Great points all Miriam!

Many local businesses and SEOs have a Google strategy of divide and conquer.

With Google Local a better strategy is "United We Stand!"

The other important thing is that we need to be mindful of the S in NAPS (Name, address, phone, site) All need to tie together.

One well optimized site with location pages works better for a wide variety of reasons.

Here is a biggie that many don't realize. Let's say main site is optimized for all the plumbing KWs and Place page is linked to home page of main site.

Then you do a microsite for citywaterheaterrepairs.com. If NAP is on the site and other signals to help it rank locally, that tie it back to the main business, sometimes the algo will REPLACE THE URL on the main Place page with the microsite URL. What happens next? The ranking drops for the money KWs- city plumbers, city plumbing service etc, because the Place page is now linked to a site optimized for waterheaters.

I've had SEOs post in my forum about this problem and even post emails they have gotten from Google support saying they will not fix the URL. Support basically tells them the algo will connect whatever site it thinks is relevant and if you only want the algo to connect to your main site - then you should only have one main site.

So anyway that's just one potential issue that can come up.  Hope that helps and best of luck!

Wayne, here are some other resources I found for you that were posted at my forum.

http://www.poweredbysearch.com/canadian-local-seo-citations-the-ultimate-guide/
http://www.ngsmarketing.com/local-citation-building-study-part-4-local-business-directories-around-the-world-canada-uk/
http://www.canuckseo.com/index.php/2011/05/diy-canadian-citations-our-2011-update/
http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/local-seo/canadian-citations/
http://www.adster.ca/blog/top-10-canadian-citations-for-local-businesses-and-local-search-marketers

There are a few issues I wanted to point out.

1st off the address in your Google dashboard needs to be the real address you work from.  So if you move you MUST change it in dash. If you don't all kinds of problems could come up including duplicates and including your listing being deleted.

Any time you move, it breaks NAP so you will likely lose ranking.

If you move to a new city you will likely only rank in that city, not the previous city. (Depends on competition and proximity.)

In either case you need to set service area and be sure address is hidden. But that service area does not affect ranking in any way at all. Ranking area is still determined by the location that's in dash, even though address is hidden.

Hope that helps and best of luck!

"We did this to let people know that we come out to their location, and also to try to expand our reach. For example, if you were searching for an SEO company in Chesterfield, that is an area that is about 30 mins from us. I'm not sure our local office listing would "carry" that far out, and thus the service area was created as a test."

Service area and service radius have absolutely no impact on ranking. It's been tested, proven. Typically you'll only rank in the city your are in. Unless competition is low and you are very strong, then sometimes you'll rank in other cities, but service area settings don't play a part.

"I'm not sure that the bot would take that long to recrawl the listing, and I would have thought that it would have happened by now if that was the case."

Sorry, not talking regular bots, like the ones that crawl sites. Maybe bot is the wrong word. But with Local listings you can have a violation for years without an issue. Then you make a minor edit and it seems to trigger a recheck of the listing to see if it stands up to current guidelines, then it gets wacked.

You had another question I got via email but it's not showing up here so copying:

"I had a question about this, as even though we had quite a few mentions of the city and service they were spread out throughout the description and not bulked together in the traditional definition of keyword-stuffing. If what you were saying about the description having no part to play is true, how would that have had an impact on the LBL drop?

Help me understand, my mind is a sponge right now ;)"

Description is not a RANKING factor. But the algo looks at it as a signal of spamminess. Spammers have lots of patterns that the algo can pick up on, this is one of them. So a non-spammy description can trip a filter if it follows the same pattern of overly repetitious keywords.

In that short description, count every single time any word is repeated more than once. I did a quick scan and counted 25.

Mike Blumenthal has also said mentioning city even twice in description can cause a 10 point ranking penalty. I have examples I could show at my forum, where the description was not spammy or KW stuffed, but the city and KWs were repeated multiple times. They clean up description per my recommendation and pop right back up.

But again all that was pre-pigeon. After, it seemed like lots of really spammy ones were getting away with it. So may no longer be an issue.

But like I said above, if it does not help and if customers will never see it and if it could maybe hurt AND if your ranking was suffering, why not clean it up? Nothing to lose.

"Is there any additional benefit to claiming a business listing other than locking it from being edited?"

Claiming does not lock it from being edited. Still can be by either Google or users.

As far as SEO and ranking - no benefit really. I see unclaimed listings in the A spot all the time.

Except for 2 important things.

1. Categories are one of the most important local ranking signals. If you don't claim, all you get is whatever standard category Google gives you, no additional ones.

2. As far as conversions, click-though and stick rate - claiming can make a HUGE difference. (Adding great images, a compelling description, hours, etc.)

Click-though and stick rate are both important ranking factors.

The data/image from the page shows up in the Knowledge panel, so a surfer comparing listings in Google search could be swayed more by a nice KP, especially if there are the additional elements added of having a G+ Post and image show up. That's just extra free ad space you aren't using if you don't claim and post to G+.

So all the above could help get either more calls or clicks and again click-through is now one of the strongest ranking factors. So I would assume click-through from SERPs to G+ would also count.

Yes I agree with everyone above. There are pros and cons both ways. We've had this discussion many time at other venues and the general consensus, even from top citation pros is that it does not matter too much either way.

As Range and Monica said, keeping NAP consistent is the most important thing.

Good points all Richard!

"Those that don't have Google+ and haven't setup social and other profiles or have NAP listings typically rank poorly even if they are EMD."

Yes, sorry I should have qualified I was only talking about local listings in the pack. In regular organic it's somewhat different. The specific potential benefit I was pointing out, only works for local pinned listings. And Google mainly seems to still like EMDs and PMDs in local pack listings .

But like you said you can't just do any one thing and expect to rank. You can have a subdomain or even an EMD and if everything else isn't optimized well or there are violations or the competition is stronger, you still may not rank.

Thanks Miriam, we've been discussing in the G+ Pro community all day and I'm working on a forum post for tomorrow. I have Andrew's post in there and I'll include a link to your post here as well.

Thanks Wick for the extra details. This one is tricky because some of the services will overlap.

Where an SMB may see themselves as 2 different companies, Google often looks at it as a marketing ploy and sees it as really 2 divisions of the same company.

This one is a little hazy to me. I think the only safe way to even try to have 2 listings is if none of the categories cross over. So even though they both do home maintenance of sorts that cat should not cross over.

Does that make sense?

I'm very much a purist when it comes to the Google Local guidelines, since I deal with fixing problems all day AFTER someone has gotten in trouble.

In my mind sharing an office like this is tricky to handle.  Now you likely would not get in trouble for adding a suite, but to me if a suite does not really exist, then it does not exist so it's a little like making up a fake location.  Here is the pertinent part of the guidelines.

Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location. Make sure that your page is created at your actual, real-world location.

In big office buildings you'll often see 10 businesses that are all at the same address that don't specify a suite at all, so it would look to the algo as if they are all in the same office. So maybe just skip suite on the new listing?

Just my anal-about-the-rules 2 cents.