Best practices for a local business move
-
My client is a chiropractic office that will be moving to the next town over in about 3 months. What are people's best practices on how to best accomplish this SEO-wise so as to not lose too much in terms of rankings, current organic traffic and citation listings?
-
Hi Brian,
There is so much confusion surrounding this very common topic because Google has repeatedly changed their stance. The thread Amber has pointed to on Linda's forum quotes the most current Google policy on this. Linda's thread doesn't link to the source of this, so I will here: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/S6APN5ijnOQ
And here is the complete language of what Google staffer, Jade, wrote:
Verified business owner of a page, and is your business moving locations? Here's what you do.__Edit your address in Google Places for Business or in the Google+ page admin area, whichever you are using to manage the page. This will either make a new page or edit the address on the existing page. It may take a week or two after editing your address before you see an update. At this point, you may need to go through a verification process again. Don't worry -- this is normal.__If you see a page that's still got the old address, click on Report a problem and mark that location as closed. Provide the link to the new address or information about the new location if possible. You can find more instructions on closing a location here: http://goo.gl/YZIjq*Now, remember, following the above steps must be followed up by a citation cleanup campaign. You need to find all web-based references to your old address and edit them so that they reflect the new address. This is very important.
-
If you're just 3 months away from the move, it's time to revise (vs. create anew ) the landing page(s) that will reflect your new location and get those online asap, so your organic results can start percolating.
-
There was a Mozinar recently called A Foolproof Process for Scrubbing Your Local Footprint Squeaky Clean that can help you keep your listings up to date. There is a list of free and paid tools in there that can help you out.
-
Your best approach would be to edit the address in Google Places for Business rather than marking it closed and creating a new listing for the new address.
Linda Buquet addresses this topic in detail here-
Hope this helps!!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Beta Site Removal best practices
Hi everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
We are doing a CMS migration and site redesign with some structural changes. Our temporarily Beta site (one of the staging environments and the only one that is not behind firewall) started appearing in search. Site got indexed before we added robots.txt due to dev error (at that time all pages were index,follow due to nature of beta site, it is a final stage that mirrors live site) As an remedy, we implemented robots.txt for beta version as : User-Agent: *
Disallow: / Removed beta form search for 90 days. Also, changed all pages to no index/no follow . Those blockers will be changed once code for beta get pushed into production. However, We already have all links redirected (301) from old site to new one. this will go in effect once migration starts (we will go live with completely redesigned site that is now in beta, in few days). After that, beta will be deleted completely and become 404 or 410. So the question is, should we delete beta site and simple make 404/410 without any redirects (site as is existed for only few days ). What is best thing to do, we don't want to hurt our SEO equity. Please let me know if you need more clarification. Thank you!0 -
Five best practice for SEO
Hello Everyone, I am new to SEO and need some help. I have 6 sites and I need to know what are the top 5 strategies for Off page seo. I mean the most important ones. Thanks Abie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | signsny0 -
Purchased Domain Not Related to Vertical and Moved Questions
Hello, We used to reside on a longer domain name character wise but had an opportunity to purchase a three letter acronym before my time. We advertise heavily on TV and other traditional media channels so it was simpler for individuals to remember. After purchasing this domain we moved over from the old one to the new one. We followed all of your standard protocols (301s, change of address in Webmaster Tools, new sitemap, etc, etc.) Google and Bing both index the new site and there isn't a significant issue there but we're having incredible difficulty in ranking for any of our core terms. We're the largest company in our space but continue to rank for terms that have nothing to do with our vertical. This is due to the fact that the site used to be owned by a company that is completely separate from ours. The site that we have today contains none of the old content but it does have links pointing to it from similar sites from that vertical. Bing was incredibly helpful and had indicated it's these links that's potentially causing us the issue in that search engines are seeing two different verticals over time on a domain. It's been a year since this took place and it seems that the only recommendation is to contact the non related sites to remove links or disavow. Bing had indicated that disavowing was not as relevant as getting the links removed. Any other thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo--team-jlck0 -
301 redirects and Blogger - moving blog
Is there any way to add 301 redirects to individual posts on a blogger-hosted blog? We're getting ready to finally move our blog off of Blogger and onto our own webserver. We're probably going to use BlogEngine.net to run it. right now the blog is located at blog.MySite.com. We're probably going to move it to MySite.com/Blog. We don't have any really popular posts and we only really get ~10 visits a day on about 70 posts. Just trying to figure out the best way to handle this without inadvertently shooting myself in the foot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _JP_0 -
Keyword Targeting Best Practices??
What is the best way to target a specific keyword? I rank well for several of my keywords but want to do better on others. How do I go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
What is the best process to move a wordpress website ?
Hello Seomoz community, Simple question , i am looking forward to move a word press website from blog.domain.com sub domain to domain.com/blog to increase my indexed link on the root domain indexed by search engine.The blog i want to move already have high PR ( 6 ) i , of course want to avoid broken link , already indexed in search engine. What would be the best way to process to prepare this move accordingly on a SEO perspective ??? Many thanks in advance. Yan Desjardins
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SherWeb0 -
Which is best structure for Multiple XML Sitemap?
I have read such a great blog posts on Multiple XML Sitemaps on following websites before a week. SEOmoz Distilled Google Webmaster Central Blog Search Engine Land SEO Inc I have created multiple XML sitemaps for my eCommerce website with following structure and submitted to Google webmaster tools. http://www.vistastores.com/main_sitemap.xml http://www.vistastores.com/products_sitemap.xml But, I am not satisfy with my second XML sitemap because it contain more than 7K+ product page URLs and looks like very slow crawling by Google! I want to separate my XML sitemap with following structure. With Root Level Category http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor_sitemap.xml http://www.vistastores.com/furniture_sitemap.xml http://www.vistastores.com/kitchen_dining_sitemap.xml http://www.vistastores.com/home_decor_sitemap.xml OR::: End Level Category http://www.vistastores.com/table_lamps_sitemap.xml http://www.vistastores.com/floor_lamps_sitemap.xml . . . . . . . etc.... So, Which is best structure for Multiple XML Sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Best way to find all url parameters?
In reference to http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html, what is the best way to find all of the parameters that need to be addressed? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0