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Hi Paul,

Good question. Google's guidelines make it clear that they want your business name on your GMB listings to identically match what consumers see in the real world. So, the name on your street level signage, your print marketing, your website logo and content, and your telephone greetings should be what you put on your GMB listing. And then, for the sake of consistency, as Sean mentions, you'll want all of your other local business listings to match this. So, short answer - no, don't shorten your name, unless you wish to formally change it and update all off and online marketing to reflect it.

I'm curious as to why you'd need to shorten the name. Is it super long?

Hi Paul,

I'm going to recommend that you contact our Helpsters directly at help@moz.com so that you can privately show them your business info and get one-on-one help with what you're seeing. Please reach out to them, and you should receive excellent help.

Hey Paul,

So, if your street-level and website-level marketing is all Evowrap rather than your full legal business name, then its Evowrap Google would want. It's the real-world consumer experience that Google wants reflected in their product.

I always find it useful to look at real-world examples, Paul. For example, look at the footer of Whole Foods' website: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com. You'll see them identified there as Whole Foods Market IP, L.P., but if you look up Whole Foods San Diego Ca, what do you see on the GMB listing? Just Whole Foods Market.

So, for legal purposes, you may need to include your full designation in the footer of your website, but provided the things assets I've mentioned previously (street level signage, website logo, etc.) are all consistent with your Evowrap name, I don't envision you'd have a problem there. Whole Foods clearly doesn't seem to be.

Hi Edward,

That's a good question, and I can see that the WB Friday you've linked to doesn't really answer it. In a nutshell:

1. Local business listings on sites like Google, Infogroup, Yelp, etc., are meant to represent businesses that meet face-to-face with consumers in the offline world, either at the company's location (like a restaurant) or where the customers are (like a plumber). So, no, your virtual business shouldn't be building these types of "structured" citations.

2. This, however, does not preclude you from getting un-structured citations from entities that are local to you. So, for example, your carpet factory is located in Augusta, Maine. You do not have an offline showroom that sells your carpets directly to customers at the factory. Rather, your carpets are sold on your website, and perhaps at 3 local home improvement stores and also at select national retailers. While you don't sell directly to consumers at your factory, your factory plays an important role in the community. It sponsors a children's crafts program at the Augusta community center, as well as contributing team uniforms to the Augusta Little League. The website for both of these entities might then mention your sponsorship, including linking to your website, as a form of an unstructured, partial citation. Meanwhile, as a major employer in Augusta, your brand might be mentioned on local online news sites or blogs, providing further citations. These citations might feature your complete NAP (name, address, phone), your partial NAP, a link to your site or no link at all, but all of them act as references to your business that Google sees as data that reinforces belief in the existence of your company.

3. For a virtual business, citations are not nearly as important as they are for true local business models, If they contain links from authoritative sources, they definitely will help you SEO-wise, but their purpose in terms of featuring your NAP just isn't the same. For a local business, repeat references to accurate NAP are believed to strongly impact local rankings, but your business won't be going for local rankings, so your mindset in regards to being mentioned by local entities is organic, rather than local.

4. As for online-only directories, they do exist, but I wouldn't focus too much on them. These were a big deal a decade ago, but due to abuses of them, Google has significantly downgraded any impact they may have on actual rankings. So, rather than focusing on directories, you may be better off looking for ways to get press from local or industry publications that would enhance awareness of your brand and be a credit to it.

Hope this helps!

Hi Nigel!

That is a really good list from Whitespark, but it's applicable to truly local business models. I think, in Edward's case, we're talking about a virtual business, which changes our outlook considerably on best marketing strategies.

Hi Gavo!

Alick300 has provided a good link for the 2nd part of your question. For the first part, we just had a good discussion on this right here: https://moz.com/community/q/local-search-can-i-use-a-shortened-company-name

Hope it helps, but if you have any further questions after reading that, please feel free to ask!

Hey Again, Jason,

Looking at your Moz profile, I believe you're here: https://www.bambrickmedia.com.au/

Please answer these questions:

1. What is the exact search term you're trying to rank for?

2. What is your city of location?

3. Are there any other marketers in your building or on your street?

Hi Bee,

So, yes, this definitely looks like Possum. When I search Google Maps for "Yacht Broker Port Adriano Spain" I see that there are numerous similar business in this location and that when I zoom in on the map, Marlin Marine Services does appear. So, a listing does exist for this business, but it simply isn't being judged by Google to be deserved of showing at a non-zoomed-in level. So, this brings us right back to my earlier comment regarding the need to do competitive research to discover the top competitor's strengths and your client's weaknesses so that you can create a plan for improvement. Hope this helps!

Hi Tyler,

I second Nigel's vote for the single domain approach. In a nutshell, it's nearly always better to build your brand on a single website than to try to spread your efforts across multiple websites. Local SEO best practice is to stick with a single domain on which you build out the necessary pages to reflect your various branches, linking to them from a high level menu or a combination of a store locator widget + an accessible html menu somewhere on the site so that you can be sure these pages get indexed.

Hi Donald!

Thanks for sharing these anecdotes with us all. Good ones!

Hey Slumberjac!

Whew ... that was an alarming experience you helped the client through. Well done! Thanks for sharing your story.

Hey There,

Please check out this recent Moz blog post: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing

It gives thorough advice for google listing issues like the one you're describing. If you don't find an answer to your specific scenario there, please let me know, but I'm hoping you will!

Hi Neil,

Good question, and unfortunately, the answer is no. The children's club wouldn't be eligible for a GMB listing, according to Google's guidelines, which state:

Ineligible businesses

The following businesses aren’t eligible for a business listing:

• Businesses that are under construction or that have not yet opened to the public.
• Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes, model homes or vacant apartments. Sales or leasing offices, however, are eligible for verification.
• An ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don't own or have the authority to represent.

The description of the club you've provided would fall under that guidelines of an ongoing class at a location that isn't owned by the club. The club can ask the school to mention its existence in the school's description of its own GMB listing, but doing so is actually kind of pointless because Google doesn't publicly display the description.

So, lacking an address of its own that it has the authority to represent, the club's business model isn't truly local. And, should the club attempt to build citations, this could actually interfere with whatever Local SEO efforts the school is trying to make. So, complete local outreach is going to be limited here for your client, and they may need to rely more on organic optimization, PPC and social.

Hope this helps!

You're welcome, Neil. Glad to have you here!

Hi Flynn,

Unfortunately, what Google determines to display is up to them, and not something you can choose. You can influence what Google displays by the excellence of the local search marketing for each of your locations, but if Google chooses to display a single result nearest you, rather than a pack of several results, that's their call.

Hi Neil,

I'm so sorry for the delayed reply. For some reason, I didn't receive a notification that you'd responded. So sorry about that!

Okay, so there are some guidelines you need to refer to here. It does sound like your business may qualify as a department of the train station. Google's guidelines on this state:

Public-facing departments that operate as distinct entities should have their own page. The exact name of each department must be different from that of the main business and that of other departments. Typically such departments have a separate customer entrance and should each have distinct categories. Their hours may sometimes differ from those of the main business.

• Acceptable (as distinct listings):
  • "Spring Gardens Optical Centre"
  • "Cafe Nero"
  • "Manchester General Hospital Department of Dermatology"
• Not acceptable (as distinct listings):
  • The Apple products section of PC World
  • The hot food bar inside Meadowhall

For each department, the category that is the most representative of that department must be different from that of the main business and that of other departments.

• The main business "Barclays" has the category "Bank" whereas the department "Barclays Advisors" has the category "Financial Consultant"
• The main business "Southend Toyota" has the category "Toyota Dealer" whereas "Southend Toyota Service & Parts" has the category "Auto Repair Shop" (plus the category "Auto Parts Shop")
• The main business "GetGo" has the category "Convenience Store" (plus the category "Sandwich Shop") whereas the department "GetGo Fuel" has the category "Petrol Station", and the department "WetGo" has the category "Car Wash"

So, from reading the guidelines, and given that you have a distinct name, the above should clarify your eligibility for a GMB listing for each of your branches.

However, regarding your phone number, that does concern me a bit. Google states:

• Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.

  • Use a local phone number instead of central, call centre helpline number whenever possible.
  • The phone number must be under the direct control of the business.

To be totally safe, you should have a unique phone number for each branch that is being answered at each branch. Any other route can lead to NAP confusion, ranking issues and other problems. So, before you start listing your branches, I would recommend resolving the phone number issue.

I hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions!

Hi Jason!

Thanks so much for coming back on this one. I'm really glad it helped. Since I responded, one of my Moz Blog posts was published which might offer additional help. It walks you through doing a full competitive audit, with a free downloadable spreadsheet to help you: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit

Going through the formal process of the audit could help you turn up some more things for your to-do list. Good luck to you!

Hey Ben!

Please check out my 2016 article on this topic: https://moz.com/blog/are-coworking-offices-eligible-for-google-my-business-listings

Let me know if any further questions arise after reading it

Hi MrSem,

Yes, the limitations you've pointed out are, unfortunately, baked into the environment. There's no way to prove impact in a vacuum. You can't stop competitors from making changes on their end that could be positive or negatively impacting the rank of your business at the same time that you are cleaning up your citations. Search results are so dynamic, it's rarely possible to be 100% positive in stating causation, with no margin for error, because even if you can control what your company is doing, you can't control what competitors are doing in the same time frame, or as you mention, a Google update occurring in that time frame, or even a bug. So, basically what you have is industry practitioners over time noticing apparent cause and effect. When practitioners state that citation cleanup appears to impact search visibility, it's based on more formal studies like Andrew's (above) and on what they notice across the board with clients, over time.

As for what is actually being cleaned up, that's easier to define. It's going to be resolving inconsistent NAP+W, hours of operation, categories and duplicates, much of the time. It can also include remedying incompletions.

I understand your skepticism. Toothpaste manufacturers have a vested interest in telling you their product will make your teeth whiter. But there's an important difference here that shouldn't be overlooked: the things we've come to think of as local search ranking factors originate in the early study of local search results being performed in the trenches by very small agencies. Going back more than a decade, you can read through the blogs of folks like Mike Blumenthal, sharing what they are discovering moves the needle, client by client. That's not quite the same as the toothpaste company, because the scale was very small at the dawn of Local. You could chalk the corpus of local-related blog posts over the past 12 or so years up to being mere sales pitches, but I think if you start reading backward from 2017, you'll see it really wasn't that way. Just as in organic SEO, it's been a voyage of discovery