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Hi There, I'm so sorry, but I've never marketed a business in the UK or Ireland. If you don't receive a response from a UK marketer in the community, I recommend taking your question to Google's own Google My Business forum: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Google-My-Business/ct-p/GMB You are certain to get an answer there.

Hi Tomer! I'd advise creating all of your listings under the same account so that you can manage them all from a single Google My Business dashboard.

My pleasure, and I hope it was helpful. Regarding developing separate landing pages, that's a decision you'll need to make, of course, but as you've raised a concern about Google not properly showing both locations, what I'm explaining to you is something that could possibly help with this. It's totally fine that the cities are close to one another. That's common for many businesses. But if you want each office you have to be treated as separate and equal, unique landing pages and unique citation sets will be the common best practice advice you'll see for this scenario.

Thanks, Erick. We do have a verified listing for one of the locations (verified many months ago) and it isn't showing as expected. We're waiting on post cards for the other locations, but I am concerned that they won't show up either.

(This is Miriam responding, but I'm in Mozzer Alliance right now) Hi Aleks, You can do an logged-out, incognito search, but the usefulness of this is somewhat questionable, as each of your customers is going to see different SERPs, based on their own location, personalization, etc. Because of this, there is no absolute local rank for any business - it varies from device to device, from user to user. More on this: https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid It's really important to train clients to understand that it's conversions, rather than rankings, that you are both working toward, because there are no static rankings for anyone. In terms of conversions - one thing Google has publicly stated is that the images displayed in your local results have a major impact on user behavior (see: http://localu.org/blog/your-google-my-business-profile-image-your-most-important-image/). Hope this helps!

"We did this to let people know that we come out to their location, and also to try to expand our reach. For example, if you were searching for an SEO company in Chesterfield, that is an area that is about 30 mins from us. I'm not sure our local office listing would "carry" that far out, and thus the service area was created as a test." Service area and service radius have absolutely no impact on ranking. It's been tested, proven. Typically you'll only rank in the city your are in. Unless competition is low and you are very strong, then sometimes you'll rank in other cities, but service area settings don't play a part. "I'm not sure that the bot would take that long to recrawl the listing, and I would have thought that it would have happened by now if that was the case." Sorry, not talking regular bots, like the ones that crawl sites. Maybe bot is the wrong word. But with Local listings you can have a violation for years without an issue. Then you make a minor edit and it seems to trigger a recheck of the listing to see if it stands up to current guidelines, then it gets wacked. You had another question I got via email but it's not showing up here so copying: "I had a question about this, as even though we had quite a few mentions of the city and service they were spread out throughout the description and not bulked together in the traditional definition of keyword-stuffing. If what you were saying about the description having no part to play is true, how would that have had an impact on the LBL drop? Help me understand, my mind is a sponge right now ;)" Description is not a RANKING factor. But the algo looks at it as a signal of spamminess. Spammers have lots of patterns that the algo can pick up on, this is one of them. So a non-spammy description can trip a filter if it follows the same pattern of overly repetitious keywords. In that short description, count every single time any word is repeated more than once. I did a quick scan and counted 25. Mike Blumenthal has also said mentioning city even twice in description can cause a 10 point ranking penalty. I have examples I could show at my forum, where the description was not spammy or KW stuffed, but the city and KWs were repeated multiple times. They clean up description per my recommendation and pop right back up. But again all that was pre-pigeon. After, it seemed like lots of really spammy ones were getting away with it. So may no longer be an issue. But like I said above, if it does not help and if customers will never see it and if it could maybe hurt AND if your ranking was suffering, why not clean it up? Nothing to lose.

I would change listings, social media information, and other external items once you've launched the new site. Think of it this way: your website is your main source, while the rest are secondary. Your website should always take precedence when it comes to change, especially when considering consistency with your users. If they go to Yelp, Google+, etc. and see "Bakery Y", but your website still says "Bakery X", it'll be both confusing and inconsistent. As for your second question, about the catering business: Facebook: you can create a new page (try to get a short and related URL!) and "merge" the old one into the new. Ensure that you clarify this change in a post, however, as not to confuse followers! Yelp: Much trickier. In this case, the only option may be to try to change the name of the current listing, rather than creating a new one. Not only are reviews something you never want to give up, the length of time your listing is up actually plays a roll in rankings on Yelp (similar to search engines for websites). Google: This is actually a combination of the two previous. You can keep the page you have now (especially good if you have reviews) and change the name and branding. If there's some reason that's not possible, or if you've yet to create a solid Google Local / My Business, then you may choose to create a new page and contact Google, asking to move assets to the new from the old. The latter is more complicated, and can take a long while, however.

If the call is ringing 10-12 times before the call forwarding provider connects with your phone, I would drop that provider. A good company will have a seamless transition so no one would ever know the difference when they call you. Who are you currently running tracking numbers through? Sounds like either you've set up too many redirects in the call system or the provider has some serious support issues.

Hey Christopher, you and only use the business address that is real and the actual dress for your company. So you have to optimize it or radius around a certain point. Say X amount or kilometers or miles from your business is your service area. can be quite large. answer this simply you must use the same address unless you open up another place where you do face-to-face business. That helps, Tom

My pleasure, Ryan, and good luck with the work ahead!

Hi there. _ I don't feel comfortable doing it this way as it goes against what I believe is good SEO_ Not true at all. Good SEO is exactly about this - good related content. In your case it's a little difficult, since it's international company and all. But the thing is that simply having local listings will not make you rank for local results, unless your brand is directly associated with the keyphrase you're trying to rank for. I would recommend to have not just 1 contact page per location and that's it, but have somewhat unique content for each location (or at least each major area).

Hi John, As Bill suggests, you're probably best off going with Google's preferred address format, as they are 'the big cheese' in Local. Then, be sure to correct all other citations, and the website content, to match that. I would not be concerned about the business name, though it is rather long. It's true that Google does penalize spammy business names, but they don't do a very good job of catching so many of them, I'd be very surprised if this was the root of your ranking issues. Getting your citations consistent will be a big start, but it looks like you also need to implement a program for earning Google-based reviews, and I would recommend doing a run-through of the Ultimate Local SEO Review by Casey Meraz to see if there are other areas that need improvement: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit

Hey Jack! Good questions. I want to preface my comment by stating that this is the type of issue that is typically going to require a formal audit from a Local SEO expert to properly diagnose. There are too many factors that contribute to local search rankings for someone to be able to take a look for 2 minutes and say 'voila, here's the problem.' So, I would highly recommend that you consider hiring a local search expert for some consultation to dig down properly, but in the meantime, I can take a glance at this. What you are describing is not an uncommon issue. If I'm understanding properly, when you are searching from a Philadelphia-based device, you are ranking well in the local pack for your core term 'garage door repair', but when you add the geomodifier, you are no longer ranking well locally. Right so far? In a city of any good size, it is totally normal for your non-geomodified local searches to bring up different results than your geo-modified ones. What I have personally noticed about this is that the former searches tend to tighten my radius to be nearer to my exact physical location at the time of search, whereas adding a city name appears to alter the radius or industry centroid. So, in other words, if I just search for pizza, Google shows me the pizza places nearest me. If I search for 'Pizza Philadelphia' Google may choose some other centroid than me, and show me pizza places downtown, near the courthouse, near a cluster of other pizza restaurants, etc. What I look at in cases like yours is the proximity of your company's physical address to the addresses of the competitors who are outranking you in the pack. I see your address is hidden on your Google My Business page, so I'm popping over to your website and see the following address: 13440 Damar Drive Unit F2 Philadelphia, PA 19116 Now, do this comparison: Do your 'garage door repair philadelphia' search in Google and then click into the more results view. Look at where the high ranking businesses are located. Open a second browser window, go to maps.google.com and look up your own address. I think you will very quickly see that, sure enough, you are located way on the outskirts of the radius Google appears to be pulling results from for that geomodified search. Again, this is my very quick glance at this, but I would suspect that geography appears to be playing a role (and not one you can influence) in this scenario. Other things to investigate? -History of Google guideline violations, be they past or current -Citation consistency and spread (glad you are using Moz Local!). Pay attention to duplicates we report! -Google-based review count and rating -Domain authority -Link quality So, that's a start, Jack, and I do recommend that you either dig deeper into research on this or consider hiring an expert who can take a more thorough look at numerous factors. Hope this is helpful! P.S. BTW, in regards to your comments about spammy names, unfortunately, yes - these still often rank dreadfully well in Google. It's a shame. What you want to find out is whether these suspiciously generic names are, in fact, the legitimate business name or DBA of the competitor. If they are not, consider reporting them for a guideline violation. I've seen it work. But, if those are the real names, you are out of luck

The short answer is "no". Your info in Wikipedia/WikiData is probably fine. Essentially, either: (1) Google doesn't view you as having enough entity authority (for lack of a better phrase) to display more information, or (2) They aren't able to validate that information against other sources. You might be able to nudge them with the Organization schema, although results seem to be mixed. There's a decent article on the general topic here: http://searchengineland.com/leveraging-wikidata-gain-google-knowledge-graph-result-219706 To some degree, though, it's not something you can tell Google to do or not do - they generate these features on the fly and it's always evolving. Best you can do is make sure your information is correct in WikiData, continue to build your overall authority, and gently nudge them in the right direction.

Hi Peter, I believe you're referring to a David Deering article on Whitespark (http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/50-how-to-make-your-local-business-schema-better) from earlier this year. I would trust pretty much any advice regarding citations published on Darren Shaw's company's website and I think that's a great article from David. I'd like to know more about his/Darren's experience with seeing quicker citation pick-up using sameAs. I'm not sure if the speed they are citing comes from something Whitespark has noted handling the massive numbers of citations they manage, or if this is something David Deering is experimenting with on his own, or what have you. The folks are extremely nice and friendly up there in Canada, and if I were you, I'd reach out to David and ask him if he can tell you a bit more about any phenomena they have documented regarding use of sameAs, to see whether any gains in speed would warrant you investing in implementing this. I've not seen any side-by-side testing done, but maybe the fellows at Whitespark have done some? Great topic!

Hey Mike, In a nutshell, you can have: 1 GMB page per staffed physical location and, if you choose, 1 GMB page for each of the lawyers in the practice, but be sure to follow Google's conventions as to naming practices for practitioners (detailed in Kristen's response) and definitely provide a unique local number for each attorney that directly connects to him/her. Be sure all citations for the attorneys are consistent across the web and all link to a unique landing page on the website for the respective attorney, which features their complete NAP at the top. I'm not sure I understand what you mean about backlinks to a Google Map Location URL. Can you provide an example or further explanation of this? The decision to use Google as a social medium has become quite controversial in past months due to the removal of Google+ links and the disappearance of owner posts from any highly visible display. I recommend reading the comments discussion here for more info on this https://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/07/23/google-removing-all-non-verified-local-pages-from-plus/. While GMB is still vital to a local search campaign, Google+ as a social platform may be of questionable value.

Hi Rich, Here's what you'll want to do: Build citations on only those directories which support hidden addresses. Phil Rozek has done the most work of anyone in the industry on surfacing lists of these, which you can see here: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/08/13/can-you-rank-well-in-local-google-without-revealing-your-street-address-anywhere/ http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/ *Please note, those posts are couple of years old, so you may want to do some of your own research to see if there is anything different or new, but in the main, those lists should be a great start for you. Build links, yes, but do be advised that these may/may not have quite the same impact as citations. They should help, nevertheless. Interestingly, the quality/authority of inbound links to the domain were judged to have the 2nd greatest impact on organic rankings in the most recent Moz Local Search Ranking Factors but only the 12th greatest on local rankings. This is pretty typical, but I think it's important to note that many Local SEOs are advising increasing focus on link earning as a result of the universal rollout of the 3-pack, making local rankings harder to win and organic rankings more important to earn. So, there's my expert opinion Hope it helps!

Creating new locations will actually create more work for you. Do like Miriam said and update the current listings. If you create new listings, you still have the issue of cleaning up the old ones which could cause ranking problems as you battle yourself to tell Google which information is correct. LocalSEOGuide created a cool tool (NAP Hunter) to help find mismatched citation sources. Download that chrome extension and plug in both your current address, and past variations. Pull all that information into an Excel file, and then you'll be able to run a pretty good gap analysis to see what you need to try and update. Not all sites will allow you to update, and old unstructured citations like news articles, blog posts, etc would fall into that category. Local directories will be a little easier, but again there are sites that lock you out from editing unless you pay. Don't wait & pray, be proactive to get these updated. Citation work can either be a large project or can be outsourced to different teams/products (Moz, Yext, Whitespark, or other consultants/contractors). It also sounds like they've manually claimed a few sites prior to you coming on, so you'd need to spend some time working with each site's support team to try and get access/reset the account. Without that you won't be able to update the business information.

No my client is based in the UK. I'll check for mapmaker functionality on My Business interface. Thank you!

I agree with Miriam, make sure that you have enough citation strength/listing withing for each location, as well as making sure you're listing is linking to your individual location page on your site. This is by far the biggest differentiator in my experience.