Best practices for a local business move

[easystreetint]

My client is a chiropractic office that will be moving to the next town over in about 3 months.  What are people's best practices on how to best accomplish this SEO-wise so as to not lose too much in terms of rankings, current organic traffic and citation listings?

[AmberRobinson]

Your best approach would be to edit the address in Google Places for Business rather than marking it closed and creating a new listing for the new address.

Linda Buquet addresses this topic in detail here-

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/moving-name-changes/3138-business-moves-procedure-changes-again-just-edit.html

Hope this helps!!

[wreevesc]

There was a Mozinar recently called A Foolproof Process for Scrubbing Your Local Footprint Squeaky Clean that can help you keep your listings up to date.  There is a list of free and paid tools in there that can help you out.

[Chris.Menke]

If you're just 3 months away from the move, it's time to revise (vs. create anew ) the landing page(s) that will reflect your new location and get those online asap, so your organic results can start percolating.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Brian,

There is so much confusion surrounding this very common topic because Google has repeatedly changed their stance. The thread Amber has pointed to on Linda's forum quotes the most current Google policy on this. Linda's thread doesn't link to the source of this, so I will here: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/S6APN5ijnOQ

And here is the complete language of what Google staffer, Jade, wrote:

Verified business owner of a page, and is your business moving locations? Here's what you do.__Edit your address in Google Places for Business or in the Google+ page admin area, whichever you are using to manage the page. This will either make a new page or edit the address on the existing page. It may take a week or two after editing your address before you see an update. At this point, you may need to go through a verification process again. Don't worry -- this is normal.__If you see a page that's still got the old address, click on Report a problem and mark that location as closed. Provide the link to the new address or information about the new location if possible. You can find more instructions on closing a location here: http://goo.gl/YZIjq*Now, remember, following the above steps must be followed up by a citation cleanup campaign. You need to find all web-based references to your old address and edit them so that they reflect the new address. This is very important.