NAP No mail delivered to physical location
-
Hello,
First question here on moz. I live in a small town, and some of my clients do as well. Some mail is delivered to physical locations, however most mail is delivered to PO Boxes. I have tried with some success to get the mail workers to flag Google and others post cards. Otherwise I am not able to verify ownership. Any ideas or help on how to verify businesses that don't get mail at their location would be great.
Dave
-
You're welcome, Dave. Good luck!
-
Miriam,
Thanks so much. I will try the troubleshooter.
Dave
-
Hi David,
While Ruben is correct that the use of P.O. Boxes is a violation of the Google Places Quality Guidelines, there is a chance that you can get help with this via the Google Troubleshooter located here:
https://support.google.com/places/
Click the contact button and go through the troubleshooter. You should see a blue 'Call Us' button appear in the form and if you can speak to a Google rep, they may be able to help you with the verification issue.
However, before you can do this, it's important to understand that any Google+ Local page you create must be based on the physical location of the business in question and not any associated P.O. box. So, for a client in this town, you'd need to create the listing, have postcard verification fail and then go through the troubleshooter in hopes of getting direct help from Google staff in verifying the validity of the business. This will be extra work on your part, and you should prepare you clients for this hangup by explaining Google's limitations in regards to small towns like yours where everyone picks up mail at the local post office. Be sure not to guarantee that you can get the listing verified for them, but tell them that you will make a best effort to make it happen.
Hope this helps!
-
Ruben,
Thanks for the reply. To clarify, these businesses have physical locations, they just don't receive mail at their location.
Any ideas in this scenario?
Thanks for your help,
Dave
-
Dave,
I would be careful about verifying businesses that do not have physical addresses or have clients at those physical addresses. Google is very clear about this being a violation of their guidelines. https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en
Granted, I'm not the google police, but it's something I would recommend you considering.
Best,
Ruben
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
-
Once you start fixing Local citations with correct NAP, is it normal for your rankings to plunge at first?
I strongly believe that I have received the most solid Local advice I could from these forums and have started (in just a few days) to make the needed corrections. At the same time I'm somewhat excited and optimistic that it will be a long journey but that it's a learning process. About 5 days ago, I set my website up with "City landing pages" and I started plundering through google, fixing and claiming and correcting as many citations as I could with correct NAP. The journey still continues today as I just got my Bing Local card in the mail and verified. I went to check my rankings on Google Maps, just to see if anything had changed and sure enough it had. My listing had been holding strong at page 10 (which drives me nuts) and now after 5 days of solid work its on page 18. I have to assume that because I'm stirring the dust perhaps Google is confused and maybe in a month or so things might start moving the other way? Thoughts?
Image & Video Optimization | | jonnyholt0 -
Citations for service providers and different locations
My clients are mostly photographers who work from home, so service based and dont have a full address listed or fear to and many want to service bigger cities and not cities they live in, or want more than one city and state. What are best practices for SEO for multiple locations as well as service providers?
Image & Video Optimization | | FeuzaReis120 -
Local SEO, how much additional information to fill out beyond NAP
Hello, When filling out citations, do you flush out each site with extra profile information like picture, categories, service area, etc or do you just fill out NAP and website link and move on? I'm concerned about the time factor but I want to do good SEO that lasts into the future. What do you skip and what do you add?
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
NAP - Name on a local website
From a local perspective, if the legal name of the business is "Rising Realty, Inc", when you added in your footer should I loose the "Inc" part to be consistent with all the other mentions of the business across the web, which are without "Inc"? Thank you!
Image & Video Optimization | | echo10 -
Multiple businesses under the same physical address
If I am running one business at one address and I start a new business what should I do to avoid triggering spam filters for having 2 businesses using the same address. I've been told by an seo that I trust the best way to do this is create a suite #. If I do this then I have to change all the addresses on the existing campaigns for the Primary business because if I create suite #'s it changes the primary's address by doing this.
Image & Video Optimization | | NormanNewsome0 -
Does it matter how the NAP is formatted as long as it's consistent?
In local SEO, does it matter how the N.A.P. is formatted as long as it's consistent? Does the name have to be the official legal name? Should the address use USPS standards? Can the phone number be ###.###.#### instead of (###) ###-####?
Image & Video Optimization | | SteeleSEO0 -
Local SEO - our company is in 2 very different locations
Hi, Our company nlpca.com is in 2 locations. It's doing really well in San Francisco, California But we've opened a 2nd location in Salt Lake City, Utah The problem is that our site is all about San Francisco, California. Utah is just as important as San Francisco to us and we need to start tailoring to both. People from Utah say they are confused because our site is so tailored to California. Even our domain name is the keyword "NLP" combined with the state initial "CA" for California. A new domain is not an option. One thing we are thinking of doing is changing our header to say "The NLP and Coaching Institute and the NLP Institute of California". It would say both of our company names and hopefully the first would catch the Utah people. But I don't think it's just our banner. Can you take a look at our site and tell us how to tailor to both locations and keep our current working optimization for San Francisco, California? Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Using 1 main site for many branch office locations
I have 1 main site with many many city/state pages within the site. I would like to use this site as the 'website' on the google local places pages for all my branch office locations, however I am worried that if my domain authority isn't high enough for the site, google will think I am spamming 'google places'. Are there any best practices I can follow to do this? Ideally I would like my blended search to show www.site.com/boston not as www.site.com
Image & Video Optimization | | ilyaelbert0