Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: Local Listings

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


  • Thanks for the helpful answer. While I apologize for not having any experience with Flat CMS, here's what I can tell you about Local: You'll need to break this down for the client into 3 interrelated components: local, local-organic and (possibly) PPC. On the Local Front - you'll want to be sure the website is properly optimized with the client's contact info in their city of location (header/footer, contact us page, in-text mentions etc), you'll want to build citations for the physical location and manage their accuracy/quality, and you'll want to earn and manage reviews on all citations that included a review component. The goal here is to show up well in Google's local results and organic results for terms relating to the city of location as well as being present across the major citation platforms. On the Local Organic Front - The most typical thing to do would be to develop additional content for customers located in cities B and C, be sure these pages are internally linked to well from the navigation and elsewhere within the site, and then earn/build links to those pages. This part of the project should only be undertaken if the client can commit sufficient resources to developing really good landing pages. There must be a reason for these pages to exist beyond impressing search engines - they must contain unique content that truly helps customers from the targeted location. The goal here is rank in the organic SERPs for terms relating to the service cities. On the PPC Front - Much can be done with the above 2 components, but where there are gaps in visibility, a supplemental PPC strategy targeting the service cities (or even the city of location) may remain a requirement, depending on the competitiveness of the client's unique geo-industry situation. Hope this helps! P.S. You might want to check out Moz Local for the citation component of this, and you might also like a recent post by Phil Rozek that outlines some of these components of work: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2017/01/27/relationship-between-local-and-organic-seo-a-simple-diagram/

    | MiriamEllis
    1

  • So glad it helped! Good luck to you!

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Howdy. So, I bet you've seen this page before - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/events If you haven't, check it out. Another step - "register" with Google Search Console. And after you apply all the schema markup, test it with google structured tool. That and the GSC will tell you if something is wrong. Another important thing to consider - schema is only a suggestion to google. If you have all the data 100% right, it doesn't necessarily mean that the rich snippets will show up. All we can do is make sure it's right, submit to google and hope for the best

    | DmitriiK
    0

  • Hi! Your physical location will have little to do if you can rank an online casino site in Thailand. Are you having problems at the moment? What is the domain? Is the site's content the same as any other site out there? Have you geo-targeted the domain to Thailand in Google Search Console if it's not on the Thailand CCTLD (.th)?

    | katemorris
    0

  • Hey There! This previous discussion should be helpful: https://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-best-seo-tool-for-tracking-local-rankings

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Thanks Thomas! So canonicals should be self-referencing, if I'm reading that image correctly.

    | dohertyjf
    0

  • Thanks Miriam!

    | julie-getonthemap
    0

  • These links are coming from when a business advertises with Yellowpages.com. I have seen evidence that they are destroying one of my clients NAP's because each link is coming from a different city that the local business doesn't belong to them. Have your client Stop advertising with them immediately and disavow all links just to be safe.

    | DavidMeshah
    0

  • Hi Jeremy, Hmm, sorry if that's creating an issue. I'd suggest getting in touch with Touchpoint Digital's David Deering to see if he has time to consult with you on any complex schema issues you can't resolve or find good advice for. He's the master, as far as local schema is concerned. Sorry my suggested solution seems like it wouldn't resolve the issue.

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hey, fascinating! Thanks for the link, and cool to know Google is investigating this. Thanks for the update, Jason.

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hi Jason, While I've not personally experienced this bug, I can imagine how frustrating it is! I think it's issues just like this one that have contributed to the popularity and rise of paid location data management services (like Moz Local, Whitespark, etc.). The days of spending hours banging one's head against a monitor over a single citation source are, fortunately, numbered, due to the emergence of these tools which resolve most (though not all) verification problems. I wish I had a solution for you. You'll likely just have to keep phoning customer service until you can get someone to understand how irritating this bug is. Or, if you've run out of patience with the issue, consider the alternatives to manual management.

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Intriguing title to this question!   You hooked me. Important question: if your client has an online-only business, why does he have citations? Structured citations are normally restricted to local businesses that make in-person contact with consumers. Does your client interact face-to-face with his customers? If so, failure to correct citations is about the worst mistake he could be making in terms of reputation, rankings and revenue. But, if your client's business model is virtual, he shouldn't really be creating local business listings and ought to get rid of them - especially any Google My Business listings as they would actually be a violation of Google's guidelines. However, if he has accrued non-structured mentions of his business (for example, social mentions, newspaper articles, blog posts, etc.) and they contain misinformation, the risk of neglecting this is that he is losing customers. If I'm correct in understanding that your client's business is virtual, I'd advise him to: Get rid of all local business listings on the major local business data platforms Make the effort to correct unstructured citations, unless he can afford to lose customers. I'd give it the 'old college try' to make the client understand his profits are at being put at stake due to misinformation being published about his company and outline a sensible plan for addressing the issue (based on whether his business is truly local or virtual). Then, if the client wouldn't hear this, I'd let him go. In fact, I wouldn't serve a client who felt that bad data about his company could be neglected. I'd be foiled at every turn in trying to market his business and see progress. His attitude would be setting us both up for failure. Hope this helps, and good luck!

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hi Foothills! Good advice from Donna, and I highly recommend that you go through Joy Hawkins article http://www.joyannehawkins.com/the-proper-way-to-deal-with-duplicates-in-google-my-business/ with fine toothed comb before you make a move in any direction. The article does a super job of explaining deletion, merging, etc. and links to another resource for understanding moving reviews from one entity to another. I believe it will be exactly what you're looking for!

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hey There, So, that horizontal display would be a 'carousel' of results, like Google rolled out a couple of years back. Bing rolled out their local carousel in 2014. Interestingly, the order of results in the carousel you've highlighted  does not in any way match Bing's local-finder-type results here. Nor am I seeing an immediate correlation between the carousel and what is appearing in the organic results. What you've highlighted, in the larger scheme of things, is the lack of information our industry has published regarding Bing local ranking factors. Google has gotten all the love! The last article I can recall of this sort was written 4 years ago (http://searchengineland.com/10-basic-bing-local-optimization-tips-109158) and it's pretty basic stuff. It's hypothesized that Yelp reviews may especially help you on Bing, and I've also seen it posited that Facebook likes could be a factor. The major factors are likely similar to Google's, but they may be weighted differently and there may be unique Bing factors Google doesn't consider. And that's just the purely local factors I'm referencing ... as for how they are ordering their carousel results, I'm afraid I have no resources to which I can link you. Basically, if there is a particular carousel you want to get into, you'd need to analyze the top 5-10 competitors in that pack to see what their strengths are. Is it Yelp reviews, links, on-page, citations, something else? You've reminded me how much I would love to see our industry throw a little more attention Bing's way, in terms of Local, but Google has hogged more than its share of attention, and I plead as guilty to this as anyone else in Local. It would be really neat if someone with the time/resources would do a study to pin down what is driving the various types of local results in Bing. And, if our community knows of something I've overlooked, please shout it out!

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hi Miriam, Hope you're much better now! Thanks heaps for your informative response as well as Joy's article. The only reason we'd come up with a unit number 'A' and 'B' for the 2 clients was to resolve the issue of duplicate address with Google. We had to resolve an issue with ABC's GMB with the help of a Google Business consultant and that's how they noticed business ABC and XYZ shared the same address (but both GMBs managed to be verified). We tried explaining to no avail that it was possible in Australia for 2 businesses to share the same office premise (with no separate entrance, they're not on different levels, they do not occupy different rooms within the same office space). Hence, we finally thought to 'resolve' it by creating unit numbers to fix the issue of duplicate address on G+. What a 'fix'!

    | Gavo
    0

  • Hello jpeg80, If you would like to filter the local organic traffic in GA, you can use this Campaign URL Builder from Google to generate a UTM tracking URL. Replace the homepage URL that you use in the directory, Bing Places, and Google My Business listings with the tracking URL and GA will begin tracking this traffic in Campaigns > All Campaigns. You can see the new sessions, bounce rates, goal completions, etc. I hope this helps! Alicia

    | PureVisibility
    0

  • Kristen, I have done this on multiple occasions and it still has not been taken off. Can you recommend methods to contact google?

    | donsilvernail
    1

  • Hi Tim, In addition to that important link Dmitrii has shared, things to consider: Be sure each location has its own local phone number Be sure each location has its own landing page on the website, featuring that number Be sure citations for each location clearly, consistently feature that number on the major platforms. Differentiation of locations and consistency of data likely play a role in Google's trust.

    | MiriamEllis
    0