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Hi Adrien, There are no two ways about this, in my opinion: consistency is all. Telling Google that a single phone number relates to 4 different business names will almost certainly kill the business' chance of earning good rankings because merged and duplicate pages will sap all the strength of the profile. Tell the client that they need to pick a single name and go with it and that citation cleanup will be critical to you getting them in the clear with Google. In your further discussion with Matt, you ask: Yet I wanted to discuss some avenues to give a business all chances to indicate to the engines - and to people - that some business names used in the past belong to them. The only way I would recommend doing this would be on the website, in non-indexable text (such as image text). If you put it in markup, Google will index it, thus confusing their ability to understand and trust the NAP of the business. So, if it's essential to have Bob's Plumbing (formerly known as Bob's Kitchen Repair and Bob The Bathroom Guy) explained someplace, put it somewhere on the website in non-indexable text, but not any place else and not in any format that can be crawled. That would be my best advice. Funny thing about Google....in the real world, businesses do have situations like the one your client has, but Google's system is not designed to handle this type of complexity. They want 1 name, 1 address and 1 phone number. Anything else is too convoluted for them.

For a strong site (SEOmoz sort of size) you're looking at a week or two. For weaker sites, it could be a anything up to a few months.

Hi John, I'm not sure that's the best decision, honestly. Before you do that, I would advise you to hire a heavy hitting local SEO to help you with this. BTW, the screenshot you are showing me (I'm not sure which page that is) is not the one I would expect to see. Read this thread and look at the 4th post on it: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local-important/1580-hooray-new-business-moved-feature-google-local.html I am still not sure how the pending status is actually affecting you, John, as your listing is clearly live. I had asked about this, but don't believe you responded. I had also asked what the history of your communication with Google was about this, but did not see a reply on this from you. My advice is that you hire someone to dig fully into this beyond what I can do here in Q&A and figure out what the best steps will be for you. You mentioned David Mihm at the start of this thread, but David is no longer doing client work as of GetListed being acquired by SEOmoz. I would recommend any of these providers: Mike Blumenthal, http://www.blumenthals.com/blog Andrew Shotland, http://www.localseoguide.com Mary Bowling, http://www.marybowling.com/ Matthew Hunt, http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/ I'd offer my own services but I am so busy right now, John, and troubleshooting complicated problems like this isn't really my area of client work. However, I do believe you would benefit from paying for an hour or two of consulting time from one of these folks BEFORE you make such a big decision. You need to present the whole history of your case and get personalized guidance. Hope my suggestion may save you from some headaches.

Hi Anton, Is your business local or virtual? If local, then yes, city landing pages are extremely common and typically contain the city name in the URL of the landing page. However, it is key with these types of pages to be sure that you are creating unique, high quality content that will be of value to the user. Do not simply duplicate content and change out city keywords across multiple pages. That would be spammy. City landing pages work well for service radius businesses like plumbers, landscapers and general contractors, because the staff travel to clients in a number of cities. They are not as good of a fit for brick-and-mortar businesses like dentists, restaurants or retail shops, because in such cases, all clients come from their locations to the locale of a business. If a brick and mortar business wants to write about cities other than its city of location, it has to discover a valid reason for doing so. For example, a doctor located in City A might have hospital privileges in City B and give seminars in City C, giving a good reason for him to publish content about his involvement in these other cities. But, to simply create pages for cities in which he has no involvement, just because he hopes patients living in those cities might travel to him, doesn't really make sense So, what you do with your city landing pages is a case-by-case situation. One rule covers all scenarios - always build unique, quality content on the pages with the goal of helping users.

That's correct, Jesse. You've understood this correctly. Hopefully, we'll see functionality of this kind in 2013!

Ah! Excellent point. Thanks!

Hi Tom, So glad to hear it!

Thanks for that additional information I was unaware of that. In this case the company has 1 location and I have achieved rankings in the second location as that is where 80% of their target market is.

My pleasure Clicksjim!

Hi Joshua, Yes, if a totally separate website (like a manufacturer's site) lists your client's NAP (name, address phone number), and lists it in indexable text, that would definitely be a citation. You're very welcome!

Thanks Phil. I almost gave up on this question! Via another article of yours, I've been able to (I believe) correctly upload a video Sitemap through Wistia. Hopefully this will add another signal to Google to rank the video. Who knows...I'll let you know if I see anything cool.

Hi Joel, You might find the below posts helpful . Post 1 Post 2 Post 3

Well, so I have another question then. Is there any research on how many people click the local listings verses the organic ones (when they show up at the top of local searches)? This is a critical question for us because we are ranking #1 organically but #4 on the page due to local listings being up top. Looking that the SEOMoz beginners guide to SEO, they claim the following stats: 30% of folks search high volume keywords while the other 70% search long tail. Of those the positions break down as follows: 1-18.2% 2-10.1% 3-7.2% 4-4.8% Now having said that, take a look at the attached image. Lets say that in our market 10,000 searches are performed by customers actually needing service (I think that it is actually much more than this). For the 30% that equates to 3000 qualified customers that are searching the high volume keyword. If our close rate is roughly 50%, the difference in revenue between the #1 position and #4 position is $80,400. Of course this entire senario assumes that the local listings count as #1, #2, #3. If not then all of these numbers are gibberish. We were planning to open another branch at the end of the year in one of the metro cities. 80k is enough to make me want to add that branch now. The real question is does the local listings matter? Does anyone know stats for clicks with the local listings displayed up top? Thanks in advance. D PS> Miriam, enough of the shellacking. I get it! We are not and were not trying to intentionally abuse the system. In our industry, google positions are highly competitive and of course we want to rank well. Ranking makes the difference as a business owner for my employees and my family. I want to anything and everything that I can to be successful. I am not not however in the business of being dishonest. Nor do I want to be. ntHBX.png

Thanks for the reply. It will be a very hands on job, lot of images to be replaced but if that's what needs done then that's what I'll do. No point in skimping on the work during a content improvement campaign, right haha To be honest I almost knew already that I'd need to 301 them all - I just wanted there to be another solution, maybe I'll be lucky and find a nice easy rewrite match. Good to get a second option on this tho. I'm going to hold off marking it as answered for a little while and see if I can get some more input while I prep the job.

Hi Masterworksintl, Bede is offering you good advice. You need to report the closed business as closed, and also engage in work to remove/edit any references across web that feature the old address. This can be a big job, so be prepared to spend some time on in, or hire a professional citation editor to do the work for you. It's amazing how many citations of a business can appear around the web in even 6 months' time.

Quite. However, they don't use the machine generated transcriptions to rank your videos yet. i don't think it was the intention of Jeff to suggest that, but It's a bit of a misnomer. They currently onyl regularly index the one's you upload (because they're deemed as more accurate).