Hotel SEO / Rank Conundrum
-
Hello Mozzers,
I am having an issue with a particular client and wanted to throw it out to the forum for feedback.
We work with many resorts and hotels. One, in particular, is a large condo-hotel property with several individual buildings. Each building has a unique name. While the property management company owns and operates most of the units within each building, there are units that are individually owned.
The property management company runs the branded resort website, all local pages & listings, etc.
One savvy unit owner, however, has built a website that is branded with the individual building name for one of the buildings. He has also taken ownership of the building Google Plus page, Facebook page, etc. He only owns a handful of units in the building.
We have retroactively tried creating a new site but are struggling to gain traction from a ranking perspective. We did temporarily change the website address that was listed for the Google local listing, via the "edit" button, and were actually starting to increase rank (presumably somewhat related to the increase in website traffic), but it was quickly fixed to the other website.
The management company has reached out to the owner but he continues to refuse to give up any rights to the Google local page, etc. We have also created a new (technically duplicate) page just to see if we can knock the other one off, though we are having issues getting the verification post card from Google.
Any advice on how we can gain access to this Google local page? Or any other tips on how to get a relatively small, new site to overtake an existing site?
I know URLs / examples are helpful in these situations but we'd prefer to keep the client names anon.
-
Hi Bernadette, thanks for taking the time to respond. The owner in question is most certainly representing his ownership and we had advised legal options, though the client is not quite ready to pursuit anything yet. Thank you for the lengthy feedback, we certainly appreciate any help we can get.
-
Thanks very much for the feedback. At this point, the client is steering away from legal options, though we had advised that. The entire situation took us off guard so we are definitely taking this as a lesson learned. Thanks again for your response.
-
Meisha, this can definitely be frustrating. When it comes to local listings, and individual units, keep in mind that every unit should have it's own unique unit number, so it would have it's own address.
You mentioned this: "He has also taken ownership of the building Google Plus page, Facebook page, etc. He only owns a handful of units in the building. "
If that other person has taken ownership of the entire building essentially, and the entire Google Plus page, Facebook page, etc. then is sounds as if he is misrepresenting his ownership. Therefore, pressure can be put on him to disclose his ownership of only certain units in the building, and you should be able to force him (legally) to only represent the units that he actually owns.
If this is the case, then he would need to update his Google Local listing(s) so that they only show the actual address of the unit(s) that he owns. If it doesn't currently, and it shows that he owns the entire building, then he should be forced to update it.
You should consult a lawyer, but most likely a stern letter to him asking him to update the website, Google Listings, and any Facebook (and other URLs) so that they only show the unit numbers he actually owns would probably go a long way. In the meantime, any listings that you create should also reflect the actual units that you own, as well.
When it comes go Google's local listings, it's perfectly fine to have multiple "businesses" at one location, as they have unique suite numbers. In this case, there are individual unit numbers, so there is an option to create a listing for each unit. It's not okay for this other person to misrepresent his ownership.
-
The answer here is not one that I often advocate but you're going to to need to grease the wheels a bit
Buy his website out. Make certain this includes his domain and control of the social media he's running. Have him sign a legal agreement as well. Once you own it, 301 redirect it to your main resort page.
If he balks, or tries to run the price up, my bet is he has a contract with the owners of the building and they might have some things they can do that will make his life uncomfortable (consult a lawyer first so you know what your legal options are). You might be able to use that as a stick to encourage him to take the carrot of a buyout. Try the carrot first, tho, and save the stick for any serious negotiations.
Next, you need to harden the contracts with your private owners. Make it clear that, for a small sum of money, they agree not to try to represent themselves as the resort. Again, consult a lawyer and get this written properly. Make any future private buyers sign this agreement as well.
At the end of the day, I would chalk this up as an expensive marketing lesson. If you can get him to sell, you don't have to jump through any hoops. Otherwise, you're competing with what Google sees as the legitimate business (which is a much more difficult path to walk).
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
-
Google maps SEO
We rank #1 for our main keyword and location, however, the top 3 google maps listing doesn't include us. We have more reviews than any of our local competitors (they have around 1/2, we have 25 all 5*) & we only seem to appear as an ad on maps listings. What can we do to resolve this?
Local Listings | | RayflexGroup0 -
Strange Ranking Results
Hi Any ideas why doing a search for 'Family Portrait Photographer' from my location on the Isle Of Wight (after deleting cache/history) etc results in a load of results relating to Cardiff Wales (local serps and main listings)? I am close to cities like Southjampton & Portsmouth as well as few other all much neaer than cardiff ! All Best
Local Listings | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan0 -
How do I treat multiple buildings on the same college campus on Google for local SEO?
Should I delete them? Simply give them a different address like "City, State, Zip"? I see the benefit of having key buildings on campus in Google Maps, but I don't want those to affect my accuracy score and, thus, my local rankings for SEO.
Local Listings | | GabeGibitz1 -
Dental Practice Acquisition SEO
Hi Mozzers! I have an interesting online marketing challenge I would love to hear the community's thoughts and advice! My clients (a dental practice consisting of 3 dentists) are taking over (buying) the practice of another dentist across the hall (same address except for suite #), who is retiring (we'll refer to him as "retiree" from here out for simplicity). The retiree's dental practice has close to zero online presence. He has citations across the web (google listing, yelp, healthgrades, etc), but no website. My question is: How would you go about consolidating the web presence for my clients? We want to get the traffic for existing and potentially new patients searching for the retiree. The retiree isn't retiring right away. His presence for the next several months will be vital to my clients' success as he will introduce new patients to my clients and pass the torch, so to speak. Would you create a landing page for the retiree on my clients' website & claim/add my clients' NAPW on all of the citations? That seems to be the best & simplest idea I've come up with so far, but I would LOVE to hear if anyone has any creative thoughts or ideas. THANKS!
Local Listings | | Derrald0 -
International SEO
Hi,
Local Listings | | Tormar
I have some problems with .com domain on English in my country. For some device they are always better than my site is. I did all things what I need to do for: Unique content on my language (not English), Unique titles, descriptions, external links, target in GSC. Do you have some advice, how can I be better than they are?0 -
SEO best practices for store locator and local pages - 301 or not?
I have been struggling to answer this on my own and now throwing up for the Moz community for a life line. Our company has several location across 6 states. We have local pages that we are working to improve with better content. We also have a store locator that will list the stores but the pages are not the same. See below example. I can't help but feel like I am splitting juice and traffic that should be combined to one page for each location. Any ideas or advice on how we can best combine/funnel the traffic to one optimized page? Here is an example: State local page - http://www.jakesfireworks.com/michigan/ Locator page for state - http://www.jakesfireworks.com/locator/?state=MI City local page - http://www.jakesfireworks.com/michigan/grand_rapids City Locator page - http://www.jakesfireworks.com/locator/?id=183&state=MI
Local Listings | | devonkrusich0 -
Rankings stuck on page 2 - what am I missing?
My business website ranked on the first page for 48 of 51 keywords for years. Then 10 months ago I had a duplicate content problem from a bad plugin and every keyword ranking dropped off the first page. I got the duplicate content problem fixed, but I've been stuck with only 3 keywords of 51 on the first page ever since. This is a local site and without much competition at all. http://www.pmaaustin.com The Yoast SEO Plugin shows the on page optimization of nearly every page/post on this website as solid Green, but MOZ rates nearly all of my pages' On Page Optimization as an F. It rates nearly all these keywords as an F as showing they should all be optimized on the Home page. I don't understand that. Also according to MOZ ,versus my competitor's websites, I have mostly the highest Domain and Page Authority. I also has the largest # and most relevant Root Domains. It also has the best written content, and the almost only active blog. Still, nearly every keyword is sitting on page 2. It seems like it wants to "Spring" onto page 1! What am I missing?
Local Listings | | OhYeahSteve0 -
My #1 (A) ranking client in Maps is now #38 after update?
We have a client with 4 locations and all of them do pretty well in Google Maps. Since the latest update, we dropped from #1 (A) all the way down to #38 in Maps. We're still #1 for our keyword in Organic but our Maps got crushed. We use Yext for the citations but we also do some a lot manual ones too. We have 3 reviews on that location but not sure why the big drop. I'm not even sure where to being to get it back. From our research: We noticed our categories were a little out of order. Our primary was "legal services" instead of "personal injury attorney" (we've now updated that.) I've noticed that all the listings ahead of us, minus a few of them, have their homepage as their link. We've always used a local landing page that has hand written directions on how to find us, our hours and who people will meet when they come in. Things relevant to that location. Our domain authority is a 40. Our homepage Page Authority is 49 and our landing page for that location is a 22. What else should we check to see what's happened? Should I move the Google+ page to the homepage instead of the sub-page (as well as the citations we have)? Thanks for your help!
Local Listings | | DarinPirkey0