More threads by Martin John

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I was hoping you guys could take a look at this situation and give me your thoughts. It's a bit complicated for my first citation clean up so I'm worried there's something I might be overlooking or just not thinking about. Also I have a few questions / concerns posted at the end.

I'm pretty new here so I hate to be the guy who just shows up and starts rallying off questions left and right. I really appreciate the time and effort you guys take to help random noobs like myself who show up out of the blue :)

Bit of a long post, figured it best to just get the details in up front rather than go back and forth.

Here's the situation:

Business A = My Client
Business B = Competitor that my client bought out

April 2014

  • A has moved to B's location / address after the buy out (bigger facility, better location)
  • A's business name and phone number have been kept, B's name has been dropped. Everything has been brought under A's brand.
  • B's G+ page was marked as "permanently closed"
  • A's original G+ page from it's original location was marked as "permanently closed"
  • A now has a new G+ page for the new location. (reviews have been successfully transferred over so all is well there)
  • A's local pack rankings dropped, disconnected listing as the organic remained fine. They dropped to around #11 to #13 in maps for their main keywords. Probably to be expected though due to the move, new G+ page, etc.

September 2014

So at this point Local pack rankings still hadn't come back, and I was asked to come in and take a look. The first thing I did was to obviously look at A's citations. Sure enough about 50% of their citations still had their old address listed.

A Couple Things I Noticed:

  • Different (slight) variations of their brand name would succeed or fail to trigger the knowledge panel
  • Searching for their phone number in maps would bring up their old closed location first.

So it was clear that google wasn't seeing their business and new location clearly, or their brand name was still tied to their old NAP and closed G+ page due to all the old citations still floating around.

At this point I went ahead and updated about 100 citations with their new NAP. There are about 30 of the old ones still out there that I haven't been able to update, but I definitely got the major/quality ones done in any case and have built a few new ones.

Within about a month of cleaning up the citations brand searches harmonized and now all variations and even misspellings of the brand name bring up the knowledge panel. Good stuff. G+ insights / analytics views had a big jump at this point too because everything was displaying properly now.

Also searching for the phone # in maps now brings up the new location instead of the old one. All positive signs.

Any thoughts, insights, or advice on things I might have missed or need to be thinking about?

Here are some questions / concerns:

  • Local pack rankings haven't budged, down around #13, and we even dropped off for another keyword since then. Organic is holding steady.
  • I finished updating the citations nearly 7 weeks ago now. what's a typical time frame for something like this? 3 to 6 months possibly?
  • Doing a search in maps for A's brand name will still show the old listing in auto-complete, any concern there?
  • A's old G+ listing is marked as "permanently closed" should it instead be marked as moved and reference/link to the new address and listing?
  • Doing a search in maps for [keyword new address] it brings up B's permanently closed listing and doesn't show A at all. Makes me worry there is still a disconnect somewhere. Why wouldn't it bring up A or at least show both listings (although B's old company name actually has the keyword in its business name so maybe that's why, sorry, bit confusing i know)
  • If I do a search in maps for any other suffix variation (er, ers, ing) of the keyword + address then it shows A & B with A at the top.
  • Is there any way that B's old G+ listing, since they are in the same industry and same address and have our main keyword in their business name, might somehow be interfering with our rankings?
  • I have noticed (from looking at the cache) that lots of the citations haven't been re-crawled by google yet, even yellowpages, which is one of our major data sources here in canada. Do you guys ever ping, push, or build a few links to citations to get them crawled and updated faster?
  • Would there be any benefit in attempting to clean up B's old citations and have them removed or taken down?

Again,I really appreciate you guys taking a look at this. Sorry for the long winded post.

Martin.
 

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