Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Niclaus, Keri is right on. You'll need to do a full assessment of the client's present status, their competition, their goals and opportunities to determine which actions may benefit them most. This type of assessment will typically go beyond the types of advice you can get from a forum, as it will be the result of some hours of work auditing the client's unique situation and goals. Most national businesses need to implement a combo of organic SEO, social, PPC, etc., but the right recipe for your specific client will be unique to them!

If you set up "rel=publisher" and link it to your G+ page this will help. See some examples I set-up here: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+body+matters https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ddr+surrey These are not big brands, just well optimised for local search. Help here: http://blog.woorank.com/2014/06/how-to-implement-rel-publisher-tag/

All of the sites you mentioned seem to do this primarily through user generated content (ie reviews). This path makes sense as it is "unique and providing value." It looks like reviews may just be the table stakes to play this game at scale. I do like how thumbtack created some localized content here http://www.thumbtack.com/tx/houston/#/2014/1\. That looks like something I could use for inspiration.

Many thanks SEO5, I note that many of the engines on the list are not resolving so presume a few Turkish search engines have gone out of business since Interesting article about social so thanks for posting that I havnt been yet but look fwd to soon All Best Dan

Hello Miriam, It is the same. I understand from a local perspective a lot of people are giving this a thumb's up. I am not sure I would at this juncture and we have had a winner or two from it. With Real Estate, if you are a broker, it is a disaster in terms of terms like home(s) for sale, townhomes, real estate or these terms and a geo-locator like Houston. (Dr. Pete spoke to this around my comments on his post The Month Google Shook the SERPS.)  You know I am not a "Google done me wrong" person; it's their web property and as EGOL said for a while they did not monetize it and people had a grand ole time. Today, they are going to monetize it just like we would. The issue is more that, IMO, user experience will suffer and I think they will begin to lose market share, but over time. I talk to enough users who are not in our field and they complain about not being able to find someone local when they are looking. For me as a searcher, I find it odd that if I want to find a specific breed of dog or a specific area for a home, etc. I am forced to use a "national" directory of some sort. Doesn't this remove the need for the search engine?? Best

LELOinc This is why I love Moz. We are all learning. Trust me with the recent whatever rollout about Local by Google I spent the last two days trying to wrap my hands around that impact and asking others in this community what they thought. Multiple brains is often better than mine. When Miriam used the term Map out that brought me to something I find helpful when dealing with a complex project: draw it out. We have marker glass (4) in our conference room and two walls that are all glass. You can do some serious drawing and writing there. With something complex, I find it easier if I begin with a visual. Take the components and break them down, then look for relationships that may bring synergy or at least assistance or load leveling. See if that helps you get a good picture before you move forward. This is one of those issues where it will not hurt you to spend some time aiming before shooting. All the best, thanks for your kind words, Robert

You can hyperlink the artwork itself back to the source site. Again, if you're linking just for SEO purposes, and you're trying to hide links from the search engines, it's not the best course of action, and goes against multiple search engine guidelines.

Nofollow links still pass some authority, but no where near an in body link.  I commented on blogs like Website Magazine, and a few other real high authority blogs.  I just used my actual name, and didn't try optimize the link. Ranking for web design is definitely a little different because of inflated numbers.  You should also keep in my that link analysis tools, like Moz and Majestic, don't find every link on the internet, and can take a while to discover some links.  Always take these stats with a grain of salt, and focus on getting quality links. If you are working local you can always try identify links pages in your area.  I was able to get one from a couple historical societies and a mall just by asking for it.  You can also have a link in your signature on forums, but try to limit these since too many would look spammy.

Kristina, Thank you! We ended up implementing trough header. Hopefully we have done it right. Very interesting material by Kate. But I have to admit that her tool made me wonder if we really need the hreflang. I asked her directly in one of her blogs. Best, Andrea

The ideas above are all great. I would add that local addresses for branches / outlets are great if you have them. Being able to supply local addresses definitely indicates that you are not solely located in one town.

agreed, so you can fix this by simply making the content on your site unique and now your previous content is the one that the current and future franchises should be using.

This post might be useful: http://moz.com/blog/i-am-an-entity-hacking-the-knowledge-graph

Nope, you can just have a regular sitemap with all of the urls. Then on the actual pages, declare the localities via the hreflang tag. Overall, you should declare the location associations on either the pages, the sitemap, or ideally, both. The more direction you can give crawlers, the easier it would be to understand.

If you use your own style/company personality and address your individual market then you can boost engagement. You can also try vlogging (video blogging) or even podcasts (audio). Hope this helps

Hi Perfect Pitch Concepts, I'm so sorry your question hasn't received a reply. Looks like no one may have noticed this about Google+ Local vs Brand pages. You're supposed to be able to link out from the description with rich text, but my understanding is that it can take longer to get verified if you do. Now, with the launch of the new Google My Buisiness, who knows! Google is definitely narrowing the gap between Local and Social page types, so I expect all kinds of changes to be going on with things just like this.

We were seeing that before Hummingbird. Even in SERPS with no mapbox or the returns under it, slots 7&8 seemed to be very local centric. We did screenshots of the same result in an incognito in our various locations and got very local specific returns in those slots.

That makes a lot of sense. We might as well target as large of a targeted audience as possible to maximize our efforts.

Great insights and suggestions - thanks for replying! I'm hung up on the different size markets as well. Our association has sorted the 100+ businesses into different size brackets, but those are based on revenue as opposed to size of city (although there is definitely a correlation.) Analytics like bounce rate though would be a benchmark regardless of the demo/size of the business' location.

Hey Brandon! If you're a local business, there are likely 2 types of links that would be most relevant to your business. These would be local links and industry links. So, a local link might be your local chamber of commerce. An industry link might come from something like a national organization that represents your industry. Obviously, it's great to get mentioned in local news, local blogs, etc., too. The main thing to concentrate on with this is that you are publishing content or joining organizations that precisely relate to your business and its location. The ideal is for these things to happen naturally. If you are targeting a state, that is not considered a true local search. Local search relates to cities - not states. So, from your query, if you are a BBQ restaurant in Colorado, the local element of your campaign would revolve around Denver, or whatever city the restaurant is in. If you want to gain visibility for your BBQ keywords and the state of Colorado, you'd need to approach this organically rather than locally, hoping to show up in the organic results rather than in the local pack. So, you might produce content about the history of BBQ in Colorado (like, Basque sheepherders in the 1800s BBQing or whatever) or make infographics comparing the best BBQ restaurants in the state based on some criteria or write article about statewide BBQ contests, or what have you. Hope this helps!

Thanks for your Answer Jane!