Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Miriam, Love the answer, some great info hidden in those links , Cheers. Also I love the "Happy thanksgiving" message. Being in the UK it obviously means very little to us apart from for some strange reason we have decided to adopt your "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" . All we do over here is have a few fireworks on the 5th November to remember some chap who tried to blow up the houses of parliament ages ago, no Turkey till Christmas for us Brits I hope that you had a great Thanksgiving anyway

Hi Arthur, This past summer, Factual made a major policy change and they no longer accept individual updates. Here's an announcement about this from July https://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/07/29/factual-no-longer-accepting-individual-updates/ So, unfortunately, this platform no longer works the way it used to, and if you want Factual to have your data, you will need to go through a trusted provider. *Hint - Moz Local is a trusted provider:) And here is a complete list of all trusted providers: http://developer.factual.com/trusted-data-contributors/ Hope this helps!

Hi Sam, You're getting some great feedback from the community - I have a couple of thoughts to add. While the concept of a city centroid has long existed, this has gradually given way to the concepts of: An industry centroid The user as the centroid You can read more about the industry centroid concept here: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local-important/8906-google-local-centroid-not-city-center-affects.html And I highly recommend watching the Bright Local webinar in which some expert Local SEOs weigh in on key local search ranking factors and touch on this emerging concept of the user as the new centroid: http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/11/13/insidelocal-webinar-local-ranking-factors-discussed/ I hope these are helpful tips!

Good luck! A quick heads up they might need to re-verify your listing (more postcard waiting fun)  just so you are prepared.

Hi Fiona, Unfortunately, it does not really matter if you set up multiple service areas, you'll still only have a chance of ranking in the city or near the area the business is actually located. (Depending on competition.) And also, since you'll just be moving there, you may not rank well at 1st compared to established businesses that have been there for a long time. The algo is like a giant puzzle and there are lots of things at play that go into the ranking order. Moving can be challenging for your Google ranking, so I'd suggest reading the Moz Local Search Ranking Factors if you have not yet and be ready to start working to increase some of those ranking signals after you move. Using the Moz Local tool to try to either correct or build new citations to the new location would be important too.

Wow, Garret - that is interesting! Sounds like some type of personalization you ran into, but it's the first time I've heard of something working this way. Really strange. Have you tried to do it again? I'd be curious to see if it happens again. I hope someone in the community will have further feedback on a similar experience, but it's the first time I've seen something like this reported. Curious!

Hey There! This post from Local U might help: http://localu.org/blog/8-tips-optimize-local-knowledge-panel-google-search/

Good for you for tuning up your pages! You might also like to check out this article on the topic of city landing pages: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide Hope it helps!

Great to hear you've recovered. Did you ever have a subsequent conversation to learn why this happened? Do you think it might have been an error?

Thanks to both of you. This all makes sense. We do have an option to opt out of certain sites and feeds like factual and that is what we have done. If we find duplicates i shall let you know.

Could not get the site to load, so I could not take a look at what you have going on. I'm guessing you are messing around with some redirects. But I can help with the MOZ and Yoast graders. The tools you are describing are only tools. If you look at the report that MOZ gives you, its only there to point out any areas where there may be missed opportunities, or if there are any standout errors. If the report is showing the page to have an F grade, it most likely is not set to target the correct keyword, or is trying to check multiple pages for the same keyword phrase. People often have issues with the MOZ grader, but don't understand how to set it up. I hope that one of the Admins on here can direct you to a tutorial, as I did a few Google searches and didnt find any worthy results. Yoast is a great tool and plugin. One thing you have to watch out for is again: its only a tool and will recommend best practices based upon the settings you enter. If you have followed its recommendations to a perfect degree, that may get you a green bar and a nice score, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the page is well optimized for that keyword. For most SEO-graders, as long as you stay with a set character limit, and make sure the URL is search engine friendly and all fields are filled out, you will get a high grade. This can have nothing to do with the content that populates those areas, only that you met the predefined requirements to get you a high grade. Once you fix all these redirect errors, I would resubmit the entire site and sitemap to Google, as they probably have a mixed idea of what the real destimation URL's are after all the issues.

An adwords ad c/w code appeared whilst viewing YouTube late on Saturday - used it and was ok. Funny thing was, I couldnt find a usable code by searching and yet a couple of days later, it appeared (I assumed through remarketing) through YT ad.

Hey All! Whitespark just posted something quite awesome along these lines: http://www.whitespark.ca/top-local-citation-sources-by-country It's a don't-miss list:)

It's my pleasure, Billy, and kudos to you for working so hard to grow your business!

Hi Andrew - Great follow up questions from you! There is zero risk in creating local landing pages on your website for your new branches. It's a very good idea, but should be undertaken with the understanding that the end goal of this practice is organic rankings, not local pack rankings. Without a Google+ Local page for each location, you will not rank locally. But, you could potentially earn some organic visibility. You might like to check out: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide End of the day - whether you also create Google+ Local pages is, as you say, up to your judgment, based on your take on how closely the new locations align with Google's guidelines. Wishing you good luck!

Hi Garret, I have some questions and then some thoughts for you: Where was the listing ranking before you claimed it (what letter)? Where did it rank after you claimed it (what letter)? When you say it is showing up in Google Maps, what position does it have in the list view? Is there any chance that claiming the listing might have drawn Google's attention to the accidental existence of you having more than 1 listing in existence for this business? Have you searched for duplicates? How good is the client's organic authority? Did you notice a general ranking shift at this time for any of the client's competitors? Could Google have coincidentally been reordering results at the time you claimed the listing or has everybody else in the pack stayed in about the same position? Some ideas: read through this article to check off potential issues with ranking failures: http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures The other thing I'm thinking of hearkens back to my early days in Local SEO. It seems to me that I remember instances in which a newly claimed listing would appear high in the packs for a brief period of time, then fall off to a much lower position and then would have to climb back up the rankings based on effort/strength. I haven't heard this phenomenon being mentioned in many years, but I wonder if it might still exist here and there. I'd highly advise looking into the duplicate listing possibility and do go through the article I've linked to:)

It depends on which language customers are searching for. I have faced very similar situation. It is further complicated by the TLD which is  not from same country users coming from. The website in one language and product description in another. We gradually added product description in both the language on same page (one below other). Even the  website is in language A, the product descriptions are in language B (with 10% of pages have A and B both). But found that majority of the customers are searching in language B (which is english) and still it ranks well and customers get what they want.  When we see search volume for a product in language A is increasing, we add translation in language A for that product on the top of existing description in language B.

That's the issue. For every other location we track, we are on page 1 or 2 for every keyword. But in St Louis, we are on page 4-8. The issue I think has to do with the landing page. When we rank that low, the landing page is our generic sales page, rather than the specific St Louis sales page. We've been working on local citations, but it hasn't moved the needle TOO much yet. And bring it on! (preferably in a city other than St Louis though)

repair.geappliances.com, and they are still ranking high for most of the cities. This is def against the terms and conditioins imo. I am using Chrome