Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you Ryder & Dennis!

Hi George, You are 100% right that the client cannot cause this feature not to appear, nor can they influence what appears in it. As to why the 'people also searched for' is appearing on your client's results, and not on their competitor's, that a good question for which I know no answer. For some reason, Google feels it's important to show the 'people' feature on one result and not the other. Could be that it will appear tomorrow or in six months on the competitor's search, too. The feature is still pretty new and may not have been rolled out for everything it eventually will be. I know business owners hate this. Google has had a history of showing the competition for local results in a variety of ways over the years. One just has to live with this and work hard on all of the things that can be controlled.

Thanks masdigitalmedia.

Hello, Thanks so much for all your help. I created  a crawl report from Moz and discover that crawler is reading 2 urls. I am not sure if that is normal. Thanks <colgroup><col width="477"></colgroup> | Title Tag | | Brooklyn Signs | Signs, vinyl banners and awnings company in New York | | Brooklyn Signs | Signs, vinyl banners and awnings company in New York | <colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup> | URL | | http://www.brooklynsigns.com | | http://www.brooklynsigns.com/ |

Brant - You are welcome. Check this out: http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tool-185532 Seems like that may be totally relevant for you right at this moment!

You've got it. This is businesses attempting to be listed first in alphabetically-organized directories, like the Yellow Pages. Doesn't work for Local, unfortunately:)

Up to 10,000 bulk easy upload is available as well! https://www.bingplaces.com/Home/MoreFAQ Hope this helps

You're very welcome, Patrick. Sounds like you've got a busy day ahead! Good luck with everything you're doing.

Hi Bob, If there's NAP consistency issues that you've discovered, they are almost certainly harming the business' ability to rank well locally. If the client has a very small budget, perhaps the best thing to do would be to offer her an hour or two of consulting to teach her how to find citations and correct them on her own. If a business owner doesn't have budget, they have to be able to invest time if they want to have some ability to compete, right? So, offering to train her to discover and correct her citations wouldn't require much of your consulting time and would really empower her to take control of her presence on the web. That would be my thinking on this.

Unfortunately, it is still the same issue. I just made this up: Mess with the NAP, deal with the crap. There is no way I would do this based on one thing alone: Experience in trying to assist those who have. Sorry, I wish it was easier, Robert

Hello Miriam, Thank you for your feedback.  I was not aware of item number one and I'll look into it.  In the meantime I'm trying to get an understanding of the factors which can replicate the effect of "custom categories" for new clients who I don't have the old Google Places interface for and could really use the effect of custom categories. As to your point on number three; I have done some testing and from what I can tell there is little or no value from the description field (probably because it would be too easy to spam). I do see some competitors ranking with the new Google Plus Business accounts even against others that have categories so I think there has to be a way to do it... I just don't know how. Thanks

You're so welcome, Blair. Yep, no shortcuts. This isn't work most people adore doing, but it's so important.

Hi MatterSolutions, What you want to avoid doing here is claiming the second listing, because it's a violation to have two claimed listings. Instead, I would recommend going through the troubleshooter as this opens a line of communication with Google about the problem. Here's the link (click the contact button on this page): https://support.google.com/places/#topic=1656871 I realized the guidelines Chris has correctly quoted state otherwise, but my own choice would be to use the troubleshooter instead.

I agree. I will create a map or drop down thanks

Totally agree with Moosa's suggestion, even for just one reason: It looks spammy and is associated with spammers, this is one of those things that can make or break website conversion.

Hi CyberAlien, So nice to know a colleague recommended you try Moz, and please don't call yourself ignorant - we are all here to learn and help one another! Let me share some important info with you regarding Local Search. If the category your business is in is, in fact, 'web design', then you are in somewhat special circumstances. About four or so years ago, Google stopped showing web design/SEO firms in their local pack of results for core searches like 'web design', 'website design', etc. The local pack of results consists of the lettered results (typically A-G) with the little pin icons that are shown within the other, traditional organic results. Why did Google stop showing web design/SEO companies in the local packs? To my knowledge, they've never made an official announcement about this, but it's presumed that they did so because Google feels that most of these companies conduct most of their business virtually instead of face-to-face. Conducting in-person, face-to-face business with customers is really the defining characteristic of a local business, in Google's opinion, and so, even though some web design firms do meet with their clients in person, they are out of luck as far as the local packs go. It is sometimes possible to generate local pack results by adding 'in' to a query, as in 'web design in little rock', but the value of appearing for 'in' queries is generally far less than appearing for main queries like 'web design', 'web design little rock', 'web design company', etc. So, what this all boils down to is that because Google doesn't really consider your company as local, it's likely that you are going to have to make efforts to appear in the organic results rather than the local ones. It sounds like you've already taken a big step toward this by creating three pages for each of your three offices. Good start! Some questions: Is the content on each of these pages 100% unique? Are the offices real, physical offices occupied solely by your firm? If so, yes, you could utilize schema. This article offers tools for doing so: http://moz.com/blog/free-local-seo-tools Have you optimized these page for both the service terms AND the geographic terms? Have you made the content on these pages really exciting and helpful? Are the pages short or long? Have you promoted these pages socially in any way? Do you have customer testimonials on these pages? If so, are you using some form of schema review markup? Are there good links pointing to these pages, both from inside the site and from outside the site? These are few questions to start with. I'm sure the community will have more questions and advice.

Good for you for finding at least two, Sonia!

Wonderful - thank you.

In Google Places for Business, Google provides an option for defining the relevant radius for a business, though the radius only goes up to 999 miles. There is also a checkbox that you can uncheck that specifies whether or not the business provides services at their actual physical location to the surrounding community. Maybe adjusting one of these settings will help.

Hi Alex, Good questions. I'm going to run through these pretty quickly since there are quite a few. I would first recommend that you study the Google Places Quality Guidelines, which answer many of your questions: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en 1) Google Places 1.  Do not create a Google+ Local listing for any location except a real, physical location that is open to the public during stated business hours (like a restaurant) or from which staff goes to serve clients (like a plumber) and at which the phone is answered during stated business hours. 2. While Google is fine with home-based businesses, they must be staffed businesses where a phone is answered during normal business hours and you must be sure to comply with their rules about hiding your address. There is grey area here. Be careful. Using residential addresses can become spammy and Google is wise to it. Again, see the guidelines. 3. Each location must have a unique local area code phone number. Do not duplicate phone numbers or use 800 or call tracking numbers. 4. If you have a legitimate multi-location business, best practice is to build a landing page on the site for each office and link to the respective URL for this page from each Google+ Local listing. 2) NAP 1. Your NAP should be identical everywhere on the web. Never add keywords, city names or other modifiers to the business name. Questions 2, 3 & 4 - see above advice in previous section. 3) Company name and domain name. If you are a brand new company and are just now naming your business, it can help to have keywords be a legitimate part of your business name. In other words, it can be better to be Anaheim Plumbing Company vs. Bob's Fix-it Service. If your company already has a brand, re-branding is an enormous task. Not sure if this is what you are asking about. Regarding domain names, having keywords in the domain can provide a small competitive edge, but my preference is for the domain name to authentically represent the business name. If a company is called Smith TV Installation, I'd be totally fine with having smithtvinstallation.com as the domain name. Of course, you can go with the shorter name if the name is just way too long. What you definitely want to avoid is publishing a weak site with an 'exact match domain', as this has been the subject of recent Google penalties. In other words, don't buy 50 domains with geo-specific-keyword-oriented words in them and then publish weak and duplicate content on them. There are many good choices you can make when it comes to naming your business or buying your domain. My preferred approach is to be as authentic as you can with your brand, whenever and wherever you can. Unfortunately, due to non-disclosure policies, I can't share my own clients sites with you. It sounds to me like you may not actually be promoting a true mutli-location site if you've only got a single office. I recommend that your first step be to study the guidelines and identify what your business model type really is. That's a vital first step! Hope this helps.