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I'm curious if when anyone has submitted a new business citation, once it appears in Google, Bing, Yellow Pages, etc, do you notice if junk mail starts to flow in?

Is the effect of NAP inconsistency on search rankings basically a myth to justify business citation management services? I've been doing SEO for over 10 years but only recently started doing local businesses. I have yet to find any sort of published study that clearly shows a significant ranking effect by correcting an inconsistent NAP on any business directory site other than Google and Bing Business Listings. In fact, the publishers of any such articles claiming NAP inconsistency has a significant negative SEO effect are almost always businesses or people that are charging for such services. Gee, could they be a little biased? Obviously if you have an incorrect address that is far from the actual address, correcting it will help your ranking (think 3-pack) in the area close to your business but that's not really the type of ranking effect I'm talking about here.  I'm talking about a missing suite #, or an old address that is 1/2 block away from the new address but still the same phone number, or identical address but different phone (a toll free versus a local number). That kind of stuff. Of course you don't want to have an incorrect address or non-working phone number on places like Superpages, Yelp, Yellowpages, etc, but does anyone know of any place I can find good factual proof that having inconsistent NAPs on these sites has any significant effect on rankings? I'm sure some of the big SEO companies have the data to determine the effect. Or is this more of a "tin foil hat" / herd / OCD mentality on this subject that no one can prove (or disprove?)

For Google, has anyone got a finger on how much of a factor the address type "service customers only at their location" versus "service customers at my business location AND customers location is" is as far as local search ranking especially for 3-pack results?  (The former they hide the address the latter they show the street address) It seems to me the primary factors are obviously (a) proximity of user's location or location intent to the business location, then (b) natural organic ranking (age of business, domain authority, inbound links, quality content, relevance to the actual keywords searched for).  But where does the address type rank amongst all the "secondary factors" like is business currently open, number of reviews and average rating, etc. etc.  My guess would be reviews and average rating along with is business currently open would be third, and then address type would factor in - but for all I know the address type could be given much more importance than I am guessing?

I want to promote a blog post with the littlest invested time.  It's not something I need to get ranked high.  Just wondering what is the most efficient method or service to broadcast it out there with at least some chance of driving some traffic (other than "just let Google index it") 😉

We want to start a blog or forum (maybe eventually both) and are unsure what is the best way to publish it from an SEO standpoint. If the blog is published on our domain, like domain.com/blog then that obviously helps the site but if the base site is a for-profit business wouldn't it get less credibility, eyeballs, links as opposed to if you started the blog as it's own separate community on a separate domain and then just strategically linked to the for profit site (sponsorship links)? Essentially the question is, if I'm the Lucky Soday Company, do I start a Blog on the Lucky Soda website, or do I start a separate website to grow a soft drink enthusiast community blog / forum? I would guess a blog has more SEO potential than a discussion forum?

Anyone doing SEO for a local business ever tried to do an A/B test between city name in title and not in title? Seems that if you have a Google Places for Business Listing and have correct NAP on your web pages, Google places heavy importance already on that when determining geographic relevance in their algo. As a business expands, maybe not that far from their original service area but starts to offer services in other nearby cities some of which may be as big of a population as the city the business is located in, it seems to make less and less sense to put city names in the title if not for the basic reason of making the title too long. But what if your primary area is basically three cities and including them pushed your title to say, 90 characters.  How much does city name in the title tag matter when you are already coming up the local 3-pack map listing on search results for the relevant cities?

I have an FAQ database setup on my site and there's about 30 questions in 6 categories so 5 questions per category which is a pretty good page size for one category.  I'm trying to determine the best strategy for publishing them from both a user and SEO standpoint. From a user standpoint, I want to have one page per category.  Dumping them into a page with all 30 questions is not user-friendly and some categories are very unrelated to others.  I should note that Google did already index a page that does have all the questions on it, but I was just planning on changing that page to just have 6 links to each of the category pages so then I don't have to bother with 301 redirect or removing the pages in the site's Search Console. There's also an option to to link the questions for the entire FAQ or from the category list to one page with just that question and answer. So my thinking at this point is to as I said, just change the page that has all 30 questions to a list of the categories and link to category pages having the questions for that category and disable the individual question pages. Or would it be beneficial from an SEO page to have google index the individual question pages and link back to the category page and put a canonical tag on the category pages?  In other words the question then becomes, index the category pages or index the individual question pages? The other issue is the answers for some of the questions are lengthy, multiple paragraphs, and the FAQ has the option to have a hide/unhide feature on the answers so you can easily see all the questions first then expand the answers on the ones you are interested in.  However I thought I heard Google discounts (doesn't ignore) content that is by default hidden on page load.  I guess this would then give a reason for going with the indexing of the individual question pages.  But it seems to me, you can't put the canonical tag on the category pages and point it to the individual question page.  And if you put the canonical tag on the individual question page linking it to the category page, then the individual page won't necessarily get indexed will it?