Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Miriam, Thanks for your great reply. It is a fairy tricky situation. In this case, we're dealing with a B2B manufacturing company and currently the lions share of their business comes from the US. Rankings on important keywords are roughly the same in the Canada and the US. We're currently trying to weigh the benefits of whether establishing the location of the firm and building that credibility would out out-weigh the potential risk of Google then penalizing ranking in the US. Thanks again for your help!

Thanks for that info Miriam But the above 'service area' business set up advice from Jeff is still correct isn't it ? especially in regard to my clients scenario So we will just have 1 x G+ listing for them but add areas served within that 1 listing The physical address of this business is not a place of business, the place of business is the various areas served which are simply different areas of London Re Schema yes i do appreciate that local address schema must be the official company address but since this is different from the areas of business/target regions i was just wandering if anyone knew of any other type of schema we can add to include regions served/areas of business ? Many Thanks Dan

I think Google updated the 14 days processing. You add a manager -> One day waiting -> Make owner. Thanks so much for your help!!!

From that screenshot, looks like you have a G+ page associated with your website that lists all of that info. Your best bet would be to disassociate your URL from this page https://plus.google.com/102542416695217785100/

Very helpful thanks Miriam. Your answer confirms my gut feeling on this, I just wanted to make sure I was on the right lines. Never heard of the same business offering separate services from two physical locations before. I think on the site we'll have two separate location pages, as you suggest. This way we can link the listings to separate URLs and keep the services separate.

If I understand your post correctly you are trying to figure out the best way to optimize your alt tags for different versions of the same image. Alt tags should really focus on the keywords you are targeting on a page. I can give you an example from my site: Product - Generac 6244 20kW Guardian Series Home Standby Generator with Aluminum Enclosure and 200a Transfer Switch (That is a mouthful) Keyword - Generac 6244 URL - apelectric.com/generac-6244-20kw-guardian Title Tag - Generac 6244 | 20kW Guardian Generator | Generac Generators Image Alt Tag - Generac 6244 20kW Guardian Series Generator Meta Description - The Generac 6244 has been our customers go to 20kW home standby generator. This unit is in stock and ready to ship same or next day for FREE. Call us today for more information, 123-456-7891 The image alt tag should reinforce your targeted keyword and include a shorter description than your description. Focusing on putting the most important part of the product first, then a secondary description and perhaps then a size. You don't want to have several of the same alt tags on one product, but sometimes this is unavoidable. I would say break the more specific description up between the numerous pictures. In my example I would do something like this: 1 - Generac 6244 20kW Generator 2 - Generac 6244 Guardian Series 3- Generac 6244 Home Standby Generator. The alt tags are a good place to reinforce your keyterms and let the engines know the whole page is really centered around that specific product. It is also how Google Images display certain pictures, they use the alt tags.

Many thanks Both That's what I was thinking. Will do. thanks again, Pete

There are plenty of photos on the Google+ Business page.  I appreciate the quick response and you confirmed my own thoughts.  The odd thing is that sometimes a photo shows up, and sometimes it doesn't, depending on slight variations in the branded search term.  I think it is as good as we are going to be able to get ti at this point.  Thanks again!

Thomas, Access the G+ profile under which the existing business page is set up and set up additional business page(s) from there.  The Google maps listing is tied to the business page so once you have the business page set up and verified the google maps listing will ride on its coat tails .  If you have more than ten locations however, log into you primary G+ profile and start here.

Hi Thank you for your response. The site is a new site launched last month. It is Chinese however I could not find any contact details. I did send an e-mail via the website but up to now there is no response. Some of the search terms which they have used with our name are appearing on page one of Google which this morning was quite bad for any Google searcher as they were then re-directed to a different product to what they were interested in. Through Google I put in a request to have the urls removed stating the above and that they were using our comany name which is in the process of being trademarked. This afternoon I have now seen that all of the urls are now 404s. Has Google actually read my request or are the urls removed as standard until they look into it. I have had no response from Google on this? Thank you in advance.

The task I was given was to find the average search engine ranking for the "Brand Name".  My company has multiple stores in all the states in the US.  Lets say over 150+ stores,  How would I check the search engine rank position for "brand name " or "Keywords" by either zip code/city/state

Hi Ryan, That's a difficult situation! Usually, what I've found in this situation is that you have to spend an hour or two backtracking to discover where the name of one business is being conflated with the address/phone/website of the other. This might exist on the company's website or website, or it might exist in citations, or elsewhere. In many cases, this type of conflation is what has caused the confusion on Google's part. It's really important when you have a franchise that you've done everything you possibly can to differentiate the various branches, including different addresses, phone numbers, landing page URLs or websites, content, citations, etc. Even then, Google can sometimes become confused about this scenario and begin merging down details. So, if you can backtrack to a source for this confusion and correct it, that may resolve the issue. You can also try to contact Google directly about this (go here and click the contact us button https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639) but you may very well get the answer, "That result is generate algorithmically and we can't do anything about it." Might be worth a try anyway.

You should definitely link to the specific landing page for each location if you have separate Google+ pages for them.

Thank you Miriam!

No real resolution. Spoke with someone from India and they told me to follow the search business angle and I informed them the business was not showing to be clicked on, in order to "Request Admin Rights". Then waited for 10 min on the phone for them to come back and tell me that there is nothing else they can do. I was on the phone for 35 min to get nowhere and will call back again to hopefully speak with another person who can escalate to a more technical person. It is the strangest thing... oh, and frustrating!

Yes, but I'd also make sure to do it in small bits at a time. Meaning, don't change everything at once. Make a small change, wait a bit to see the results, and if they're good, then make another small change. If the results of the first change aren't what you want, then rethink your keyword strategy and try something a little different! Good luck! Give an update in a while if you can. I'd be interested to hear what happens.

Hi PT:) You might also like to check out this blog post on local landing pages: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide Hope this will be helpful!

Max, Let me try to clear up this "deep linking" question for you. First, I do not use the term deep linking and am not sure the entire goal of it. If you are going out trying to set up links in some way and direct them to specific pages, IMO you are going to a lot more trouble than it is likely worth today. Your content should be able to get you links. If your "deep" pages have good content they will get links, Period. Here is an example and it is one that for us was really irrelevant content.  One of our people did a post and included something on 3-D printing. We do not own a 3-D printer, I would not know how to use one, etc. Yet, we got people linking to that. Another was about 18 months ago or so, we did it a post on responsive design. The post was done just to talk about responsive design. We did not send it out to people to get links, we did not submit it to article directories, etc. Yet, it is one of our most linked-to pages on our site. The reason seems to be due to the image and people wanting to use it. BUT, we did not set out to get links. I would worry a lot more about ensuring you are creating content regularly and that it is not just content for content's sake. Make it readable, interesting, engaging. If you are "deeplinking" whatever that practice is, you are trying to create links to specific pages and I just think that is a waste of time 99% of the time. Best

Pardon my delayed response here, but wanted to thank you all for your input. I was pretty confused about the issue at the time, and your advice/info proved to be very helpful.

Thanks William and everyone else too!