Bing Local Lists Yelp Reviews From Another Business At Shared Address

[rbmac]

Hi everyone, I am having a problem with Bing local listings and am hoping someone might be able to help me out.

Basically I am working with a business that shares an address with another (separate legal entities, different owners, different phone, different domain). Both are bathroom remodelers, but one uses the space as a storefront/showroom, the other is strictly a service area business and uses the space for storage/office space (this is the one I am working with). I have claimed their listing on bing local and set it to hide the address.

The problem I am having is that for whatever reason, Bing local is associating the yelp page of business 1 (showroom) with business 2 (business 2 is not currently on yelp).

My question: what options do I have to remedy this? Is there a way to request a manual review of sorts to have this fixed? Would it be sufficient to create/verify a yelp page for business 2 and hope that Bing picks up on this?

[rbmac]

OK, so maybe I asked this question a little prematurely...

After inspection of the local setup of the business with the showroom I am finding out they have quite a shit show going on. There are a number of issues, but most importantly (presumably) Bing local has them listed at an old (incorrect) address with an old (incorrect) phone number. So, presumably that is the reason Bing can't associate their local results with their Yelp page (which has all of their current details) and is falling back to business 2 because it shares the same address.

If this is the case, I should be able to encourage the showroom to claim and update their bing listing and hopefully this will fix everything.

Is that a reasonable assumption or are there other measures I should take as well?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi There, RBMac!

Yes, I am with you on ensuring that both businesses have a Yelp profile, and this could potentially resolve the issue you are experiencing, but in reading through your scenario, I think there is a larger issue at hand that both business owners should discuss. The presence of two businesses in the same industry occupying the same address is pretty much the recipe for running into this type of citation confusion, which can then sometimes lead to even larger problems in Google (lack of trust, accidental merging, etc.). Given that these are two legally separate entities, have the business owners considered getting a legal suite number for one of the two businesses, to permanently differentiate them? While this would not completely remove the risk of merging or other mix-ups like the one you're seeing with Yelp, it could substantially decrease that risk. You would then, of course, want to be sure that all citations correctly reflected the separate addresses. Something to consider.

[Ron_McCabe]

This is an interesting problem.  I would take your Yelp idea a few steps further by creating a full set of local directory listings for both entities either through Moz local or manually.  If one of the entities is wholesale and the other retail I would definitely consider highlighting this when you write up the descriptions for these directory listings. If they are addressing different markets I would highlight this as well.

Another thing you may consider is signing up both businesses with one of the USPS business services as these require you to put in a unique FEIN number for each entity.  The fact that these are different entities will be highlighted in the USPS database as a result. The USPS database is key reference point the search engines utilize. So making it clear that these are separate entities in the USPS database should be helpful as well.

[rbmac]

Thanks for your feedback, Miriam. My original thought was to have them set up suite numbers, however one business (the one out of my control) will be closing shortly and the other will be taking over the entire space. In the meantime I am just trying to do what little I can to avoid these types of confusions.

Maybe this incident will be what it takes for me to convince them to do things my way rather than just keeping me around for damage control

Thanks again for your suggestions.

[rbmac]

Hi Ron,

As I mentioned above, one business will be closing down soon and in the meantime I am just trying to minimize problems like this. That is why I have hesitated to set up a full set of directory listings for the new business until the other is ready to fully step down and out of the picture. But maybe it is time to revisit that idea.

And thanks for the information about the USPS database... I never even considered this before.