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I agree with everyone here, especially about links not being as important or at least not the 1st thing to focus on. One other thing I stress to new consultants is read the Google My Business Guidelines. Then read them again with a fine toothed comb. There are many subtleties that are not spelled out and many unwritten rules, so you need to sort of read between the lines. But things are much more clearly spelled out in the new guidelines. Here they are in case you have not read yet: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en&ref_topic=4540086 Read all the + Learn more links too. The last thing you want starting out, is to unknowingly break the rules and get a client deleted or suspended. But if you are very cautious about the rules and stick to Miriam's list you'll be in good shape.

I think its clear that the best option is a subpage.

I have the same problem, sometimes i optimize the metadescription to increase my CTR but google doesn´t want to show it.. grr

Thanks, Miriam! I'll take a look at those two links.

You're in the clear using a Google custom search box because Google is the one delivering the results so they know not to double up on those.  You're right that the pages that are getting indexed in Google on the other site are from a different process and an attempt to trick the engine with sparse, dynamically generated content. Hint?  Huh?  I'm not nearly that clever.  Cheers!

Thanks Issa.

I agree with Ryan, This is essentially a link wheel, and seems like it will have short terms success. Always link with a purpose and have the user experience in mind.

Make big improvements to a few unimportant pages.  See what happens.   I think that this is relatively safe.

Thanks for your swift replies, Alick and Chris. Much appreciated!

One more thing... That you may also find helpful the leaked Google Qualaity Rater Guidelines - it was leaked to us SEO practitioners last July or so... Google for that term - but here's my own blog posting on it - http://www.canuckseo.com/index.php/2014/07/shhhh-google-quality-rater-guidelines-2014-leaked/ - and there's a link there too to download the 11 mb .pdf....

Wow, excellent response Miriam and right on! The other thing you might want to consider is getting more rankings for long tail queries for each location by actively incorporating neighborhood SEO. So each location tries to get more rankings for neighborhood and other regional queries to help compensate for the fact they may not rank for KW + city. I think there have been several posts about this, but here is one I found for you from SE Land: http://searchengineland.com/ready-googles-neighborhood-algo-194161

Thank you for the tips Miriam! I will definitely keep all that that in mind, and if we still can't seem to get things fixed after taking these basic steps (some of which we indeed do need to follow up on), will consider reaching out to Andrew as I'm sure he's also an amazing source of knowledge.

You can use send feedback button at the bottom of the search page results. It will ask for more information about your query fbSOKdH

In this particular case, I did not see a penalty assigned in Webmaster tools. Do you think that going back to westvalleyflooring.com would be a good call? floorscalgary.com temporarily ranked on page #2 or #3 and has now fallen back. This account has been a big challenge.

Understood. Just post more details as you learn them, and I'll do my best to address any issues.

I'll go through these in order. #1-#4 Not unless you're advertising a different domain name via collateral or other channels. In regard to #3 specifically, that should be an easy SQL find and replace (e.g. Find smithjonespllc.com and replace with smithjonesdoepllc.com) if you have to change the name. Then get ready for a ton of NAP cleanup. #5 This may be an interesting opportunity to measure your offline efforts. Perhaps a clone of the site could be blocked via robots.txt and meta robots. Though you're better off spending most of your efforts online anyway. It's just a thought. #6 I've worked with a number of firms and partners come and go. So it's a question of permanence/vanity in many instances. Though it's entirely possible to make a page for the partner and run a local campaign for each partner. You'll more than likely get more mileage that way, and have less NAP cleanup issues. My aunt is the President of her firm, though all of the properties only have the founding partner's names. The firm is over 100 years old and they're doing fine.

I believe Wedding Photography is a competitive keyword and ranking on local for this kind of keyword we need to think and act beyond basics. Miriam Ellis did a great post on Moz that illustrates guide on local SEO rankings: http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide Please take a look and go from there accordingly. Hope this helps!

The more you keep separate the better although unless you're doing things REALLY poor quality, it should be ok to at least fight for the top spots. Good luck with it!

Jumping into an older thread here to let you know we now track local results! Please check out our blog post at http://moz.com/blog/local-rankings-in-moz-analytics

Thanx Dennis and Miriam. I'll stick to the main account with the publisher tag Grtz, Leonie