I have a client where we put the specific local listing page url (example.com/locations/phoenix/location1) in the Google Places URL field. It works out really well as we get the home page ranking organically (depending on the query) and the specific places result locally. Sometimes they are combined and other times they are not, but we are in the mix somewhere almost always.

In my experience, I had a client with the positioning like yours. We created the Places account and it just went into the local / maps results. The good news was that the SERP didn't contain any other organic listings at the top. If you have prominent and consistent rankings and are confident in your strategy, then you might not need to create a places account. Just be aware that moving down 1 spot could really be 8 or 9 spots on the real estate of the SERP. Moving down to #2 organically could mean being below the entire local results. You will need to judge the risk / rewards. Hope that helps.

Personally, the only reason a pingback is useful for me is for the notification that someone is linking to me. When you "accept" the pingpack it displays it on the blog as if it were a comment. When you view the pingback in the comments on the post page it really doesn't make any sense at all and doesn't really have any value to the page or those looking at it. I typically just delete the pingback and go forward now knowing another site linked to me.

Also, there is the possibility that Google may crawl the link in your comments. In that case it will now look like a 2 way / reciprocal link, where there have been several cases that Google has discounted / devalued those types of links. Hope that helps.

Since people will not be able to visit the locations of your driver's addresses, I agree with you that you would not want to use that. Also, it will be a bad idea to setup home based service area businesses at your drivers' houses since they will essentially be able to control the listings you create. You will need to come up with some sort of space that is controlled and utilized by your business in those locations. It doesn't have to be a large space but it will have to be a unique address. Even though customers may never come to it, you'll still need to get it setup. Then, in Google places set the business up as a service area business with the appropriate areas that your drivers in that area can legitimately serve. Click the "hide address" box and you'll be good to go. You'll want to setup local phone numbers for each location as well.

Then you can create unique content around those other areas where you can do business directly on your website. Have localized content (services, reviews, phone number, etc) specific to each location. Set the URL for the places pages to those specific area locations on your website.

Edit: spelling and grammar

"In summary, is it correct to say that H1 and H2 tags are stronger signals to the search bots of what the page is about?"

Absolutely. These tags are strong signals to search engines as to what the page is about, along with title tags and meta descriptions. You can prioritize content and break down the page with H1 through H6 headline tags. SEOmoz has a great on-page best practice guide for setting up the page, which makes sense for your users as well as search engines. Try not to spam keywords anywhere, just make sure it is "keyword friednly" but at the same time readable and would make sense to a human.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/on-page-factors

I have had experience with all three.

To answer your question, I think Localeze is the best for distributing your NAP, however, there is no substitute for or better value than manually claiming local citations. It also takes awhile for the listing to get distributed across of their local search platforms.

In my opinion, Yext is overpriced, but is valuable in claiming major citation sources. The number of profiles available are capped. David Mihm recently posted on this: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/yext-local-marketing/

UBL is good, but I only spend the $39 core syndication annually since they have access to the Acxiom database.

In short, you can pay for all three, but don't just set it and leave it. Always claim and manage as many citations as you can manually. You can take advantage of all of the local search platform's features without overlooking anything.

Although the filename will be duplicate, the content on those filenames will be okay. Google will look more at the content on the page rather than anything else. There are sites out there that have weird file structures, like:

/index.php

/services/index.php

/products/index.php

Some CMS's will automatically do this, but they rank fine because they have quality content, even though the index.php is technically a duplicate filename.

You should be fine with this method.

Ok gotcha- well if that is the case, then think about how the user will navigate to the end result if they started from the home page. Logically, you could assume the following

If URL structure is as follows:

www.lawyerz.com/office-locations/dr-al-pacino

then /office-locations/ should contain links to all office locations of multiple lawyers.

But with this structure

www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/office-locations

/dr-al-pacino/ should contain links to the 4 other pages. **This option will probably be your best structure. **

Is there any particular reason why office location, phone number, reviews, and ratings need to be on 4 separate pages? I could see there being a lot of thin content which won't really rank well or provide a ton of user value. Can you give some more info as to why this would be? I could easily see all 4 of these pages combined into one.

With that, you can focus your URL structure into categories or local regions or both, depending on how dynamic you want the site to be. For example:

http://www.lawyerz.com/nevada/personal-injury/dr-al-pacino

OR

http://www.lawyerz.com/personal-injury/dr-al-pacino

OR

http://www.lawyerz.com/nevada/dr-al-pacino

Unless there is something that I missing, I think no matter how you structure your URLs, thin content just won't rank.

I would think that buying AdWords for your brand name would be a good/affordable solution until you outrank that video. Benefits are:

• Those ads could potentially move the negative video down the page visually.
• Clickthroughs to your site will be affordable.

It might be a good idea for your client to get good reviews in video format. Have them contact their past customers who are happy and would be willing to review them on camera. Post these video testimonials on YouTube and embed them on the client website.

You can also have the company create an "Brand Name - About Us" video which gives insight into the company for prospects. Explain how they do business and why they are best choice over their competition. You can also ask questions in the video and encourage watchers to comment.

If these videos you create have more interaction and more popularity than the other negative video, and is relevant for the same search terms (Brand Name) then that negative video will probably drop off the first page of organic / universal results.