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Hi Epic, I'm so sorry this question slipped under my radar. I really apologize for that! At any rate, I suggest you check out the past work of Local SEO Nyagoslav Zhekov. Look through his blog: www.ngsmarketing.com/blog/. He is probably one of the world's most experienced internationally-focused Local SEOs, having worked with local businesses in a many, many countries. He's written quite a bit about the different platforms in different countries. Additionally, have you checked out the new Moz Local learning center? This page contains links to Local Search Ecosystem graphics for the US, UK, Germany, Brazil and Canada: http://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-providers Might be good to take a look! Again, I'm chagrined that I didn't see your question in June. I hope this reply, though belated, is of some help!

Excellent discussion going on here, ladies and gents! I am so impressed by the deep questions and answers present here. Our community makes me proud! Ruben, I'd like to bring up a couple of things to add to this good topic. You might like to read my Moz Post http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide which covers the concept of building out pages for various locations in some depth. Citations are a big part of the picture - absolutely! They serve 2 main functions which are a) to help customers find you on a wide variety of platforms and b) to build a consistent, trustworthy body of information about your business on the web, which is then crawled by search engines, causing them to have confidence in the cluster of data they have about your business which can then increase your chances of being considered a relevant answer for certain queries. So, it's a 1-2 punch kind of thing, building citations. There are direct benefits in a customer finding your listing on a site like Superpages and indirect benefits in the consistency and prevalence of your citations helping search engines to feel confident about the validity and prominence of your business. This being said, it's my belief and understanding that it takes time for validity/prominence to actually start affecting rank. Every local business platform has its own schedule for taking a citation from zero to live, and then I have to think about search engine bots picking this up and stirring it around in the bucket in which they've got all my other business data. Then, I have to take into account whether my citation building has, in fact, surpassed what my direct local competitors have done or has simply brought me on par with them, meaning citation building will not be the difference-maker I'd love it to be, because my toughest competitors have done the same thing I have (meaning, I'm going to have to find some other way to distance myself from the field). In sum, citation building is a must-do for any local business that doesn't want to fall behind in their niche, but it takes time to see the positive effects from it and the level of positivity is going to directly relate to the stiffness of the competition. You are in a tough market - law in major cities, which I would consider one of the most difficult ranking environments. Yes, you've got to get those citations in good shape, but my honest appraisal of this is that you are going to have to go way beyond these basics to surpass what is doubtless a highly active/ heavily marketed competitor base. The usual advice of build excellent content, implement on-page Local SEO, build citations, earn reviews is going to be common to all your competitors', so finding something that they're not all already doing may be necessary to see yourself rise in the SERPs by dint of some extra creative, superior effort. Hope these thoughts are helpful! Glad you brought up this topic, and I hope once Moz Local has had a few more months to bake in the oven, we'll be able to publish some case studies that prove a correlation between participation and positive results!

You will have to claim each listing once you set up the new accounts.

Hi DJReason, If you can manage to not have a pool of numbers for SEO traffic, my solution above will work. By using a script that only fires when certain parameters hit, it allows you to only use one number for non-parametered URLs, so search engine bots will only see the one number. Then you use that number during citation building, and you're golden... at least from that perspective.

You may also want to check out Inbound's job site at http://inbound.org/jobs and our LinkedIn group jobs section at https://www.linkedin.com/groups?jobs=&gid=2976409 for places to post.

thanks a lot i have more to learn

You can still utilize this form of rich snippets using XHTML _"In general, RDFa uses simple attributes in XHTML tags (often  or _ ) to assign brief and descriptive names to entities and properties." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146898?hl=en&ref_topic=6003477 Simply update your site it is not a hard thing to do I would recommend using an HTML 5 boilerplate things are only going to get better for HTML 5 sites and Harder for HTML 4. if it will not validate using HTML 4 and you are not comfortable trying to get it to work even using googles highlighting tool which allows you to highlight rich snippets or schema then place it into your website. https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/3068649?hl=en&ref_topic=4600447 http://help.simplytestable.com/errors/html-validation/there-is-no-attribute-x/there-is-no-attribute-itemtype/ use an HTML 5 Bpoiler plate if you keep having problems. http://html5boilerplate.com/ All the best, Thomas

Okay Thanks!

If I had a site like that I would eliminate the individual ad pages and have much longer-tail ad categories.  Then the category pages would each have multiple ads, most recent at the top, and expiring ads at the bottom. That puts much more substantive content on every page of the site, more potential keyword matches per page, more ranking power per page.

If you find that the other mentions of the phone numbers are on directory sites like DMOZ (which can take along time to get edits) you can add this code to the head section of the homepage:

I would not use a .eu domain if I were you (or probably anyone else). It's too big and generic of a target when Europe is full of so many countries and languages. I'd recommend it only for a site such as Eurovision. Now, there are three ways to do it. **1. Separate root domains.**This would be creating and using example.be and example.nl. 2. Separate subdirectories/subfolders. Take your main website at example.com and configure its targeting (in the meta data and Google Webmaster Tools) to either Belgium or the Netherlands. Then, create a subdirectory/subfolder for the other country (example.com/nl/ or example.com/be/) and configure its targeting as well. 3. Separate subdomains. This would be creating nl.example.com and be.example.com SEOs and digital marketers will argue forever over which one is best. I'll point out some general differences and points since I don't know your specific situation. Separate root domains and subdomains are essentially entirely-separate sites in Google's eyes. This is good to use when you have a lot of specialized content for each domain's target audience/country/topic. It's also usually easier to use different design templates on different domains and subdomains. The bad side is that links pointing to one domain or subdomain will probably not "benefit" the other one. Keeping everything on one domain in a second subdirectory/subfolder can be a lot more simple to manage. Plus, all links to everywhere on the domain generally "help" everything on the domain. However, you will often be limited to using the same overall design template. Since you cannot create country-specific content, I'd create one website and use a secondary subdirector/subfolder (number two in the main list at the top). Google says the duplicate content is not a problem as long as it is clear that the two versions are each targeting a different location. As to why your current .nl website is not performing, it's impossible to say without taking a look at it. First, review this page of introductory guidelines and the related links. Some more detail from Google. A Webmaster Support question. For more information on international strategy, I'd suggest this post by Moz Associate Aleyda Solís. Good luck!

now that you mention it, it appears that only the primary number is shown on both Google Maps (newest version) and on the Google + Local business profile page. guess we can only effectively use one now!

I would just leave it blank, some say remove them or some say add keywords as like Arif said it can be used by smaller search engines. I personally would leave it blank and focus on adding your keyword and also variations of your keyword in the page and in the Title and Description tags. When it comes to on-page work I always think of Marys Chocolate Donuts.... Thanks Rand ha

Prashant, You could be told many different things depending on who you ask, but I'd say from my experience working at a company that makes websites, the answer is that there is no definitive answer. That being said, there ARE helpful tips I can give you: "How many links?" is a less important question than "What kind of links?" Consider the position of each page in regard to where it is in your sales funnel (if at all). The closer to the bottom of the funnel (bottom = conversion), the more straightforward your navigation and direction should be. For instance, you wouldn't put a link to your "About Us" page on a landing page or contact form, because it directs traffic away from conversion and the flow of your site. The modern design tends toward simplicity - which means that while it's not necessarily a problem to have so many links, it will be confusing to your customers and lead people away from the content they were initially searching for. People are inattentive and fickle, so you want to guide them. Links need to fit logically with the content. If a page is about a service X, don't link to service Y unless it relates to service X, and you write your content in a way that makes sense. I hope that's helpful for you!

A friend of mine, working for a child daycare center, experienced the same issue lately. Seems like some flaw in the Google system. Hope this has been resolved along with the major Google Local Business Center update.

Cool. I'm flattered.

Great responses so far! I would like to add that Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz, and not a metric created or used by Google. There is likely a correlation that a higher DA will help you do better in search engines, but it's not a metric we're getting from Google or sending to them.

I know it's not any bankruptcy related directories or poor citation building, because we've just started building out for this location a few months ago. And, we've never stressed bankruptcy, but thank you for the suggestions. Those are definitely sold point to consider. It's starting to look like I may just have to delete the other categories, but I worry because, if I do that, I won't have a "complete" profile and that could cost me in google's eyes as well.