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Hi Daniel!

Thanks for asking a good question. It sounds like you've got a complex issue here, so I'll number my thoughts to reply:

1. If your competitors are spamming you on Yelp, then your first step should be to document that as much as you possibly can and report it to Yelp: https://www.yelp-support.com/Reporting_an_Inappropriate_Review?l=en_US Be prepared to offer any proofs you can that these are actually competitors doing this to you.

2. No one that I know of has ever published a study as to whether owner responses on Yelp impact the rankings of Yelp listings. It's an interesting question, but not one I can respond to with data, unfortunately.

3. If you are able to get Yelp to remove spam reviews, problem solved. If, however, you can't prove to them that these are your competitors and they leave the reviews live, then I would strongly recommend replying to them. Otherwise, what you are doing is giving up any control you have over writing any part of this narrative of your brand online. Yelp reviews are public, and negative reviews with no owner responses tell the public that the brand doesn't care and leaves customers in the lurch when they have a problem. The opposite of this can be a brand like yours that responds with accountability and support when a customer complains, showing the public that your business takes care of customers and will take care of them. However, it's definitely challenging to do this when a review is actually spam. It all feels rather fake to apologize for a fictitious negative experience, but the thing is, your potential future customers don't know the negative experience is fake. So, you just have to do your best to demonstrate that your brand listens and cares, even if you believe what you're listening to is fictitious.

4. It also sounds like you need to work on getting real reviewers that meet Yelp's filter criteria to review you. Darren Shaw wrote a good tutorial on this last year, and I think it will really help you with this: https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-get-yelp-reviews-that-wont-get-filtered-and-improve-your-rating/

5. Be sure you are building up an excellent review base on other platforms like Google, Facebook and whatever directories matter most to your market.

6. Hang in there. You can't ignore Yelp right now, but they are only one portion of your reputation, and you're not alone in having a hard time navigating their filters and spam problems. Hopefully, you can prove you've been targeted with spam and get some/all of it removed. But, if you can't, re-focus on the core of providing exceptional customer experiences and diversifying the number of places you receive reviews, and that should help you continue to grow a positive reputation. Review sites are all having a hard time with spam, and it's their problem to solve if they want to remain relevant to consumers.

Hope this helps!

Hi Corsolutions!

I agree with what our community members are saying here: it's tough to rank in the local packs without a physical location. Because of this, your strategy for visibility in these other service cities can include:

• Content

-Links to that content

-Social outreach

-PPC

-Offline Marketing

Your goal here will be organic, social, paid and real-world visibility, instead of local SERP visibility, because it's typically out of reach unless you are in a market with very low competition.

My pleasure, Joe!

Hi David,

Yes, unfortunately, Google's support is often not the best. That's why I'm recommending you take this to the forum and ask for the help of the expert volunteers there.

Hi Davit,

Thanks for the links! I agree with you that it seems a bit weird seeing this business, with no GMB listing, doing so well organically. I looked at a few things I normally look at, and couldn't see a "easy" explanation.

So, I asked one of our organic SEO experts, Britney Muller, if she could take a glance at this, and she suggested a couple of things:

• Your competitor has been around since 2006, so pretty established

• Your competitor has invested in links, which appear to be paying off

• "LAX car service" is one of the phrases they are doing best on, though they are not doing so well on other terms

• They are investing heavily in PPC, which could be producing what she described as some sort of "halo" effect

Taking all of that into consideration, I do consider this competitor of yours as having earned rankings for this term that don't make immediate sense. Give this, I believe if you could hire a good company to do a full competitive audit for you, you should be able to map out a strategy to surpass them, but it may take some doing.

Hope you'll receive other feedback.

Hi Joe!

Yes, you want a single website for the company, with 3 good landing pages on it (one for each of your locations). With just 3 locations, you could put all 3 in the footer, if you like, but it's likely not necessary to do so.

And, if these are physical, staffed locations and the company meets face-to-face with its customers and you have a unique phone number for each branch, it is eligible for 3 GMB listings.

You can then either link all 3 branches' listings to the homepage (which some argue is better for rankings) or, link each to its own landing page (which I much prefer as it offers a much better opportunity of converting the customer with content that's been created just for them). But, it's up to you which you prefer as Google doesn't insist on one path or the other.

Just be sure your locations meet the specifications of Google's guidelines and you should be good to go.

Hi Davit,

Something very important to take into consideration here is that this is a local business and you are competing for local queries, including localized organic queries. This means that Google's local and organic results will be localized to the searcher, basically creating a scenario in which there are no static #1 rankings. Whether you are competing for geo-modified or non-modified keywords, the SERPs will change based on search language and searcher location.

It sounds like you've begun a competitive audit between yourself and this competitor (we have a free spreadsheet for doing that, mentioned in this blog post, if it helps). Have you studied the geographic relationship between your physical location, your competitor's physical location, the centroid of the city you're competing in, and the relationship of both your businesses in regards to the perimeters Google shows on the map when you look up your city? What are you seeing when you do so?

Also, if you can share your own domain, that should help the community better understand your scenario. Hope this helps!

Hello there!

This is an 'it depends". Are you able to offer some further details? For example, are you saying that you have something like a cleaning business that used to serve both residential and commercial clients, but now you have built a separate website for the commercial services the business offers? And, that you are still really just one company, operating out of the same physical address? Or, something else? The more detail you can provide, the better advice the community can give

Dear David,

You may already have done this, but I would highly recommend that you take this question to the GMB forum and ask, in the title of your post, for a "Gold Product Expert" to help you understand whether you have a penalty and if you do, why. GMB name spam may have contributed, but is usually not a big issue if you correct it. However, moving your address around numerous times and not really having an address is an issue you need to speak with one of the Gold Product Experts about. I have never had a client in Africa and am not sure of the exact protocols there, so please, do go to the forum, share the complete details of your business and specifically title your post with a polite request for help from those folks. Good luck!

Glad the reply was helpful, Chook1. You're in a tough spot and I wish there was an easier answer to give you, but know that I'm wishing you good luck in this venture. May your as-yet-unknown beautiful places for bike tours become world-class destinations in the future!

Hi Chook1!

From reading this thread, I'm understanding a couple of things. Please confirm that this is the scenario you are describing:

1. You offer cycling tours in parts of Australia that no one seems to be looking for.

2. You wish that when people search for something that they are looking for, like "cycling tours Italy", your pages about your tours in Australia would come up in the results.

If my understanding is correct then, in response to the above two points:

1. You have a demand problem rather than an SEO problem. Selling a product/service people aren't yet asking for (cycling tours in Carnarvon Gorge) means your initial focus has to be on creating awareness and a demand for this. It's like you've built a new invention that no one has ever heard of before. In order to turn your invention into a household word, you're likely going to have to advertise it via social media and other channels until the demand becomes real and people are actually searching for what you offer.

2. Google has no incentive to show Australian bike tours when people are looking for Italian bike tours. Anything outside of Italy would be irrelevant to the searcher, so this is not really a goal you should waste time on trying to achieve. Google Maps, mentioned in the ongoing discussion on this thread, will be of no help to you in Italy if your business and your tours are located in Australia. Google Maps is for local search marketing - not International marketing. So, rather, your best strategy is likely to be what I've described in #1 around building awareness/demand for what you offer. If you are trying to get Australians to take bike tours in little-known spots in the country, you will need to advertise in Australia. If you are trying to get travelers from other countries to come to Australia, you will have to advertise wherever those audiences congregate. As far as SEO goes, you'll likely want to try to develop relationships with whatever websites publish the most trusted info on bike tours for your target audience and see what you can do to start getting some press and links from them.

Does this help? If I've in any way misunderstood your scenario, please feel free to provide further details.

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.

Hi Steven,

I believe this WB Friday will be quite apropos to your question: https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

*But do remember, rankings are not static. Where you may be #2 for one searcher, you could be #1 or #10 for another, particularly for localized phrases like the ones you are targeting.

Good Morning, Isenselogic,

I totally understand the frustration here, but it sounds to me like you need to have an important conversation with this client regarding the fact that no SEO has the ability to control Google's presentation of its data. For whatever reason, Google considers your client more relevant to the plural form of this search than to the singular form, and they also feel that the user is best served by the more limited results for the latter. Google has always treated singular and plural keywords differently, and in local, they do all kinds of zoom variations based on perceived intent and user location. If the client is expecting you to change Google's mind about this, then this is an unreasonable expectation and one you need to sit down and talk them out of, if you can. SEOs can implement best practices but do not control SERPs.

That being said, one thing I do notice looking at those two sets of SERPs is that the 3 showing up for the singular keyword phrase have selected a different primary category than your client. Your client is listed as an "herb shop" and they are all listed as "cannabis stores". So, one experiment you could do would be to see if changing your client's primary category would vary the way they are being displayed. But, of course, before you dive into doing that, you need to let the client know that changing primary categories can seriously alter rankings. So, you'd need to present this as an experiment and then track results and see how it went. If, however, Google is tied to the idea that they only want to show 3 results for that particular phrase, then you cannot guarantee that the client will be one of the 3 and you can't "convince" Google to show more than 3 results if they want to show 3 of them.

Theoretically, if your client is stronger (in all of the various ranking factors) than any of the results in that set, changing their primary category could cause them to displace one of the 3 competitors, but be sure you're setting the client's expectations properly by telling them you can't guarantee anything. If the client won't be reasonable about this, it may be time to end the contract.

Sounds like the name change might be a good suggestion, Robert, given this scenario. Good luck with this!

Thanks so much for the link!

That's a good video. I enjoyed watching it and see how it worked well for HubSpot. So basically, from watching that, I see that HubSpot is calling their core topic a pillar page. In your case, your core topic is "Normandy Bike Tour". Following their model, you would be creating blog posts answering user questions surrounding that topic ... but you are saying your research is telling you no one has questions surrounding this core topic. That kind of made me scratch my head and I went to AnswerThePublic to see what they said. I was honestly surprised at how little their tool turned up:

https://answerthepublic.com/reports/f9df5323-7f1b-48a2-90e6-293279b7b916

So not a ton of help to you there, but do scroll down that page to see a couple of ideas.

Google's related searches is showing me:

bike tours france

brittany bike tours

guided bike tours europe

tours of brittany and normandy

backroads normandy

bicycle tours

vbt france

walking tours normandy

And if you start slowly typing Normandy bike tour (one letter a time) into Google's search box, you see things like:

Normandy bike routes

Normandy biker friendly B&B

Normandy bike trips

Normandy bike hub

So, while these aren't questions, per se, they are possible ideas for blog post content that can support your pillar page.

If I replace "Normandy" with "France" both in Google and at AnswerThePublic, I get more information, and it's making me wonder if your topic is a bit too narrow to be a true "pillar" by HubSpot's definition. I wonder, rather, if your core topic is actually French bike tours and information about touring Normandy is one of the supporting topics rather than a pillar. I'm not sure what your complete business model is, if it's limited to Normandy-only, or if it has a larger topic. Care to provide any more detail on this?

Good afternoon!

Your YouTube link appears to be broken. Can you kindly re-post it so the community can take a look? Thank you!

Hi Robert!

By BSC are you talking about the educational term Bachelor of Science? If so, then Google would almost certainly be trying to parse the intent of a search phrase containing that term. If I name my meteorology store "Weather Near Me", Google is going to have a very hard time knowing that customers are looking for my store and not for a forecast for their area. Sounds like this may be what's happening to your client ... that their name is too much like a more general search phrase, causing Google to diversify the SERPs because they aren't 100% certain about searcher intent.

If I'm not understanding, please feel free to provide more details.

Good afternoon!

My ideal approach is that you go with a single website at domain.com with the location landing pages all being domain.com/chicago

It's the simplest method with no drawbacks of any kind. Subdomains can get you into this messy controversy:

https://www.seroundtable.com/seo-google-fight-subdomains-subdirectories-25126.html

But, your scenario has an extra layer of complexity built into it, in that your client has also built out multiple domains. That makes this such an 'it depends' scenario, that it's unlikely you'll be able to get a really authoritative answer from anybody who isn't looking at your client's actual domains.

So, what I can say here is that, ideally, I'd recommend a single website with all content on it and links to it going to strengthen the overall authority of the domain and brand instead of being divided up across multiple domains. I think this is the strongest approach, in terms of SEO, branding, consumer experience, ease of management, etc. But, I will say that there are some cases in which, if the client is earning significant revenue from multiple domains, it could be not-the-best idea to tell them to take those down or even re-direct them. On the other hand, sometimes the client has simply created a spammy mess, sometimes even for the purpose of fooling search engines and customers, in which case, you may need to make overhauling all of their web assets a prerequisite of working with them. Definitely, this is an "it depends".

Hello Korado11,

As I understand your question, you are offering a service in a large city with several hundred districts, and you are hoping to rank for your service in multiple districts. There will be several facets to the advice I can give you about this.

1. If you are trying to rank in the organic results for these districts, your ability to do so will be based on a combination of domain authority, page authority, links, optimization, website content and user behavior.

2. If you are trying to rank in the local results for these terms, everything in #1 applies, plus other factors like reviews and citations, but you must also take into account the role user proximity plays in local rankings. If you are physically located in district A and your potential customer is located in district B, Google simply may not show you in the local results for that user, because they are not physically near your business at the time of search. Where competition is low or weak, it is sometimes possible for a business to rank locally in multiple districts of a large city, but if competition is stiff, it will be an uphill battle to overcome Google's extreme bias towards user proximity.

3. Whether you are hoping to rank organically or locally, your key here will be to do a competitive audit of the businesses outranking you to see how their metrics for each surmised ranking factor outweigh yours. You will tally this up with software or in a spreadsheet and this is what should set the strategy that you or any marketer you hire will enact so that your metrics can compete with and eventually surpass those of the businesses currently outranking you. *However, there may be some things you simply can't overcome, like user proximity. Where organic/local efforts fail, your alternatives are PPC, social and offline marketing to reach audiences you just can't access via SEO .

4. I would advise you to closely study the most recent Local Search Ranking Factors survey to see which factors expert local SEOs feel have most impact on local and localized-organic results. You will want to familiarize yourself with each factor, and most of them should be in your competitive audit process. I will also link you here to a post I wrote two years ago containing a spreadsheet for a competitive local business audit, but I want to mention that there are some new factors I'd be adding to that in 2019. Nevertheless, it will give you a good idea of what an audit should look like.

5. At the end of the above process, what you'd want to have is a list of tasks and goals, including a list of goals that aren't going to be achievable so that you don't waste time or money on pursing them with tactics that won't actually work. By studying the SERPs and your competitors, you should begin to have a strong sense of which districts you may be able to achieve a strong local and organic presence in, and which districts may be beyond the reach of SEO, making it more sensible for you to attempt to reach those desired audiences with PPC, social or offline outreach.

Hope this helps!