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Hi Bob,

When you claimed the client's Google Places listing on their behalf, did you

• bulk claim or individual claim
• claim in the new Google+ dashboard or the Places for Business dashboard

?

Bob, what a strange situation.  Are you SURE that your client hasn't given permission to ZocDoc to create this page on their behalf?  If not, sure seems pretty sleazy on their part.

As far as a tactical fix, I'd recommend that your client (and their friends, and you, and your friends) click the Report a Problem link on the lower righthand side of this page:

https://plus.google.com/104280204877579676759/about

and let Google know that the URL for this listing should be stonebridgedental.com.  With enough of those reports, Google should make the edit, although that may or may not solve the problem of having duplicate listings in this instance

Ron, this is exactly how I'd set up the site:

"I believe we should create a mini web site starting at the location page that has specific content and navigation related to each location.  That the content should focus on the specifics of that area and what would serve that clientele the best. We should add to each branch location based on the key words and competition in that area. "

I'd surface blog articles tagged with each location in their corresponding sections here, but wouldn't worry so much about the structure of the blog per se.

Hey AJ,

I am forwarding this along to our engineering department.  We'll take a look on Monday & let you know about the 'unable to contact' errors.

As far as Moz in particular, we're not really a brick-and-mortar company, so Local Listings are not (and shouldn't be) a priority for our marketing department.  Having said that, my associate Miriam Ellis is working on a guide to claiming listings for our Portland office as we speak, to practice what we preach :).  That should be out later this summer.

Thanks for commenting!

David Mihm
Director of Local Search Strategy, Moz

Generally, my opinion for most small businesses is that ad networks like CityGrid are not the highest-and-best use of their advertising dollars.  However, if it's a new business, or one that has a lot of listing consistency issues, CityGrid can be worth an investment to try to clean up this information quickly.

Without knowing more specifics about this case, my generic advice would be to stick to Facebook ads or exact-match long-tail Google Adwords.

Cvissi,

Couple things:
#1 If this is one client with 250 locations, then it's a best practice to create a places@client-domain.com email address and then use the Bulk Upload feature from within Google Places for Business.

#2 If it is actually 250 individual clients with 1 location each, you should create a unique account along the lines of places@client-domain.com for each one of those locations.

You should never use an agency email address to claim client locations.

Does that make sense?

Hi Andrew and Christopher,

Thanks for contributing to this thread.  I've just returned from vacation to Miriam's email in my inbox.  We're definitely looking to bring more local reporting features to our customers over the next few months & appreciate you voicing this request, as it helps us prioritize features internally.

Thanks again for being a part of our community!

Hi Echo,

You're in a very competitive space, so I would say I'd focus more on getting quality unstructured citations.  One or two from colleges and universities or government organizations could indeed tip the balance in your case.  Have you thought about giving free rides from O'Hare and Midway to incoming guest speakers at various seminars / colloquia @ Univ of Chicago, Northwestern, etc, just as an example?

Taking a quick look (assuming this is you) -- I'd suggest trying a couple things first, though:

1. set your service radius much tighter (something like 30 miles)

2. get more reviews on TripAdvisor, WeddingWire, AngiesList, and Yelp.  These seem to be the most prominent review portals in your space.

Hope that's helpful.

Hi Nick,

• Do the clients already have an existing phone number?  Is it well-indexed by Google?  If it is not well-indexed, the client should first establish a permanent phone number and that number should be well-indexed before going ahead with this service.

• In general, dynamic javascript insertion works fine, as long as the existing phone number remains on the page in HTML somewhere, preferably in close proximity to business name and address (the footer is a good place for this).

• Make sure they are NOT sending tracking numbers anywhere outside of this client's website. Period.  No matter what they tell you about how their system is implemented.

As Greg said, as long as they are Noindexing the page or robots.txt 'ing it out of the crawl index, you should be just fine.

It's still more than a bit lame that they might be able to take credit for content and layout that you did, though.

In the US, Localeze, Infogroup, and Acxiom are the "big three" data providers.

I tend to agree with BeardoCo, in general it's not worth paying for an upgrade.  There are two notable exceptions:

#1 if the site in question is very heavily trafficked in your industry and provides real eyeballs as part of their premium listing package.  An example might be a TripAdvisor ad for a hotel or B&B -- especially one that's brand-new and hasn't had time to accumulate enough reviews to reach critical mass in TA's internal algorithm.

#2 Sometimes it may be worth paying for an enhanced listing on one of the major data aggregators like Localeze -- in order to include your URL and social information in the results that they syndicate to secondary and tertiary sites.  Additionally, paying for an Enhanced listing on the "back end" like this means that if there aren't any advertisers in your category on the sites that Localeze is syndicating to, your listing is likely to rank pretty well in the "organic" listings of that site.