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In addition to Ray's response, are you also asking about increasing walk-in visits to your brick and mortar store via an increased presence on local search? You're best planning gains will likely come from quantifying the average values of visits to your brick and mortar and ecommerce stores then planning for X hours of work to increase that number Y%.  This is all going to be data that's unique to you. Still, here are some guides to help you with your planning. http://searchengineland.com/google-uses-neural-networks-reverse-turing-tests-validate-street-address-numbers-signs-209801  (A review of the growing interlaced relationship between real location presence and virtual presence.) http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/tracking-offline-conversions-hope-seven-best-practices-bonus-tips/  (Analytics guidance on tracking offline conversions) http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2343577/google-local-searches-lead-50-of-mobile-users-to-visit-stores-study (Stats from Search Engine Watch saying 50% of mobile users doing local searches visit business locations.)

I recently did a similar thing with two of my domains - however, this was a .co.uk to .co.uk move. It took around 3 months for our google results to settle down and return our previous rankings. Pages would bounce around daily between there old positions and new, often worse positions. Eventually it was all good... you need to give it time.

We have seen quite a few ranking changes in the UK SERPS across the weekend. For both local terms with geographical qualifiers and those without. Not huge swings either way maybe + or - 5 places but enough of a pattern to think it is more than just coincidence. Niches include legal, B2B, consumer goods, fashion, web design, home and gardens and recruitment. Mainly positive movements for us. We keep a close eye on them across the week.

You've very welcome!

Hi Adam, I want to make sure you received the answer I gave to Stephen via the Help Desk as well. Basically, right now, yes, Moz Local in marking hidden Google+ Local addresses as inconsistent and this is negatively impacting the Moz Local listing score, but coincidentally, this is something our Engineers are working on to change. I don't have an ETA, but it is our plan to stop marking these as inconsistent in the near future, and this will remove any negative impact on the listing score. Hope this helps!

Thank you both.  After posting this question, I did stumble on some of these great prior posts (which my initial searching didn't find). A few that stood out: http://moz.com/blog/scaling-geo-targeted-local-landing-pages-that-really-rank-and-convert-whiteboard-friday http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

I agree with Miriam and give a thumbs up to her thorough response. I would only add that not having an additional number for the separate business is pretty inexcusable.  With Skype, Anveo, or any other myriad of VOIP and cell options, getting another number is a dirt cheap cost for someone running a legitimate business. Plus the value it adds for the business should more than cover the $50 or so they'd spend yearly.  If they still want the number to ring to the same line, the could just set up call forwarding on the new number... Again, all that should cost less than $100 a year and probably be even cheaper than that.  Best of luck!

Hi Wick! Definitely consider checking out your site on our free Check Listing tool, which generates data about your business on 15 sites that Moz considers among the most important: https://moz.com/local/search Nice answers, everybody!

Thanks, Patrick! Best wishes for an excellent 2015 to you, too!

Hi Sassy, When I look up the main term you've stated 'nail salon in Sevierville tn' I see your website coming up #1 organically. While it is sometimes possible to appear in both the organic results and the local results at the same time, it's not terribly common. If you have an outdated Google+ Local page representing an old location (Pigeon Forge) , here are Google's official instructions for getting rid of it: https://support.google.com/business/answer/4569146?hl=en Hope this helps!

One of the basic tools SEO's use to determine the strength of their website's rankability and trust on behalf of Google is a website audit. This process effectively gives you an outline of your ranking factors and potential issues that you can fix such as 404 disconnects, incorrect 301 redirects, improper heading usage or missing meta tags, among 100 other factors. This is what I think you should have done for your website. If you want a DIY method, several website audit tools include: SEMRush (semrush.com) SEM PowerSuite (Website Auditor)  WooRank (woorank.com) If you want someone to go over the results of the audit with you, it would be a good idea to consider hiring an SEO consultant who will be able to make sense of your audit and help you reach your SEO goals. From the sounds of it, my gut tells me it has something to do with a 301 redirect error or set up errors with respect to your site. There is a small chance it's related to your Google+ profile or perhaps to duplicate content or your link profile, but these are less likely.

Hi Adam, It's very important to keep your listings and physical locations separate, as were they to merge accidentally, it could result in your contact details being mixed up, so typically, merging is something business owners want to avoid. Each Google+ Local page needs to be viewed as a separate entity, earning its own reviews.

Thanks Ray. I was also under the impression that Yext may have created this listing trying to get a foot in the door. I also share the same dislike for Yext as you do. We already have a page out ranking the false listing, but that false listing just started popping up in the first page of results. Another issue is the the way the listing is title makes it seem the office manager is a dentist. Guess I will give contacting them a shot. Thanks again.

Hi Kevin, I'm reviewing the questions assigned to me as Associate, and I was wondering if you consider this yours as answered. If it is so, I kindly ask you to set it up as answered. Thank you.

Hi Vasily, You've received some great feedback here from the community and nice of fellow Canadian Jim Rudnick for letting us know he hasn't seen 7-packs in months. I digress here, but in the US, I am still not only seeing 7-packs for dental searches but am also seeing major directories outrank them organically. Ah - the fun of Local SEO! Basically, I agree with what Brady has written. With their 3 or 7-pack display ranking up top, they are showing you what they think is best for customers and best for Google. Getting this to change is unlikely, though a major algo change on Google's part in 2015 could, of course, throw all of this out the window For now, your best bet is to be able to achieve consistently good visibility in the packs-n-stacks in your area.

Hi DVOH! I know this is a headache. Not a great answer here for you, but no, there probably isn't much you can do to stem the tide of solicitations. When you build citations manually, you will note that some of the platforms have an auto-checked box for "I want to receive updates and offers about important, etc, etc." that you can uncheck, but, in general, you are going to be stuck with companies trying to market themselves to their customers. Now, regarding Moz Local, if you sign up with us and list all of your clients under your agency's account, we will only contact you, the account holder, with all Moz Local updates. We should not contact any of your clients directly. But, this does not mean your clients may not be contacted at some point by the platforms on which their citations exist, because, as you've said, they are then on the radar of these local business data platforms. I suppose you could have your clients set blocking in their email programs, but that seems like a bit of a stretch. After all, they might miss something important if they did this. And, as for phone calls, there is really no way to reduce this apart from do not call lists. Kind of a pain, I know, but likely a necessary evil If anyone in the community has a second opinion on this, I hope they will share!

Hi Gannon! Let's take a look together at a well optimized multi-location business like REI.com. Just one site for the brand, but great little pages for each location. See this: http://www.rei.com/stores/corte-madera.html Look at the super effort that is being made to include unique content on this city landing page versus the many other cities in which this company has stores. To me, this is the best possible business model for any multi-location local business. All possible benefits accrue to the overall brand rather than being split up between a bunch of different websites, while individual city landing pages benefit from the strength of the overall brand. I am not a fan of a multi-site approach for local businesses. I am much more in favor of every effort you make strengthening the overall website and brand at a single source. A way I find helpful to think about this is: Core pages like Home, About, Products, Services - optimized for the brand. Locational pages like city landing pages, Contact and blog posts - optimized for brand+ location And, yes, you'll want to build a completely new set of citations for the 2nd location, and, if you decide to create a landing page on the site for the 1st location, as you have for the 2nd, you should edit the original citations to reflect the new landing page instead of the homepage. Will you lose rankings? It's possible that you could temporarily, but if the business is on the verge of expanding, you have to think to the future and have a strategy for properly marketing each of the locations as they are developed. Definitely look at the way REI has done this. I find them to be a great role model!

Hi Chris, Thank you for your lightening response! I also appreciate you looking at my site and giving me feedback regarding my meta description. I will get on the case! best wishes. David.

Great! No problem

MGordon, This is patently untrue. We have clients who change locations and we do not change the website/content/etc. Yes, you need to make sure the NAP is clean for the new location, and make sure the website has the new info and not the old, but there is no other website change needed. Best