Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You are very welcome, Denis, and good luck!

Hi Dennis,

Google's policy is that you are allowed to claim 1 listing for the business and one for each partner within it. It sounds to me as if you haven't created a Place Page for medical center itself (linking to the homepage). You are allowed to do this.

Regarding Yelp - I'm not 100% sure, but I do believe you can link to a page other than the homepage. However, I'm not sure of the value of doing this at this point. It may be smarter to just go with the homepage and a general overview listing of the medical center.

Good luck!

Hi Tom,

Both Richard & TomCraig are giving you some good ideas here. There is no reason your website can't be optimized for both National & Local SEO and the suggestions being given are ones I would agree with. In addition to this, you should properly optimize the footer site-wide for the local address/addresses using hCard microformatting and make sure your contact page is rich in content and well-optimized. Best of luck!

Hi JimmySEO,

Some good responses here. I also thought I'd throw into the mix SEOverflow's competitive analysis toolkit:

http://www.localsearchtoolkit.com/

I think you might find that very helpful.

Cheers!

Miriam

Hi All,

I thought I'd jump in here. Some good and creative discussion here, and Martin's comment regarding David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors is an important one. Definitely, though, a ton has changed since the 2010 study (which I had the fun of participating in) and I can hardly wait to see how the 2011 turns out. The rollout of Place Search last October has really shuffled the deck.

Tbone, I know the hope of your question is to find a workaround for this client whose franchises have no address, and while weaknesses in Maps/Places certainly have created some rather staggering loopholes, I'd like to throw a question into the mix:

Have you explained to your client that his business does not fit Google's definition of Local and that, rather than gaming the system and incurring the potential future wrath of the bots, he may need to do what other business are: changing his business model so that it is an authentic Local fit?

When the phone book was invented, you had to have a phone number to get listed. Local is equivalent, and the requirements are a unique local area code phone number and address. I genuinely believe that the quality of everyone's user experience is dependent upon business owners following these two guidelines, rather than attempting to come across as having a physical location where none exists.

Eric Enge did a great interview with Carter Maslan a while back that dealt, in part, with franchise businesses (http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml), and while your client cannot legitimately claim a Place Page for his non-physical locations until he changes his business model, he can at least follow the lead of creating a Place Page for his headquarters and city landing pages on his site for his service areas.

In my own work with Local clients, I try to teach them a civic-minded approach to the scenario. When they don't fit Google's definition, I encourage them to follow Local news to see if Google's rules change to include other types of business models than they currently do. I get phone calls every week from people who either don't understand the definition of Local, or do understand it and want to bend the rules, and I see these calls as a great opportunity for educating folks.

Good luck with your client. He's in a tough spot until such time as Google decides to broaden its definition of Local.