Two Dentists, Same Address, Same Phone, Different Business Names
-
Hi Everyone,
I've been looking into this situation for quite a while, but most posts/information on this topic seem to be from at least 1-2 years ago.
I'm currently working with a dentist who just moved into the same suite as another dentist who has been working there for years.
They each have the same address and same suite number, the same phone number, but each own their own respective practice and have their own patients. To make things even more complicated, the dentist that has been working there for years uses his name as a business name, while the new dentist has a business name differing from her actual name.
I'm not exactly sure how to go about optimizing the new dentist's local presence, but the only thing I can think of doing is try to recommend having the suite split into Suite #-A and Suite #-B and seeing if it's possible to add a second phone number for the new dentist.
Please let me know your thoughts, and if you've seen this topic come up in the past, I would love to get pointed in the right direction.
Thanks for all your help!
-
Thanks Miriam Agreed on all of the above.
-
Hi Alex,
I agree with Dana. It will be important for the new dentist with the separate business name to establish his own suite and local phone number for a variety of reasons.
-
He needs to be able to get his own phone calls
-
He needs to be able to get his own postal mail
-
Were he to market himself at the same address and phone as the other practice sharing the office, he would likely end up harming the other dentist and precluding himself from being able to develop his own business on the web.
The new dentist needs to set up his own website, of course, and be sure that all of his citations reflect his own name, address, phone and website.
The only alternative to this would be for the 2 dentists to combine their practices under a single name, but it doesn't sound like this reflects their real-world situation.
-
-
You are very welcome. I do think that separating the suites and adding the extra phone number (particularly for their Google+ pages) will really be all that needs to be done. Good luck!
-
Hi Dana,
Thank you so much for your response! It does seem to be a tricky situation. I can imagine that many dentists, doctors and lawyers run into the same type of situation, however, I'm don't think it's too normal for them to share the exact same suite number and phone number.
Thankfully, the dentists do have different websites. While this will help, I'm not sure this will make too big of a difference in the grand scheme of things.
Thanks again,
Alex
-
Hi Alex,
As I read your question my mind was already turning. I haven't dealt with exactly the same situation, but I have run into a situation where the same company has different divisions that each have separate addresses and phone numbers, but only one business name. It's a different, yet similar problem in reverse in a way. Consequently, I have also struggled with the whole business citation problem and inconsistencies with NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information.
That being said, I think your idea of splitting the addresses by adding Suite # and having one of the dentists get a uniqur phone number is probably the best solution under the circumstances. This might be hard to explain to the business owners, but I'd just present a case to them on how important it is to have all of those online citations line up with absolutely matching NAP information.
Do these dentists share the same Website? If so, this could be a problem too, and it might be worth convincing one or the other to get their own domain, but it sounds like they already have separate sites (since they have different brand names). If they were sharing the same site that would add a whole additional element that hopefully isn't a factor here.
Hope that help! Cheers,
Dana
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
-
Best practices when merging 2 domains with different themes and CMS's?
I have a client with 2 sites - one for an external audience and one for their ~2,000-3,000 employees. The external site (call it acme.com), built on WP with a custom theme, is pretty small. The internal site (call it acmeinternal.com) has TONS of high quality content with incredible engagement metrics, but it's built on a separate CMS with an entirely different custom theme. The problem we're trying to solve now: Can we bring the internal site over to the external domain (acme.com and acme.com/internal, for example) so that client.com can benefit from the quantity and quality of content and behavioral metrics associated with the internal content? The external and internal audiences, and the corresponding content for each, are both entirely mutually exclusive. A potential client of theirs who would come to acme.com would have no reason to visit acme.com/internal (we'd actually prefer to not provide navigation to it for them), and the internal audience would treat acme.com/internal as their landing page, and all the posts would then live at acme.com/internal/news/post-name. I'm assuming there are reasons why we couldn't have half of the site on one template using one CMS, having certain SEO tags, certain HTML structure, etc where the other half of the site is using a completely different template with a different CMS with different SEO tags, different URL structure etc? To reap the reward of the great content, would we have to essentially recreate the internal site's content on the external site's cms and template? Is it even possible for the domain authority of acme.com to improve based on the engagement on acme.com/internal/_xxxx _if there's virtually zero linking back and forth between acme.com and /internal/? Any advice would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ThinkAOR0 -
Why can't I rank for my brand name?
We are soon to launch a new company in New Zealand called Zing. I have been tasked with the challenge of ranking as highly as possible for anything to do with Zing before launch in February. Zing is in the financial industry so my colleagues thought that it would be a good idea to make a small blog (very small with literally one post) that reviewed other financial lenders. This sight stayed online for a couple of months before it was replaced. The official website is still yet to launch, so as an in between, I asked that we make a splash page with a small competition on it (see here at zing.co.nz). I would have preferred there were more keywords on the website but this was not achieved. I am still pushing for this and am hoping to get a few pages on there in the near future. Instead of getting the keywords on the splash page, I was given permission to start a subdomain, (blog.zing.co.nz). This contains many more common search terms and although its not quite doing the job I would like, the rankings for Zing have started to increase. At the moment, we are ranking number 1 for a few brand related keywords such as zing loans. This is why I feel something is wrong, because we rank number 1 for over 10 similar terms but yet we DO NOT EVEN APPEAR on the search engines at all for Zing. Have we been penalized? Do you have any suggestions at all? Do you think we could have been penalized for the first average blog? Maybe I messed up the swap over? Any help would be hugely appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Startupfactory0 -
Are permalinks ending in / different than permalinks with nothing at the end?
In my Google Analytics, I have different stats for what I think is the same page, win-a-party and win-a-party/ I searched all over for the win-a-party/ page and I couldn't find it anywhere. Why would it be tracking these differently? Should I set a 301 from win-a-party/ to win-a-party?
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Why are these two URLs showing in Moz as duplicate content?
Here is the first URL - http://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/FBPP0000012376.asp Here is the 2nd URL - http://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/flag-spreader.asp Granted I am new to this issue on this website, but what is Roger seeing that I'm not? A lot of our duplicate pages are just like this example.
Technical SEO | | Flaglady0 -
Repeating brand name on all subcategory levels
As part consolidating our site navigation, I have an opportunity to change how we name url s on child pages. At present, I think there are 2 problems that could be fixed.
Technical SEO | | stephenfishman
1.As you drill down, the brand name is not part of each url.
2. Also, the urls show abreviations that are not customer friendly. Are these worth changing? I am redirecting pages whether I change the naming or not. Below is my current navigation and below that the changed navigation I am considering. Many thanks to all that look and share their thoughts. Handcrafter --- details -- This is an e-commerce site with on hand products and similar products which are custom ordered from a catalog: Current Navigation Drill Down: /ctgy/brandname.html /ctgy/brandname-onh.html
/ctgy/onhmir.html then the specific products:
/onhmir/30322-onhmir92_741.html
/onhmir/30324-onhmir96_743.html The catalog has more products and so has 1 extra level of child category pages:
ctgy/brandname.html
/ctgy/brandname-cat.html
/ctgy/brandname-catmir.html
/ctgy/design1catmir.html
/ctgy/design2catmir.html then the specific products:
/catmir/30322-catmirhappy.html
/catmir/30324-catmirhappy.html Changed Naming Under Consideration:
On pages above the product page, (category pages) spell out all words and place the brand name in the parent url. The result would be: /ctgy/brandname.html /ctgy/brandname-on-hand.html
/ctgy/brandname-on-hand-mirror.html then the specific products:
/brandname-on-hand-mirror/30322-onh-mir92_741.html
/brandname-on-hand-mirror/30324-on-hand-mir96_743.html The catalog has more products and so has 1 extra level of child category pages: /ctgy/brandname-catalog.html
/ctgy/brandname-catalog-mirror.html
/ctgy/brandname-catalog-mirror-style1.html
ctgy/brandname-catalog-mirror-style2.html then the specific products:
/brandname-catalog-mirror-style1/30322-cat-mirhappy.html
/brandname-catalog-mirror-style1/30324-cat-mirhappy.html0 -
2 similar websites targetting different countries
I have a website that has a .com.au extension running on zencart. If I load up the exact same wesbite (with the same website name) on the .com, will my .com.au be penalised by Google? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | theshining0 -
Same image file with different alt text?
I have an image that represents 'widgets'. The image works for more than one kind of widget. I have two pages, one optimized for 'blue widgets' and one optimized for 'red widgets'. I would like to use the same 'widgets' image on both pages but change the alt text to be 'blue widgets' or 'red widgets' depending on the page it is used on. Should I: (1) use the same image on different pages with different alt text. (2) duplicate the image file and have two copies 'red_widgets.jpg' and 'blue_widgets.jpg' and then use each copy on the page optimized for the corresponding phrase. (3) create distinct, unique image files (where the pixels are different, not just the file names) for each kind of widget. This is a simplified example of a larger SEO problem where I have 1 image that can be useful on 20 pages that are each optimized for 20 different phrases. Should I use the same image with 20 different alt tags, or create 20 identical (but renamed) copies of the image, or create 20 slightly different image files (with different pixels in each image)? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | scanlin0 -
Google Confusion: Two Sites and a 301 Redirect.
Hi, We have a client who just sprang a new project on us. As always, they went ahead and did some stuff before bringing us into the loop! (oh the joy of providing SEO services!) Anyway, i'm pretty swamped right now and need some extra brains on this. Basically the client had www.examplesiteA.com online for many years (an affiliate site which had built up a strong brand in the industry). They have now decided to turn this affiliate site into a full blown service platform and so with the new site being built they 301'd the whole thing over to www.examplesiteB.com - this is where they want all the old affiliate content to be hosted. So essentially examplesiteA.com is now examplesiteB.com and a new site is being placed on examplesiteA.com - still with me? So this has all happened and a brand new website is on examplesiteA.com and the old examplesiteA is now sitting exactly as it used to, but on the examplesiteB domain. The 301 redirect has been removed and the new examplesiteA seems to have been crawled, but the homepage is not indexed. When you search for examplesiteA, examplesiteB is the top result. Now they are similar domain names and to be fair I have very little data at this point i.e. I don't know when the 301 redirect was removed and it maybe that this all fixes itself with time. How is link equity effected now that examplesiteA.com was 301 redirected to examplesiteB.com and cached in this way, but now the 301 redirect has been removed and does not exist? Would link juice have been diluted throughout the process? Obviously if we had been in on all this before anything was implemented we would have done things differently. Interested to hear what others would do coming in at this point. Thanks and look forward to the advice!
Technical SEO | | MarcLevy0