Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Neil!

Not a silly question at all. In the past couple of years, what has become a dominant force in local results is typically referred to as the user-as-centroid. What this means is that results vary based on the physical location of the searcher at the moment he makes his search. The affects both desktop and mobile local results, and is especially sensitive on mobile, wherein a searcher at one end of town looking for a pizza is going to see different results than if he drives across town and searches again.

So, the user-as-centroid phenomenon is playing a major role in results being personalized to the searcher, and beyond this, things like past search behavior contribute as well to my results being different than the results my clients see when they do the same searches.

Hi Jeenu,

So that does, indeed, sound like Possum. I have a couple of follow-up questions for you:

1. What is the relationship of the 2 businesses? Are they actually just one business, trying to appear as though they were two businesses, or are they 2 totally separate legal entities?

2. Are both of these businesses your clients, or just one of them?

Hi Bede,

I confess, I don't have any strong direct experience with Yodel, but, from what I've read in the past, they do appear to have a rather direct relationship with Google and there have been some complaints in regards to their creating new Google+ Local listings (some even with taboo call tracking numbers - uh-oh!). *Remember, I'm just repeating what I've read from other Local SEOs - not what I've experienced first-hand.

Your question made me recall a thread I'd read months ago at Linda Buquet's Local Search Forum. I managed to find it again and I think it will be helpful to you:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-help-support/4181-yodel-claims-clients-places-listing-but-dashboard.html

What's surprising to me, honestly, is how little overall documentation there appears to be from third party sources about Yodel's process, Bede. Here's an old thread from Mike Blumenthal's saved version of the old Google Local Business Help Forum:

http://places.blumenthals.com/thread3eeb.html

And there is stuff from Yodle like this:

http://www.yodledentalmarketing.com/blog/post/claim-local-search-listings/

But the main thing that I recall about this particularly company was a rash of complaints years ago that their sales reps were somehow convincing business owners that they were calling from Google in regards to AdWords. Do you remember that?

At any rate, my take on this is that there just isn't a ton of 3rd party documentation from the Local SEO community about this company, but that your client may well have had his listing claimed by Yodel, given all of the above. I hope my reply is at least somewhat helpful!

Hi J.P.

As Dennis and Donna have suggested, sharing further details of this will help the community look further into your question. If you are unable to share the client's details, that perfectly fine, but it will limit the amount of support the community can give.

Hi Jeenu,

Thanks for the reply. Okay, so your best bet at this point is to do a complete competitive audit of the company that is outranking your client, doing a side-by-side comparison of their metrics vs. your client's. This will enable you to form a hypothesis about what factors the competitor has that are stronger than your client's and that may be leading Google to favor that competitor over your client. You need to look at every possible factor so that you can form a picture in your mind of why the competitor gets to show at the automatic zoom level while your client is being filtered out. Is it domain authority, age of domain, citation consistency, reviews, links, etc? You'll have to be extremely thorough to start to get to the root of the matter.

Once you've formed your hypothesis, the second step will be to create a plan for your client to begin beating the competitor's metrics. Maybe your client will need more authoritative links, better GMB landing page URL content, etc. Every case will be different, so there's no shortcut for getting down into the trenches on this one and doing the research and analysis to form a clear plan.

Your goal: find what improvements your client needs to make in order to convince Google that his business is the one that deserves to be shown at the automatic zoom level, instead of being filtered out.

Hope this helps!

Hi Anatoliy,

I am seeing this Google+ Local page for you:

https://plus.google.com/117400845160255741148/about?hl=en

Both in the main SERPs and as the circle image on your Google+ page, I see a photo of a woman getting a massage.

This photo is coming from here:

https://plus.google.com/117400845160255741148/photos?hl=en

Because this is the first photo in your lineup of photos, it is the one Google is using as your main photo. This seems to confuse many people. See:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/change$20photo/business/AiFuzhaOs6g/hd4H1BNxWDEJ

So, if you want a different photo to appear, you need to put it first in the lineup. Be advised, however, that photo changes can take weeks to go into effect.

Hope this helps!

Hi Jag,

Are you able to share the URLs for the 2 Google+ Local pages here? It would help to be able to to see them directly.

Hi Neil,

Please check out the big table of options in one of my recent Moz Blog posts for instructions about handling duplicate listings:

https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing

Then, please come back with any questions you didn't feel were answered by it that relate to your specific scenario. Thanks!

Hi David,

Without actually seeing the website and listing of a client in a situation like this, it's not possible to give targeted advice. So, we must speak generally:

1. Have you done competitive analysis. If not, try: http://www.51blocks.com/online-marketing-tools/free-local-analysis/ That may show you why competitors are outranking your client for this specific term.

2. Mentioning a keyword in the midst of many other keywords on a homepage is typically not going to be enough to get them to rank for it. As you say, you've gotten this client ranked well for their core terms, so I'm assuming this is a secondary, side term. How much content have you developed for the terms and what does the link profile look like?

3. You must always consider penalties in local when you fail to rank for something you think you should. Have you accidentally violated any of Google's policies? See: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

These are a few ideas to start with. Hope this helps!

Hi J.P.,

You are correct that city centroids were once considered a strong ranking factor. This was then edged out by the concept of industry centroids, but this in turn has given way largely to the concept of user centroids. Recommend you read the history of the centroid here:

https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid

My answer beyond this is in two parts:

1. To discover whether your client can move up in the local pack rankings you must a) audit her business and b) do competitive analysis to discover if any competitors can be surpassed. Your audit of your client's marketing should include an assessment of their website, citations, reviews and social engagement.

2. Whether this will lead to your client appearing in black text at a lower resolution of the map is not known. I have never seen a thorough study of how Google determines which locations show at the lowest resolutions there, so this would be something you'd want to be sure you weren't promising to the client. In our sample 'newport beach plastic surgeon' the only 2 businesses receiving this treatment at the automatic zoom level are those ranking top 2 in the maps pack, but whether this is the case for every such search, I honestly don't know. If you could get your client to be #1 or #2, perhaps this would lead to them replacing one of the 2 businesses in black text, but I am not 100% sure of that and would need to look at a larger data set to begin drawing such a conclusion. Interesting topic!

Of course, the ideal is always to get the client as high in the local pack rankings/maps pack rankings as possible, but the difficulty in achieving this relates directly to how tough/strong his unique competitors are and how much motivation/funding your client has to make efforts to move up. And, these days, it's really important to bring into the discussion the fact that your client's customers are not likely to see the same rankings that he does or that you do, given the user-as-centroid phenomenon. Sometimes, in a really competitive field, going after hyperlocal or long tail keywords may enable them to earn traffic that they simply can't get from the main searches because the field is already too crowded with strong competitors.

Hope these are helpful thoughts.

Hi Ruchy,

It's totally fine to have testimonials on your website, provided they are authentic. I wrote a pretty exhaustive article on just this topic last year. It includes guidance from some of the best in the review business, including sample markup for your reviews:

https://moz.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-creating-onsite-reviews-testimonials-pages

I believe that should get you going!

Hi Echo1,

What you put in your website NAP should identically match what's on your Google+ Local page. If your listings and citations are without the 'Inc', then, yes, that is how I would recommend styling your business in your indexable website-based NAP. Consistency is so key, as you know.

Hi Jolie!

Thanks for posting a good question. Moz Local guarantees your data on 7 specific platforms, which represent the 5 major US aggregators, plus 2 other important sites. These 7 partners are:

Infogroup

Acxiom

Best of the Web

Localeze

Factual

Foursquare

Superpages

We do not control the push beyond these 7 partners. That being said, it is typical for our partners to then push to their own partners. You can see an illustration of how data is typically shared in the link Patrick included in his reply. But, again, it's important for me to clarify that the movement of your data beyond the 7 partners is not part of our service.

So, if there are specific non-partner platforms (like Yelp or TripAdvisor) that you want to advise your client to claim, you are free to do so.

This is a good question, Brooks!

My take: When scaling rep management for companies with 100s or 1,000s of locations, there's no way the owner is going to be personally responding to each review. Rather, he/she will be designating staff to act in his/her name. So, basically, you can think of this scenario this way. You're being empowered by the owner to act on his/her behalf, and putting the name "owner" on the review is an indication that the reply represents company policy, rather than the owner sitting at a laptop late into the night writing responses. I can't imagine John Mackey was logging hours replying to Whole Foods reviews.

So, this is one of those scenarios in which I say, "Think big." If the "big guys" have staff who respond in their names, then smaller businesses can follow suit. I think we're pretty safe in assuming that Google's generic language of "response from the owner" isn't convincing Whole Foods shoppers that they've just receive a personal reply from John Mackey

That being said, it would certainly behoove owners and C-suites to craft very clear policy governing how employees should respond to the public while representing the brand. This is a step that should not be overlooked in organizations large or small.

I hope others will weigh in on this, as this is just my opinion.

Hi Echo1,

If you find that those keywords are driving traffic, then yes, I'd select them as your categories...but not as your first categories.

Regarding services radius vs. areas served, I recommend you read this thread:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/service-area-business-issues/4780-setting-milage-radius-versus-static-location-places.html

Hope this helps!

Hey There!

In cases like these where you're in doubt about a given practice, your first stop should always be Google's own guidelines: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Check out the section on the business name, which reads:

Your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers.

And be sure to read the whole section on this so that you can explain these types of policies to clients. Thank goodness for guidelines!

I'm not 100% sure what your other question is about accounts. Please feel free to clarify that. Thanks and good luck with your client!

Hi Eport12!

A couple of suggestions:

1. I highly recommend checking out GetFiveStars, which I've personally test-driven and have been extremely impressed by. The product was co-founded by Local SEO guru Mike Blumenthal and the rate of innovation of the tool has been amazing.

2. I would be absolutely positive that whatever service you sign up for, it does not auto-populate review stars in reviews. One of the larger ORM software companies, Birdeye, recently fell out of Google's good graces for this practice and the case is serving as a warning now to everyone in the industry: be sure automated review requests do not auto-generate review stars. So, as you're considering your options, do keep that little proviso in mind.

Hi Again Echo!

This is Vanessa Gene's post on 'Do Not Support'

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/OqKS72sqrzA

However, this doesn't exactly describe what you're experiencing and I have seen identical issues reported in the Google and Your Business Forum. Read this thread and try to figure out if it applies to your situation:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/do$20not$20support/business/TQbDfFELsZo/IRM85Pvxq1sJ

Also see:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/do$20not$20support$20respond/business/iCugtUxWqxU/sODmbx9aI9kJ

I know I've seen this brought up many times at the Google and Your Business Forum. You might want to do some further searches there for the topic if the above links aren't describing your issue. It's good that at least your listing is still live!

Hey Ricky,

Good answer from Travis, and the guidelines he links to exactly describe Google's preferences regarding naming conventions for multi-practitioners, etc. Things to be aware of:

1. Because doctors do leave practices on a regular basis, you need to be aware of the closed listing phenomenon: http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/27109-can-closed-google-local-listings-kill-ranking-important-new-troubleshooting-tip.html

2. Google does not delete duplicates for doctors: http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-duplicates-doctor-dentist-lawyer.html  (recommend further research of Linda Buquet's work of doctor/dentist duplicates

3. If you're going to do a unique Google+ Local page for each doctor, be sure it links to a landing page on the site for the doctor ... not to the homepage for the practice.

I'm not saying you shouldn't create a unique Google+ Local page for each doctor, but if you decide to recommend this strategy, do fully research the issues of dr/dentist duplicates and closed listings before you make an official recommendation to the client. Hope this helps!

Hey Thomas!

It's good on a thread like this for the community to provide a variety of recommendations. I'm glad you shared what you like about ReputationStacker. Always helpful to have multiple choices!