Local SEO For Agents

[APFM]

My company has local offices all over the United States, similar to what you would find with insurance, financial advisory services or real estate.

We would like these individuals to rank in their local communities.

A few questions:

(1) Do we need to set up a unique local website for each of these agents or can we build a unique page for each of these agents on our main website.

(2) Agent(s) within a city can each provide their services to individual in or near that city, but they don't offer their service regionally or nationally.

(3) The agents are generally home based and while there is no concern having their phone number listed, there is some issue with showing a private home address. How does this limit local search and are there any alternatives.

Thanks in advance

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

Good question, and brace for a long answer here.

So, where we start with this is Google's own guidelines for multi-practitioners which we excavate for clues to see how they feel about your scenario. These guidelines state:

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Individual practitioners (e.g. doctors, lawyers, real estate agents)

An individual practitioner is a public facing professional, typically with his or her own customer base. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, and insurance or real estate agents all are individual practitioners. Pages for practitioners may include title or degree certification (e.g. Dr., MD, JD, Esq., CFA).

An individual practitioner should create his or her own dedicated page if:

• He or she operates in a public-facing role. Support staff should not create their own page.
• He or she is directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours.

A practitioner should not have multiple pages to cover all of his or her specializations.

Multiple practitioners at one location

If the practitioner is one of several public facing practitioners at this location:

• The organization should create a page for this location, separate from that of the practitioner.
• The page for the practitioner should be titled with name of the practitioner only, excluding that of the organization.

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This is the sum total of what Google tells us and, and while some of these guidelines apply to your scenario (like your agents operating in a public facing role) there's a catch here.

Though you've described having multiple offices across the country, you have further described that these agents you'd like to market don't work at these offices. They work from home and would need to keep their addresses hidden because of this. This is a common scenario and one of the more significant grey areas of the guidelines. The problem here is, should Google discover than you've created 30 listings in Iowa for your agents, and then they look at their street level imaging of the back-end addresses you've listed in your GMB dashboard, they will see that these are not offices - they are houses. And, at that point, it's up to Google to decide whether you have a legitimate business model or whether you are trying to game the system by appearing to have offices in these 30 locations when you really don't.

The problem here is that many companies have spammed Google in this way. The yard cleaning company whose owner literally does work from home in San Francisco, but who has also set up listings in San Jose (his cousin's house), Oakland (his mom's house) and Walnut Creek (his sister's house). Google catches onto this and hammers down not only on the 3 spammy listings but may also hammer down on the legitimate listing in San Francisco, as well.

So, while this is not what you are trying to do, and your agents genuinely do work at home while representing your company, the grey area here is whether Google will see it that way. There is no guarantee that they will, and so what I would say on this is that the safe path here is to only list your physical offices in the cities where you have them and list any agents that work in these offices and are "directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours". You could try it the other way, listing every possible agent, but you'd be doing so at your own risk.

Hope these are helpful thoughts! It's good you're considering all the options here. Very smart.

P.S. So sorry about the formatting on this. It is wacky.