Is the client taking walk-in traffic at home?  If not--i.e. the address isn't necessary for people to visit--I would approach your client with the idea of purchasing a mail box service to use as the business address.

A few days plus ~100,000 decade's old pages in Google is usuallynot enough time to see a change. You can spot check the 301s and run a fetch / render from GWT to see if the changes should be working though. Other than that, you'll probably have to wait a bit longer.

It's definitely an odd situation!  Any sort of differentiation you could use would help though: logo, tagline, business format (LLC, Inc, Canadian equivalent)... Personally a year wouldn't mean much to me if I was on the consumer side trying to figure out which one was which.

You're not running Burger King in Matoon are ya? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_(Mattoon,_Illinois) -- a pretty good read about how the US has two Burger Kings...

That's definitely a tricky spot. Has the competitor already registered social media accounts in the company name as well? Is their domain a better match for the brand than your client's? Is the competitor active on social media matching the company name? Are both companies thoroughly listed on the sites you'd find in Moz Local (Yelp, YP, Foursquare, Google and Bing Local Business, etc.)?  To get the map pin you'll really want to focus on the Name, Address, and Phone lining up on each service and ensure that Google has the verified business address as well.  If there are big gaps in any of those things between your client and the competitor catching up should help move the needle.

There's not much on this in sourced material other than some mentions in places like: http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/familysafety/advice/#behaviors, "Set age-appropriate filters on your computers and your child’s mobile devices: Filters and other internet safety tools block categories of inappropriate websites a child can view, such as sites containing pornography, violence, gambling, and illegal drug information."  Google's SafeSearch is primarily focused on pornography.  And the filters mentioned in the link above are in reference to installs on local machines.

Is there some filter going on though?  Try typing, 'california medical marijuana' into the search bar and notice where suggested search ends...  Obviously at this moment in time there's a legal gray area for this topic as a few states have made medical and recreational use legal, while federally it is still illegal in the US. And right now, search tends to mirror that grayness as well.

You could focus group the two and see which people prefer.  Or you could buy several and test their performance via Adwords split testing before taking the plunge of transferring or creating the new site.  Really this boils down to not what has possibly worked for others, but what works best for you.

Hi Margaret. Here's the Guide on rich snippets for products: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146750 What you'll be interested in making sure price and priceCurrency are correctly used. The snippet "priceCurrency" is, "The currency used to describe the product price, in three-letter ISO format."  Cheers!

Hi Linda. I've had some clients in the medical field that fortunately had their own offices--or buildings in some cases--which made this easier, but have certainly seen multiple doctors practicing out of the same suite using a ###+Letter format. Have you come across this in your work? Just curious how you handled it. PM if necessary. Thanks!

Hi Wick.  I've seen this behavior before and it's pretty common amongst doctor offices in commercial settings. For example, here's a listing that uses the 101A format as you're considering: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=Dr.+Barry+M+Zingler+MD%2C+New+Jersey

Just be disciplined in your presentation of the different address, names, and phones so that they always match and you should be well on your way. Also, you might want to clear the A/B differences with the building where they're renting in order to make sure no mail gets lost as well.

Why yes the is! In 2013 Kaila Strong wrote an in-depth article here: http://moz.com/ugc/guide-to-using-unlinked-brand-mentions-for-link-acquisition-20981 as one example.

One suggestion I'd add is the creation of a Media Kit page that provides pre-approved pull quotes, company related imagery (in various sizes), timeline and more can work well in either gaining hotlinks to the images or providing citation samples that make it quick and easy for someone writing an article to cite your company.