Google Places: Multiple company listings. How to rank the HQ page over a branch location.

[Jon_bangonline]

Hi Moz experts! I have a client with Google Place listings for multiple branch locations and for some reason the fully SEO optimized Head Office listing is being beaten by an un-optimized branch listing.

The HQ listing gets a tonne of traffic where as the ranking and unoptimized branch location doesn't and is the main listing when searching through Google.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

[Ron_McCabe]

Jon,

Where are their relative locations?  Where are you when you do the search relative to each location? How many inbound links on the HQ VS branch ? Have you looked at the localized content ?

Ron

[MoosaHemani]

Not really sure about this but try to get more citations from different quality locations under the HQ address and keywords and add links that points to your HQ address listing, thin might help!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jon,

Unfortunately, what you are experiencing is one of the potential issues with having multiple listings, whether this is for multiple practitioners within a single location or multiple locations within a region. It is up to Google to decide which of your listings they consider to be most authoritative.

I will repeat a question asked by Ron. How far apart are your different locations? Are you searching from a single location or are you going to the devices at different offices and searching for the respective locations from them? Google will typically localize the results either to your device, or to keyword indicators you provide in the search term, such as a city name. Would you like to provide more specifics as to what you are searching for and from where you are searching for it?

I will be happy to stop back by this thread if you can provide some further details.

[Ron_McCabe]

Jon,

I am willing to help as well but I need the data.   One other thing that I thought about based on Miriam's comments is you may want to use open site explorer to look at the relative in bound links, specifically local directories on the HQ vs the branch.  One thing that might have happened is whomever set up your directory listings gave a URL for HQ rather than the URL for the branch.

Ron

[Jon_bangonline]

HI Everyone,

Thanks you for your responses everyone, sorry for my late reply.

Please see the search with the keyword 'westrac' via google.com.au. The results are in this screenshot http://screencast.com/t/rgUpDppIx15B. This is the smaller branch showing.

You can see the  locations here: http://bit.ly/18J6eYa

HQ location is location B (hidden under C and D) and location A is the smaller branch.

We have tested the keyword 'westrac' from location B and also from another location near map marker F, approx 25 mins drive away.

We have suspended the google place listing for location A, the smaller branch some time ago and added a new listing for the same location without a website url to try and overcome the problem but I think the original listing for the branch is still showing as the url is present.

Hope this helps and thank you again for everyone's help!

Freddy

[MiriamEllis]

Thank you for the links, Freddy.

Looking now at your bit.ly URL, I see you have a large number of locations, making this problem more complex. I was under the impression that you only had two. I am a bit confused by what I am seeing in the examples vs. your notes.

Is this your HQ? In Bathurst?

https://plus.google.com/113521293483420343122/about?gl=au&hl=en

When I access the bit.ly URL for Google Maps, I am seeing a South Guilford in the A position and Bathurst in the B position, but your screencast is highlighting a Kewdale location as the one appearing for your branded search in the organic results. So, not sure what is up with this discrepancy. I am in the USA, so I may be seeing results in a different order in Maps, even with your link.

One thing that immediately jumps out at me is a violation of the Google Places Quality Guidelines. Many of your listings have 'City Branch' in the business title and this is not allowed. For example: Westrac - Bathurst Branch. This is not allowed, per these guidelines:

Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business in the business name field.

This needs to be cleaned up.

Because I am confused about which of your branches is HQ, I'm not sure which Google+ Local page to look at. Can you please provide a link to the HQ listing? The Bathurst one I looked at in G Maps Position B looks completely unoptimized.

Something else I've noted is that it appears you are linking all of your +Local pages to the homepage of your website. Have considered building a landing page for each branch and linking to that instead of the homepage?

Do any of these locations share a phone number? Have you gone through all of this listings to see if the phone number of one of them is ending up live on another one of the listings?

Here is a similar thread on the Google And Your Business Forum:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/branch/business/WPptzqIgcj8/OKWaMlCtxQsJ

Thought you might like to take a glance at that.

This is as far as I've been able to dig. I'll stop back by if you can provide further clarification, Freddy.

[Ron_McCabe]

Jon, I took a look at this(the screencast was helpful). I would go to this blog and read about the local directory ecosystem: https://getlisted.org/static/resources/local-search-data-providers.html One of my suspicions is that the other office has more local citations than your head office. The other things is that your site and many of the references on the site do not really differentiate between the locations. For example on Careers each address directs to the same page. You may want to consider modifying you map so that there is a mini site under the main site for each location. This would help signal multiple locations and a hierarchy to the different search engines. Ron