Oops, above post was from me Sorry, I was logged into a different account when responding.

Hey Patrick,

Adam's most important tip is to use creativity to not make these page read in a robotic, repetitive fashion ... that applies to how you write all tags, as well as main body copy. (Good point, Adam!). Personally, I wouldn't worry about a number of times you repeat a keyword in the text. Trying to meet numeric quotas can kill creativity. Write as beautifully and helpfully as you can on every page you publish, and you'll probably find that you are naturally optimizing all tags and text without having to jump through any hoops to do so.

Hi John,

Also see the classic post from Ed Reese: http://localu.org/blog/how-to-segment-local-search-analytics/

Hi Pete,

Hmm ... could be my Yankee lack of knowledge here. What is a tool hire affiliate? This isn't an industry with which I'm familiar here in the US, but my best guess is that you rent tools (like mowing machines or bulldozers) to people. Yea or nay? At any rate, it sounds like what you are talking about might be similar to something we used to have here in which industrial strength vacuum cleaners (hoovers) are located at the front of grocery stores. The stores don't own the machines. Rather, the machine owner has a sort of kiosk within the store from which they rent their machines. Is this similar? In such a case, you'd need to have pages specifying that your products can be found INSIDE such-and-such market at 123 Front Street. You can create web-based content for these, but should scrutinize the Google guidelines to see whether you qualify for Google+ Local pages or not: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Does this help, Pete?

Hi Pete,

I want to be sure I'm clearly understanding your business model. You are saying yours is an e-commerce site, which is most commonly a virtual model, but you are also saying you have locations. Are these locations physical locations unique to your business (not like having your products in someone else's store) and do your employees interact face-to-face with customers who come to rent your products? If yes to all these, then there is no problem with you having a page for each of your physical shops - no problem at all. Just be sure each page you create is unique and useful and linked to from your navigation.

Please, let me know if there is some facet of this I'm not quite getting. For now, the practice of having a unique page for each of your shops is still a best practice.

Hi Nichole,

Wow - sounds like you're getting it right in a lot of areas. That's fantastic, and so good that the landing pages you've created for the 2 physical locations include video, etc. Regarding the possible project of creating a new set of landing pages for your non-location cities, here's what I think: to cover 3 states, you'd have to build thousands of these to cover every possible town and city. Given the vast resources it would take to make this many pages unique, I would suggest a more refined approach. Perhaps something like this -

• Identify 3-5 most important location-less cities in each of the 3 states.

• Over the next year, task staff with doing photo or video documentary of beautiful projects in each of the target cities.

• Write text descriptions of each documented project.

• Secure good testimonials from the associated homeowners

• Create one other unique section of the page for each target city showcasing information that is not on any of the other pages. The sky is the limit with this. You might do cleaning tips for certain types of flooring, explain sustainable flooring choices, showcase made in the USA products, interview the business owner or staff members, offer a city-specific special, etc.

At the end of the year, you will have added 9-15 extremely strong pages to the top-level menu of your website that you can then hopefully build up internal linking to as well as hopefully earning some inbound links, too. Whether you expand beyond this to further cities should be determined on the success of this initial project, but at any rate, I don't believe this approach could hurt you, but it could certainly help you.

Hope this helps!

Hi Nichole!

Thanks for sharing some more about this. I totally know how frustrating it can be when competitors with supposedly-taboo practices are surpassing you in the results. I would be quite surprised if the secret sauce for them in stuffing the footer unless Google hasn't looked at this area of their data in years, but I do have some suggestions. My advice here is general, in the absence of actually being able to look at your client's site and his competitors' sites, too.

1. Be sure the city landing pages you've build are of high quality - no thin/duplicate content. Building statewide landing pages is really a tough challenge when what you are offering is essentially the same service in every city. Showcasing completed projects in the various cities and getting user generated content from your happy customers will likely be key here.

Your two truly local geoterms relate to the 2 cities in which you have physical locations. My advice is to put 75% of your effort into developing a strong local pack presence in the 2 physical cities and use the additional 25% to see what you can do organically for the non-physical cities. This 25% may be devoted to improving your on-site landing page quality or to other efforts like social promotions and sharing, video marketing and offline promotions. Start with 5 non-physical location cities in which you would benefit most from visibility for and develop a creative approach to marketing in these communities. If organic efforts fail, you may need to consider PPC for these location-less cities, depending upon the competitiveness of the various geographies.

The following comments relate solely to your physical locations:

2. Run your site through a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/local/search to get an initial sense of how the client is doing in terms of citations. This is a good free place to start, as it will give you instant data about the business on 15 of the major platforms, including info about incomplete, inconsistent and duplicate listings. Then, follow up on this with further citation analysis, either manually or with other tools.

3. Run your key competitors through Moz Local as well to see if you can identify any weaknesses in any of their citation profiles. If there are weaker competitors, set your sites on surpassing them first. If, however, your direct competitors are all doing well with citations already, this is likely not an area that's going to give you a lot of room for competitive advantage.

4. Assess your Google+ Local reviews in terms of number, quality and recency, vs. those of your competitors. Can you earn more reviews for the 2 showrooms than competitors have earned.

5. Are your competitors doing a good job with social and/or video marketing? Can you surpass them with a more creative effort?

6. Audit the overall basic SEO of the website.

7. Audit the usability of the website.

Analyzing competitors can yield clues, but once you have those clues, the hope is that you can create your own strategy that really shines out, and that Google will reward that instead of rewarding spammy practices. In some cases, this can be an uphill battle, but don't give up hope. A really successful social campaign or other effort can sometimes break through a stagnant situation and end up with the rewards you're hoping to win for this client. Good luck!

Hi Nichole,

Glad you asked about this. No, this is not a good idea. It is, in fact, cited by Google's webmaster guidelines as a practice called 'keyword stuffing' that is frowned upon. These guidelines are here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en. Please read those.

Are you able to share a bit more about your client's business model? Are they meeting face-to-face with customers in 40 cities/multiple states? Or is this a virtual business? The more information you can share, the better feedback the community can provide. It's really good that you've asked about this!

Hey there!

Normally, a change of address on a verified Google+ Local page should happen quickly. If it's been a week, I'd suggest phoning Google (https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639). I would also recommend that you use Moz Check Listing to be sure there isn't more than one Google+ Local page in the mix here.

Hey John,

You're receiving good input from the community. I'll just summarize a couple of points here:

• Without physical locations, no, you cannot rank in the local packs of results.

• This leaves you with trying to rank organically via a combination of website content and optimization (see the landing pages article Patrick linked to) and trying to shore that up with things like link earning, social media, video marketing, etc. The main pitfall to be aware of in this practice is that many companies end up building a large number of thin, duplicate content pages for their service cities. This should be avoided. The main goal of this practice is to gain some organic visibility for local searches in the absence of being able to gain local pack rankings.

Hope this helps!