Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Avin, I'm really sorry that I did not see you had replied on this thread. Provided that you have face-to-face interactions with customers at your corporate office, then yes, it would be worth it to build citations on the major platforms.

Hi Sanjay There's a lot of issues with this site. I'll list out the worst ones I saw: There is a lot of unnatural link building as you can see here in the Open Site Explorer anchor text report - way too many links for "pharma machines manufacturer" and other commercial keywords There's tons of keyword stuffing on the site itself. The homepage header does not need to have all those variations of keywords for example. Your title tags are also long lists of keywords. Check out Google's guide for title tags. You're linking out to web designers and SEO companies in the footer, also with exact match commercial keywords - it definitely would count as links that are being given to sites in unnatural ways possibly. There are issues with the graphics and design which might deter users and give you bad user metrics. The graphics are low quality and show pixels. There is a broken image at the very top of every page. I would clean those up and make it look higher quality. Social accounts like Twitter are just stuffed with keywords as well: https://twitter.com/prismpharma - you'll want to clean up social accounts and remove keyword stuffing. You probably ranked where you did artificially before, because of the spammy links etc. So it may take some time of doing things to right way before you rank well again. -Dan

Hi Ryan, if the client does not care rather not they are a local business and found for local purposes it should not matter how ever if you want to call that one location depending on their phone tree it would have to be modified. Simply find a close number and or unique number for that secular location. A suggestion that you use a separate service to get numbers I guarantee you that somebody has them. Level 3 as well as jive communications are companies I've used with great success getting phone numbers.  Hypothetically you could even go to http://www.phonebooth.com/  and see if they have numbers I know trillow uses level 3 and has a very wide selection of numbers all the best, Tom

Such a good response Richard. To piggyback this a bit, if a link provides you real value and is relevant to your site, go after it - even if it's not listed in a tool. We need to stop looking at links as a SEO only item and really look at them as a value add to our business. Don't worry about Google and other search engines when it comes to links your intuition tell you are valuable or relevant. They'll catch up and you'll be on the right side of history.

Full and correct NAP (Name, Address, Phone) Local Citations with consistent NAP Verified G+ Local Page - this needs to be properly set up And your business appearing on the map is influence by the keyword competition and your competitors as well (how many reviews they have, how may relevant citations, etc).

Hi Kerry, Excellent answer from Patrick. I just want to add a bit to it. For local businesses, directories are very much still part of the picture. I, too, am curious about the nature of the directories your client is listed on. I'm assuming they are not major directories like HotFrog. Would these be niche directories, specific to your client's industry, or something along those lines? If so, do you sense that there is something fishy about the directories or the client's presence on them?

So glad you guys and gals like the Moz Local Learning Center. That's great to hear! It can even be a useful thing to share with your clients to help them start speaking the Local language with you

Google prefers local phone numbers that connect directly to the place of business, but in recent times, they have allowed toll free numbers into their system. You can read the guidelines here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

You can list all 5 addresses on your contact page, but you should consider creating local landing pages if you serve customers at each location. See the following for some best practices. http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/30/16-ways-to-create-unique-local-content-for-cities-where-you-want-to-rank/ As for your second question, if you want to drive traffic through local search, you definitely want to clean up local business citations.

Hi There! This is pretty typical that Google will show different results for different search terms ... even when to our eyes the terms are so similar. Building your authority for the second term will be your best bet for being seen as a relevant answer on the 'designer' term. Changing your title tag could help, but it could also make you less relevant for the pack in which you've achieved that great #1 spot, so I wouldn't be inclined to go that route. Rather, I would do an audit of the sites that are ranking well for the 'designer' term to see what is making them strong enough to do so. I would then try to up my efforts in the areas discovered, whether this would involve tweaking SEO, publishing new content, improving social signals, earning links or what have you. In a nutshell, I wouldn't recommend taking steps that could work against the #1 ranking you've achieved for term one, but rather, would set term two as a new, separate goal and create a plan around it that could help me earn greater visibility in this second pack.

Hi... I don't know if you have discovered the reason of the mysterious traffic from Sweden. I've thought about it, and the only justifications I can think about are these: or your company name corresponds also to a real Swedish brand, so Swedish people are entering in your site for brand name searches; or that your domain name - if it a generic one - once was the domain name of a Swedish website, hence with still enough link popularity from Swedish website, so that i can still rank in google.se

You are so right, Miriam! I informed my superior of the consequences of moving forward, but it seems like they're going with Situation B anyway. Oh, well. Thanks for the advice, though - you're awesome!

I have great success filing a DMCA with google when this happens.  The process is easy, and can be done here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard From my own experience it will take them 3 or 4 weeks to process it, but I have been successful every time.

Hi there, from what I understand of your premise, you are asking whether you should create multiple backlinks from the same sources to each of your 20 pages. There are 2 issues you have to contend with here: Backlink density and propogation As far as acquiring links goes, the key factor here is not so much the number of links you acquire, but the quality they provide your site. After gaining a link to your domain from another domain, the value of future links to your domain from the same domain diminishes, making this an extremely poor expenditure of resources on your part. For example, Google wants to see multiple domains linking to individual pages on your site rather than the same sources connecting to your site over and over on different pages. This approach is just more natural in its appearance. Here is an updated guide to general link-building. I think this would do you some good: http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building Backlink locality Since you operate a website purely in the U.K., links from outside your country will likely be less relevant geographically if they come from other countries, but the pages being linked may not matter. For example, blogs involving tips to fix a leaky faucet or a clogged drain are likely to be equally valid regardless of who writes them or from where. On the other hand, if your site is attempting to find customers for a plumbing client of yours, it doesn't make sense to get links from plumbing material manufacturers in Texas if you work in the U.K. To illustrate this, here is a personal favorite of mine from Rand: http://moz.com/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links See also: http://moz.com/blog/are-on-topic-links-important-whiteboard-friday (on-topic vs. off-topic links) In short, stick to 1 link per domain to your site unless there is something extremely relevant to your site and you feel the extra effort of building that link is worth it. Links built from UK sources are likely to be more valuable to your overall, but you can also find relevant information and data from international sources depending on the topic (in this case, informational pieces, perhaps in regards to DIY plumbing projects). Hope this helps and feel free to follow up with further questions, Rob

thanks all, i understand better about citations now NAP etc

thanks will use my city/area in navigation menu, to try and get higher rankings for my local business

Hi Chase, Thanks for the further details. Helpful! If we're talking purely organic results, these are not nearly as dependent on having a physical address on-page (nor citations of any kind) to rank. This is why developing landing pages optimized for city/product/service terms is the most commonly recommended strategy for service area businesses which lack physical locations in the cities they serve - a plumber can build 5 pages optimized for his service cities in hopes of achieving some organic visibility for these terms, even if he can't achieve local pack rankings. By the same token, organic results for local-intent terms typically feature a strong presence of directories like Yelp, YellowPages, etc. These directories do not have a physical presence - they simply feature information about businesses in various cities. So, in the example you're giving, Google is presently judging the rep management company's landing pages to be relevant, though from what you've explained, they don't sound to me like they would provide a very valuable user experience. Unfortunately, there is not much you can do about this. Typically, when Google's organic results appear to contain low quality pages, it is because: There is a paucity of information for Google to choose from, meaning there aren't enough high quality results for Google to display. Spammy quality practices are managing to trick Google into judging pages as relevant when a manual check would show that they really aren't. The business has fudged its way into looking authoritative with things like building a mass of links that are passing under Google's radar, for the moment. This could, of course, change at any time, demoting the site from its high rankings. There is something else about the pages that Google considers relevant answers to our searches, even if we can't figure out what on earth it would be. In all 3 cases, your best bet of outranking a non-quality website is to audit it and then surpass the efforts it has made so that you are providing Google with an excellent reason to rank your site higher than the weaker competitor.

We have this issue with Law Firms or Solicitors as they are generally know in the UK and I can only echo what has been mentioned above. Claim those Google+ listings, getting you NAP sorted, add as much info to the Google+ listing, We have had more success when we have uploaded photos to the new sections (indoors, outdoors and staff). We also have location pages with good on page SEO elements in place and link from the Google+ pages to the location pages on the client website. Good luck

Ah, great! The multiple physical locations part is key for the multiple listings. You should be good to go in listing each.  Cheers!

Thanks to all, i have learnt more