Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you for your answer, it's exactly what I was expecting your to say. I'll take the advice.

Hi, I have a client that has an address that is shared for a few different businesses in the holistic health field. My client is a chiropractor. There is an eye doctor, massage therapist and acupuncturist aslo sharing the same address. It's a subburban setting with two buildings all sharing one address.

In the interest of preventing any merged listings down the road, I recently added un unofficial suite number to his website and Google places business listing. I also did this for all of his online directory listings, and for Bing and Yahoo as well.

Did I do the right thing here?

It seems to be having a positive impact on his local SEO as far as I can tell. Or at least there has not been any negative impact in the last 6 months

Your thoughts?

Google is going to choose the most relevant page for the search query. I would keep your pages as tightly themed as possible.You don't want them competing with each other. You don't want the same keywords in your title tags for two different pages.  I believe the coined term is keyword cannibalization.

It's good that you have landing pages and the fact that you are not seeing them in the SERPS means that your new site is not fully indexed. A week isn't a lot of time. It can take several weeks for things to settle and your pages find their places.

I don't know what platform your site is on but it may speed the indexing process along if you use Google webmaster tools to submit a sitemap.

Good stuff, you give a compelling argument. Right now there is no site up just a few months of Google Places, Bing and Yahoo. I am supposed to make the decision this weekend now I am confused about what to do.

Brand and consistency make a lot of sense and "WTF is that" sorta hits that home thanks for your help.

A very interesting take you have, thank you for that perspective. Do you think that there would be a better chance of outranking yelp for their generic page titled,"Auto Repair+City" using a keyword domain?

Thanks for your response. Not that is should make a difference in your response. The scenario above is fictitious and I should have stated that. The actual situation involves a website that is about to go up with two newly purchased domains. One is the brand name and the other is autorepair+city.com

The title tag and meta description are what people will see in the SERPS.. Don't you think that the url will be insignificant to those that are actually searching for the business name? Isn't a exact match domain like that desirable? Especially when trying to compete with sites like Yelp that may have a low page authority for that a particular term but a really high domain authority.

For a first time, new website. I have a Barber shop in Hartford named "Dixie Cutters" with two domains, dixiecutters.com and barberhartford.com. Obviously the latter domain has two main keywords, barber and location...Hartford. So it would be better to use that and use a 301 redirect for dixiecutters.com to redirect to barberhartford.com.

Many online directories including SE listings on Google Places, BIng and Yahoo have already been set up withe domain "dixiecutters.com" and the email address info@dixiecutters.com.

If I choose to make barberhartford.com the primary domain with dixiecutters.com 301 redirecting to it....does this mean that I should then change the directory listings and more specifically, the SE business listings so that they have the primary domain listed (barbarhartford.com) with an email address like...info@barberhartford.com? Or can I leave all of this alone and keep as stated above without any SEO local consequences.

I know consistency is a big issue with NAP. I also know it's recommended to use an email address with your domain name in the SE business listings. If a 301 is in place, can I use dixiecutters.com in my listings?

I would be curious to know if your website home page has some inbound links point to it using anchor text with those search terms...."yoga bolsters" or "yoga mats."

There is also the possibility that your pages have similar content and Google is dropping the the other pages. Are the "yoga bolster" and "yoga mat" page indexed and ranking well? Are they competing with your home page in the results?

This is not meant to be an advertisement for any of the things I have listed here, which is why there are no links.

You can add an ecommerce plugin to any wordpress site. A while back I installed the a WP plugin purchased at shopplugin.net. If was installed on a client's site here: livingwheel.com. The WP theme was iblog pro from pagelines.com. Which is a clean, full featured theme. I have no idea if this shopp ecomerce plugin would suit your needs. The point is, you can set any wordpress site up for ecommerce. You can ask the sales department at shopplugin.net if you can disable the shopping cart as you were talking about. Alternatively, do a search for Magento, that is a robust ecommerce solution with lots of sleek templates on the market, that is if you are not married to the Wordpress idea.

Other Theme Companies that have quality WordPress themes are:

Genesis
Elegant themes
Ithemes Builder
Pagelines

Here is the scenario I often wonder about:

My client's  tree removal service is ranking in #1 in local search for
"tree removal  town state." His Google Places account is set for a 30 mile radius. He has lots of directory listings and positive reviews. Some inbound links as well.

The same client is ranking #1 in organic listing for "tree removal county state" ...I chose to target the county for organic listings because the client was dominating local search for the town.

My reasoning: I thought, Google local search would bring all of the local specific searches for "tree removal town state" and organic listings would bring the broader searches for "tree removal county state." That is exactly what's happening and stats show there are some visitors coming to the site searching with the county name. Not a ton of traffic but a lot of keyword variations using the county name. The bulk of the traffic comes from the his Google Places listing for the town the business is located in which is great.

Dilemma: My client is not ranking in local search results for neighboring towns just a few miles away and certainly not ranking in organic listings for neighboring towns either because we are targeting the county. He has a long list of town names he services in the footer area and this does seem to help for organic search in neighboring towns with little competition.

Broad Question: How can I optimize pages for the same services in neighboring towns without duplicating content. For example, the home page title tag and H1 reads:
Tree Removal, Tree Trimming, Stump Removal, County State

It would be very easy to create identical pages with title tags and page headings for the different towns but that would undoubtedly create duplicate content and would look weird to someone browsing the site.

Specific Questions:

• Should I put the town name where the business is located in the title tag even though the site already ranks #1 for that town in local search, without having the town in the title tag? Why not use this importunity for an area that we are not ranking for?

• Do I nix the county and state and try to insert another town or two in the title and H1?

  Ideally I would like to have this site rank well in local search for all of the neighboring towns.

This may be too broad of a post, (it is my first one) but perhaps there are a few of you out there that can outline strategies that work for service industries like, lawn care, tree removal, landscaping, etc.

Thanks for reading.