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I got it. Didn't really notice that with snail mail I guess this kind of advertisement technique is vanishing with time...and its not really worth the effort (to collect address from there and print and send stuff there)

Hi MrSem, Yes, the limitations you've pointed out are, unfortunately, baked into the environment. There's no way to prove impact in a vacuum. You can't stop competitors from making changes on their end that could be positive or negatively impacting the rank of your business at the same time that you are cleaning up your citations. Search results are so dynamic, it's rarely possible to be 100% positive in stating causation, with no margin for error, because even if you can control what your company is doing, you can't control what competitors are doing in the same time frame, or as you mention, a Google update occurring in that time frame, or even a bug. So, basically what you have is industry practitioners over time noticing apparent cause and effect. When practitioners state that citation cleanup appears to impact search visibility, it's based on more formal studies like Andrew's (above) and on what they notice across the board with clients, over time. As for what is actually being cleaned up, that's easier to define. It's going to be resolving inconsistent NAP+W, hours of operation, categories and duplicates, much of the time. It can also include remedying incompletions. I understand your skepticism. Toothpaste manufacturers have a vested interest in telling you their product will make your teeth whiter. But there's an important difference here that shouldn't be overlooked: the things we've come to think of as local search ranking factors originate in the early study of local search results being performed in the trenches by very small agencies. Going back more than a decade, you can read through the blogs of folks like Mike Blumenthal, sharing what they are discovering moves the needle, client by client. That's not quite the same as the toothpaste company, because the scale was very small at the dawn of Local. You could chalk the corpus of local-related blog posts over the past 12 or so years up to being mere sales pitches, but I think if you start reading backward from 2017, you'll see it really wasn't that way. Just as in organic SEO, it's been a voyage of discovery

Hi MrSem, By open/closed for business do you mean a permanently closed business, or something you look up when it's after hours for a business? Any further details? BTW, I mentioned I would have more coming soon on this topic of SAB challenges. Just published: https://moz.com/blog/sabs-decreased-local-search-visibility

Hi, I'd use social media - Twitter, Facebook. If you have good images you could also use Instagram and in the accompanying text say that there's a post about it over on your site. I'd look at what others have done by searching the keywords on that social media platform and seeing what comes up. if they used a good hook or hashtag then use that in your post too. You could post a few times on your chosen platforms with different text each time and see what works best - don't overdo the posting though as people will get annoyed. If your topic ties in with something upcoming eg a national awareness day or big event, make sure you post during that period and use the relevant hashtags (which you can usually research before).

This is a great question, in doing A/B testing with some of our clients we have generally seen improved rankings for a specific city if we include that city in the meta title of the website page. Since you are targeting 3 cities, I would consider writing unique "city landing pages", for each city and then only mention that one city in the meta title. If you do this, try to make each city landing page as unique and helpful as possible, with unique city data, customer review/testimonials from that city, etc.

I think I've come to the same conclusion.  On many blog sites you may have multiple recent posts on the home page and then individual post pages for those same posts.  Similar to FAQs.  Google is smart enough to see, oh this is just another type of organization of this content that exists on individual pages. It appears even though pages higher in the hierarchy are supposed to carry more weight, that Google favors indexing the individual pages deeper down than the "category" pages higher up.