Client bought out shop but used existing phone number
-
We have a client in Nashville who opened his first location on Spring St., then later bought out PAC Auto to open a second location on Dickerson St. Lately, we noticed that the Dickerson location wasn't ranking. I found that the previous business owner at Pac Auto had already built up a good web presence and that sigh our client was using their old number.
Basic NAP violation, ok, got it. But what to do next?
I decided to update PACs citations with The Car People's business name and website. Where I was unable to edit or where listings were already claimed, I just reported PAC auto as closed.
But yesterday I noticed not only was the Dickerson location still not ranking, but the Spring street location had indeed dropped several places too! (edit: I'm referring to local search results here as we don't own the site)
What kind of beast have I stirred?!
What kind of signals am I sending to Google that are devaluing the Spring st. location? Will things get worse before they get better? What can I do to make some progress on one without hurting the other?
Is it worth trying to get the previous business owners logins (not likey)? Talk to The Car People about getting a new number (not impossible)? Is it worth trying to get the site in order to build separate landing pages for each location?
Thanks in advance!
-
Hi Nick,
I would say you need to accomplish:
a) Getting the company to get a new phone number
b) Getting the developers to put a landing page for each location on the site
c) Building new citation for the new location, not piggy-backing onto citations for the old company. After all, despite the fact that The Car People occupy a building that was previously occupied by another business, there is no relationship between the two (or, at least, there shouldn't have been, if not for that decision to keep the other company's phone number)
d) Tell the client that some of the decisions that have been made are going to make it essential to have a lot of patience here while you try to create a data cluster out there on the web that Google can trust. Right now, it's unlikely that they have this. It's going to have be created over time with a lot of care.
-
I thought you claimed the old competitor page and tried to input your client's info for their Google+ page.
If that's not the case and you've already set up a Google+ page, there's nothing that needs to be done in my opinion.
I'm not sure that I would have had them change their number prior to reading this story, so as much as I would like to say yes and sound smart, I would have probably played it the same way. Especially when you think of the benefits of old customers of the competitor calling your client looking for the same services.
-
First off, thanks for your careful analysis, and to answer your questions
-
The Car People have the same name at both locations. PAC Auto (closed) was the previous shop at the Dickerson location.
-
We do the off-site stuff and our competitor does the on-site SEO (don't ask), so creating landing pages means a little push-back. So by "getting the site" I mean that if they won't take our recommendation to add landing pages (not to mention additional issues with NAP in html markup) then we'll push for a sale.
Otherwise we'll talk about a new number and start building again from the ground up.
Too bad about my goof on modifying PAC Auto's citations. Guess I'll go back and close those now.
Tough indeed. Time to call in the dream team.
-
-
Hi Nick,
Whoa - yes, this is messy. You are right about that. The business should have gotten a brand new phone number and I'd suggest that they do so and edit all existent citations to reflect the new number. If your client's company is The Car People at both locations, and their competitor is PAC, (I think this is what you're saying) you should not have attempted to edit or claim PACs citations, beyond reporting them as closed. You should have built new citations for the new business. My guess is that Google is now confused about which business is located on this street as it is seeing not only 2 business names hooked into it, but an identical phone number. Basically, it sounds like a citation confusion catastrophe
I'm not sure what you mean by:
"Is it worth trying to get the site in order to build separate landing pages for each location?"
Which site? Do you mean buy out the competitors' website? Something else? Your client should be in control of their own website, and have a separate landing page for each location on this website.
Whether what is going on with the one location is affecting the older location, I can't say. It is possible for Google to be mistrusting of an overall profile if something wonky is going on with part of it, but there is also a big shakeup going on in the Local results that could be the cause of what you're seeing with the older location.
You may need to get a professional audit of the situation, Nick. There's a good chance I'm not understanding certain nuances of the situation (such as whether both companies are named The Car People or whether one is PAC, and what you mean about 'getting the website'). Sounds like you've got a really tough client who did not go about things in an optimal way, and it's my best guess that a high level Local SEO would need to do a sort of case history to get all of the details sorted out on something like this. Tough one!
-
Great feedback--thanks! On your suggestion I think we're going to push for their website.
Are you suggesting closing the existing Google+ page for Dickerson and verifying a new page, or was I just not clear about having already opened one? And for conversations sake would you have done something differently to start? For example, having them change their phone number?
-
You're probably not looking at a quick fix any way you slice it but here's what I would do:
- Create a new Google Plus Local page for the Dickerson address.
- Claim/Create as many listings as possible for the Dickerson address
- Create a landing page on the client's site for both addresses
- Link each Google Plus Local page to the location specific landing page you created
I think you do those four things, you'll be fine.
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 use of an old domain?
I've discovered that my clients website used to have another domain name, which they still own but don't use. It's doing OK considering its not been used for a few years - almost 6,000 backlinks showing on Majestic. So what's the best way of using this for SEO? I'm presuming some kind of redirecting? A simple redirect of everything on the domain to the new domain index page? Or going trough all the old pages and redirecting them one by one?
Technical SEO | | abisti20 -
Can OG titles be used as a substitute for Meta titles
We use og (open graph) titles in lieu of meta titles. Is there any downside to using just one. Should we be using both og and meta titles on our page. Appreciate any insight. Himanshu
Technical SEO | | patilhimanshu0 -
Implementing Schema within Existing CSS tags
In implementing Schema with a site using CSS and containing existing tags, I want to be sure that we are (#1) using the tags effectively when used within a product detail template and (#2) not actually harming ourselves by telling Google that all products are named or described by the SS tag and not actually the product name or description (which obviously could be disasterous). An example of what we are looking at implementing is the following: Old: <ss:value source="$product.name"></ss:value> New: <ss:value source="$product.name"></ss:value> Old: <ss:value source="$product.description">New: <ss:value source="$product.description"></ss:value> Basically, is Schema at the point where the SS tag be replaced (in the eyes of the search engines) with the actual text and not the tag itself?</ss:value>
Technical SEO | | TechMama0 -
Have you used the Addthis Widget and had your rankings drop
Just wondering what experience people have of this widget? I added it to a site I look after late last week and we took an noise dive over the weekend. Any thoughts / comments are appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RodneyRiley0 -
Using symbols in the html title of a webpage
If you a symbol in the title of a webpage will this dilute the keywords in the title
Technical SEO | | mickey11
thus making it rank worse in search engines here is an example <title><br /> Black Shoe Polish<br /></title> versus <title><br /> ▶ Black Shoe Polish<br /></title> will the extra symbols count as words and thus the dilute the effectiveness of the Black Shoe Polish keyword. sort of making like 4 words instead 3. By the way, The reason to use a symbol is to make it stand on in the search engine results0 -
Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?
We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times. Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.) So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times. Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that. A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1. Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option? Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic. Thanks, Trisha
Technical SEO | | lzhao0 -
Is there any issue with using the same structured data property multiple times on the same page?
Im working on implementing structured data properties into my product detail pages. (http://schema.org/Book) My site sells books and many books have both a 13 digit ISBN # and a 10 Digit ISBN. Should I apply the itemprop "isbn" to both of them or just the one with higher search volume? Some books also have multiple authors, how should I handle that?
Technical SEO | | myork07240 -
How do I 301 url's with numbers in them?
I have a number of 404 error pages showing in webmaster tools and some of the url's have numbers, % symbols, and some are pdf's. My usual 301 redirect in my htaccess file does NOT redirect these pages where the url's have special characters. What am I doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0