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Category: Local Listings

Examine the impact of maintaining consistent and accurate local listings on your local SEO strategy.


  • In this case I'm trying to implement schema in a local business and as you mention I'm trying to create as many schemas as I can. Thank you for your time.

    | Roman-Delcarmen
    1

  • Matthew, For branded search, this box is generated using the information from your Google My Business listing. Do you have that listing claimed, verified, and accurate?

    | LoganRay
    0

  • Got it! Thanks for the further details. Now, if you're a Moz Local customer at the Professional level, you can sync up your GMB listing to your Moz Local dashboard and we'd show you month by month gains your listing was making in terms of impressions and cool KPIs like clicks-to-call, clicks-to-website and clicks-for-directions, but when it comes to absolute proof that your edits resulted in a reordering of the results, I'm not aware of a tool that would offer such proof. The problem is, your edits could be responsible for pack movement, but ranking changes can occur for so many reasons, like a Google update, a guideline violation, a competitor doing a better or worse job building authority or links. So, to say, "I did this and, presto, the rankings were affected," has to be more of a hypothesis than a provable fact, because there are just too many variables at play. What if the pack was partly impacted by what you did, but also partly impacted by the fact that a competitor just had malware show up on their website? You can't really track all those aspects. So, whether you take screenshots on a daily basis to track ranking changes, use analytics like Moz Pro, or are looking at the data in the Moz Local dashboard, I believe the best you can come up with is a theory, rather than absolute proof. If anyone in the community has another solution or suggestion, please share with us!

    | MiriamEllis
    1

  • Hi There! My latest Moz blog piece might help you: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing If you still have questions after reading that, please definitely ask.

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hello, I've noticed that some of our storefront locations with verified GMB listings do not have an associated brand account. Has anyone else seen this, and how can we create a linked G+ page when no brand account exists for a listing? Thanks!

    | SEOJedi51
    0

  • Hi Adam, Good question. 3 tips: Document the client's current and former NAP (name, address, phone) including any branding or phone numbers and any location they may have used in the past decade or so. And, if the client is a multi-practitioner model (like a legal firm, realty firm, dental office), document the names of all of the practitioners for whom listings may have been created. Now, enter these name/zip combos for each entity into the free Moz Check Listing tool for a very fast check. By clicking the Duplicates tab in the results, you'll see all of the duplicates we were able to find on the major platforms based on the information you entered. If you are Moz Local customer, we can help you automate closure of the duplicates across our partner network (saves a ton of time and worry!). You may wish to supplement this with a manual search for Google My Business duplicates. Here's an excerpt we published from Joy Hawkins eBook that covers duplicate listing management in depth: https://moz.com/blog/duplicate-gmb-listings. And, here is Joy's own blog post about managing duplicates: http://www.sterlingsky.ca/the-proper-way-to-deal-with-duplicates-in-google-my-business/ These three elements should get you going. Hope it helps!

    | MiriamEllis
    1

  • You must read this article :https://codeable.io/how-do-i-get-on-the-first-page-of-google/ The best thing you can do is write and SEO

    | SergioB1717
    0

  • ok great thanks will do ps - dont spose any chance of getting this one answered is there: https://moz.com/community/q/problem-toggling-between-ga-profiles-since-new-update

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • Hi Ben, Another good question. I want to preface what I'm saying here by saying I'm not an expert in linkbuilding and that I see what you're asking about as having some grey area. I'll do my best to describe what I'm talking about. In an organic SEO scenario with virtual businesses, I agree with Rand's explanation in this WB Friday https://moz.com/blog/backlinks-maximize-benefits-avoid-problems-whiteboard-friday. Please, watch the video and pay special attention to his explanation of linking from mysite.com to myothersite.com, where he's describing cross linking between two domains you control. So, his explanation is good on this and very educational and well-thought-out. Now, once you've watched that, we need to consider that your business scenario is not virtual - it's local, and you're having to take all of these extra steps to make sure your two websites don't get mixed up with one another in Google's "mind". Again, if you were able to get the client to consolidate, then you and I would be recommending a super internal linking strategy because that would be purely internal and would not look like the business is trying to manipulate anything. But, in the multi-site local business scenario, we're dealing with 3 possible outcomes from cross linking: It could potentially look to Google like the business is trying to artificially elevate the authority of that second site, though Rand's advice could help lessen the chances of that. You're taking all these steps to separate website A from website B (ensuring there is no shared NAP or shared content) to avoid citation confusion, but now, you could potentially be undoing all of that by overtly associating the two sites back together by crosslinking between them. If there's no matching NAP between the two sites, citations may not suffer and duplicate listings are unlikely to result, but you are definitely letting Google know that both sites are related. And, even if you think you're being pretty mild in your cross linking, it's important to know that there have been cases in which the industry has speculated that Google was applying the Possum filter in the local rankings based on a parent company controlling the two entities. See the #2 case in Joy' Hawkin's article about Possum: http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900\. I mention this not because you'd be going after local rankings for the two entities (you're only pursuing then for the main business), but simply to illustrate that Google may well understand that the same business is controlling both websites based on something like the same parent company being listed on two business licenses. Google can dive pretty deep, it seems. Point of all of the above: there really may be little way to hide from Google that a single business owns both entities, so basing the SEO strategy of either on crosslinking between the two may not be that smart. To me, personally, it's a strategy that seems kind of manipulative at face value, and while I've described nuances that could make a gentle approach not too big of a deal, I'd be leery of making it into a "strategy", per se, for the business. That second website, if it must exist, needs to be good enough to earn links on its own and to be a candidate for selective external linkbuilding efforts. If it has to lean heavily on the main site, it's just another argument for why the multi-site approach isn't really recommended. Whew! Long answer, but this is a complex topic. Hopefully you can read up further on this topic to form your own opinion and help the business make a sound decision.

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Think holistically. Think strategically. For example, if I was a supplier, I wouldn't want a link profile that consisted largely of customer footer links cause those can be manipulated and carry less weight with the search engines. As Martin and George have pointed out, you could create goodwill with valued suppliers and perhaps some leverage for yourself if you were to follow those links and position them higher on the page with surrounding text. Follow links pass link juice. It's a currency you can sometimes use to your advantage.

    | DonnaDuncan
    0

  • Hi Bee, Provided your company makes face-to-face contact with its customers, then the discipline you need to start learning is Local SEO. Your efforts will involve a combination of website development and local optimization, content development that surrounds the topics that matter to your industry/geography/clients, building and managing local business listings on a variety of platforms whether manually or via a service like Moz Local, review acquisition and then additional forms of outreach like social media and video marketing. All of these practices combine to begin building your geo-topical authority. You'll be striving to earn local pack rankings relating to the city in which you're physically located, and, in some cases, organic rankings for other cities in which lack a physical location but which relate to your business in some meaningful way. There is a lot to learn here. If you have a more specific question, please feel free to ask!

    | MiriamEllis
    1

  • Wow, that's awesome Joy! Thank you so much for reaching out and helping! Nothing more infuriating to me than a half completed job, and you were pivotal in getting it done. Thank you so much!

    | nbyloff
    0

  • Correct, and yes the trust factor definitely makes sense to me. I just didn't know if anyone had a case study or experience of a business that wasn't doing much SEO, decided to get BBB Accredited, embedded the BBB badge on their website, and then saw a change in rankings due to it. I have never used the BBB to search a business either and think that it may be more of a correlation than a causation, as a business that decides to get BBB accredited is also probably investing in SEO, a blog, other high DA directory listing, content marketing or a combination of marketing efforts that could be leading to high local rankings.

    | NickW816
    1

  • So to confirm, when claiming the business, when it asks if we deliver goods to customers at their location (which as I understand it is the point where you choose if it's a service area business), say "no." Keeping in mind of course that this is not a storefront location either, and other than the fact that the office is located in one city, there is no reason it is more or less relevant in that city than anywhere else in the world. It just seems like the whole My Business area is catered to local businesses with either storefronts or regional service areas, so it's always been unclear to me what to do about those businesses that don't have a regional focus.

    | PlusROI
    0

  • Thank you for the detailed response.  This is tremendously helpful.

    | setokin
    0

  • Hey Miriam, That is interesting...and complex! Considering the location of the user at the time the search take place makes so much sense...especially for Google to rank them that way. Unfortunately, that also makes it harder to help clients who want to be in the top three all the time. Thanks so much for your time and insight. Kirk

    | kbates
    0

  • +1 for GR. No one tool for any job. Id go on good and do a site:directory.com clientdomain.com search and see if it's indexing first. If it's indexing and you know it's there, then it's likely a matter of propagation. I used Moz, Majestic, ahrefs for any backlink review as each tool operates differently and a combination of all of them will give you a holistic picture. Good luck!

    | pastcatch
    0

  • This is possible however, each business has to have its own phone number, and should technically be different business types. Like each business should not each be foot doctors.

    | donsilvernail
    0

  • You are very welcome, Michael. So glad to have you here, asking good questions!

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hi There! It will be really helpful to the community if you can share two things with us so that we can look at your actual business: Your website URL The keyword phrase you are trying to rank for If you can't share these, it's okay, but the community won't be able to provide feedback specific to your business and there are believed to be over 200+ ranking factors in Google's algo, so we'd only be guessing. Thanks!

    | MiriamEllis
    0