Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Ron! Thanks for letting me know you have some additional questions. Moz Local will help you get your data correct on these 7 partners: Infogroup Best of the Web Localeze Factual Foursquare Superpages Acxiom Any other platforms, you will need to manage manually. Yes, you can absolutely use the city landing for each listing - you do not have to use the homepage. Hope this helps!

Hi Nakul, Thank you for your feedback, I read the beginners guide to link building, and a few articles around directory submissions that also suggested the same thing. Cheers

Hi Miriam, Here is a screenshot. It may not look all the terrible, but Hollywood Hills is nowhere near us (other side of the state), and we've never had anything close to that phone number. It says a bunch of stuff in addition to the screenshot, but the rest of the stuff is just a boilerplate "how to contact us to get this changed" message. Ruben bDCSu9Z.jpg?1

Thanks so much for saying so, Tom, and glad to hear you're feeling better. I don't travel much, so I don't have anything scheduled, but thanks for asking. Have a good weekend!

Great thank you, I think you just verified other research that I have done.  Thanks again!

You're welcome both! We can always count on Mike to provide the most awesome answer to any Local question, eh?

Hi David! Good topic. First of all, you should remove the modifiers from your business title on your Google+ Local page (and elsewhere). Google was briefly supporting these types of modifiers, but the most recent iteration of their guidelines states that this is not acceptable Location information, such as neighborhood, city, or street name, unless it is part of the real-world representation of the business. Your name must not include street address or direction information. Not acceptable: "Starbucks Downtown", "Macy’s Union Square", "Holiday Inn (I-93 at Exit 2)", "U.S. Bank ATM - 7th & Pike - Parking Garage Lobby near Elevator" Acceptable: "Starbucks", "Macy’s", "Holiday Inn Salem", "U.S. Bank ATM", "University of California Berkeley" So, do get rid of the modifiers. But ... I do not recommend linking both locations to the same page. If one is the corporate headquarters, then linking it to the homepage would be fine, but in a multi-location scenario, linking to a specific landing page of the website for each shop would be a more typical way to ensure that you are keeping your locations distinct and separate. And yes, the authority of these pages very likely does impact rankings. Be sure the first thing on these pages is the complete name, address and phone number of the specific location. Be sure you are creating good, unique content for each of the pages, too. The challenge you are up against with more than one business in the same city is that Google is unlikely to show more than one of the same business in a keyword search. A brand search is different. If someone just searches for 'Crescent City Vape', Google may well show both businesses in a 3 or 7 pack, but if the search is just for 'e-cigarettes in Crescent City' then Google is less likely to show any business more than once in a pack. So, where this leaves you then is pinning your hopes on the fact that Google is getting more and more sensitive to the user as the centroid of search - meaning that Google is likely to show users (especially mobile users) the location of your business that is physically closest to them at the time they make their search. So, a user searching from his cell while in Uptown will be more likely to see the Uptown location on his phone (and possibly his desktop) while if he goes over to the lower garden district, Google is likely to show him that shop instead. What this boils down to is that you need to optimize and promote both locations equally, and leave it up to Google to parse which user group gets shown which result. This is about as good as you can do. I would not make the locations part of the business name on the website - instead, I would include this in: The content of the page The description on your citations Blog posts Social outreach Menu links pointing to these pages on your website, as in 'Visit our Uptown Location', 'Visit our Lower Garden District Location'. Hope this helps!

Thanks for the responses, everyone! And thanks for those resources, Miriam. Very helpful!

Hi There! What you need to do for a multi location scenario is have a unique Google+ Local page for each location. Whether you use the social features on these or not is up to the company. Will Scott recently wrote a really good and simple explanation of the different types of Google pages here: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-get-google-my-business-right-for-your-medical-practice-practitioners-212768 I think you if read the above, you'll be able to get a good strategy together for managing your social/local presence with the right types of Google pages. Hope this helps!

Hi Samuel, I see ... thank you for explaining what you meant about the dates. You're right, no one is going to search for the business name/year. Good luck with the citation building!

Sorry. I was reading in the discussion and someone had suggested changing the phone number on the listing and then closing. I'm guessing this would remove the NAP match of the listing and take away some of the negative issues with closing the location?  That was what I was referring to. I appreciate your help on this.  I am definitely much more informed on this than before and I don't know that there is a clear answer. It may come down to what the business needs to do from a non-SEO perspective and then we just adapt.  I can only inform them of the difficulties and risks involved.  Thanks again.

Hi Miriam. Thanks! Honestly, the mailbox advice was a consideration purely from a privacy stand point as I wouldn't recommend anyone to use their home address for any business based activity regardless of what Google recommends. But you're absolutely correct that Local is designed for physical addresses of public locations open for designated hours. If that's the setup that someone is pursuing than they should definitely make it as straightforward as possible. Thanks for emphasizing that point here and your superb answer below!

Thanks Wick for the extra details. This one is tricky because some of the services will overlap. Where an SMB may see themselves as 2 different companies, Google often looks at it as a marketing ploy and sees it as really 2 divisions of the same company. This one is a little hazy to me. I think the only safe way to even try to have 2 listings is if none of the categories cross over. So even though they both do home maintenance of sorts that cat should not cross over. Does that make sense?

Thanks Ryan!  It sounds like we'll have to go the manual route for cover and profile photos, but we'll also def plan to upload other images via bulk upload as well.

If you search for very basic terms using this tool you should find quite a few relevant ones that you're looking for... http://blumenthals.com/google-lbc-categories/search.php?q=dog&val=hl-gl%3Den-UK%28PfB%29%26ottype%3D1 If you need lists to download there are several on this page: http://blumenthals.com/Google_LBC_Categories

More that will help you show google there two companies Yes in order to break the correlation between the businesses it does not really matter that they're on the same IP.  more on that at the bottom in case you're using a .com and trying to target a country that you have yet to tell Google Webmaster tools you wish to target. this only matters if you are outside of the country you are are targeting with a geo-targetable domain like .com,  see https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922 etc. you will then want to make sure you sign up for https://www.google.com/business/  this is free and allows you to add your business to Google plus one very important part of adding this site correctly or sites correctly to Google Webmaster tools is to make sure you have chosen www. or no-www in Google Webmaster tools the reason this matters is you cannot target any country without doing this first. See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en Then add Your businesses to https://www.google.com/business/faq.html you should place your IP address into the box in this URL this will tell you where your server's data center is http://www.neustar.biz/services/ip-intelligence ( always nice to see people using a VPS) one thing to understand about IP addresses is they do play a small role in Google's understanding of where you are but it is extremely small. If you are in the United States and have a .com address you will want to use Google Webmaster tools and target United States. Obviously you would want to do the same for whatever country or in. If you're in a country with an non-geo-targetable domain like .ca ( Canada) or .de( Germany)  you automatically are targeting  the countries with a geo-target domain. There is really no other way around doing that then once they're created use Moz local to create citations that will differentiate the two businesses even more. https://moz.com/local/overview one of the best I signed up with http://localu.org/ You will also want to add schema to your address along with a KML file and XML site map with your  latitude and longitude this is a free tool that allows you to do this and even creates a schema generated map. http://www.geositemapgenerator.com/input If you use WordPress I recommend purchasing the Yoast local plug-in it will do this and add it to your site map flawlessly along with giving people directions to your business you can also incorporate tools like yoast local SEO in order to add  https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/local-seo/ http://local.yoastdemo.com/widgets-demo/ another easy way to add schema for your address is to use Google's rich snippet creator which is only good for Google not other search engine but if that does not bother you here it is. https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/ in my opinion this is one of the greatest schema tools and it has a WordPress plug-in if needed. http://schema-creator.org/organization.php or you just want a fast address made correctly http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/address/ to better understand why you should use it http://www.webmechanix.com/advantages-of-html5-and-semantic-markup All the best, Tom

Chris is absolutely right. Here's a tip: For each Google+ Location create a separate landing page on your website to associate it with and in the 'website' section on Google+ use the landing page URL, instead of simply your domain name. This is standard best practice when dealing with multiple business locations.

I see the same thing. I rank #2 in the organic SERPs for a really good money term... and I have a really low  clickthrough rate.  But, there are lots of ads above me.... and image results above me.... and shopping results on the right....  and more ads on the right. I bet google is making buckets of money from all of those ads and the big beautiful images in the shopping results.

Thank you for your insight!

Hi Anton, In my opinion, this situation is one in which I'd be recommending a complete audit of the website for its local and traditional SEO, content, links and off-site local search marketing. Here's a great place to start: http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit. In the space of a Q&A forum, no one is going to be able to do a thorough job of this, but I have some resources to share that I feel may be helpful to you in troubleshooting issues with the site and, also, improving it. First, discover if any obvious mistakes are being made by starting here: http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures http://searchengineland.com/citation-inconsistency-no1-issue-affecting-local-ranking-210643 http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/12/04/insidelocal-webinar-troubleshooting-local-ranking-issues/ https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en Next, be sure the website is utilizing basic Local SEO best practices: http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/seo/onpage-optimization-local-seo-perfectly-optimized-local-page/ Next, dig into the numerous factors that make up local search rankings to determine how well your client is doing with the most important ones: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/11/13/insidelocal-webinar-local-ranking-factors-discussed/#watch Check out what experts are recommending as best Local SEO practices for the coming year: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-have-a-successful-local-seo-campaign-in-2015 http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/12/17/insidelocal-webinar-state-local-search-2015/ Keep current on changes that will indubitably roll out this year by following people who make it a habit of writing about these things. I recommend following Mike Blumenthal, Linda Buquet, Phil Rozek, Darren Shaw, Greg Sterling, authors as Search Engine Land who write about Local SEO and authors here on the Moz blog who do the same. This is a short list, there are lots of very great options out there for daily reading. Local SEO, in my opinion boils down to: Not violating Google's guidelines Avoiding obvious pitfalls Publishing the very best website you are capable of in your industry/geography, possibly earning links for the qulity of your content and having a strategy for ongoing content publication and that the basic SEO of the site is correct rather than problematic Ensuring your citations are in tiptop shape Social participation, if appropriate Keeping up with the news, because it's a given that there will be both minor and major changes that may impact your rankings and your strategy. I hope these resources are helpful!