Moz Local and Multiple Locations

[shauna7084]

I have a client that has several virtual addresses that he uses since he does business in several surrounding areas.  I want to use Moz Local to manage his NAPs, but wasnt sure if I needed to invest in separate listings for each address or not...?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Shauna!

So glad you've written in with an important question. Here is how this works:

Virtual offices are strictly forbidden by Google's quality guidelines  (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en) which state:

Address

Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location. PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable.

• Make sure that your page is created at your actual, real-world location.

  • If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at a different address from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours.

  ---

So, Google is as clear as can be on this one and you should be sure the client is being educated properly about the fact that he is not eligible for a Google+ Local page for any location other than his real, physical ones. Rather, your client's eligible business model would be as a Service Area Business (SAB), if he has a single physical location from which he is serving a variety of other locations.

Now, how this comes into play with Moz Local is that we only want to push out real, physical addresses, too, and we are reliant on the data Google and Facebook show us about a given business for validation purposes. So, if your client has a real physical address, then this is what he can use to build citations via a tool like ours, or, simply manually.

One last important thing on this, specifically regarding Moz Local. If the business is listed as an SAB on Google, this will result in his address being hidden by Google. Moz Local cannot pick up or validate against a hidden address. So, for our SAB customers, the alternate validation route is to be sure the full address is published on the Facebook Place instead, as Facebook does not require SABs to hide the address of their physical locale.

Further reading on the topic of virtual offices:

Here's a recent case of a Google takedown of virtual offices:

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/26844-busted-warning-attorneys-regus-non-compliant-offices.html

And here's last year's Moz Local Search Ranking Factors, which cites listing detected at a false location as the #1 negative ranking factor:

https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

Hopefully, you can share these things with the client and help them to ensure that they are running a guideline-compliant marketing program.

[shauna7084]

Thank you so much for the thorough response.

I am still curious about the service business area though.  My client already has a service business area of 100 miles.  How does this affect local search?  Will he show up for all cities in that area?  He operates from Farmers Branch TX, but does business in Dallas, Plano and Fort Worth TX (much bigger cities).  Will the NAP work help him out, even though all his addresses say Farmers Branch?

Shauna

[shauna7084]

Also, will changing the address to the physical location affect the results my client is already getting?  IE, he gets a lot of traffic from Plano TX right now, because that is the virtual address that is listed in Google+, on his website, and in Infogroup.

I'm also curious how the service business area will affect Bing and Yahoo results.

[Moz.HelpTeam]

Hi Shauna,

You're very welcome! If your client's only real office is in Farmer's Branch, any Google+ Local pages he has built for any other city would be a violation of the guidelines, and thus, at risk for a takedown any time Google might notice them. Because this could then potentially 'prejudice' Google against the whole business, he might find his legitimate location suspected of spammy stuff as well. So, in a nutshell here, the client should not be thinking about what he may lose if he takes down spammy listings - he should be thinking about the preservation of his legitimate location. He's in an at-risk situation that needs to be addressed as wisely and speedily as possible

SAB marketing works like this:

1. You build a website. Your core on-site optimization revolves around the city in which you have a physical office.

2. You only build citations for that physical office.

3. On the website, you develop a unique page of content for each service city. You do not build citations for these location-less service cities. You hope to earn organic rankings (not local pack rankings) with these city pages because of their strength, quality, earned links, etc.

This article is a year old and may have a few outdated references in it, but it should help you discern your client's business model type and understand what a typical marketing plan looks like for this type of model:

https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

The only alternative to the above is for the client to establish a legitimate, staffed office in Dallas, one in Plano, etc.

If this is a new client of yours and/or you are new to Local SEO, I think it would be a very smart move to suggest that he hire an expert Local SEO to consult with him. If you've already discovered that he's been engaged in some spammy practices, chances are pretty high that he has engaged in others you may not yet know about. If a good Local SEO was willing to fully audit the business for him or for your agency, they would likely uncover a number of things that need to be addressed to clean up the way the business has been marketing itself and put it on a clean track.

If you're looking for a heavy hitter in this field, I recommend you check out the Contributors box on last year's Moz Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Everyone who participates in that survey does so because their expertise is widely recognized: https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

Hope this helps!

P.S. Oops, so sorry. This is Miriam writing, by the way, but I'm signed into Alliance at the moment