Annex city & citations

[autoczar]

The large city (A) Annexed small city B (in 2007) where we have a few car dealership locations.

The problem is that the post office still recognizes city B, so for the most part our citations are still for city B, but we want to have local optimization for City A AND also have consistent address information across the website (citations).

What are your suggestions on going about this the right way so we are optimized for the large city & our citations are consistent?

[ak1lz]

Make sure all your business directory listings are consistent with the new location. This means Yelp, City Search, BING, Yahoo ect..

A good service to look into is yext.com, a bit pricey but it will make managing somewhere around 35 websites like the ones above, a breeze. You have control over the details all in one place, making it way easier than keeping track yourself.

There are other services like localeeze, we have used them but is not as effective & takes a while for the listings to be updated. Both these services should help with SEO rankings in the local listing area. Hopefully Google will pick it up and display the correct address. I have heard of similar problems with businesses changing locations and Google displaying the old address. I would definitively ask the post office to make the correct changes as well with any phone companies you use under your business.

Hope this Answered your question!  If not, I will gladly try to answer anymore questions you have on this matter.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Autoczar,

How is Google doing handling the annex that happened? Are the properly listing competitors who used to be in city B as being in city A as of 2007? This would be my main concern, as Google is sometimes very, very slow about understanding and implementing changes of this kind.

I've run into so many scenarios in Local where the business owner is confused about the best way to proceed, given the various rules about address and citation handling, but I want to let you know that this is the first time I've run into your specific situation. I think it would be worth your while to post your question to the Google And Your Business help forum, which is staffed by Google employees as well as a lot of smart Top Contributors. I think your situation is unusual enough to inspire some kind of response, and I'd be really interested to hear what that response would be. Here's the link, in case you don't have it:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business

I would title the question something like:

My City Annexed By Larger City - How To Proceed

You will need to be willing to give full details as to what your Google+ Local listing is and what your cities are in order to receive the best response. I hope you can give this a shot and receive some useful advice straight from the horse's mouth on this. If you do, I'd love it if you would update this thread with what you heard.

Good luck!

Miriam