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Yes. If you've already claimed it, you just need to log into the Google account you used to initially create the account and you can make changes there.

Have you previously claimed a Google Places page for the business?

For me, it's been a good year since I've been able to enter a phone number at that first stage and the system has actually pulled the business that corresponds with that number.

You're talking about losing your existing photos & videos, so that makes it sound like have already set up a Google+ Local page/Google Places page. So why are you going through the process of creating a new one?

The fact that you're saying the incorrect/old listing has been deleted is puzzling. How long has the incorrect listing been deleted/suspended?

I'm assuming you've created a new listing with the proper information, correct?

Have you taken an inventory of all of your online citations and ensured the incorrect listing info no longer exists on directory sites?

Have you tried contacting Google?

I've often wondered the same thing.

I don't know what USPS standards are (maybe because I'm not American).

As far as the legal name. Search engines don't necessarily know what your legal business name is. In Canada at least, as an incorporated business, your legal name can be a number. Google obviously isn't expecting you to list yourself as a number. It's important that the name is consistent.

When manually submitting/correcting client's information on directory sites, I try to keep the address the same in terms of whether or not I'm writing the street name as 'Road' or 'Rd'. (Maybe that's what you're referring to). It seems silly that Google would penalize you if 75% of your citations have 'Road' and the other 25% have 'Rd.'

As far as the phone numbers go, from my experience, you don't necessarily have control over that. You can input the phone number one way, but then the way that it's actually displayed online may show up differently, i.e, dashes vs. no dashes, or including the '1' vs. excluding the '1'. You can't control that, so don't worry about it.

If you refer to David Mihm's Local Ranking Factors  both the quantity and quality of citations are more important factors than the consistency of those citations.

Does anyone know how to make meaningful contact with Facebook???

Last month I tried to set up a couple Facebook PPC campaigns for a couple clients only to find out that I can't because another client of mine for whom I set up a Facebook PPC campaign last fall has an outstanding balance of a whopping $30. To be clear, I was only an admin on the client's Facebook page. Their credit card (not mine) was in use, and they didn't pay their bill.

So now, Facebook is holding that against me. I've contacted them through one of the help forms on the site. They clearly don't understand where I'm coming from. I've now sent them 3 emails, and now I'm not receiving a response.

I just recently resorted to sending a direct message through Facebook to Facebook Marketing. No response.

It really does boggle my mind how they're penalizing me, and in turn, my clients, because another former client of mine from nearly a year ago has a $30 balance. I'm not even an admin on the one client's Facebook page anymore?! With AdWords, I regularly have clients who owe Google money but that doesn't affect all of my other clients.

I agree. It's ridiculous how little some of these designers make. It seems that all of them are overseas though. If they make $100 it means a hell of a lot more than $100 means to the average North American.

My uncle owns a pretty prominent graphic design firm that has done work for very large organizations across the globe. For the logo design projects that I've done through 99 designs, he said he'd have to be paid $3k just to consider the project. And I believe I got the logo done for $300. When he looked at the finished product, he had his fair share of critiques, but his observations weren't ones that the average consumer would notice.

I've used 99 designs and I've been quite satisfied with the end product. They do all sorts of types of design work from logos to wordpress themes.

If you don't like what the community of designers provide you, you can get your money back.

There's a few shady people in the community. I had one or two designers on logo design project that just copied something and tweaked it, but within their community, it was caught and that person was disciplined.

Hi Anthony,

In what sense is it a poor-performing account? Just in terms of your ROI? You're talking about using new landing pages, that suggests to me you're not receiving a good ROI.

Your post seems to suggest that you're thinking that having better performing landing pages will result in Google giving your client some priority (i.e, increase in quality score). There's really only the smallest bit of truth to that notion.

According to Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, your landing page only accounts for about 10% of your quality score. The largest factor in quality score is your CTR, which represents about 60% of QS and the notion of 'relevance' is about 30%. You can check out video I've attached.

As far as your client's large budget, I've never seen or read of any evidence suggesting that the total amount of money that Google makes off an advertiser has an impact on Quality Score. Obviously the max CPC bid for individual keywords has an impact on your client's position (Ad Position = Max CPC x QS), so if your client is looking to bid very high amounts for individual keywords, that will certainly help with where their ads will show up.

watch?v=qwuUe5kq_O8

Oftentimes what I'll do for small business clients of mine (service-based businesses) is have a few different types of contact forms through the site. You obviously want some type of form on the contact page itself. Depending on the type of business you may also have an actual page for a 'Request an Estimate'/'Request a Quote'/'Book an Appointment'. The latter type of form would typically be more detailed (i.e, more fields) than a basic contact form on a contact page, but what I've found effective on a homepage, or sometimes on every page of the site is some sort of 'Quick Contact Form', where you're asking for the bare minimum amount of information from the user in order that your client can proceed to the next step.

There's no silver bullet and what works for one site or one industry doesn't always work across the board. I'm a huge proponent of conversion tracking/goal setting and measuring the each form separately.

Pardon my ignorance when it comes to your particular industry, but do those pages need to be crawlable?

As far as the member profile pages, can search engines crawl those pages?

Hi Miriam,

Thanks. That was very thorough. I did have some of the same concerns, particularly about their network of sites. I'd love to be able to work with them on just certain services. The video for example, I don't need. My clients don't need. It appears as though they put together a cheap montage video that in my opinion has little value. Personally, I'd want to handle setting up a Google+ Local listing for clients as well, but manual submission to dozens of local directories is where it gets tedious and takes up time. That's all I really want them for.

I provided a link to the help article...

Geo-related factors are one of the reasons that search results get personalized and the SEOMoz software doesn't (at least for now) have the ability to show personalized search results based on location, meaning, if your keyword is just 'pizza', it's going to show you how the search results will display for "most" people. So if you're in des moines, iowa, and your client, Des Moines Pizza, generally shows up #1 in the local search results for 'pizza' when the user is located in Des Moines, that's not going to show in the SEOMoz software. You'd have to input your keyword as 'pizza des moines' to get search results specific to that city.

From the SEOMoz Help section...

Why do the rankings in SEOmoz not match what I see in Google?
Great question! Although there is never one “right” ranking for any keyword, SEOmoz tries to represent the ranking results that “most” users will see. If you see wildly different results from your search engine compared to your Ranking Report, it could be because of the following reasons:

It's definitely not the easiest thing to wrap your head around, and I'm sure anyone who has ever managed a PPC campaign has thought the same thing.

When I first saw Hal Varian's video on Quality Score  that gave me a better understanding.

He breaks down quality score as follows:

60% is related to CTR

30% is related to 'Relevance'

10% is landing page

The way that I've seen a lot of people talk about Quality Score & AdWords suggests that they think the landing page is a much more important part of the equation.

In my opinion, the best thing the focus on is CTR. If your clients' ads are getting clicked on more often, you're helping Google make more money. If the ads getting clicked on more often because it's more relevant to the user's search query, Google has a strong monetary incentive to serve that ad up higher. That's all very logical. Try not to get caught up in the minutiae of Quality Score. When you don't know exactly what their formula is, it can definitely get confusing/frustrating.

In what sense? This isn't 'directory submission' in the classic sense where it's a service that submits your site to low quality web directories. This is a Local SEO service, so it's not so much about submitting a website as it is about building a citation.

Maybe I'm not reading between the lines enough with what they're actually offering, but I'd just like to hear any specific concerns about this service.

Just wanted to see if anyone had any experience with Local Site Submit. 

I'd be particularly interested with experiences from the agency/reseller side of things.

Here's a great article that appeared on Mashable recently that outlines 6 different types of posts specifically for Facebook to build user engagement.

In addition to these types of posts, publishing great content to your blog that would be appealing to your users, and then promoting those posts through Facebook and other social media sites is also a good idea.

Whenever you're dealing with a large company a la Reach Local, you just really need to know what you're getting into. You should also research your alternatives. The more information you have, the better, more informed decision you can ultimately make.

As some of those commenting here have said (who have more experience with Reach Local than me), they're not exactly laying out all of the raw data in front of you for your inspection. However, in my personal experience, I have had clients who have dealt with companies as large, or larger than Reach Local who seem to have violated some very basic Google Third Party Policies. The first point is that third parties should provide a monthly report containing AdWords click costs, total clicks and total impressions. In the past, I instructed prospective clients (who later became clients) to ask for this information from a very large AdWords Certified Partner. Even after repeated requests, the client was not provided with this basic information for which they were asking.

Now, if you really want to play 'lawyer', the wording in the policy does say that third parties should provide this information. They're not technically required to provide this information.

The way that many companies structure an SEM program for clients (I believe this is how Reach Local does it), is that the client pays the 3rd party directly for everything, i.e, you, as the client, are not paying the search engines directly for advertising. But if the 3rd party is not required to tell you how much they are spending on your behalf on search advertising, you don't know how much money is going to the search engines and how much money is going into their pockets. In my opinion, that's not right. If you agree with me, make sure you know this information before signing anything with a large SEM firm.