Hi there Mozzers!

This is only my second YouMoz so as ever in this great community, constructive feedback would be appreciated!

The Motivation Behind This Local SEO Post
At the end of October we moved house. Given that mOxby Design (editor's note: mOxby is now Summit Web Solutions) is mostly myself with some input from my wife, moving the business was just as easy as moving home (anyone find moving home easy?). This was not going to be a small move - from Peterborough (UK) to Inverness in Scotland. This would affect our own local SEO efforts and so I documented our action and have provided some conclusions to help others not have the same problems we have had!

Our Approach

Stage 1 - Pre-move Scotland Trip (September 2011)
We spent a month working on the Isle of Harris (my wife's family live there). Just before that time I launched a new page of the website targeting two keywords to experiment.

• web design highlands
• SEO Scotland

In order not to confuse our regular site visitors, we linked to the page from the page footer and added it to sitemap.xml in order for the page to be discoverable and indexable. We also announced the page overtly through Twitter and Facebook.

We have a UK-wide keyword campaign as well, so we monitored our rankings for that as a 'constant' throughout.

Micro-data

We kept our site-wide Schema.org microdata at our Peterborough location except on the page relating to the Highlands.

The result of this initial work to rank in Scotland was that we stood at 13th for "web design Highlands", not too shabby for the visitors. (We are not there now as we've changed our keywords to town-specific since moving).

Stage 2 - Key Changes Made (end of September 2011)
To ensure there was no bias in our process we made no major textual changes or new content. Once we knew where in Scotland we would be moving to and had the full address. What we did was:

• All site-wide references to our address were changed to our new Inverness address. Microdata was updated at the same time.
• Geo-sitemap was update using Geo Sitemap Generator. Related to this, we updated the geo tags in the site's header.
• We had some file names with Peterborough in so we did a bit of renaming and 301/htaccess magic.
• Google Maps listing was updating using the Verified Listing editor.
• We also updated our Qype and FreeIndex listings.
• After all our site changes we resubmitted our sitemap.xml

Stage 3 - Just a little bit of Social
After a great article from SEOmoz I asked a few friends who I thought were interested in our business and may know people who could be to socially share one of the new pages created from the above renaming activity. The page chosen was one with a particularly local SEO focus.

At this point things seemed to be going well. A week after these changes all Peterborough-related website pages were out of the Google index. Fantastic. Peterborough-related keyword rankings were sliding (as planned) and Inverness ones started to rise.

Stage 4 - Local Listing Changes
I have observed that in terms of local SEO consistency of information about your business positively affects your rankings. This means that wherever your business is listed, your business name and contact details must agree with what you say about it. Therefore we set to work updating listings, whether other sites had a link to our website or not. We did this using a simple search query:

7 Green Lane was our old street address, so this ensured we found pages that related to our business and also mentioned our old street address. Where possible we logged in to change the address though sometimes an e-mail was required.

Stage 5 - Anchor Text
Using Open Site Explorer's link analysis of our own site we identified sites linking to us with Peterborough-related keywords and had those changed.

And then it struck...
We know how much in love with duplicate content Google is (cough) and how businesses should never have more than one map listing (unless you have multiple branches). Well it came to our attention that in updating our maps listing in the correct way, Google had decided that we had two listings, one in Inverness and one in Peterborough. To make it worse, our Peterborough one actually had the Inverness address next to it!

 

I would like to point out for our non-UK friends that Peterborough and Inverness are 500 miles apart. We have tried 

• Reporting an error
• Reporting a mislocated pin
• Reporting a duplicate listing

I've even had three phone calls from various Google offices to confirm the changes and nothing's changed. Both are listed as verified listings, owned by us! I even got a happy client to rate us on the Inverness-pinned listing to check Google genuinely had two listings, which they had, yet the Google interface said we had claimed both listings, so I couldn't claim the duplicate and delete it!

Given that our Maps listing had five reviews on it and other businesses in Inverness don't have any the likelihood is that this was affecting our local SEO efforts. A month and more since we moved, Google still has duplicated listings, which is proving very frustrating.

The Result

On the whole our local rankings are going in the right direction and the move has not been too stressful.  It will take time for the sites which listed us as Peterborough to get updated and reindexed but we are getting there. So what can we learn?

The Lessons

1. In case you were under any illusions, the guys at Google are not perfect. Check the changes you make are reflected accurately when you update your maps listing.
2. Be patient: nothing happens over night. Moving the business location is effectively re-marketing and starting a whole new SEO campaign
3. If you manage the transition carefully you should not adversely affect any non-local keyword rankings.
4. Start Earlier: this would be our biggest point for you all - if you know where your new location will be start re-marketing earlier than we did. I thought I had left enough time to be doing as well in Inverness as we were in Peterborough, but I didn't. Learn from us and re-market quicker!

Have you had to do a major relocation? What did you do differently and how did that go? What should we have done differently?

I look forward to hearing about your experiences.

Thanks for your attention!