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I'm still a firm believer that NAP audit and correction services are primarily hyped as far as their actual effect on rankings.  No one gets paper phone books anymore and there's no reason to buy advertising from the likes of Yellowpages, Superpages, etc, so they are desperate to create new revenue streams.  Hence when you submit your business on all these sites they automatically show you a list of even more obscure sites you are not on or your NAP doesn't match.  Our best performing location has two different NAPs out there about a mile from each other.  One was an old mailing address.  It's 3-pack 99% of the time for all our target keywords.  My determination is that what makes the difference is that the business is listed with one of the main three databases Axciom, Localese, Infogroup.  Paying attention to NAP in all the second and third tier directories using a paid service is a complete waste of time and money in my opinion.  I've scoured the Internet for any sort of well done study to prove the effect on rankings of NAP consistency. They can't be done as there are too many other ranking factors anyone I've found to publish any sort of article on the subject is in the industry that sells those services.  You think you moved the needle making your NAPs more consistent, but most likely the timing was just coincidental. I know I sound jaded, but I've just been around the block too many times and see the money making schemes from a mile away.  If you got time and money to waste, it definitely can only help if at all.  If you NAP error is in another city or something, then obviously you'll have conversion issues.  I'm talking about missing suite number on some or Street versus St. That kind of stuff. But I've gone off on a tangent sort of, sorry.

Here's an interesting tidbit I recently noticed.  Words in the reviews are a ranking factor believe it or not.  You will notice on Google 3-pack, sometimes you will see an excerpt of a review with one of your search keywords highlighted.  I threw in an obscure word into a search test once where we should never come up in the 3-pack for and we did because the word was in one of our user's reviews.  Very interesting.

I also think Google likes schema markup and makes much more of a difference than NAP consistency every will.

I agree broad match will waste some money especially at the beginning of the campaign but as you examine search terms and build the negative keyword list, you eventually hit 'equilibrium' in that the advantage of catching long-tail keywords you have not thought of through modified broad match equals and eventually outweighs trying to add every long-tail keyword you find in the search terms as an exact (or phrase) match.  In my experience, it depends on how competetive the industry is .  Of course the account would not start out 100% broad match.  You would include the obvious, high-volume exact and phrase match.  But in most circumstances, if you place value on your time (which many fail to do), it's more cost effective for me to build a huge negative keyword list over time, then build a huge list of exact match and phrase match keywords for every possible search term you uncover has been used or think will be used.

QS is related to the search term used, not the keyword.  Obviously an exact match keyword the search term will be identical.  So I'm assuming the QS for a broad match is just an average for all the search terms that matched weighted my impression volume for each term.  (I know I'm probably repeating what has already been claimed here or elsewhere.)

I've been around the block too many times to see people advocating very granular account structures which are very time consuming where the increased ROI didn't cover the cost of the extra labor to get so anal about the account structure.  This of course is not true in many circumstances for very high cost accounts, but there's always the bias to justify your job.

Thanks for such a lengthy reply.   Much of it I'm not surprised as I sort of assumed it's a time issue combined with DA which benefits both local and national.

To give more specifics.  The business is a B2B service business.  The problem is, the service also has a highly popular associated product.  So I guess in a way I'm lucky as the thing that segregates people looking for product info versus service info is in most cases a location intent.  The product search will never have a location intent.  The service search will sometimes NOT have a location intent.  That is fine with us as we only have a by appointment only location only in a small subset of cities.

I've been testing and testing too.  I've been surprised how little weight Google puts on number of reviews and average review rating. I guess it's because that aspect can be fairly easily 'gamed.' It seems the proximity to user location or intended location and normal organic ranking factors like DA are king.  The former being most important obviously for local 3-pack when you have competitors with similar non-map organic rankings.

We also have our original city name in some of the image alt tags etc on our home page.  Our business location schema is perfect.  I think one factor is some of the other cities have not shown up yet on some of the business directories the original city has - but really, how much weight does Google give Superpages and the like when you virtually never see those domains in the SERPS with a location intent search?

I think the key is time and keep creating good, original content optimized for each city.

Our company originally started in one city, now it is in multiple and the city we started in is actually now less important to our business than some of the new cities.

We've of course have Google Places for Business listings for all our cities and are listed in the other prominent directories for each City (Bing Places, Manta, Superpages, etc etc)

We have created once city page for each city in our domain.  All this has improved our Local SERPs for those cities but they pale in comparison to our dominance in the city we started out in.  We did have the first city in our home page title, we took that out.

The obvious problem is from an SEO standpoint your home page is your "strongest" page but how do you make your home page rank top for multiple location intent searches:  "{city} {target keyword}"  ?

The 3-pack is KEY.  For example, for one city we make it into the local 3-pack but we are not in the organic SERPs on page 1 outside of the 3-pack.

As far as I can tell the major factor in 3-pack ranking is of course proximity of business to the user's location or user's location intent.  I would say followed by the natural ranking factors (or at least a large subset of them) that Google uses for its normal organic rankings, followed by Google Places reviews.  You would think the Google places reviews really make a difference, but not as much as you think.

So how do you dominate local searches in different cities when competing against local-only companies?  My only guess is you need to create as much content as possible.  You don't want to make micro sites I think as you lose all the link juice going to your main site.  But how much content can one make that isn't duplicative.  You can describe the same products and services over and over for each city but that's not useful nor wise.  I guess you could do some re-writing.  But other than a different address, phone, and staff members, if your service is identical for each city it doesn't leave a lot of room for useful content creation to improve local search SERPS.

I guess this begs the overall question, can a multi-city company ever dominate local SERPS when the search has a location intent (city name in the search) it there is even just a couple competing local companies doing some SEO work. it seems it is an extreme uphill battle if not next to impossible. (Never say never.)

I'll make this quick and simple.  Let's say you have a business located in several cities.  You've built individual pages for each city (linked to from a master list of your locations).

For SEO purposes is it better to have the URL be a subfolder, or a parameter off of the home page URL:

https://www.mysite.com/dallas  which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/dallas/index.php

or

http://www.mysite.com/?city=dallas  which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/index.php?city=dallas

** This question is about QS of Broad Match and how it pertains to THE AUCTION ONLY.  Not looking for opinions on campaign/ad group structure/strategies.

For an Adwords account where all the ad groups are using modified broad match keywords I see that some keywords are assigned quality score.  Obviously a broad match keyword can be triggered by a very wide variety of actual keyword searches.  So I assume/guess that Adwords assigns a quality score for every single keyword entered that matches with that broad match and then makes the quality score for the broad match an average of the actual search term used quality score weighted by the volume of searches for that search term?

Or am I wrong and the quality score for a broad match is the exact match quality score for that term (I doubt that since broad match the words can be in any order.)

So for example, let's same I have this broad match score: +auto +insurance

This is going to match with: auto insurance companies, auto insurance prices, luxury auto insurance, auto insurance brokers, and on and on and on.

Let's say my landing page happens to have a lot of content about ratings for auto insurance brokers.  If the CTR for that terms is high, when it's matching my modified broad match, does that mean Adwords assigns a higher quality score, internally, to the search term "auto insurance broker" so if that term is entered, for the purpose of the auction, Adwords doesn't use the quality score of the broad match but the quality score it has calculated for that specific search term -- I just can't see what it is because I don't have that term as an exact match term on my account.

Or, does it use the broad match quality score no matter what search term is used that matched the broad match?  I would be highly surprised if that was true.  If this were true, then you would want to break out the important terms into their own exact match keywords.  In many cases, the more efficient strategy for an account is to have fairly narrow modified broad match terms coupled with a very large negative keyword list.

The question is mainly, is there any advantage from the perspective of competing in the auction to have the term be an exact match versus matching a modified broad match keyword?  If QS is stored for the actual search term, then I would assume the answer is NO.  I know it would provide more granular reporting and the ability to more fine tune landing pages etc etc etc but I'm just talking purely from the perspective of the auction.

Our company originally started in one city, now it is in multiple and the city we started in is actually now less important to our business than some of the new cities.

We've of course have Google Places for Business listings for all our cities and are listed in the other prominent directories for each City (Bing Places, Manta, Superpages, etc etc)

We have created once city page for each city in our domain.  All this has improved our Local SERPs for those cities but they pale in comparison to our dominance in the city we started out in.  We did have the first city in our home page title, we took that out.

The obvious problem is from an SEO standpoint your home page is your "strongest" page but how do you make your home page rank top for multiple location intent searches:  "{city} {target keyword}"  ?

The 3-pack is KEY.  For example, for one city we make it into the local 3-pack but we are not in the organic SERPs on page 1 outside of the 3-pack.

As far as I can tell the major factor in 3-pack ranking is of course proximity of business to the user's location or user's location intent.  I would say followed by the natural ranking factors (or at least a large subset of them) that Google uses for its normal organic rankings, followed by Google Places reviews.  You would think the Google places reviews really make a difference, but not as much as you think.

So how do you dominate local searches in different cities when competing against local-only companies?  My only guess is you need to create as much content as possible.  You don't want to make micro sites I think as you lose all the link juice going to your main site.  But how much content can one make that isn't duplicative.  You can describe the same products and services over and over for each city but that's not useful nor wise.  I guess you could do some re-writing.  But other than a different address, phone, and staff members, if your service is identical for each city it doesn't leave a lot of room for useful content creation to improve local search SERPS.

I guess this begs the overall question, can a multi-city company ever dominate local SERPS when the search has a location intent (city name in the search) it there is even just a couple competing local companies doing some SEO work. it seems it is an extreme uphill battle if not next to impossible. (Never say never.)

Thanks for such a lengthy reply.   Much of it I'm not surprised as I sort of assumed it's a time issue combined with DA which benefits both local and national.

To give more specifics.  The business is a B2B service business.  The problem is, the service also has a highly popular associated product.  So I guess in a way I'm lucky as the thing that segregates people looking for product info versus service info is in most cases a location intent.  The product search will never have a location intent.  The service search will sometimes NOT have a location intent.  That is fine with us as we only have a by appointment only location only in a small subset of cities.

I've been testing and testing too.  I've been surprised how little weight Google puts on number of reviews and average review rating. I guess it's because that aspect can be fairly easily 'gamed.' It seems the proximity to user location or intended location and normal organic ranking factors like DA are king.  The former being most important obviously for local 3-pack when you have competitors with similar non-map organic rankings.

We also have our original city name in some of the image alt tags etc on our home page.  Our business location schema is perfect.  I think one factor is some of the other cities have not shown up yet on some of the business directories the original city has - but really, how much weight does Google give Superpages and the like when you virtually never see those domains in the SERPS with a location intent search?

I think the key is time and keep creating good, original content optimized for each city.