Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello there! You've come to the right place. Local SEO hinges on the physical location of your business and its customers. If you have a physical store in NYC, you can work towards competing for visibility in Google's local packs for users and queries surrounding that city. If you have a physical location in LA, same story.
What you can't do is hope your NYC store will show up for users in LA. Local search doesn't work that way. Rather, you'd need to pursue organic rankings and paid advertising in markets where your business lacks a physical location.
_Moz just published the Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, which will teach you all the basics of local SEO for free! Hope it helps: _https://moz.com/local-seo-guide

Hi Tony,

Unfortunately, Google's guidelines often disappoint in that they don't seem to cover real-world realities. If you're aware of the guideline language and are communicating to your friend that straying from the guidelines could result in listing removal, then that's about all you can do.  If a brand decides to stray from the guidelines, they should be aware of the risks. And finding other listings that area also straying from the guidelines will not convince Google if the listing gets removed.

You can learn more about the "located in" feature in this thread: https://localsearchforum.com/threads/new-feature-manually-add-located-in-to-a-gmb-listing.53221/ but this is typically meant to be used for something like a McDonald's located in a Walmart.

Hi Tony,

My apologies for the delayed reply. I just saw your questions this morning.

The relevant area of the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google contains the following language under the section in ineligible listings:

• An ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don't own or have the authority to represent.

It sounds like this is what you're describing, in terms of your friend having an ongoing class at a community center. Rather than the class having its own listing, Google's advice on this has historically been to try to get the eligible entity (the community center) to include mention of your class in their listing, rather than creating a listing yourself.

The only safe alternative for your friend would be if they want to become known, independent of the community center, as a separate licensed business. For example, if your friend wanted to establish themselves as a personal trainer, for hire, then they could create a listing for that using their own phone number and home address. With their address outside the city of location, you are right to guess that this means that they would most likely not appear for rankings within the community center's city, but this is the only path forward I can see for your friend in the local SERPS.

The organic SERPs are different, of course. Your friend could certainly build their own website to talk about their work and make an effort to get this ranking organically if the community center would give permission for their entity to be mentioned by a third party (your friend) on a third party website.

Hi Michael,

Are you referring to the reporting within GMB Insights in your Google My Business dashboard, or some other form of call tracking?

Hey There!

Google removed Google-based review stars last from their organic SERPs in 2019, unfortunately.  However, Facebook and Yelp stars still commonly display for some queries.

Hey there!

The report is now live here: https://whitespark.ca/local-search-ranking-factors/

Hi Jonathan,

I'd call this behavior normal if Google is localizing the results to the location of the user, based on which page they feel is the best fit for the user's location+intent. I'm not 100% sure of the architecture of your content, but if you want all traffic to hit a single landing page for a specific search term, you might need to consolidate your content.

Good morning!

It's good that you're doing a competitive audit for the business, as I agree, it appears to be being excluded from Google's local finder for searches like "senior placement". I am able to find the listing's Google Business Profile doing a branded organic search and I'm able to find it via a branded search within the finder, but it's not coming up for me for non-branded searches. So, the listing hasn't suffered a hard penalty (removal) but it's not ranking for your stated search phrase.

I can't replicate a full audit here in the forum, but here are some things standing out to me, at a glance:

1. Many of the top ranked competitors have exact matches of "senior placement" and "placement" in their business titles. You don't. If these are legitimately their names, then this is to their advantage. But if any of them have added "senior" "placement" or "senior placement" to their business titles when this is not their name, this would be a violation of Google's guidelines that you could report.

2. Many of the ranking businesses have a street address published on their listing. Your facility doesn't. In fact, there are zero signals of location on your website, other than the 502 prefix of the phone number. I see no address, no mention of Tucson in the text content of the pages, and only a reference to locality in some title tags. Is the business actually based in Tucson? Why does it not publish an address, and why am I not seeing Tucson referenced in the content of the website? It's making me curious about the business model. Is this a single business at a single location, or is it part of a franchise and the website I'm looking at at aseniorjourney.com is just for the Tucson branch of a much larger business? At any rate, there's no address on the Google listing (compared to competitors) and very weak signals of locality coming from the website. I do see that Old Pueblo Placement Services is ranking without an address, so what I've noticed here is not "the answer". Still, it's something to investigate further.

3. The Possum filter does not appear to be at play here, because no matter how many times I zoom in on the map, the business just isn't showing up.

4. How confident are you that the review practices the facility has engaged in are guideline compliant? 33 all-five-star reviews makes me slightly worried. Not saying anything is wrong there, but I always find businesses with perfect 5 star rating to be slightly unusual.

5. Without a street address, I can't run the diagnostics I would like to seek problems with the listing. Have you done this?

6. It looks like the GMB listing hasn't been claimed. Is that right?

That's all I have time for this morning. Something is definitely amiss with the business. I would recommend taking the listing over to Google's Help Forum for further troubleshooting.

Hello there!

I have two thoughts on this.

1. Remember that rankings are not static. You mention ranking positions for your core terms, but where are you standing when you do these searches? Searchers around Toronto and North York are going to see different local and localized organic results based on their proximity to the place of business at the time of search. From my locale in the US, you are #1 in the local pack and #11 organically for your Toronto keyword phrase. Are you noticing a drop in traffic, leads, phone calls, form submissions? Those are the metrics that are typically best to determine whether a business is falling off.

2. Visibility is something that has to be judged in relationship to competitors. If your business is going down, others are moving up. The key is to find out what competitors are doing that might be causing the rise of their assets in juxtaposition to the the fall of yours. Here's a link to a tutorial on doing a basic local competitive audit: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit. It's a few years old now, but the basic idea is to stack up your metrics against those of your top competitors and uncover the factors on which they are winning. Have you done some audits of this kind for your most important phrases?

Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions.

Hi Jepaul4,

Thanks for asking your question. As long as the address and phone number for each location of your business is unique, do not worry about the name being the same. Google understands that a brand like McDonald's has thousands of locations with the same name at different addresses, and they will not consider your listings duplicates if they share a name but have different addresses and phone numbers, too. Hope this helps!

You're welcome. If you want to go with the separate website and phone number for the online printing business, and you do not attempt to create a Google listing or other local listings for it, then no, I would not be concerned about local search engine results filtering. That would only happen if you tried to submit a listing for both businesses.

The only thing to look out for would be if someone (Google or a member of the public) accidentally created a listing for the online printing business. I wouldn't be too worried about it, but if you are ever having ranking issues for the real-world website design business, remember that we had this conversation about filtering and be sure no listing has accidentally ended up in Google's local index for the printing business.

I do think getting a P.O. box is a good idea for the print business, if you need to accept mail, because then you won't have to put the street address of the design business on the print business' website. Just to mention ... Google does not accept P.O. boxes as legit addresses for creating a local business listing, but if you have no intention of locally marketing the print business, this point is rather moot.

Hope this helps!

Hi VELV,

Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. Local SEO is largely based on the physical location of the business, not its menu of services. As you describe it, you have a single company at a single location, with a varied menu of services. This might be comparable to an HVAC company which both installs air conditioners and repairs hot water heaters. It's a single company, doing multiple things. The HVAC company, and your business model of a single business with a varied menu, at a single location, is eligible for just one Google My Business listing, and if you choose to move ahead with the model you've described, your business will be "optimizable" in all the various ways one would typically market a single local business.

The alternative to this would be to legally register your single companies as two distinct businesses, with unique tax IDs, unique phone numbers, business names, and completely distinct Google My Business categories. Envisioning your printing company as completely separate from your website design company is an option, but it has potential problems.

The first problem would be that co-located businesses can sometimes be filtered out of Google's high level mapped search results, particularly if they are in a shared category. This is why I'm emphasizing that you would need no crossover between categories. Even with distinct categories, there is some chance you might experience some filtering. More concerning, though, would be the possibility that Google might decide that your two businesses are actually one business attempting to appear like two, in which case they might suppress or remove one of your listings. Your best defense against that would be going to all the necessary lengths to legally register the second business, and keeping its phone number, website URL, and other assets separate, and not linking between the two businesses in any way.

It's a choice you need to make about how you want to envision and present your enterprise. The easiest route will be as a single business with a menu of services. You can select categories for both services on the GMB listing, and build out great content for both on your website. But if you want to move ahead as the owner of two separate businesses, you'll be best served by taking the necessary steps to register and run the two brands, perhaps with the eventual goal of a separate physical location for each business. In that case, the concern about co-location and filtering goes away!

Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions. Good luck to you!

Good follow-up questions, Jason. I did the work in that article from a non-Google Local Guide account, so it would not be biased in any way. I also did all of the reporting myself, without asking for any backup support from folks suggesting additional edits, though that technique can sometimes be helpful. So, in this case, I don't believe my success was unusual or based on some unique factor.

Like I said, many Google processes are running really slowly right now. Have you reported the spam to the Google Help forum?

Hi Jason,

Good topic! The pandemic has resulted in lowered responsiveness from Google in many areas, so that's one thing to keep in mind right now. Persistence is the best strategy for fighting entrenched local spam. You sometimes have to report things repeatedly, and when that doesn't work, if you uncover what appears to be a large network of spam, publicity can sometimes move Google to action when nothing else will.  Here are a couple of good articles, in case you've not seen them:

https://moz.com/blog/simple-spam-fighting

https://www.sterlingsky.ca/ultimate-guide-fighting-spam-google-maps/

But you are so right that Google doesn't have a realistic approach to managing spam in their index. The problem is large, ongoing, and poorly addressed. Good luck!

Hi Kitely_Katie,

I have an article in my column here at Moz that should be an exact fit for what you are trying to understand. Please read this, and then let me know if you have any further question:

https://moz.com/blog/rank-beyond-location

Hi Scott,

My apologies for you not receiving a speedier reply. First, be sure you're using as many Google categories as are applicable to your business, while not being redundant. In other words, you can have both "physical therapist" and "sports medicine clinic" as categories if they accurately describe what your business is. Review the categories you've chosen in your GMB dashboard to be sure you've made the most of what's available to you.

Next, if you have a menu of different services you offer, you can use a google menu to list those out. I can't guarantee that this will impact what you rank for, but it is at least a feed of data you are giving Google about what you business should be a candidate for.

Beyond this, your ability to rank for different terms is going to be based on a number of different factors including your reviews and your organic strength. You will need to focus strongly on the organic content of your website and the links this content earns that describes these various services in hopes of this building your authority around these topics in a way that is strong enough to influence how Google views your business in relationship to these secondary search terms. Highly authoritative brands can rank for many, many terms in their overall service or product menu, so building authority over time is your goal here.

Hello Regina,

Thank you so much for bringing your question to the forum. Can you please clarify where (via which product) you are tracking keywords?

Hello Daniel,

You are right - this is an unusual time for all of us, and local businesses are facing some real challenges. If you need to temporarily close your location, contact Google via twitter at @GoogleMyBiz. Mike Blumenthal reported on the 16th that Google will be pushing out a "temporarily closed" label on businesses that local and state governments have ordered to close.

Other areas of your GMB listing you can use to push out info about the changes include:

• Hours of operation

• Google Posts

• Description

• Google Q&A (remember, you can write questions AND answer them as the business owner, but you can't apparently mention COVID-19 in this area.)

For restaurants, Google is apparently allowing them to edit their business name to state that they are offering takeout.

I recommend reading this post from Darren Shaw for more ideas: https://whitespark.ca/blog/keeping-gmb-accurate-during-covid19-pandemic/

I hope this helps, and I'm wishing you well.

Hello Rob!

Thank you for bringing your question to the forum.  If I'm correct in understanding that you have a Service Area Business (SAB) then here's what I can tell you:

1. You are not allowed to create multiple GMB listings for your service areas, in most cases. Most SABs are allowed a single listing ... not multiple listings covering all the cities/suburbs they serve.  So, you could be having trouble because you've created ineligible listings. Definitely read Google's guidelines on this: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

2. It's fine to create whatever pages on your website you want to in order to represent your service area. However, only create such pages if they have a real purpose beyond targeting keywords. Recommend that you read: https://moz.com/blog/rank-beyond-location

3. For your eligible GMB location, you can either choose to point the listing to your homepage or to a landing page on your website. The homepage will typically have higher authority, so some businesses with multiple physical locations do choose to point all of the GMB listings to the homepage URL. Others feel it's better UX to point mutli-location business listings to the location landing pages on the website. It's a choice each brand has to make. So, for a legitimate physical location of the business, if you had a listing pointing to the homepage and then changed the URL to point to a location landing page with lower authority, that could cause a drop in local pack rankings.

I hope this feedback is helpful. Main thing will be for you to determine the number of listings you are eligible for, based on your number of physical locations. Please, feel free to let me know if you have any further questions.

Thank you for bringing your question to the forum, Daniel. Likely, what you will need to do is a full competitive audit (for which you can find some guidance here: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit) to discover why your business is being outranked by a competitor.  My glance at this here in the forum can't replace an audit, but I will take a look and jot down some notes about what I see.

1. You mention that you were previously in the 3 pack for "escape room Chicago" but on March 10, you dropped. Looking from my location on the West Coast on March 16, I see you are at position #10 in Google's local finder (the mapped results you see when you click on the 3-pack for more info). So, you haven't disappeared altogether, but you have definitely fallen at least 7 spots since you last enjoyed your 3 pack ranking. When you search from your location at the place of business, what position are you seeing yourself in today?

2. Your review count is many times greater than that of any competitor, with the exception of Fox in a Box also having over 1,000 reviews.  You currently have 1,399 reviews vs. the top competitor for this search term, Escape House, which has 95.  Pardon the frank question, but are you certain you haven't done anything to violate Google's review guidelines in a way that might have prejudiced them against your listing? This would include incentivizing reviews in any way for your business, having employees review your business, etc. The advantage should be to you here, in your far greater number of reviews, but when the total number of reviews is so much greater than most of the rest of the field, it's important to be sure guidelines are being adhered to.

3. Your overall star rating of 4.9 is .1 greater than Escape House's 4.8. Advantage to you.

4. Your categories are the same as your top competitor's. No difference there.

5.  Your competitor has written Google posts in the past. None are showing for you. Advantage to them.

6. You are doing a much better job responding to reviews than your top competitor is. Advantage to you.

7. What is going on with your business being located next door to two other escape businesses? Do you have a relationship with Escape House or Safe House? What is the scenario here?

8. In terms of business names, the name on your street signage as seen via Google Street View does not match what you have called your business in your GMB listing. Your street sign reads: The Escape Game. Your GMB listing is titled: The Escape Game Chicago. Adding extra keywords to your listing title is considered spam. Meanwhile, Escape House does not have extra keywords in their name. Technically, because Google's algorithm is still rewarding business name spammers, the advantage in this could be to you, but on the other hand, it could be possible that your business name was reported to Google and they are docking you for this.

9. The MozCast reported a bit of heavy weather on March 9th which could have included a shakeup in your pack. Local Rank Flux also reported a "hot" day on the 9th (see https://www.localsearchforum.com/threads/sudden-gmb-ranking-drop-for-all-keywords.55923/).

So, these are some things I'm seeing at a glance. I would recommend that you follow through with a complete audit between yourself and the business ranking #1. And those questions regarding your reviews, your business name, and the geographic scenario regarding your business and the 2 competitors being next door to one another deserve a closer look. You aren't being impacted by the Possum filter, from what I can see, because you are present on the map despite your close proximity to the two other competitors, but you are in a densely competitive area, for sure.

Please, feel free to come back with answer to the questions I've asked or with further questions of your own.