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Hi Karasd,

Thanks for writing in. Looks like the MozBar crawler isn't quite smart enough to figure out some of the code on the page, specifically this snippet:

(This is Miriam replying but I'm in Mozzer Alliance right now)

Hi Michael!

I think the most important thing here is for you to give yourself a crash course in Local SEO. This is a good place to start: <cite class="_Rm">https://moz.com/learn/local</cite>

It's vital to understand that your client's local pack rankings are going to relate solely to their physical location. So, if they've got 1 physical location, that means 1 Google My Business listing and 1 set of citations for that location only. You do not want to acquire extra phone numbers or virtual addresses of any kind. Only the real, physical location can be promoted as a contender for Google local pack rankings, unless you live in a very rural area or have a very niche business. Instead, you are in a competitive industry in a large city. So, main thing is to remember that physical address = local pack rankings. All other service cities = organic rankings.

So, yes, you do need a physical address. The phone number doesn't have to be local, but it's considered preferable by some. I don't see any mention of an address on the site right now, so that's something you'll need to address with the client. If the company does not have a dedicated public address, you can use the home address of the business owner and then, when creating the Google My Business page, be sure to choose the service area business settings that signal to Google to keep the address hidden. Regardless, it's advisable to have the complete name, address and phone number (NAP) of the business on the Contact Us page and the website footer.

The site architecture you'll be building out for the moving company will likely consist of basic pages (home, about, contact, etc.) a page for each service (moving, piano moving, what have you) and a page for each major city you serve. The content on these service city landing pages must be unique and of the highest possible quality you can create. This might include text content, video content, images, testimonials, tips, safety warnings, etc. But, again, be sure to warn the client that you do not want to use virtual addresses on these pages or anything like that. Don't be swayed by competitors who are seeming to get away with thin or duplicate landing pages. This is not the way to go and it makes them weak - you can hope to surpass them with a superior effort.

I'm not sure what you're describing about the links/press releases and blocks of cities. Google's Webmaster Guidelines do not want blocks of city names/zip codes anywhere on your website, so I'm not quite sure what it was that you saw.

Finally, yes, you may have a better chance of achieving higher organic rankings in smaller cities more quickly, because the competition is likely to be lower, but achieving this is going to be a combination of time + effort. It's much better to under-promise and over-deliver, specifically as this is your first job.

Hopefully the Moz Local learning center will get you off to a good start, and we have tons of great content in the Local column of the Moz blog. https://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo

Good luck with the project!

Thank you for reaching out! I'm Maura Hubbell, software engineer and member of the Mozzer Alliance, the Help Team's help team.

I've found out that protecvinduer.dk is responding with HTTP code 302, a temporary redirect, to protecwindows.com. Since protecwindows.com isn't a subdomain of protecvinduer.dk, we won't any redirect from the former to the latter. You need to set up your campaign with protecwindows.com.

Thanks for your question.

Maura  Hubbell

Hello again!
There are a few layers of things going on here, so I'll try to break it down as completely as I can.

The number of links reported in the 'Internal Links' column is coming directly from our index rather than the live crawl performed by the Crawl Test. So, any pages that we haven't indexed would display 0 internal links and a Page Authority of 1.

For the pages that we have indexed, we tabulate internal links from all pages on your site that we view, but those pages are not necessarily indexed. This means that the large difference that you're seeing between your site and your competitors' internal link count could be simply coming from the fact that we've seen (and potentially indexed) more pages from your site than your competitors. This could happen more readily if we indexed inbound links that pointed to a wider variety of pages on your site, and also the overall size of your site.

Also, it is always worth noting that this is just a snapshot based on your highly-authoritative backlinks, so it is not necessarily able to serve as a complete indicator of your (or your competitors') total link counts; these are just what we've observed during our particular indexing process.

As far as the SEO implications of these counts, while I'm certainly no expert, I don't believe that large numbers of internal links like this would have any sort of direct negative affect on your rankings. I hope this helps to explain!

Hi Benny!
Thanks for reaching out, and sorry for the confusion! Moz Local automatically pushes your business info out to Factual, Foursquare, Neustar/Localeze, Infogroup, Best of the Web, Acxiom and Superpages, but beyond that scope we aren't able to make any sort of guarantees.

We do also report on Google, Facebook, Yelp, Hotfrog, YP, Citysearch, Yahoo! and Bing, but if you're looking to create additional citations, then I would recommend investigating the full reach with help from another tool :).

Hey Pascal,

I took a look at your account and I don't see any messaging that notes you have hit your account limits. If you are still seeing the messaging on your account, can you please send us a screenshot to help@moz.com so we can investigate the issue further?

Thanks!

Chiaryn

Miriam here, signed into Mozzer Alliance at the moment.

Yes, include the suite number within span tags, definitely. You are also right that Google wants suites in the second address line, but for Schema purposes, do include them within the address section.

Hey David,

Tom brought up some good points and he's spot on with the fact that Google is always difficult to compare anything against.  They have so many more details that we can't replicate even with incognito windows such as Region, IP Address, Time of Day, etc.

I took a look at your account and compared a handful of keywords.  You definitely have some volatile keywords that fluctuate often.  This makes it harder to keep the reports up to date with the daily rankings since we run these reports weekly.  You may want to utilize Rank Tracker to check keywords a bit more manually if you want more control over your comparisons.

If you have more questions about your keywords and reports, the help team is always happy to investigate specific situations to give you more details about the comparisons.  Feel free to email your examples to help@moz.com and let us dig in for you more.

Hi Shauna,

You're very welcome! If your client's only real office is in Farmer's Branch, any Google+ Local pages he has built for any other city would be a violation of the guidelines, and thus, at risk for a takedown any time Google might notice them. Because this could then potentially 'prejudice' Google against the whole business, he might find his legitimate location suspected of spammy stuff as well. So, in a nutshell here, the client should not be thinking about what he may lose if he takes down spammy listings - he should be thinking about the preservation of his legitimate location. He's in an at-risk situation that needs to be addressed as wisely and speedily as possible

SAB marketing works like this:

1. You build a website. Your core on-site optimization revolves around the city in which you have a physical office.

2. You only build citations for that physical office.

3. On the website, you develop a unique page of content for each service city. You do not build citations for these location-less service cities. You hope to earn organic rankings (not local pack rankings) with these city pages because of their strength, quality, earned links, etc.

This article is a year old and may have a few outdated references in it, but it should help you discern your client's business model type and understand what a typical marketing plan looks like for this type of model:

https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

The only alternative to the above is for the client to establish a legitimate, staffed office in Dallas, one in Plano, etc.

If this is a new client of yours and/or you are new to Local SEO, I think it would be a very smart move to suggest that he hire an expert Local SEO to consult with him. If you've already discovered that he's been engaged in some spammy practices, chances are pretty high that he has engaged in others you may not yet know about. If a good Local SEO was willing to fully audit the business for him or for your agency, they would likely uncover a number of things that need to be addressed to clean up the way the business has been marketing itself and put it on a clean track.

If you're looking for a heavy hitter in this field, I recommend you check out the Contributors box on last year's Moz Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Everyone who participates in that survey does so because their expertise is widely recognized: https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

Hope this helps!

P.S. Oops, so sorry. This is Miriam writing, by the way, but I'm signed into Alliance at the moment