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Many thanks for the feedback, Miriam. hope all's well. You make a lot of sense.. my train of thought though is that if you do have varied unique, optimised descriptions you have more chance of a number of different directory profiles ranking in Google for related searches, therefore increasing your 'third-party' search visibility. Wouldn't Google only rank one of your directory profiles if the content (description) is duplicated? Thanks again, Lee.

So glad to hear you're making progress, Mark!

Thanks so much for letting our community know you're finding a lot of help here. That's wonderful! Sounds like you have some good improvements planned migrating to Wordpress. To me, it looks like location/contact could possibly be turned into a single page, making more room in your menu for a blog link, but that's a call you'd need to make. I can see from the blog post you've shared that you're looking to put lots of effort into the blog, so giving it a priority link makes sense to me! Good luck with all you're doing!

Hi Gavo, The Google Rep is right - what you're describing about the second business has all the earmarks of a listing that would get flagged and removed by Google, and this could actually hurt the work you've done for the first business. What are those earmarks? Shared category of products/services Shared address -Shared phone number If your client's second business was selling vacuum cleaners instead of driveway services and had its own phone number, it would be okay to move forward, but from your scenario description, attempting to use Google to market the second business would be a mistake. Now, not every directory shares Google's stringent policies, BUT if you do decide to build citations other than at Google for the second business, you should take these precautions: Separate phone number Separate website with totally unique content Don't link between the two businesses to try to cross promote them Even with these precautions, there is risk of troubling citation inconsistencies arising from the fact that two driveway businesses are sharing the same address. You could wind up with merged listing details out there in the ecosystem, so if you choose to go this route, forewarn the client of the risks before taking any steps in this direction. So sorry ... this is probably not the news your client is hoping to hear, but honestly, if you prevent him from making a costly mistake, you could be saving his bacon

So happy to have you in the community, Donna

Hi Matthew! Good question! Best advice: build just one website and one set of citations for this business. What you are describing sounds to me (and would likely sound to Google) like a single business in a single physical location that has purchased other businesses in order to expand its menu of services. Unless the business genuinely has unique forward-facing departments (like a hospital campus with one dept. for X-ray and another for ER) then the client would be taking a needless risk trying to promote the business as though it were 5, 6 different companies all in that same building. Remember that Google reads street-level imaging. Should they take a look at the building's signage and see Big Guy Marketing on the sign, but see that the owner is also listing Little Guy Printing, Medium Guy Car Wraps and Funny Guy Graphics in his Google My Business dashboard all in that same building, Google would rightly have cause to be suspicious that they are being spammed, by a single marketing company trying to look like multiple businesses. The good news here is that the owner is already wishing to consolidate. He should do so, and then you and he can both focus on building out one really awesome brand with a powerful, diverse menu of services (but just one set of citations)! Hope this helps!

Nice discussion going on here. To be honest, I am still unaware of any tool that does a very good job with local-specific kw info. I have never really trusted Google's numbers on this, so my rule of thumb remains to do keyword research without geomodifiers and then simply add the geomodifiers into your kw list for optimization purposes. The one proviso here is when you are dealing with a product/service that is called totally different things in different regions (pop vs. soda vs. cola). There are many, many examples of this and it is going to require regional research (interview the business owner and staff to define local terminology) to get the terms right.

Hey Ryan, Just checking in with you again, wanting to be sure you saw my earlier reply. I had asked some questions to help our community get down to the heart of your query. Hope we'll hear back from you!

Hey There, You might also like: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages Hope you find it relevant!

Hey Jim, Linkbuilding isn't really my area. One is always aiming for a natural link profile, but you might want to start a new thread about linkbuilding, and also, check these out: https://moz.com/blog/link-building-outreach-in-a-skeptical-world-whiteboard-friday http://niftymarketing.com/list-of-local-link-building-ideas/ Hope it helps!

Hey Robert! Though I don't know the complete details of your scenario, you've done a good job providing some clues. Here is what I'd suggest: These do sound like two distinct businesses. There is no obvious connection between a roofing contractor and a window washing company. So, good on this. I am assuming the 2 companies are fully differentiated with different names, phone numbers, separate websites that don't interlink and totally unique content on the two websites. Any other approach would be problematic. However, both of your business models are likely SABs (service area businesses) unless customers are actually visiting either company at the place of business. That seems unlikely for either a roofing contractor or a window washer. If both are SABs, you should be hiding the Google My Business listing address for both. Providing you are doing everything in point #2 correctly, there is no reason not to include complete NAP on each website for the company. You don't need to hide the address on the website or on other citations. You only need to do that on Google, because it's their unique requirement. Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any further questions!

Optimize the umbrella company as a brand for organic search but NOT for local SEO. Use the 3 local venues for local search optimization and it helps to use the local landing page for Google My Business and 3rd-party citations.  For the GMB pages, you really need a separate phone number for each venue even if they forward to the main line.  You can create a Google Plus page for the umbrella company but you should not create a Google My Business listing.

Hey There! Thanks so much for taking the time to contribute to this discussion. The geographic variations you mention sound normal to me, but the issue of the companies consistently ranking highly for no apparent reason is interesting. Are you saying the search is yielding a onebox (just one result) or a normal pack? Is the name of the business an exact or close match of the keyword phrase you're searching for? Is the business right in the middle of a cluster or similar businesses? Sounds like a good puzzle!

Hi Mark, I'll be very glad if the info was helpful. That's interesting about BrightLocal ... I wasn't aware of that. Maybe Whitespark will be a better option. Good luck!

Hi Cole, When you're trying to understand the relationship/the difference between the different entities I find this to be the most useful screen: http://schema.org/docs/full.html. Taking your example, we can see that LocalBusiness is a type of Place and a type of Organisation. You'd always want to try and pick the most specific entity possible, so you'd pick LocalBusiness rather than Place. But your business does multiple things and LocalBusiness isn't very specific. Schema.org supports the concept of multiple types for a single object but at the moment, all the structured data validators throw up errors and can't work with it. Here's the last discussion that happened on it: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2015Feb/0061.html And the page that came from it: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2015Feb/0061.html In your case I think the right thing to do is either to use Restaurant gain the special markup properties available to a restaurant and put the other features in the description. Or use Localbusiness and then use the additionalType property to show the other kinds of things you do. (Although they as they mention in the documentation, they might not understand this bit quite as much at the moment.) You can find great examples for the first one on the restaurant page at schema.org http://schema.org/Restaurant And 2 in JSON-LD would look something like this: On the menu point, I couldn't recreate any rich menu's, the only examples I could find were links to menus from the local business blocks. And in that case it's being pulled from the Menu property in Restaurant.

Great answer thank you. Can anyone advise me on this?

Hi Cristina! Did Miriam's response answer your question? If so, please mark it as a "Good Answer." Otherwise, is there any way we can still help?

Great answer, thank you.