Category: Local Listings
Examine the impact of maintaining consistent and accurate local listings on your local SEO strategy.
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Client Being Outranked by Horrible Websites with No SEO--Help!
If the address is a legitimate forward-facing public office, then it shouldn't be causing any local or organic issues. I definitely recommend doing a run-through of this https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 to see if there could be technical issues holding you back.
| MiriamEllis0 -
Been working on SEO on and off for a couple of years but my websites still doing badly for SEO. Why?
Gaston has hit the high notes. I would also consider an ssl certificate. You are correct about your on site optimization it is pretty good. Good responsive site. The links are the major problem. They are not high quality, relevance / trust the clear factors. Hope that assists.
| ClaytonJ0 -
New Global Company website launch question
Hi SeoSheikh, did Dirk's or Dmitrii's responses help? If so, please mark one or both as a "Good Answer."
| MattRoney0 -
Is there something that I can do to get my listing back in Places?
Thank you for the post recommendation, this has helped my websites greatly over the last year or so!
| ReviveMedia0 -
Web3.ca moving into U.S Market
hreflang is basically a way to tell search engines that you have a version of a website per country (or, actually per spoken language). Read here on what it is and how to use it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en In your case, since you gonna have US and Canada website you gonna have something like this: in your header.
| DmitriiK1 -
Google Places - Cached Citations
Hi Miriam, I will definately focus on the new, good idea about the feature, will start thinking about some PR. Justin
| GrouchyKids0 -
Local SEO For Agents
Hey There! Good question, and brace for a long answer here. So, where we start with this is Google's own guidelines for multi-practitioners which we excavate for clues to see how they feel about your scenario. These guidelines state: Individual practitioners (e.g. doctors, lawyers, real estate agents) An individual practitioner is a public facing professional, typically with his or her own customer base. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, and insurance or real estate agents all are individual practitioners. Pages for practitioners may include title or degree certification (e.g. Dr., MD, JD, Esq., CFA). An individual practitioner should create his or her own dedicated page if: He or she operates in a public-facing role. Support staff should not create their own page. He or she is directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours. A practitioner should not have multiple pages to cover all of his or her specializations. Multiple practitioners at one location If the practitioner is one of several public facing practitioners at this location: The organization should create a page for this location, separate from that of the practitioner. The page for the practitioner should be titled with name of the practitioner only, excluding that of the organization. This is the sum total of what Google tells us and, and while some of these guidelines apply to your scenario (like your agents operating in a public facing role) there's a catch here. Though you've described having multiple offices across the country, you have further described that these agents you'd like to market don't work at these offices. They work from home and would need to keep their addresses hidden because of this. This is a common scenario and one of the more significant grey areas of the guidelines. The problem here is, should Google discover than you've created 30 listings in Iowa for your agents, and then they look at their street level imaging of the back-end addresses you've listed in your GMB dashboard, they will see that these are not offices - they are houses. And, at that point, it's up to Google to decide whether you have a legitimate business model or whether you are trying to game the system by appearing to have offices in these 30 locations when you really don't. The problem here is that many companies have spammed Google in this way. The yard cleaning company whose owner literally does work from home in San Francisco, but who has also set up listings in San Jose (his cousin's house), Oakland (his mom's house) and Walnut Creek (his sister's house). Google catches onto this and hammers down not only on the 3 spammy listings but may also hammer down on the legitimate listing in San Francisco, as well. So, while this is not what you are trying to do, and your agents genuinely do work at home while representing your company, the grey area here is whether Google will see it that way. There is no guarantee that they will, and so what I would say on this is that the safe path here is to only list your physical offices in the cities where you have them and list any agents that work in these offices and are "directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours". You could try it the other way, listing every possible agent, but you'd be doing so at your own risk. Hope these are helpful thoughts! It's good you're considering all the options here. Very smart. P.S. So sorry about the formatting on this. It is wacky.
| MiriamEllis0 -
Consistant citations for Local SEO
Hey Jon! If you feel totally confident that Google will agree that these are 2 different forward-facing businesses at the same address, than the differentiating items will be the name, the phone number and the website landing page the Google My Business listing links to. Being sure that all 3 things are unique should help Google keep them separate, ideally. Hope this helps!
| MiriamEllis0 -
How to set-up international URL structure for e-com shop?
Hi Jerome, If your SaaS vendor allows it, you should use subfolders for the countries instead of subdomains. So www.example.com/uk instead of uk.example.com, for example. The reason for this is that the subdomains won't share link equity as effectively. You should implement hreflang -- Moz has a great introduction to the topic here -- on all equivalent pages (I'll explain what I mean by that in a second). By all means choose sensible default currency options (for example GBP should be the default currency in the /uk directory), but preferably do allow users to change that default value if they wish. If they do change it, do not direct them to a different URL. Use a cookie to store their currency preference. Now, more on 'equivalence'. The point of hreflang is so that you can have identical or very similar pages targeting different country/language combinations, and have Google discard these pages as duplicate content. The pages don't have to be completely identical. For example, Americans and Brits use different spellings for common words. If my product was online math(s) lessons, my two equivalent URLs may look like this: www.mystore.com/us/online-math-lessons www.mystore.com/uk/online-maths-lessons The language, tone, and general marketing pitch of each page may be different, and tailored to their respective audiences, but they're each fundamentally selling the same product. So I would add the following hreflang tags to these pages (both tags on both pages): Be careful to use the correct country codes: en-UK is not valid, for instance, but en-GB is. Read Google's guidelines on the topic.
| StephanSolomonidis0 -
Preferred URL structure for directory pages?
Thanks for the insight - it does make sense to go with /location-name/service-name because people might want to look at all services in a location, but all locations for a service doesn't make much sense, (unless someone's scraping my site, and I don't want to make life easy for those people!). Things like /within-50-miles will be canonicalized to the base location as you suggest. You're right that there isn't much difference between that and simply /service-a/location-a I want everything to be bookmarkable, so keyword search will be either a parameter or another path, (like /keyword-{urlencoded keyword content} ), and I may or may not canonicalize that to just the location/service combo, or simply noindex it, or leave it as-is and see what happens. The /location-a/ part of the URL can accept a lot of formats, and some, like GPS coordinates, will have to be noindexed to avoid duplicate content, (I guess I could rel=canonical them to the closest town or something, I can save that as an experiment for later). Thanks again for the insight. It makes sense to me.
| 4RS_John0 -
How can I submit Baidu business listings if I live outside of China?
Thanks for your input!
| RosemaryB0 -
Is there is any benefit to linking to the Google page from RFQ contact page?
Hey Scott, What Ioganr has mentioned is correct. Google+ pages, per se, are no longer really the core URLs of your local data on Google. Rather, what happens these days is that your Google My Business dashboard data is being displayed in a variety of ways, and that the URL you'd be most likely to link to these days for any purpose would be the Maps-based URL, like this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Whole+Foods+Market/@38.596632,-121.364044,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x5f6895a3853012bc But, linking to this on a RFQ page is probably going to be a distraction from what you'd like users to do there, yes.
| MiriamEllis0 -
How Far is Too Far to Show Up in Local Results
Hi Kaitlin! The radius from which Google draws local and localized organic results is really dependent on competition. There won't be a single answer to your question, because it's going to be different in each case. For example, if you are located in a very rural area with few options, Google will reach out beyond the borders of your town to adjacent towns to return results to make up a full set of results. In some cases like this, there won't even be a 3 pack, but solely organic results. When you are dealing with a large city, you are much less likely to see this outreaching behavior on Google's part, because they will have plenty of results right near the user within the city. The only exception to this would be if the business is offering something very unusual and there are few or no competitors inside the city. For a Service Area Business, the rule of thumb is to go for local pack rankings for their city of location and organic rankings for their service cities. It's rare for a service area business to rank in the local pack for any city where they lack a physical location, unless, again, they are offering something very rare. Doing research on Maps will help you determine the general radius from which Google is drawing results for a particular query, but it's extremely important to remember the user-as-centroid phenomenon, especially when dealing with cities. Google will show different results to users at one end of the city than to those at the other end of it. Educating clients about the fact that there are no static rankings is vital these days Hope this helps!
| MiriamEllis0 -
Domain Purchases!
I too agree with them both EGOL, and again thank you for taking the time to respond to my question! as I have said above I will be putting a website on that domain and link back to my main one from it! Can always use it as a vanity url in the future! Thanks again and have a great day buddy! Phillip Dews
| Brumdesign0 -
Does Google Analytics automatically desseminate Maps/Places traffic from Organic traffic? Do webmasters still have to apply UTM parameter tracking to URLS in their GMB profile listings?
This has been a common question from several of my clients. I'm shocked that Google hasn't done anything to segment this local traffic since it's coming from one of their own products. Google insights on the GMB panel isn't enough to cut it when our client has thousands of local listings.
| RosemaryB0 -
Local Business Audit Help.....
That's an amazing resource. How have I not landed on that before ! Thanks Miriam !
| BeanstalkIM0 -
Good service for loactions for google maps
You have to use the home address as the main point to send the postcard & list on the Google business page, then hide the address. Do not use virtual offices, po boxes, or anything else to try and game the system. The reason Google is tougher on this niche is because so many locksmiths have done shady things to manipulate the system and gain an advantage. Follow the rules and set up the page legitimately to have longer term success. If there is no physical office location, you must use the home address. Optimize the website to cover the different service areas that you want to target (use local landing pages), which will help improve organic ranking in those areas. Do not create multiple pages for each location (that's another violation), just use the home address & hide it on maps when you select a service area.
| Eric_Rohrback0