Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi AtlasGlobal! Great questions. You do not want to assume the old listings for the former brand, as their reputation belongs to them and not you. Rather, I recommend that you read this post https://searchengineland.com/business-owners-guide-moving-office-234671 and follow these steps outlined in this post for what to do when a business moves: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing. I would follow those steps in dealing with the GMB listings, and I'd recommend updating any existing  Yelp listing manually for your client, and then I would use Moz Local to get the new info out there on the major aggregators + other critical platforms.

I got it. Didn't really notice that with snail mail I guess this kind of advertisement technique is vanishing with time...and its not really worth the effort (to collect address from there and print and send stuff there)

Hi Rayflex! There are two ways to approach a good question like this, and it's often best to take both: Do a competitive audit, using a spreadsheet like this free one so that you can identify where your top competitor is strong that you are less strong: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit. Then, feel free to come back to the community with any findings or questions that arise from that process. Additionally, you're welcome to show us the listing, if you have the authority to do so. If you can, please provide a link to your business' website and tell us the exact keyword phrase you're trying to rank for. It's perfectly fine if you're not able to share this info, but without it, the best the community can do is make guesses about which factors may be holding your business back from the local pack rankings you're hoping to achieve.

Hi MrSem, Yes, the limitations you've pointed out are, unfortunately, baked into the environment. There's no way to prove impact in a vacuum. You can't stop competitors from making changes on their end that could be positive or negatively impacting the rank of your business at the same time that you are cleaning up your citations. Search results are so dynamic, it's rarely possible to be 100% positive in stating causation, with no margin for error, because even if you can control what your company is doing, you can't control what competitors are doing in the same time frame, or as you mention, a Google update occurring in that time frame, or even a bug. So, basically what you have is industry practitioners over time noticing apparent cause and effect. When practitioners state that citation cleanup appears to impact search visibility, it's based on more formal studies like Andrew's (above) and on what they notice across the board with clients, over time. As for what is actually being cleaned up, that's easier to define. It's going to be resolving inconsistent NAP+W, hours of operation, categories and duplicates, much of the time. It can also include remedying incompletions. I understand your skepticism. Toothpaste manufacturers have a vested interest in telling you their product will make your teeth whiter. But there's an important difference here that shouldn't be overlooked: the things we've come to think of as local search ranking factors originate in the early study of local search results being performed in the trenches by very small agencies. Going back more than a decade, you can read through the blogs of folks like Mike Blumenthal, sharing what they are discovering moves the needle, client by client. That's not quite the same as the toothpaste company, because the scale was very small at the dawn of Local. You could chalk the corpus of local-related blog posts over the past 12 or so years up to being mere sales pitches, but I think if you start reading backward from 2017, you'll see it really wasn't that way. Just as in organic SEO, it's been a voyage of discovery

Hey Ben! Please check out my 2016 article on this topic: https://moz.com/blog/are-coworking-offices-eligible-for-google-my-business-listings Let me know if any further questions arise after reading it

Hi MrSem, By open/closed for business do you mean a permanently closed business, or something you look up when it's after hours for a business? Any further details? BTW, I mentioned I would have more coming soon on this topic of SAB challenges. Just published: https://moz.com/blog/sabs-decreased-local-search-visibility

I would recommend to have structured data for each individual listing. Try to structure as much information as possible and this should help the search engine and your SEO.

My great pleasure, Neil. Best of luck to you!

Hi Jason! Thanks so much for coming back on this one. I'm really glad it helped. Since I responded, one of my Moz Blog posts was published which might offer additional help. It walks you through doing a full competitive audit, with a free downloadable spreadsheet to help you: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit Going through the formal process of the audit could help you turn up some more things for your to-do list. Good luck to you!

Never experienced and heard this before. In first sounds like a scam, then I have gone through many online communities to ask this. I found that yeah Google does calling for verification of your local addresses.

Hey There Capsquare! Joy's suggestion of Whitespark might be a good one. They're a very fine company. However, if you've got 30 locations, and let's say you want to submit them to 7 basic places (Google, Bing, Acxiom, Localeze, Infogroup, Factual and YP), at $4 a citation, I'm getting an $840 price tag, so that's not really within your client's budget. And, it doesn't include finding and permanently closing duplicate listings (which, with 30 locations, it's a good bet they've got), remedying existing listings with misinformation, and ongoing monitoring (pretty essential for a good-sized enterprise like your client's). And, of course, 4 hours of your time isn't going to cover citation development/management. So, your client is pretty much putting you in a rather difficult position, because their expectations aren't commensurate with the requirements for managing their business online. I've been in your shoes, Capsquare, trying to find the right way to educate owners as to the importance of investing reasonably in location data management. It's a necessary investment, and given how search outperforms so many other mediums as a driver of traffic/transactions, it's a smart investment. A single component of citations - reviews - can truly blow away other forms of traditional marketing investments. In fact, I'd suggest you show this recent GetFiveStars post to the client, to give them a sense of why revising their budget to stretch to citation management could result in greater profits for them: https://www.getfivestars.com/blog/google-as-the-new-home-page/ But, I know ... sometimes clients don't get this, despite statistics. It's always worth a try, though.

Hi Joy, Thanks so much for your response! I had seen that article, but wasn't entire sure if what I was seeing in the results were directly correlated to the Hawk update. I've attached a screenshot of the Maps rankings changes I was seeing in my ranking checker. Unfortunately, I didn't take screenshots of the live Maps results before, so it's tough to pinpoint with certainty. I am seeing two separate businesses, each with two locations, now showing up twice in the top 10, so that could definitely be related to the update. However, since I don't have screenshots of the live Maps SERPs, it's difficult to say for sure if that's what was causing our drop in the rankings, which is why I wanted to reach out and see if anyone else is noticing any other factor[s] that we may be overlooking. Thank you again for your feedback! It could very well be related to the Hawk update! wMEYA

If the locations are fairly spread out and there aren't multiple locations in the same city, this probably isn't possible. If they do have several locations in the same city, can you share the website + query you put into Google?

Hi William! My search Monday morning from California for "Florist Middlefield OH" is currently showing your client #1 in both the local pack and organic results. If you're seeing the organic ranking appear and disappear, it could be: Google testing things The result of whatever the crawl issue was or is; do you have confirmation from Google Search Console that the homepage is fully crawlable? Something else ... is there any pattern to the appearance/disappearance of the organic ranking? Like, are you searching for it at the office and seeing it, or searching for it at home and not seeing it? Or searching during open hours and seeing it, but searching after hours and not seeing it? Is there any pattern?

You're welcome, Neil. Glad to have you here!

Hi David! Please check out the tutorial in this recent Moz blog post of mine, which I believe will outline the options in your scenario: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing If any question remain after reading that, please definitely let me know!

That is a fantastic article, and good information. I appreciate the link

Yes, its complicated. The new listing is in place to stand alongside the existing Adwords campaigns which are in the other Google account. Neither of the listings have reviews, at least not at the moment, it's something we need to work on. Working on amending the citations to the new address at the moment. What do you mean by ranking signals, other than citations and reviews, what other aspects come into play?

Yes, I sure will Thank you for caring. Regards, Thomas

Hi Rohit, First step for you will be to read (and memorize!) the Guidelines for Representing your business on Google: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en If you are hoping to serve local business clients, so many of your actions will be governed by those guidelines, so read them until you know them by heart. For your particular question: If you client has 4 physical offices, and each of those serves customers face-to-face, has its own address and own phone number, you can build a Google My Business listing for each office. If, however, your client has just 1 physical office, but it traveling to 4 different locations to offer services, then the business only qualifies for 1 Google My Business listing  - not 4 of them. Hope this helps!