Miriam Ellis has written on this subject a few times and perhaps her advice would be useful here. Check out these articles if you haven't seen them already:

• https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
• https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Regarding link structure from your main site, she suggests:

Do not bury your local landings pages somewhere deep within the architecture of the website.
Link to them from a high-level menu.

But she immediately follows that up with this point: "Finally, do not build an unreasonable number of landing pages."

It sounds like you're right within that recommended threshold.

Hope you're able to find something useful in those links. Good luck!

Great post Miriam, and thanks for sharing. I'm also pretty excited for this year. Most of my fascination tends to be drawn toward the geeky plumbing of getting data around:

• How larger companies/agencies can nail their store pages at scale optimized for Local SEO. I've been poking around at large sites and have been so fascinated with all the variation (Schema.org, sitemaps, storemaps, etc.)
• How Google is evolving the Maps and Local SERP experience to be even richer and more engaging. I tweeted about some fun stuff I found in downtown Seattle one day when I should have been looking up which bus to take to meet my wife for an appointment
• How Schema.org lets companies tag their businesses on their web sites, and if and how that matters

But there's always so much to do, and it's all exciting. Let's get going!

For suggestion 1, I should clarify that you already are using Microdata. Your Microdata is repeating what is already in the page, rather than "tagging" your existing content inline. Microdata is a good tool to use if you are able to tag pieces of content as you are communicating it to a human reader; it should follow the natural flow of what you are writing to be read by humans. This guide walks you through how Microdata can be implemented inline with your content, and it's worth reading through to see what's available and how to step forward with manual implementation of Schema.org with confidence.

Will these solutions remove the duplicate H1 tag?

Whatever CMS or system you are using to produce the hidden microdata markup needs to be changed to remove its attempt entirely. The markup of the content itself is good, but it needs to be combined in with existing content or implemented with JSON+LD so that it is not duplicating the HTML you are showing the user.

Are these options relatively simple for an experienced developer? Is one option superior to the other?

Both should be, but it depends on your strategy. Are you hand-rolling your schema.org markup? Is somebody going into your content and wrapping the appropriate content with the correct microdata? This can be a pain in the butt and time-consuming, especially if they're not tightly embedded with your content production team.

I downloaded the HTML and reviewed the Microdata implementation. I don't mean to sound unkind but it looks like computer-generated HTML and it's pretty difficult to read and manipulate without matching tags properly.

Is one option superior to the other?

Google can read either without issue; they recommend JSON+LD (source).

In your case, I'd also recommend JSON+LD because:

• Your investment in Microdata is not very heavy and appears easy enough to unwind
• The content you want to show users isn't exactly inline with the content you want read by crawlers anyway (for example, your address isn't on the page and visible to readers)
• It's simple enough to write by hand, and there exist myriad options to embed programmatically-generated schema.org content in JSON+LD format

Please review this snippet comparing a Microdata solution and a JSON+LD solution side by side.

PLEASE DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THIS INTO YOUR SITE. It is meant for educational and demonstrative purposes only.

There are comments inline that should explain what's going on: https://gist.github.com/TheDahv/dc38b0c310db7f27571c73110340e4ef

I see that you're using CSS to get that markup into the page, but definitely not visible to the user. Am I interpreting that right? If so, it seems like your goal is to get some Schema.org tags into the page to mark up your content as a LocalBusiness.

I have 2 ideas for you:

Use microdata (the markup format you're using now) to mark up your tags inline with your existing content. So, wherever the

tag with the company name lives that is rendered and shown to the user, ad the "LocalBusiness" itemscope to the parent tag that surrounds it and its content. Basically you'd merge your Schema.org code with the user-facing content

Use JSON+LD markup instead. You can get the same information "repeated" but the JSON+LD markup isn't rendered for users. jsonld.com has a great page with a template you can copy and adjust to suit your business. If you go this route, remove the microdata-laden HTML hidden off the page with the inline CSS and replace it with the JSON+LD wrapped in . Google also has some great documentation around the LocalBusiness type.

Hope that helps!

David's (other David!) response definitely works for Moz customers. I'm not sure if you were asking about this a Moz Local user or if you were going at it on your own. If the latter, have you considered managing your listing on services that feed into these directories?

For Mirror, if you look at the footer on their website, you'll see that they cite Central Index as the source of their business data:

Powered by web.com. Business data Central Index and third parties.

You can review the full suite of their network partners on their Publishers page. Regarding Sun, you might look to Scoot as they mention Sun among their network of business directories.

Unfortunately, I cannot speak to what experience you may find creating an account, finding, and managing your listings. The best I can offer is my understanding that they are all related to each other.

For suggestion 1, I should clarify that you already are using Microdata. Your Microdata is repeating what is already in the page, rather than "tagging" your existing content inline. Microdata is a good tool to use if you are able to tag pieces of content as you are communicating it to a human reader; it should follow the natural flow of what you are writing to be read by humans. This guide walks you through how Microdata can be implemented inline with your content, and it's worth reading through to see what's available and how to step forward with manual implementation of Schema.org with confidence.

Will these solutions remove the duplicate H1 tag?

Whatever CMS or system you are using to produce the hidden microdata markup needs to be changed to remove its attempt entirely. The markup of the content itself is good, but it needs to be combined in with existing content or implemented with JSON+LD so that it is not duplicating the HTML you are showing the user.

Are these options relatively simple for an experienced developer? Is one option superior to the other?

Both should be, but it depends on your strategy. Are you hand-rolling your schema.org markup? Is somebody going into your content and wrapping the appropriate content with the correct microdata? This can be a pain in the butt and time-consuming, especially if they're not tightly embedded with your content production team.

I downloaded the HTML and reviewed the Microdata implementation. I don't mean to sound unkind but it looks like computer-generated HTML and it's pretty difficult to read and manipulate without matching tags properly.

Is one option superior to the other?

Google can read either without issue; they recommend JSON+LD (source).

In your case, I'd also recommend JSON+LD because:

• Your investment in Microdata is not very heavy and appears easy enough to unwind
• The content you want to show users isn't exactly inline with the content you want read by crawlers anyway (for example, your address isn't on the page and visible to readers)
• It's simple enough to write by hand, and there exist myriad options to embed programmatically-generated schema.org content in JSON+LD format

Please review this snippet comparing a Microdata solution and a JSON+LD solution side by side.

PLEASE DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THIS INTO YOUR SITE. It is meant for educational and demonstrative purposes only.

There are comments inline that should explain what's going on: https://gist.github.com/TheDahv/dc38b0c310db7f27571c73110340e4ef

David's (other David!) response definitely works for Moz customers. I'm not sure if you were asking about this a Moz Local user or if you were going at it on your own. If the latter, have you considered managing your listing on services that feed into these directories?

For Mirror, if you look at the footer on their website, you'll see that they cite Central Index as the source of their business data:

Powered by web.com. Business data Central Index and third parties.

You can review the full suite of their network partners on their Publishers page. Regarding Sun, you might look to Scoot as they mention Sun among their network of business directories.

Unfortunately, I cannot speak to what experience you may find creating an account, finding, and managing your listings. The best I can offer is my understanding that they are all related to each other.

Great post Miriam, and thanks for sharing. I'm also pretty excited for this year. Most of my fascination tends to be drawn toward the geeky plumbing of getting data around:

• How larger companies/agencies can nail their store pages at scale optimized for Local SEO. I've been poking around at large sites and have been so fascinated with all the variation (Schema.org, sitemaps, storemaps, etc.)
• How Google is evolving the Maps and Local SERP experience to be even richer and more engaging. I tweeted about some fun stuff I found in downtown Seattle one day when I should have been looking up which bus to take to meet my wife for an appointment
• How Schema.org lets companies tag their businesses on their web sites, and if and how that matters

But there's always so much to do, and it's all exciting. Let's get going!

I see that you're using CSS to get that markup into the page, but definitely not visible to the user. Am I interpreting that right? If so, it seems like your goal is to get some Schema.org tags into the page to mark up your content as a LocalBusiness.

I have 2 ideas for you:

Use microdata (the markup format you're using now) to mark up your tags inline with your existing content. So, wherever the

tag with the company name lives that is rendered and shown to the user, ad the "LocalBusiness" itemscope to the parent tag that surrounds it and its content. Basically you'd merge your Schema.org code with the user-facing content

Use JSON+LD markup instead. You can get the same information "repeated" but the JSON+LD markup isn't rendered for users. jsonld.com has a great page with a template you can copy and adjust to suit your business. If you go this route, remove the microdata-laden HTML hidden off the page with the inline CSS and replace it with the JSON+LD wrapped in . Google also has some great documentation around the LocalBusiness type.

Hope that helps!

Miriam Ellis has written on this subject a few times and perhaps her advice would be useful here. Check out these articles if you haven't seen them already:

• https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
• https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Regarding link structure from your main site, she suggests:

Do not bury your local landings pages somewhere deep within the architecture of the website.
Link to them from a high-level menu.

But she immediately follows that up with this point: "Finally, do not build an unreasonable number of landing pages."

It sounds like you're right within that recommended threshold.

Hope you're able to find something useful in those links. Good luck!