Client bought out shop but used existing phone number
-
We have a client in Nashville who opened his first location on Spring St., then later bought out PAC Auto to open a second location on Dickerson St. Lately, we noticed that the Dickerson location wasn't ranking. I found that the previous business owner at Pac Auto had already built up a good web presence and that sigh our client was using their old number.
Basic NAP violation, ok, got it. But what to do next?
I decided to update PACs citations with The Car People's business name and website. Where I was unable to edit or where listings were already claimed, I just reported PAC auto as closed.
But yesterday I noticed not only was the Dickerson location still not ranking, but the Spring street location had indeed dropped several places too! (edit: I'm referring to local search results here as we don't own the site)
What kind of beast have I stirred?!
What kind of signals am I sending to Google that are devaluing the Spring st. location? Will things get worse before they get better? What can I do to make some progress on one without hurting the other?
Is it worth trying to get the previous business owners logins (not likey)? Talk to The Car People about getting a new number (not impossible)? Is it worth trying to get the site in order to build separate landing pages for each location?
Thanks in advance!
-
Hi Nick,
I would say you need to accomplish:
a) Getting the company to get a new phone number
b) Getting the developers to put a landing page for each location on the site
c) Building new citation for the new location, not piggy-backing onto citations for the old company. After all, despite the fact that The Car People occupy a building that was previously occupied by another business, there is no relationship between the two (or, at least, there shouldn't have been, if not for that decision to keep the other company's phone number)
d) Tell the client that some of the decisions that have been made are going to make it essential to have a lot of patience here while you try to create a data cluster out there on the web that Google can trust. Right now, it's unlikely that they have this. It's going to have be created over time with a lot of care.
-
I thought you claimed the old competitor page and tried to input your client's info for their Google+ page.
If that's not the case and you've already set up a Google+ page, there's nothing that needs to be done in my opinion.
I'm not sure that I would have had them change their number prior to reading this story, so as much as I would like to say yes and sound smart, I would have probably played it the same way. Especially when you think of the benefits of old customers of the competitor calling your client looking for the same services.
-
First off, thanks for your careful analysis, and to answer your questions
-
The Car People have the same name at both locations. PAC Auto (closed) was the previous shop at the Dickerson location.
-
We do the off-site stuff and our competitor does the on-site SEO (don't ask), so creating landing pages means a little push-back. So by "getting the site" I mean that if they won't take our recommendation to add landing pages (not to mention additional issues with NAP in html markup) then we'll push for a sale.
Otherwise we'll talk about a new number and start building again from the ground up.
Too bad about my goof on modifying PAC Auto's citations. Guess I'll go back and close those now.
Tough indeed. Time to call in the dream team.
-
-
Hi Nick,
Whoa - yes, this is messy. You are right about that. The business should have gotten a brand new phone number and I'd suggest that they do so and edit all existent citations to reflect the new number. If your client's company is The Car People at both locations, and their competitor is PAC, (I think this is what you're saying) you should not have attempted to edit or claim PACs citations, beyond reporting them as closed. You should have built new citations for the new business. My guess is that Google is now confused about which business is located on this street as it is seeing not only 2 business names hooked into it, but an identical phone number. Basically, it sounds like a citation confusion catastrophe
I'm not sure what you mean by:
"Is it worth trying to get the site in order to build separate landing pages for each location?"
Which site? Do you mean buy out the competitors' website? Something else? Your client should be in control of their own website, and have a separate landing page for each location on this website.
Whether what is going on with the one location is affecting the older location, I can't say. It is possible for Google to be mistrusting of an overall profile if something wonky is going on with part of it, but there is also a big shakeup going on in the Local results that could be the cause of what you're seeing with the older location.
You may need to get a professional audit of the situation, Nick. There's a good chance I'm not understanding certain nuances of the situation (such as whether both companies are named The Car People or whether one is PAC, and what you mean about 'getting the website'). Sounds like you've got a really tough client who did not go about things in an optimal way, and it's my best guess that a high level Local SEO would need to do a sort of case history to get all of the details sorted out on something like this. Tough one!
-
Great feedback--thanks! On your suggestion I think we're going to push for their website.
Are you suggesting closing the existing Google+ page for Dickerson and verifying a new page, or was I just not clear about having already opened one? And for conversations sake would you have done something differently to start? For example, having them change their phone number?
-
You're probably not looking at a quick fix any way you slice it but here's what I would do:
- Create a new Google Plus Local page for the Dickerson address.
- Claim/Create as many listings as possible for the Dickerson address
- Create a landing page on the client's site for both addresses
- Link each Google Plus Local page to the location specific landing page you created
I think you do those four things, you'll be fine.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I want to use a domain that has previously been forwarded elsewhere. Any considerations?
There's a domain name (we will call it A) with no domain authority that is currently forwarded to a domain with 36 DA (we will call this domain B). B has been dormant for about two years. I am getting both domains, but domain A works better for what I will be using it for. So basically, I want to swap things around so B forwards to A, instead of A forwarding to B. Any dangers here or things to consider that I may be overlooking?
Technical SEO | | CWBFriedman0 -
Pros and Cons of using rel=next on blog posts
Hi there, at the bottom of my website's blog posts the rel=prev and rel=next tags are used on links that point to the previous article that was posted and the next article that was posted. Often these articles are not 'linked' in terms of their content or message. Is this the correct use of rel=next/prev and if not what are the possible negative effects. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | Bee1590 -
Instead of a 301, my client uses a 302 to custom 404
I've found about 900 instances of decommissioned pages being redirected via 302 to a 404 custom page, even when there's a comparable page elsewhere on the site or on a new subdomain. My recommendation would be to always do a 301 from the legacy page to the new page, but since they're are so many instances of this 302->404 it seems to be standard operating procedure by the dev team. Given that at least one of these pages has links coming from 48 root domains, wouldn't it obviously be much better to 301 redirect it to pass along that equity? I don't get why the developers are doing this, and I have to build a strong case about what they're losing with this 302->404 protocol. I'd love to hear your thoughts on WHY the dev team has settled on this solution, in addition to what suffers as a result. I think I know, but would love some more expert input.
Technical SEO | | Jen_Floyd0 -
Am I using 301 correctly?
Hello, I have a 'Free download' type site for free graphics for designers. To prevent hot linking we authenticate the downloads and use a 301 redirect. So for example: The download URL looks like this if someone is clicking on the download button: http://www.website.com**/resources/243-name-of-the-file/download/dc37** and then we 301 that URL back to: http://www.website.com**/category-name/243-name-of-the-file** Is a 301 the correct way to do that?
Technical SEO | | shawn810 -
Can the Breadcrumb Trail be used as the H1 tag?
We hace recently discovered that the x-cart sites we have dont have H1 tags. Can the breadcrumb trail on the category and sub category pages be used as the H1 tag?
Technical SEO | | heathshowman0 -
Using a canonical tag to eliminate ID variables?
My research on seomoz has resulted in conflicting ideas regarding the canonical tag. One article says avoid it, the other says embrace it. We have fixed a majority of our architecture problems using redirects for duplicate content, however, when we send out newsletters we still have these pesky tracking ids. I figured out how to remove them from analytics, but am unsure of how this affects our SEO. An example of one of our links is: https://www.quicklearn.com/transcript/?utm_source=news101011&utm_medium=e&utm_campaign=newclass&nlid=news101011&UID=2287 The original url being www.quicklearn.com/transcript/ the custom (non-Google) variables being nlid and uid. Is this a problem? Do I need rel cononical tags on each and every page?
Technical SEO | | QuickLearnTraining0 -
Does using parentheses affect the crawlers?
Quick question: if you using a parantheses around a keyword, do search bots still recognize the keyword? Fox ex: Welcome to a website about the National Basketball Association (NBA). Will the bots recognize that I'm trying to optimize to NBA and not (NBA)? Is this different for tags vs. actual body copy?
Technical SEO | | BPIAnalytics2 -
New consultant looking for advice on setting client expectations
I'm just starting to provide paid consultation to a few clients who have approached me for SEO help. As I've not completed a lot of projects, I'm looking for guidance on how to set expectations. I get the feeling that one of my clients is going to expect that once our initial work (keyword research, addressed their primary technical issues, fixing on-page issues) that they will automatically appear on the first page of Google. In a project with 50 keywords, I believe this may be true for a few keywords where there isn't a lot of competition. However, I believe that for many of the keywords, we won't be able to achieve ranking on the first page unless we do an on-going link-building program. Is this assumption accurate?
Technical SEO | | EricVallee340