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Hi Cyrus, I actually see you coming up organically (just searching in Google) for these terms, on the first page. I'm not using Ad Preview. To start troubleshooting any issues with your Local SEO, I'd recommend going through this: https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist Remember, too, that location has a greater impact on Local Pack rankings than on organic ones, so while you may be physically closer to people in Wilmington, you may not be as strong organically as the Jacksonville competitor.

If you are using niche specific directories I think they will be fine. The directories you need to stay away from are sites like freeSEOdirectory.info Do your research and see if the site is active, if they have quality content, if they have an approval process on new business owners been added.

Hi Vadim! Thanks for sharing your take on best wording for this. I like your suggestion.

Thanks, I had wondered if it was location based but it wasn't making much sense - the computers used to check were all much nearer the head office than the satellite office that showed up top - in fact the satellite office is a long way away. We used three different machines and each time we got the same result. The smaller office is in Leicester (UK) and the head office in in Christchurch which is where where 2 checks were done, and another was done in Blandford, all getting Leicester come up top. Our head office address is the only one listed on Facebook etc so it's a bit odd. I've just tried it again and got a more local office showing, but it's still not head office. Thanks for the links to other posts and thanks for the suggestions: Verify all info is correct and the same business name is being used on major data providers such as Yellow Pages, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Yahoo Local, etc. And be sure they are linking to your website. Here is the full list: https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-us - **all the info on Google places is correct and the head office. Will see if there are other places we can list it though ** Make sure your full address is mentioned on your website contact page. - this is already the case Get quality backlinks from related websites and include the city(s) name in the anchor text.- will try this Use a local phone number area code and keep it consistent - we use a central call centre for most places although the local Leicester office that was showing above head offce uses a local number so even more strange that is should show as it's miles away Possibly have your smaller offices identify themselves with a specific location in their name - will look into Get more positive Google reviews for your office - will look in to but Leicester has no reviews so bit odd Include location and business keywords in your Google Maps description - already doing Thanks both

Agree with Andy. Unfortunately, this is all part of Google's apparent master plan to force the pay-to-play scenario. Given that rumor has it that we will  also see a paid ad in one of the 3-pack spots at some point, the writing is on the wall.

I think the answer is in the last part you said - making it useful for the reader. If you make a legitimately useful piece of content, then I would always say go for it. A good example is a brand with multiple stores, where it absolutely makes sense to create a unique page about each location. This page would include information about the store, parking, directions to the store, selection of products, employees, some information about the town, etc. If you're making the page just because you want to rank for "keyword + town" on the other hand, then I would probably think twice, before doing it. You would simply be creating thin content, which could potentially piss off both the panda and give your users a bad experience on your site.

I imagine the goal for duplicating the site is to have each state indexed in search. If this is the case, you'll want to create unique content for each state page. To go one step further, you might want to consider adding a unique image and title tag for each state and acquire their own relevant backlinks. Best of luck.

Hey There! Good suggestions from the community about studying the Beginner's Guide so that you can be more specific in your query here, which should ensure much better community feedback. Also, I see you've categorized this as a local strategy question. May I recommend that you go through our Local SEO Checklist, for advice specific to Local?  See: https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist Hope this helps!

Thanks Gents, Great answers - much appreciated

Nice! Thanks for confirming, Andy.

Hey James, I'm afraid I don't know enough about this, either. It's my understanding that local reviews play a part in Siri results. How is your client doing on Yelp? I find it odd that Siri can find zero results for your query in a large city like Denver.

Hey There! If you're just offering 1 service in 1 city, I do not see the point of having a 'driveway cleaning' page and a 'driveway cleaning glasgow' page. Rather, I'd make the homepage strong about your customers + city + service and then I'd build out content about various aspects of driveway cleaning that would also mention your geography. I'd fire up something like http://answerthepublic.com/seeds/290501 and start developing additional pages like: Should you use caustic soda for driveway cleaning? Should driveways be cleaned with chlorine? The pros and cons of pressure washing driveways. Research both via online tools and direct interviews with your customers + staff to discovers what common customer questions are and start developing the best content in your city around these topics. Highlight your trust metrics via testimonials, reviews and guarantees. Show your before-and-after work. Seek out opportunities for community involvement and publicize them. With just one service in one city, you'll have to take a granular approach to grow beyond being a 5 page website to being the most informative and useful local brand. Hope these ideas get you going.

So it sounds as though you have: A ".in" site for users in India, and A ".com" site for users outside of India. And that almost all of their content is the same. For this, you need to implement hreflang tags. You can read the Moz guide on hreflang tags here. For each on the ".in" site, find the similar page on the ".com" site, and then add hreflang tags to both. As an example, if I had the following two pages: www.mysite.in/example.html www.mysite.com/example.html These two pages have the same content and are both in English. I would add the following hreflang tags to both of them: Notice that the second link there has only a language code - not a country code. The ".com" domain is targeted at users speaking English, whereas the ".in" domain targets English-speakers in India. If you need to add more languages, you should try generating some hreflang tags with Aleyda Solis's hreflang tag generator tool. Finally,  if you want to check that you have implemented hreflang correctly, Distilled has released a tool at hreflang.ninja. If you implement hreflang correctly, Google search results in India will begin to show the ".in" domain. You can then remove the 302 redirect.

I'm chiming in to add a vote for Mike's strategy. I've used the same strategy with great success when rebranding a business and moving it from one site to another.

Hi Michael Thanks for your answer! No I have not implemented hreflang to all domains. I know now this is something I need to to do and will get on to it. FYI - Further research today uncovered this response from the  officlal Google Webmasters Forum: _Yes, redirecting Googlebot back to the .com site would be predictably disastrous for the .au site. _ _Google crawls from the US so will always see the IP redirect, it will have to be removed. Anticipating the next question "can we redirect users but not Googlebot? The answer is no."  _ _Can you prevent US visitors from visiting the .au site? No. But if you GEO target the sites properly US visitors on Google will see the .com and Australian searchers will see .au.  _ Unfortunately analytics was only set up after the redirect was put in place, so does not provide historical data. The client anecdotally feels the drop off in traffic through sales though. Search Console certainly does provide historical data that shows that massive drop in both impressions and clicks.

Hi Hemant, Unfortunately for you, Moz's spam score is doing its job very well here - there is a lot of spam in your backlink profile. Looking at your list of referring domains, there are a lot of .ru, .in. .jp links etc which is strange for a US dentist, particularly when they're not in English. The anchor profile is a pretty good indication of spam here as well: no mention of the company name and in the top 20 most used anchors, only 1 of those isn't a blatant keyword. The other signal I noticed that's often an indication of spam is the fact that you went from 25 links to 411 in a couple of days. Basically, the best way to lower your spam score is to lower your spam Quality links should be relevant to what you do and from high quality websites.

As I noted in my endorsement, I'm 100% with Patrick on this. I just wanted to drive home this point—do not buy links. It can work for a bit, but you will get caught, and it will be extremely difficult to regain your rankings.

So glad you find the Checklist helpful!

Hi Rudd, You have answered yourself to your questions by giving the background of the issue (thanks for doing it too as this is key to identify these type of issues): "A week ago we changed our canonical links which were actually randomly referring from .be > .nl and .co.uk to .com." This was certainly the problem which is still causing this as a consequence today... as you were telling before to Google that the original versions of your Belgian pages were the Dutch ones, and the same with the UK version pointing to the .COM one, so Google did what you were specifying and that's the reason why it was showing these other pages in their cache instead of the Belgian and UK ones, because they were "their originals". This has nothing to do with hreflang... it had to do with the way you were configuring your canonicals and what it meant. It's great that you already fixed your canonicals though The thing is that Google seems to not having yet updated the information... you will certainly give it a bit of more time if that just happened a week ago. My recommendation is that you should resubmit for recrawling your Belgian and UK versions via Google Search Console so Google recognizes your current configuration and not the old one... once they do it, they will correctly show the right content in the cache, as now you have your canonicals set to inform that they're the original versions of themselves. Thanks, Aleyda

I agree with Miriam. The only thing I would add here - consider making changes to your lead conversion form to reinforce the "we only work in California" aspect. This could be like a check box up front that says "Are you located in California?" If they select "No," the rest of the form disappears and they get a message that says "At this time, we're only able to serve the California area. Thank you for your interest!" or something. You could keep your lead form as-is and if people select a state other than California when entering their location information, send them to a different thank you page that delivers a similar message. Basically, I would recommend changing your lead process so that a.) it's really clear to users that you don't operate outside of California, and b.) the information about whether or not a lead is from California is easy to see up-front in your lead management system. You'll probably still get some irrelevant leads (everyone does), but you'll be able to deal with them quicker.