify which pieces of content are your best. And, typically, best is going to equal the content that specifically supports the various stages of the user journey, be that awareness, consideration, decision, or conversion. Conversion is almost always the end goal of content, but each stage has to be supported, and evergreen content can play a role at each stage of the journey.

So, summing up, I wouldn't confine the definition of this type of content to a single format (it could be any type of page or form of media), and I also wouldn't state that you can only have X number of cornerstone pieces on a given website. A small site might only have 3-5 of these, but a larger site could have 20, 30, 100. Identify the most important topics for supporting the consumer journey, and then be sure that your resources are better than your competitors. Finally, be sure you are intelligently linking to these cornerstone pieces internally, so that they are ideally accessible.

Hope this helps, Brian!

Thanks for clarifying, Roman.

Hey Roman!

Thank you so much for joining this conversation. For my own clarification, is this your advice, or Yoast's:

Websites should have a minimum of one or two cornerstone articles and a maximum of eight to ten. If you want to write more than ten cornerstone articles, you should probably start a second website.

Hey Brian,

Thanks so much for asking about this. Before diving in, may I ask, are you seeing the word "cornerstone content" being used as a metric/descriptor in a particular SEO tool? Like maybe Yoast SEO or something like that? It's not a term I see used frequently, and want to be sure I understand.

My pleasure, Gary. And Happy New Year to you, too!

Hi Gary!

That's a great question. From a UX standpoint, repetitious links in a menu aren't something I'd recommend. But, from a pure SEO standpoint, from all we've seen, Google only "counts" the first link of multiple same-destination links on a given page. For more on this, see point 6 on this awesome Whiteboard Friday (I recommend watching the whole thing!): https://moz.com/blog/should-seos-care-about-internal-links-whiteboard-friday

The video doesn't specifically speak about menu links, likely because it's just not a great or common practice to double them up as in your example. So, while redundant menu links may not directly impact SEO, poor UX can definitely lead to higher bounce rates and shallower page sessions. This can result in decreased repeat traffic to pages. Which can then result in you earning fewer links. Which can then definitely decrease your ability to rank well. So, holistically speaking, poor UX decisions can lead to poor SEO outcomes, even if indirectly. Likely, your website would benefit from a careful overhaul of the menu structure to improve its clarity, reduce wasted screen real estate and enhance the quality of the user experience.

Hope this helps!

I'm so glad if that helped, Ed!

Hi Ed,

I would highly recommend watching this Whiteboard Friday if you've not yet seen it:

https://moz.com/blog/optimizing-for-rankbrain-whiteboard-friday

Please, spend a few minutes watching that and see if it provides further clarity.

Hi Gremmy9!

Congratulations on expanding your practice - and on doing such good work in the communities you serve.

Growhat has made some good suggestions. He's linked to an older Moz blog post of mine - here's a newer one on the same topic that I believe will help inspire your work: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

I think your question has two parts to it, given that you've only got two locations now but plan to have more in the near future. Right now, having two-three pages on your website with a moderate amount of duplicate content on them isn't likely to cause much, if any harm, to your rankings. But, you are being very smart in forecasting this into the future, when you have 5, 10 or 15 locations throughout your state or in a variety of states. If you end up with 1/2 of your website being redundant content, that could start to get a bit worrisome, right?

So, your work right now is to develop a template that will ensure that as much of the content on your homepage and landings pages is as unique and as helpful to customers as possible. I would recommend that this template work something like this:

1. Put the full NAP (name, address, phone) of each location at the top of its landing page (not at the bottom as in your mockup). People need to see that information first to understand that they are looking at the page representing the office nearest them.

2. Then, offer a brief, unique summary of the treatments offered at this practice. You shouldn't have a problem describing this in a unique way if you take the target community into consideration. Explain that you serve both adults and kids. Try to hone the message to the community, based on whatever data/statistics you may have about that community.

3. Then, find 1-2 unique success stories from clients in that target city to share. If you wish to follow this with the information about "Our Anxiety treatments really work", I like your idea of creating a little infographic for that, to break up the page content and make it more digestible. But, I think most of this information should be conveyed in the opening description (types of ailments treated and why your methodology works).

4. Then, introduce the therapists at that location, along with reviews/testimonials concerning their work.

5. Highlight 3rd party reviews following this, on whichever review platforms matter most to you clients in that city.

6. Repeat NAP, put a map, and write out driving directions. Include social media links, if appropriate.

7. End with a clear call to action. Let the website user know what you'd like them to do, whether that's call you, book an appointment, etc.

Within the above, when a specific service/ailment/etc. is mentioned, do internally link to the authoritative page on that topic. So, for example, if you have a page about OCD, and on the landing page you are mentioning that you help people with OCD, feel free to link to the authoritative page on the subject.

I think with a structure like that, the majority of the content will, by nature, be unique, because you will have a unique therapist to introduce, unique testimonials/reviews, unique NAP, unique directions, etc. Your introductory paragraphs will be the only part you really have to noodle over to make unique and compelling to the target audience. The question I'd ask is, "Is there something that would really resonate with our potential clients in X city that is unique to X city?" Maybe there's been a natural disaster there that had increased anxiety. Maybe clogged freeways there cause anxiety? Maybe environmental pollution? I'm not sure ... you are the expert, but I would strive to make that introduction as highly personalized to the community as I could, without turning anyone away.

Hope this helps, and that the blog post I linked to will give you further ideas!

Happy New Year, David! I love that you're exploring that geeky plumbing. Nice list you've added here, and I hope I'll get to learn from your investigation

Hi Veronica!

That is, indeed, such a difficult situation. I hope you and the client are aggressively reporting the spam, and yes, maybe this will be the year in which we see Google step up its game in this regard. Crossing my fingers! Thanks so much for the good wishes

First, I want to thank all of our awesome community members here who continuously post interesting, tough and good Local SEO question in the Moz Q&A forum. I love chatting with you all, and I hope you'll keep asking away, giving us all the opportunity to muse and learn together.

I think 2018 is going to be challenging and fun, and have a few thoughts on that I'd like to share, hoping you'll reply with your own tips and predictions. In the new year, I believe:

1. Quality is going to further solidify as the most apparent differentiator of local businesses, giving those companies with the most considerate and excellent service and policies the upper hand. Memorably good customer service will drive the high-star reputation and word-of-mouth marketing that leads to success.

Small local businesses have an advantage here, in their agility to implement the most genuine home-town excellence, but bigger brands can strive for this, too. From skilled phone service, to adequate in-store staffing, to employee training, to dedicated management of all online local assets, to initiatives that make a lasting, positive impression on consumers, quality is the key ingredient to loyalty, which is what every local business should most pursue in 2018.

2. Speaking of loyalty, I would especially advise SABs to leave no stone unturned in earning it. Google's LSA program will be a serious disruptor of business-as-usual in this sector, changing the makeup of local SERPs and striving to become the middleman in the service industries. SAB owners won't love having to rent back their customers for a fee to Google, so developing Google-independent streams of leads and repeat customers will be vital in any city where LSA rolls out in the coming year. Serving in a smaller town? Begin working on Google-independence anyway, particularly via word-of-mouth marketing so that you have these streams running in advance, should LSA move beyond the more densely-populated areas.

3. While developing Google-independence, don't overlook Google opportunities that are still free. I think Google Posts was the most interesting development of 2017, and there has been some anecdotal evidence that weekly use of this form of knowledge panel microblogging may give a small ranking boost. Be an early adopter and take advantage of that.

4. 2018 may be the year in which Google finally cracks down on two things: keyword stuffing of the business title and review spam. I'm sure they're tired of the complaints surrounding the former and if Google's commitment to identifying quality remains in place, sooner or later, they have got to deal with this false signal of relevance the same way that have with EMDs. As to the latter, Google's increased focus on reviews over the past year is apparent in the sheer number of emails they are now sending out regarding them. Also fascinating to see that we're closing out 2017 with third-party reviews finally reappearing in Google's local products, after years of absence and trouble with the FTC. Overall, Google knows that their review corpus is dependent on consumers trusting it, and better spam detection methodologies and better/faster response to review spam reporting has got to be on their to-do list. This could be the year!

For local businesses, protection lies in abandoning any type of spammy practice (from keyword stuffing to self-reviewing). And, being proactive if you are the victim of review spam. Report it. Raise a polite but firm hullabaloo. Let Google know you hold them to reasonable standards of accountability in their role as public arbiter of brand reputation.

5. The best Local SEO agencies and local business will dig deeper into the history and tactics of organic SEO than ever before. We need to understand Hummingbird, RankBrain, and matching content to the buyer journey with the best of them. We need to master not just linkbuilding, but the relationship building that makes it most authentic and of most lasting value - and this is an area in which local businesses have a massive advantage over virtual ones, in that we can actually meet our neighbors face-to-face to build beneficial bonds. And we need to get a real handle on the technical side of SEO, understanding how site structure, handling of the robots.txt file, and the management of indexation and accessibility issues impact us. When we put high-level knowledge of all these considerations together with our Local SEO know-how, we can be successful in new, exciting ways we may have overlooked in the past.

Oh, there's so much more I could say about the interesting things I see coming in 2018, but I'd love it if you'd talk now. What do you see in our industry's near future? I'd love to know. And let me take this opportunity to wish you all a fun, exciting and prosperous new year!

Good thoughts from Roman, for sure, and a good question, Dylan.

Roman is right that formal link analysis will provide the only data-based answer to your query about which link will "do more" for you. But, in general, for local businesses, it is best to build up local relevance with local links. However, if a dental practice had a chance to be featured on the website of the ADA or something like that, then of course, you'd jump at that chance.

What you don't want to do is focus on getting backlinks from something that really doesn't relate to the geo-industry. So, for example, a dentist in Chicago doesn't really have a sensible relationship to a directory of dental providers in San Diego ... even if you could somehow get a link there, it wouldn't be very relevant.

But, in general, build up highly relevant local links, and if the chance comes up to be featured on an authoritative industry site, go for that, too.

It's my pleasure! Good luck with your client.

Hi Zx3,

So, if she meets clients at their locations instead of her own, that would be a service area business (SAB) which you will find described in the section of Google's Guidelines called "Address" (see:https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB).

It's actually Google's requirement that SABs hide their address. When creating the listing be sure to select the option reading "I deliver goods and services to my customers at their locations." Do not select "I serve customers at my business address". This should lead to the outcome of your client having a GMB listing that shows her city name, but not her street address.

However, there are a couple of provisos you should always share with home-based businesses with privacy concerns.

1. You can't guarantee that Google will keep the address hidden forever. There have been bugs that have caused SAB addresses to go public temporarily. Also, Google could change its policy at any time and decide to show SAB addresses instead of hiding them.

2. When it's imperative to keep an address hidden, citation building is somewhat limited. Some directories won't accept a hidden-address listing, though others will. Please read this post by Phil Rozek for a list of directories that allow addresses to be hidden on listings: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/ It's a bit old now, so I would double check that each entity on there is still supporting hidden addresses, but at least that's a start. The reason it's important to let your client know about the limitations of hidden addresses is that she may not be able to be quite as competitive as some of her competitors who have visible addresses.

Hope this helps!

Hi Donald,

Thanks so much for the answers. Other than a past SEO doing this for some weird reason for your client, the only other explanation I can think of is that the weird listings are the outcome of some kind of aggregation by the directories in question. Some directories do auto-generate listings, and there is a possibility of your client's business getting mixed up with the details of some other business. But I'm not really leaning that way because of the fictitious address. That "feels like" spam to me. But, I definitely would review this with the client in full to see if anything about it rings a bell to them about past work that may have been done internally or by an agency.

I think the best thing to do here would be to discover as many directories as you can that are listing the fictitious business and contact them to request listing removal, as you've done with Manta. You will easily be able to approve that the address is non-existent, that the phone doesn't connect to anything, and, if you've received no reply trying to use the email address, that the email is unresponsive. Show legal proofs of ownership of the brand name if necessary. Then, once you've gotten these odd listings removed, I would make it a practice once a month to search for any new listings that may crop up. Not very fun, but it seems necessary in the instance of such an odd scenario.

Good luck!

Hey There!

Thanks for asking this question. Before I reply, can you define what you mean by a "remote" business. Is your client meetings customers face-to-face at your house or theirs, or is her business totally virtual (no face-to-face interactions)?

Thanks for the further details, and shalom to your wife and family.

Wow - this is super weird, Donald. When I saw the word "hijack" I assumed your were talking about this entity hijacking your GMB listing, but you've clarified that this isn't so. Bearing in mind that I haven't dealt with this scenario before, here is what I see.

When I search for the Galveston address in Google's main engine, I see:

https://www.google.com/search?q=1644+Lynn+Ogden+Lane+Galveston%2C+TX+77550&oq=1644+Lynn+Ogden+Lane+Galveston%2C+TX+77550&aqs=chrome..69i57.463j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

You are right ... there appear to be a number of listings that have been created for this business.

When I click into Maps, I see the following error message:

Maps can't find 1644 Lynn Ogden Lane Galveston, TX 77550

So it would appear that address doesn't exist. Let's check Smarty Streets just to be sure. Yep! As I suspected "address unknown".

So, the address being used doesn't actually exist.

Calling the phone number several time only yields a busy signal.

The website listed on that Wufoo form is your client's own website. Are you seeing a website anywhere for this other entity?

The Manta listing for the strange entity is bringing up a 404 error page: https://www.manta.com/c/mh1l5py/s-s-s-custom-closets, but I'm seeing a live listing on Hotfrog and a couple of other low level directories.

I have to ask, what would be the point of this spam? If they're pointing to your client's website, and the phone number on those weird listings isn't functional, how would this be a successful spam strategy? I just don't get it.

A couple of questions, Don:

1. Are you positive your client has never attempted to operate any type of undertaking in Galveston? Positive they didn't try to do anything spammy on their end, like set up a fake location there? No offense intended in any way, but sometimes clients have done weird things in the past that we don't know about unless we ask.

2. What is the email being listed on those weird listings: warblingjulian@rediffmail.com. Is that your client or the unknown entity? Have you investigated that email at all...tried to write to them? I just don't see any other way to contact this unknown person than by filling out the form/emailing them, if they have no website or working phone number.

One suggestion:

I would urge you to do some work on your client's website to locally optimize it better. The website is currently very vague about its location. The homepage, contact, footer, about, etc. should list the full NAP of the business. Right now, I'm seeing a mention of the city here and there, but to ensure that your client retains dominant status for its name + location, some optimization needs to be done on-page to associate that brand name with the correct street address.

Please, if you can, answer the couple of questions I've asked, and thanks for bringing this mysterious case to the community. It's just not adding up for me. It's not typical local spam.

Hey Mike,

I hope you'll take a peek at my Monday blog post which Paul has linked to in his reply to you. It deals with precisely this topic. Your dilemma is a really common one, and so frustrating, I know! Basically:

1. Yes, you should remove the keyword stuffing. It's a guideline violation, and therefore, a risk.

2. Yes, this may cause rankings to drop - you will have to build authority in a Google-approved way to get it back.

3. Yes, Google can "soft supsend" the listing if you don't remove the kw stuffing, which will likely cause your listing to become unverified and your reviews may get lost because they aren't associated with a GMB account anymore. You'll have to re-claim the listing if you get caught, but I can't guarantee the reviews will come back (this is scary).

4. Yes, Google is doing an awful job catching this type of spam, so help them out. Once you've cleaned up your own listing, start reporting every single competitor for spam. It would help if you could achieve Local Guide status in Google, as it will give your spam reports a bit more oomph...better still if you can get to know a few other Local Guides and team up to repeatedly flag a business for spam. You have to be on the lookout after you report a business for business title spam - very often, they reappear with the spammy name intact! Arggh - so annoying. But be persistent.

Again, hope you'll read the article, and thanks for asking an important question.

Hey hey, Paul - you read my article! Woo hoo Thank you. And thanks for your great contributions to this thread.

Hi William!

I'm so glad you're here, participating in Q&A. Thank you for being part of this conversation. I want to take a minute to explain why ThompsonPaul is saying "no no!" to non-physical addresses, in hopes that it may be good learning moment for lots of community members.

P.O. boxes, mailboxes, virtual offices, etc, are a violation of Google's guidelines, which state:

Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location. PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable.

Though you are absolutely right, William, that some mail services provide a street address, it's so important to remember that Google can read street level signage. So, if Steven's wedding company were to try to list at such a location, Google can easily see that they're looking at a mailing office instead of a business with a sign outside of it saying "Steven's Wedding Company". Important to remember that customers and competitors can see this, too, using Streetview, and can easily report any offending business for spam.

ThompsonPaul has linked to my recent Moz Blog post in which I explain that the results of being detected at an ineligible location would be a "hard penalty" causing listing removal, rendering any money, time or effort that had been put into building up the fake location listing null. We don't know for certain how this might, then, influence Google's feelings about the entire brand ... but I wouldn't want to risk that my spammy behavior in City B wasn't somehow putting a black mark next to my legitimate location in City A.

Finally, when this topic comes up, I always like to touch on the ethics of the thing. Smart businesses know that it can spell doom to be cited by the consumer public for deceptive practices. Not only has a failure to live up to truth-in-advertising standards led to public lawsuits, it has really tarnished brands. So, it's just good business to be 100% honest in how you present a business to the public, including being truthful about its physical locations. Anything else is a risk.

Good discussion going on here, William. Hopefully we can all learn something about these challenges from participating.

Hi Steven!

So, basically, the answer is: you can't. I know that's not what you want to hear, but it is the reality for nearly all single location businesses that serve multiple cities. Google's bias toward physical location affects all service business models this way. Unless you can get a staffed, physical office in the second city, it will be a waste of your time to make it your goal to rank in the local results for that city. Instead, your options are:

1. Go after organic rankings for that city via the authority you build surrounding website content+links for that city.

2. Pay for visibility with locally-targeted PPC.

3. Use social media to try to build brand awareness for your work in that city.

4. Do everything you can to encourage word-of-mouth among existing customers. Customers in City A have friends and family in city B. Make a superior effort to offer the type of superior service that would cause the A group to recommend your services to the B group. Consider how loyalty programs might assist with this. Perhaps every customer who brings you a new customer gets a voucher for a free dinner, free massage, etc.

5. Explore building relationships with related businesses in City B. Perhaps your company does everything but bake the cake for weddings. Find the best bakers in City B and see how you can help one another in terms of lead gen.

A combination of all these efforts could begin generating some leads for you that are not dependent on the unrealistic goal of ranking locally where you aren't locally located. Hope this helps!

Adding to Roman's advice, which I agree with, be sure you've updated all of your government records so that the address reflects your business instead of the old one.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer, and yes, I understood exactly what you are describing.

So, the one common exception I have seen to the rule of thumb that you can't rank where you don't have a physical presence is when Google doesn't have enough results within a single city. So, if you're one of only 3 gas stations serving 10 towns in a rural area, you have a very good chance of ranking for all 3 towns.

I'm not sure how competitive your XYZ area is, Gary. Where I live, any town with an "auto row" has tons and tons of dealerships. So, I wouldn't expect a dealership in town X to show up in the results for town Y, because town Y has 15+ dealerships of its own. What's the situation where you are?

It's my pleasure, Jeff, and I hope going through a formal basic audit, using the free spreadsheet that's in that blog post I linked to, will help you see exactly how your church might improve its overall metrics to become more visible. But those filters can be hard to overcome. Best of luck!

Hi Jeff,

I'm looking right now at your scenario and am going to jot down what I see as I go:

1. Searching from my location in California for "church spring hill tennessee", I see Community Baptist Church coming up #15 in the local finder view (to the left of the map).

2. In order for me to make Covenant Community Church appear in the local finder, I have to zoom in 2 levels on the map, at which point, your church appears at #20 in the local finder, with Community Baptist being at #11.

3. This indicates to me that your church (Covenant) is being impacted by a Google filter, like the Possum Filter (read: https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-possum) which has the effect of filtering out businesses that share a building or a category. I'm not positive this is actually Possum, because the two churches do have different categories, but I suspect it is a shared-building filter of some kind.

4. I'm assuming you are located near your church, and I would advise you to try to replicate what I am doing zooming in on the map, click by click, to see if your church then appears in the results. If you see the same results behavior that I have from my locale on the West Coast, that is further confirmation of a filter.

5. Some good news, is that if I search Google for just "Covenant Church Spring Hill TN", you are the ONLY entity that comes up, with it's own knowledge panel and everything. So, if I were new to town, and was of a Covenant affiliation, Google would be showing me your organization as a result. That's good to know! I'm also glad to see that the two churches have different phone numbers.

6. I would advise you not to worry about people searching for you by address. If I am looking for a church, I'm going to look up "Baptist Church Spring Hill," or "Episcopal Church Spring Hill". I'm not going to look for a church by typing "123 Main St." into Google or Google Maps, right?

7. I want to ask about your use of a suite number. Is your congregation actually occupying a different building on the church grounds than the Baptist community is? My guess is no on this, and that you are both using the same church at different times of the day. If I'm right about that, you should remove the suite number from your Google My Business listing and other local business listings. Google pays no attention to suite numbers, but you want to be totally accurate in how you represent your church's location, and use of a suite number does not prevent filtering (as we're seeing with our own eyes in your scenario).

8. It's up to Google who gets a place label icon (the little church symbol you see) and typical advice on that is that you need to build up authority to earn one. The fact that the Baptist organization has the symbol and the higher local finder visibility leads me to suspect they are simply the stronger "competitor". I know it's kind of weird to talk about "competitors" when we are talking about churches, but that is how we'd phrase this if we were talking about two businesses occupying the same location, and all of this leads me to my next point.

9. If you are concerned that the Baptists are outranking you in some way that would be preventing Covenant affiliated folks from finding your community, then you will need to conduct a competitive audit to see where the "competitor" is stronger than you are. Again, sorry for the business-type language! This recent post of mine (https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit) will walk you through the process of doing a basic audit, so that you can discover areas in which the Baptist church may have superior metrics that are causing it to outrank your church for a generic search like my original "church spring hill tennessee".

10. Always keep in mind that local results are not static. Because Google now sees the searcher as the centroid of truly local searches, this means that people living right next door to (or driving past) your church building may be seeing different local results than people who are doing the same search while being located up on Buckner Road on the north side of town. And, folks 30 miles away (like in Nashville) are likely seeing yet different results. I just mention this as something to always keep in mind when looking at the results.

If you take the time to do the audit referenced in point 9, and any questions arise from the data you total up, please feel free to come back to this thread and ask me. Thanks for the chance to look at your scenario.

Hey Michael,

Nice to know my name is one your cherished family members had (may they rest in peace), and thanks for the kind words in your reply. I'm sorry if what I was describing was a bit basic - stuff you already knew, but it does sound like that city-specific ranking bias of Google's is the cause of what your clients are experiencing in the more populous area you've described. One thing I am curious about, and would like to ask you as you've been looking so much at the results in this tri-city area. Let's say your client is in city X in the XYZ of this triangulation. Do you ever see competitors in city Y ranking in the local packs for cities X and Z, or competitors in city Z ranking in the local packs for X and Y? Just curious.

I know what you mean about spurious agencies offering your client the impossible, and yikes, the client taking the bait. So frustrating when that happens. Likely, the best thing to recommend to the client in city X is to invest in Adwords so that they can show up in the paid results for cities Y and Z.

Enjoyed your reply very much!

Hi Gary,

Great question. The answer is, no, I don't believe that is a "known" quantity, because it would vary for each scenario, each search. How frequently one of your clients appears in the results is going to be based on a) it's strength, b) the strength and number of nearby competitors it has and c) the location of the searcher. So, as you can imagine, that varies, search by search, user by user.

A given in any scenario is that a business is only likely to rank for both truly local and remote searchers for the city in which it is physically located. So, let's say you have a dealership in Dallas. Someone in Dallas searches for "auto dealership" and your client has a good chance to rank for that. Someone in Sugar Land searches for "auto dealership Dallas", and, again, your client can rank for that. But, if someone in Sugar Land searches just for "auto dealership", Google is going to show him Sugar Land results, and your client won't be included in those because they are located in Dallas.

The variables in the scenario relate to the exact proximity of a user to your business at the time of search. A searcher in a Central Dallas neighborhood looks for "auto dealership" on his device, and Google is most likely to show him dealerships that are closest to him. If he then drives over to the Park Cities neighborhood and performs the same search, his results are likely to change to that geographic area of the city. But, if the searcher is, say, 10 miles outside of Dallas, searching for "auto dealerships Dallas", Google defaults to a different type of result for him, which appears to be based more on authority than proximity.

So, those are basically the elements that you have to take into consideration in trying to understand the reach of a given business. You have to consider the location of the searcher, as well as the level of competition both right next to the business, and within its entire city or zip code.

Not a simple answer, I know! But, I hope it helps.

Hi Jared!

Please email help@moz.com so they can give you the steps to go through when a business moves. They'll be able to explain all of the details.

Hi GVZH!

Great question. There are so many different phenomena that can contribute to the scenario you're seeing. In order for the community to help you dig into this, we'll need to know:

1. The identity of your website

2. The exact keyword phrase you're trying to rank locally for.

If you can share these things, you should receive some great, targeted advice here. Otherwise, unfortunately, we'd just be making random guesses.

Whoa - that's not only a great tool, Igor, but your strategy for how to use it is quite amazing! Thank you so much for the suggestion. Very, very cool!

Hello to our wonderful community here!

I'm updating an old list of free tools to use in a local search marketing campaign. The original list was created before there were quite so many paid tools in our industry, and it definitely needs an update!

I'd like to ask, are there free tools you find yourself using these days in marketing local businesses? These could be related to any aspect of your campaigns.

I'd love it if you'd share your favorites with me, especially if they are things you feel others might not be aware of but which are working really well for you! Thanks for any suggestions you can provide.