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Hi Tommy, From a purely local perspective, it is very important to understand whether the client has just 1 or 10 physical offices. If only one, then the main thrust of his website will probably need to be slanted most strongly towards his physical location. The hope here would be to gain traction in the Local SERPs, whereas any other cities he wants to target, but in which he has no physical office, will be unlikely to be able to achieve high visibility in the Local SERPs. These office-less locations would need to fight for organic rankings for his other desired local terms. There is some grey area here on my side because I'm not positive whether your client's business model is actually local or not. Is there a legal business name, unique physical street address and unique local area code phone number associated with at least one of his target cities? Or, is his business (and his product) totally virtual? In the latter case, then breaking into the local SERPs at all is going to be next to impossible because of Google's preference for displaying true local businesses for so many geo-related queries. I feel like I've started to answer your question, but details like the ones I've mentioned are what one needs to understand before making a positive decision about how to proceed with a campaign. Please, feel free to give further information if you can about the client's business model, product and physical geography - but you do not need to give names or use real keywords. Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question! Miriam

Hi Jason,

If that is the source of the snippet, then the business is more or less stuck with waiting for Google to update its cache. How frequently Google does this for a given site is dependent on many factors. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A but I'm going to ask one of our excellent traditional SEOs to stop by to speak to you about the cache. Hang in there!

Miriam

Hi Jason,

Thank you for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Can you please define precisely what you mean by 'incorrect'? It doesn't match what?

At any rate, first step for you is to do a search in the Google for the text of the description to see if you can find out where it is coming from (someplace on the site, from a third party site) etc. Google takes its text from more than one place, so discovering the origin of what you are seeing is going to be your first move. Please come back and update us on what you find.

Miriam

Thanks for the clarification, C2G,

I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A. Speaking from a purely Local perspective, yes, the job ahead of you for the separate insurance business will be to build a good website with strong geographic hooks in it, following basic local optimization best practices. You will want to linkbuild to the site. Off the site, you will want to claim any existent profiles, make sure there are no violations on any of them, check for duplicates and other problems and fill in the blanks where there are not currently listings but should be.

In my opinion, the absolute easiest tasks are for brand new businesses with no Internet presence at all, because you are starting from scratch and have total control over getting things done right the first time around. I find it a little more challenging doing the sleuthing for an existent business in order to turn up all records that pre-exist for their business to verify their correctness, but this is certainly not impossible.

Regarding reserving the domain name...it has long been considered a good trust signal with SEs to purchase a domain name for at least a few years at a time. Insurance is a dog eat dog world...you want to encourage the client to do all he can to appear trustworthy.

Greetings, Michael!

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. While a complete audit of both businesses would take some doing and is really beyond the scope of what I can do here in the forum, I think the obvious reason one of those business is ranking for 'best bar' is that the name of the business is 'best bar  (b que)'.  Google may be understanding queries for 'best bar' as having an intent to find this business.

Other members are taking a proactive stance in asking you what you are doing for your business. Are we all reckoning correctly that these 2 businesses are your competitors? If so, have you done everything possible for your own business, in terms of a local search marketing campaign. Specifically,

How strong are the local hooks in your website?

How strong is your local content?

Have you got a good link profile pointing to the site?

Is your Google Place page violation free and complete?

Are there duplicate listings or other problems that could be tanking your rankings?

Are you actively encouraging Google-based user reviews? Does any competitor have more reviews than you?

Are you listed in major third party local business indexes and review sites?

Are you building up a strong citation profile to your Place Page?

Shane Thomas is right to mention the importance of reviews - but I did want to be sure to mention that Google and most other review entities specifically forbid the use of incentives in exchange for reviews. You must inspire happy customers' goodwill rather than attempting to give them bonuses if they will review your business. And Yelp doesn't want you to ask for reviews at all (though this is something of a grey area).

It's smart to look at the competition, absolutely, but the only thing you can control is what you are doing with your own business. Hopefully some of these ideas will be helpful to you! Good luck!

Miriam

I think you've made a smart choice, Nolan! Thanks for letting me give you my feedback and good luck with the Local SEO. It should be fun doing this for your brother. If I can be of any further assistance, please just let me know.

Miriam

Hi C2G,

Is the legal business name, street address and local area code phone number for the law firm COMPLETELY distinct from that of the insurance business? I ask this question because Google does not permit the creation of additional Place Pages for specialties within a given business. For example, a company that washes windows cannot have a separate Place Page for their gutter cleaning services. This is only allowed if the 2 things are separate legal business with separate offices and phone numbers. I thought it was important to jump in here and ask this vital question.

Greetings, Nolan!

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Definitely read the article Itsvan linked to. It's a super resource.

In my opinion, the hyphens are not optimal. As the aforementioned article states, hyphenated domain names can look somewhat spammy.

Here's something for you to consider: when I do a Google search for just 'north brunswick', Google immediately shows me a map of New Jersey. I am not finding any other North Brunswicks mentioned in the top 10 results of the SERPs. I wouldn't consider the mention of NJ in your URL necessary at all, given this point. Because of this, I would consider northbrunswicklaundromat.com to be a better choice than any you have listed.

24 characters puts this on the long side, but it's certainly optimized and at least it isn't hyphenated.

I was tempted to suggest nbrunswicklaundromat.com to cut out some of the letters, but a search for that is bringing up references to NEW Brunswick.

At any rate, I think the mention of New Jersey is unnecessary. The strength of the optimization of your website is going to count most in terms of displaying strong geographic data for the bots and human users. Google should have no problem understanding where you are.

Hope this helps, and do read that article!

Miriam

My pleasure - sounds like your experience will be your most powerful asset! Sincere wishes for success!

Miriam

Hi Fidelity One,

Thank you for clearing that up for me. I misunderstood your business as a virtual one. Your questions is one I have seen commonly asked, and one for which no Local or Global SEO firm that I know of has every published a firm answer. Google certainly hasn't. You can see a small discussion on this topic in the comments on a post of Rand's from last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local

Here is what I can tell you, but please take this advice in the form of an opinion rather than a hard fact. Local and organic SERPs are running on two separate, distinct algorithms. Let's think, for example, of a franchise like McDonalds. They have a national headquarters and are an international business, but they also have Place Pages for each of their storefronts. Google is not going to think McDonalds is located at 21 Center Street SmallTown USA because they've got a Place Page for a storefront there, right? Granted, few businesses have the fame or clout of McDonalds, but the same factors should ostensibly apply to any business.

In your shoes, I would view Local as something I was doing in addition to my traditional SEO. In fact, you could start this out extremely small as an experiment (with, of course, stat tracking software in place). Instead of going the typical route of a purely local business, implementing geographic data sitewide, you could create just one page on your website with a locally-optimized URL, title, header, content, business name, street address and local area code phone number. In creating your Place Page, you could do what franchises do and link the Place Page directly to this URL instead of to the homepage of your website. Then, you could watch over a period of, say, 6 months to see what actual effect this has had.

Does your organic traffic drop in any way? How about your rankings?

Are you getting new visibility and links thanks to your local promotion? New traffic? New phone calls and business?

My guess is that you would NOT see any detriment to your organic standings, but because of the unwieldy and honestly unpredictable nature of Local in Google, you should treat your case as a distinct experiment. If you are new to Local, you need to know coming into this that Google Places/Maps is notoriously buggy and that folks like myself and Mike Blumenthal have been blogging about the crazy bugs in the system for years now. Stats were recently published that 8 million users have signed up for Google Places, but Google continues to pursue their policy of not offering real, meaningful customer support. When things go wrong (and they often do) getting help can be virtually impossible unless you've got an in with Google.

I don't want to scare you off, but do want to be sure to add this cautionary note if you are entering Local for the first time.

The other thing to remember is that Places is not actually an opt-in venue. If your address exists anywhere on the web (such as in a yellow pages ad or other directory), Google can create a Place Page for your business without any action on your part. So, if your address is already out there anywhere, this is all the more reason for you to actively participate in Local so that you have at least some control over your data.

I hope my thoughts have helped you to reach a decision about this important step! Thanks again for coming to Q&A to ask your question.

Greetings Fidelity One!
Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. If am correctly understanding your description of your business as being a virtual one, then this is not a question of rankings but rather one of appropriateness. Virtual businesses are not deemed to be Local by Google.

In order to qualify as local, you must have a real physical street address (not a P.O, box or virtual office, a unique local area code phone number and a legal business name. Clients must either come directly to the street address to do one-on-one business with you or your staff must depart from the physical street address to do business with clients (as in the case of chimney sweeps, carpet cleaners, etc.)

If any of these criteria do not fit your business model, then Local just isn't the right space for you.

Hope this helps!

Greetings, Matt!

Thanks so much for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Your assessment of the situation is an honest one - how much can one say about auto insurance over and over again? Member, Ressler Motors, has gotten you off on the right track here, thinking outside the box to discover creative types of content that could make each page different.

I would further recommend discovering how you can personalize the pages in a meaningful way. For example, each city page could tell a real story about insuring a real driver there. This would take some doing - you would need the company to identify a happy customer who would be willing to tell their story and you would have to arrive at a level of privacy for them that meets their comfort at the same time. So, you might not publish photos or full names, but getting a driver from City X to describe why he needed to come to your client's company would make this page different than your page for City Y.

Similarly, you can mine the staff at the company for other stories. Get them to describe what is most common in different towns in terms of the types of issues that make for high risk drivers. Does town X have a lot of DUIs, while the highway passing through town Y engenders a lot of speeding tickets?

Does the company offer any type of seminars about improving one's driving record? Could these be featured on certain pages?

How about interviews with highway patrol officers explaining their side of the story?

How about advice for parents whose teens have already racked up a bad driving record? When should they take the keys away? When will the law take the keys away in these cities, towns, counties?

Ressler's idea about photos is excellent, complete with good captions, of course, and I definitely think there is room here for videos. Statistical videos (with text descriptions) showing worst traffic areas in town with stats of the numbers of accidents and violations would be unique and very local.

How well your client is funded and how invested they are in the creation of quality pages vs. squeaking by with the least possible effort is likely to determine how far you can take this. Assuming that the client has only one main office, I would expect the pages to have to be pretty strong to break into the organic SERPs because the client is likely to be outranked by companies with actual physical offices in the neighboring towns in the Local SERPs.

I think the overall picture needs to be one of telling a compelling story about what happens in each of the towns in terms of driving problems, who these issues affect and how the company can help. You may want to engage a creative copywriter to manage the project, but I do believe your richest data sources for whatever is written or produced will be the company's clients and the staff.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

Miriam

Hi MLC,

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. The requirements for your client having a local listing are that he has a:

-Legal Business Name

-Real street address (not a virtual address) where people come to him for services or from which he leaves to render services for clients

-Local phone number.

If he does not have all three of these things, he is not appropriate for inclusion in Local results.

If he does have all three of these things, then a local SEM campaign for him is typically going to include having strong geographic hooks in his site + good local-focused content + inclusion in Google Places and any other local business indexes that are relevant to his country + the acquisition of links, citations and reviews.

In addition to this, you will be implementing traditional SEO techniques for his national SEO campaign.

I want to be sure I am correctly understanding your question regarding making queries from other locations. I believe what you mean is that you are located in a different city in Spain than your client and, thus, you are seeing different results than he. This is true.

However, it is critical for any Local SEO to understand that ALL Internet users see different local results (and organic, results, too) based upon factors including IP address and past user history. Because of this, Local SEOs must educate their clients to understand that no results are set in stone. Even the person living next door to the business owner may be seeing slightly different results because of his past user history.

Now, that being said, in North America, when I do a search for something, the results come complete with a left column that shows my location and asks if I want to change it. Do a search for something like tapas restaurant and see if you get this same column on the left side of the results in Spain. If so, you can change your location from Madrid to Barcelona. Sorry that I'm not 100% positive which options there are in your country - I'm most familiar with how things work in the USA. Try this and see if it works for you.

But bear in mind, no matter what your settings are, there is no such thing as a set of local results that are the same for all users. Because of the way Google now handles relevance for individual users, we all see personalized results.

Hope this helps, and I would appreciate you returning to this thread to let me know if you have the change location capability in Spain. I'm interested!

Miriam

You are very welcome, John!

Hi John,

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. In my personal experience, I have seen listings marked as 'personally closed' eventually drop out of the index if no further changes are made to them, but as to how long this takes, I can't give you a firm answer. Mike Blumenthal's in depth post on this topic comes to the same conclusion regarding unknown length of time, and you might like to read it:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/09/28/google-places-what-does-the-new-business-permanently-closed-process-look-like/

The alternate route to sitting around waiting to see when this would happen would be to reclaim the business back into the client's account and then follow the steps for reporting the problem of the business having moved and having another, authoritative Place Page.

At the beginning of 2011, I wrote a post about experimenting with reporting a closed business:

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=926

4 weeks later I heard from Google and wrote about their marking the business as closed and emailing me

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=958

At that point, I could still find the flagged-as-closed business in the index. Your question here prompted me to go and see if this was still the case. I discovered that the shop I reported as closed now appears to have disappeared from the organic and Places results, a year later. Wish I could tell you exactly when this happened, but I didn't keep following up on this. At any rate, it did happen eventually.

Hope this helps, John!

Miriam

Greetings!

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your important question. This interview with Eric Enge is over a year old now, but his advice holds true, in my opinion:

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml

The part of the interview relating to your scenario is this:

Eric Enge: Let’s say you have more than one location, 100 for example. In your view, is it helpful to have individual pages on the website for all of the locations? Also, is it helpful to have the Google local business center linked to each of those individual pages rather than having 100 locations that point to a single web address?

Carter Maslan: I can tell you what I think the ideal end state is, and there are various levels of getting there. Ultimately, we would like to have the store-specific page known so that people can just click through and see today's specials and any kind of adjustments for that particular day. We would love to have all of that information on a direct click to the most specific page for that location.

That’s what we encourage, but there are still a lot of chains and things that just link to their top-level domain. I guess it's a split answer. We want to get to a store specific page, but we are not uniformly there across all of the businesses.

Eric Enge: Could that potentially be encouraged by making it a ranking factor, for example?

Carter Maslan: Yes. I guess there are two sides to it. If you create a store-specific page that really just has an address, it wouldn't be as helpful as having some genuinely good content on the page that the user would really appreciate having as the first click-through experience. That’s what I think we need to work through.

We don't want to arbitrarily tell people that they must create a store-specific page, because we are really just trying to find the most useful page for that business. That’s why I am not so definitive on the store-specific page or not. I really just want what’s best for the retailer, store or businesses, first and foremost giving the user what he would want to see when he clicks on that business.

Eric Enge: Say you have a store-specific page that lists specific and individual things about just one store location. Depending on the kind of business that could be an inventory list that shows you've got extra stock?

Carter Maslan: There is a chain of stores that carries yoga equipment that my wife really likes. They have special yoga instruction, carry special brands, and host lectures on some special days. There are all kinds of things that the retailer does that relate to that specific store location, and there is also a general corporate catalogue page. So this is not black and white, and even though we want to encourage it, it's not that there is a definitive guidance saying companies need to have that page.

Eric Enge: Obviously it’s good if there is a quality page with information unique and specific to each location.

Carter Maslan: Yes, that's great. If we know that there’s good information about that page, then that helps on search and the snippets that we can show on the search results, because we know that the page is referencing that place. It does help even if it ends up not being the page that you list as your primary homepage. If there is good content that we know is content about that place, then it helps us do a better job with query results.

If a company has a page that's store-specific and talks about its class schedule, and there is one that says its holding Tai Chi class tonight and someone is searching for places to do Tai Chi, then that helps us to score it. If a lot of people have found that page helpful about the Tai Chi class, then when people search for Tai Chi we would know that that location has something to do with Tai Chi.

Now, bear in mind that Eric was stating this as an opinion of best practices rather than an official statement from Google, but barring having a distinct website for each of the franchise's locations, yes, having a unique page for each business will be a good idea. And, of course, each location must have its own local area code phone number and street address. This will qualify each branch to have a unique Place Page which can then link to its respective landing page on the website.

Parting advice - do make an effort to make the landing pages unique. Don't just cut and paste copy, changing the address and phone number. Write unique copy about each business!

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Greetings Ian,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I want to be certain that I understand your client's situation. You mention the queries

First Aid Training in Cornwall
First Aid Courses in Cornwall
Health and Safety Training in Cornwall

These are not, per se, local queries. Google Places (and most of local search) is a city based application. If the client is in Victoria, Cornwall, then 'Victoria' is actually his true local term. I am in the U.S., so things may be slightly different here, but at any rate, I would expect the client to rank well in Places for Victoria-related queries and that efforts to go after the county of Cornwall would need to be chiefly organic in nature.

Is this correct or am I misunderstanding what you are describing?

In general, in North America, the website is an extremely important part of any local campaign. One applies all traditional SEO techniques + the strong usage of geographic data. So, good onpage SEO, lots of local-focused content and linkbuilding are all going to be party of your work with local-focused clients to achieve high Places rankings for their city of location.

At the same time, they need to have a clean, complete Places record (no violations!) and work to accrue citations and reviews within Google. Simultaneously, they need good records in the major 3rd party local business indexes in your country. All of this comes together to create a winning Internet presence.

In closing, there was a shakeup here in N. America some weeks ago. My friend and colleague, Linda Buquet, has dubbed this change the 'proximity algo lockout'. I don't know if this happened overseas as well, but I recommend you read about Google's apparent new narrower circle from city center in their results:

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-algorithm-ranking-drop.html

Did this happen in the U.K. as well, and could it have affected your client's rankings? Just a thought.

Hi Rahul & Robert,

If I've understood your questions correctly, you want to know how one becomes a third party image provider in Google Places so that linked images are showing up on Place Pages from your body of data. I want you to both know that I have researched this and have also spoken with Mike Blumenthal (imo the top Local SEO in the country) to be confident that my facts are correct.

As I mentioned before, it is up to Google to decide with whom it partners for this service. There is a form somewhere for submitting a request to become a Google partner, but for the life of me, I couldn't find it and Mike wasn't sure where it was either. It may be somewhere within this set of pages:

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mapcontent/

I spent about 10 minutes hunting for it to no avail, so it seems it's not very obvious, but maybe with some more searching, you can turn up the form.

What you can typically expect is that Google is only going to partner with very huge companies able to provide a huge set of data. If you are small, it won't hurt to contact Google (if you can find that dratted form) but I would not expect to become a partner.

Other than being a partner, there appears to be a more random sourcing of data from various sites using rich snippets, so that is something you both might want to investigate further. I sincerely hope this answer helps.

Miriam

Hi Robert!

I want to make sure I understand your question. Can you define what you mean by an 'affiliate'? Obviously, Google allows UGC from anybody on Place Pages (any user), but I'm not quite sure this is what you mean. Thanks!

Hi Rahul,

Google has certain sites from which it draws third party photos (such as Panaramio, Yahoo, etc.). In order to get links like that, you would have to be considered one of Google's trusted third party image sources. Does this answer your question?

Miriam