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Hi Crystal,

I might need a bit more info on this to offer best guidance. Am I understanding this correctly:

• Your client is Dr. Jones.

• Dr. Jones has her own office at 123 Main St.

• Dr. Jones does not own any other offices, but she sees patients at the local hospital and at the local health care clinic, as well as seeing them at her office.

• You want to know if Dr. Jones is then eligible for 3 Google My Business listings since she sees patients at 3 locations, one of which she owns, and two of which she doesn't.

Is this the scenario, or would you describe it differently?

Hi Crystal,

You're welcome, and from the additional details you've provided, I would recommend:

1. Just one GMB listing at her central location with her single phone number

2. Build content on the website and socially around her privileges at other clinics

Hope this helps!

Hi Taylor,

Are you able to share the identity of the client? If not, my best advice is to investigate

1. Filters (like Possum)

2. Hard/soft penalties.

3. Bugs

Hi Kyo,

Please, check out the illustrated guide to the Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors, which I wrote in 2017. It provides a thorough explanation of the most important ranking factors listed in that survey. I hope this helps you out with definitions, and if any questions remain after you've read through it, please let us know. Thanks!

Hello There!

Thanks for asking a good question. The best practice for this is found in Google's guidelines, which state

-Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible

• Use a local phone number instead of central, call center helpline number whenever possible.

So, it will be best if each of your facilities publishes its own, local number.

Hi Matt!

Glad you've asked, and you're right - you definitely don't want to mark your business as closed. Instructions for this are found in the Guidelines for Representing your Business on Google, which read:

Seasonal hours

​If your business has seasonal hours, use the following guidelines:

• During the season in which you’re open, set hours that reflect the current season's opening hours. You may set special hours for holidays, temporary closures, or other events.
• When your business is out of season, remove all opening hours, so they appear as unset. Set your opening hours again at the beginning of your next open season.

Hope this helps and that you have a good open season!

Hi Adam!

Yellowbook still exists and is accessible from the US. I'm sorry but I'm not sure why it wouldn't be so from your location.

As for workarounds, I can suggest two:

1. Infogroup feeds Yellowbook, as far as I know, so if you have something you need to do on Yellowbook, you might want to take that up with Infogroup.

2. If you need a citation built only on Yellowbook, get someone in the US to do it for you. Of course, if the business you're promoting is in Israel and there is some reason Yellowbook isn't accessible to anyone from there, having a citation on that platform would be of questionable value.

Hope this helps!

Hey Steve,

I first learned about Pointy from the American Independent Business Alliance a few months ago, and wrote a bit about it here:

https://moz.com/blog/local-seos-guide-to-buy-local

*See the section subtitled "Digitize Inventory Easily".

It's early days yet, but the fact that founder of WordPress and co-founder of Google Maps are Pointy's angel investors makes me think it could go far.

While I've yet to hold a Pointy device in my own hands, the potential for it to enable smaller local businesses to get their inventory onto the web so easily is incredibly appealing.

If anyone is actually using Pointy, I hope you'll contribute to this thread!

Hi Jacob!

This does sound totally odd. Let me be sure I have the facts straight:

1. You have an MCC account via which you are managing Google Ads and it includes both your agency and your clients Google Ads campaigns.

2. You are also managing local search for your clients. Have their GMB listings been created in their own accounts, or were they created under your agency's account?

3. When you search for "Happy Floors Orlando Florida" (fictitious name), Google is bringing up a local pack of results that shows your client (Happy Floors) but also shows your agency's listing in it 1,000 miles away?

4. The only link between the two is that you have your client listed in your portfolio?

Please, let me know "yes" or "no" to each of these.

Also, as you can't publicly share the details of the business/agency in question, please ask a friend (maybe someone at another agency) to do the search you're doing and tell you what they see. I'd like to do this myself, but understand if you need to keep that private. Tell me what comes of that, please.

You've definitely gotten me curious!

Ad Adlev,

Yes, that's a weird-looking example. As far as I can tell, it's likely stemming from the business in question setting San Francisco and San Diego as their service radius and then Google drawing the lines between that. It's a huge service area, so it looks a bit strange, but it is plausible.

Hi Ben,

You're welcome! Good follow-up question.

If your company (XYZ) places patients in facilities you don't own (Sunshine), then you aren't authorized to create GMB listings for Sunshine. Nor would any other service that places patients in those facilities. Sunshine would need to market themselves as the owner of that location.

Hope that makes sense.

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for coming back to this thread. The permanently closed listing for an unrelated business at your address should not affect you in any way. If it were your business that was marked permanently closed, that would be a problem for you. But as it's the former tenant's business marked that way, it's only a problem for them. I would not worry about this.

Dear Sabar-din,

Hopefully, the article Hannah linked to will answer your question, but if not, please let us know and please explain why you are trying to remove the listing and what precise steps you've taken so far.

Good Morning, Bek!

I hope you will receive a variety of responses from our community on this, as citation management is often a case of horses for courses. What you choose should be based on factors including the scale of your business model, your funding, your expectations of control/management, etc.  Basically, you have 3 options when it comes to citation management:

1. Do it all manually. The plus side of this is that you have as much direct control as possible. The minus side is that it is time-consuming and can't be scaled easily for companies with multiple locations. It's all but impossible to efficiently, manually manage local business listings for dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations. And, manual on-going monitoring of citation quality is a huge chore even if you only have a single location business.

2. Hire a company to do it for you manually. Whitespark is one of the more popular companies that builds a la carte citations manually. The plus side of this is that you pay once and the citations are built well with good data that you've approved, without you having to invest a lot of time. The minus side is that citations typically need to be managed on an ongoing basis, which companies like Whitespark don't do. They are an excellent service for a one-time manual build, but because of the way data can degrade over time, may not be the right match for a business that wants to monitor and manage their listings on an on-going basis.

3. Automate it. This is what companies like Moz Local, Uberall and Yext do. Moz Local, for example, distributes your data to the major citation platforms (including the major aggregators) and then offers you a dashboard for ongoing monitoring. The plus side of this is that the work on your end is nominal and, at least with Moz Local, you'll be alerted to ongoing issues with your data, including inconsistent and duplicate listings, as they arise. A solution like this scales to dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations. The main minus side is a lack of direct control, plus cost can be a factor, and one of the key complaints about Yext is that (unlike Moz Local) they charge for your distribution to low-quality directories that few people actually use.

So, those are your 3 options, and what might work best for a single location boutique may not be the right match for a multi-location restaurant chain. Some businesses do like Yext, but if you do a bit of searching, you will also find genuine complaints, as you will about most providers. Other people are big fans of Moz Local, BrightLocal, Uberall and other providers. So, as I said, I'm hoping you'll get multiple points of view on this thread, do some investigative work, and discover the right match for your brand's scenario. In the end, that's what matters most!

I'll just finish up by letting you know that if you have any questions about how Moz Local could help you business, please email our customer service support at help@moz.com. You'll receive a friendly and helpful reply.

Good morning!

So sorry to hear you've encountered some trouble. Can you answer some questions for me about your scenario, please?

1. Did your re-design of the website keep the exact same domain and URLs, or did you have to do any re-directs?

2. Am I right that your concern is that, when you search for things like "austin plumbers" while you are physically located in Dallas, you are seeing your client on the first page of the organic results, but when you search from a physical location in Austin, your client is coming up on the 9th page of the organic results? Is that right?

3. You mention local results, as well. What were your client's local pack rankings prior to the re-design and how, exactly, have they changed?

4. How long ago did you launch the re-design?

Thank you for the replies to my questions. I'm just going to start jotting things down here:

1. Your client is outside of the Austin city limits. The location is the quite a bit west of the city boundary, as perceived by Google: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Austin,+TX/@30.3172704,-97.91144,11z/data=!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x8644b599a0cc032f:0x5d9b464bd469d57a!2sAustin,+TX!3b1!8m2!3d30.267153!4d-97.7430608!3m4!1s0x8644b599a0cc032f:0x5d9b464bd469d57a!8m2!3d30.267153!4d-97.7430608

2. I mention this, because Google is fairly biased towards physical location, and a business outside of city borders is not one I'd typically expect to see ranking well locally, unless there was little competition. Organically, I might see them ranking however. So, I'm walking into this not really expecting your client to rank well locally, and I just want to mention that.

3. Using BrightLocal's rank checker tool and setting my zip to the zip code at Google's perceived center of Austin (78701) I am unable to find your client in the first 10 pages of the organic results for "austin plumbers". You mentioned you are seeing them on page 9 from another tool. I just can't find them at all.

4. Yet, when I search from my own location in California for this same term, your client is #1 in the local pack and #2 organically (just below Yelp). So, for non-Austin-based searchers,your client is doing extremely well. And, this comes as a bit of a surprise to me, given what I said above about them being beyond city limits. To have overcome this, the site must be doing something right to be so dominant!

5. So, now, the frustrating part of this. It has long been observed that Google handles proximity of the searcher quite differently when the searcher is near a business vs. in some other city or state. In other words, if, from my location in California, I look for a plumber in Austin, I'm not likely to see the exact same results as someone actually in Austin would see. Rank checking tools aren't great at approximating this. So, I want to ask you to ask your client to do something. Have them search from their office computer on Ranch Road for "austin plumbers" and tell you exactly where they see themselves both locally and organically. Please, if you can do this, come back and let me know what they say.

Clearly, the launch of the new site design is making you question whether something you did caused the ranking drop. But, I want to be sure that we aren't overlooking that Google somehow made a change that is coincidental to your redesign and has nothing to do with it. If your client's site was penalized, I wouldn't expect to see it ranking so excellently for my searches from California. And the GMB listing is not suspended or anything like that. So, let see if you can get your client to tell you what they see searching from their own office. I'll stay tuned.

Hello Again,

Looking at this again after reading the reply you received from Google. The trouble is, when I zoom in enough on the map, Google's borders disappear, so I was having to approximate location. To confirm, can you let me know if this image is correct:

https://imgur.com/NhaXUj3

Thanks!

Hi Tim!

As Alex says, you can add multiple phone numbers to your GMB dashboard, but getting Google to associate the numbers as in your screenshot might not be possible. I'm wondering if Schema could influence this, but I don't know for sure on that.

However, I do want to raise the point that large companies with multiple departments are often eligible for multiple listings, and if the business is big enough, Google will display links to the department listings within the main listing. Adding an attachment to show what this looks like. https://imgur.com/a/7FGNPpw

I am not sure if your company is big enough for this treatment, but the fact that you have different phone numbers for different departments is a start. Read Google's Guidelines pertaining to "Departments within other Businesses" to see if you're eligible: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Arggh! Definitely a frustrating and unusual case. Literally one of the best illustrations I've ever seen of how being on the border of a big city can create such a hurdle to rankings. Sorry this worked out this way, but yes, your options are:

1. Create content surrounding Racine. I would suggest that the dentist find some opportunities to interact with/contribute to the Racine community that you can then create content surrounding. There has to be something more to write about than just a "our patients come to us from Racine" reason to write about Racine. That's not interesting. But, if the dentist sponsors Racine groups/teams/events, if he speaks at schools, belongs to business associations, contributes to online news, etc. all in Racine, this is something to showcase on the website to highlight his community involvement in that city. It will also be the best kind of way to get linktations (see: https://moz.com/blog/linked-unstructured-citations) to support organic rankings for implicit and explicit Racine-related searches.

2. Invest in social outreach hinging on the Racine community.

3. Invest in PPC targeting Racine

4. Invest in offline advertising targeting Racine.

5. Run campaigns at your practice that in some way reward customers who refer Racine neighbors to you.

6. Use all available GMB fields to mention Racine. This includes Google Posts, Q&A, description, photos, review responses, etc.

7. Bear in mind that while it's not likely for a business to rank outside it's city of location where there is a fair level of competition, it's also not absolutely impossible. Don't make any promises to the client about this, but on the back burner of your marketing plan, keep in mind that you are trying to see if any amount of organic signalling can overcome that border bias. I'd track everything closely. If you manage to surmount this issue, you'll have a fascinating case study on your hands.

Honestly, the scenario of having the parking lot in Racine and the dental office in Mount Pleasant is so odd, I'm half-tempted to recommend you find some clever and funny marketing angle in it, but that could just be the local SEO in me who finds this scenario weird and exasperating. Maybe a goofy idea, but I've seen such things take on a viral life of their own for other local businesses. Good luck!

Hi VELV,

I agree with AL123Al on this, for the present. Should your business grow to the point when you can legitimately run two separate, staffed offices, it might be time to revisit legally setting up two separate companies. But, for now, with a single address, you're likely better off sticking with a single site approach.