Local SEO and PO Boxes
-
What is the best way to do local SEO when the business has a physical address, but the mailing address is through a PO Box. Can you still list your business on Google Maps, Google places, yahoo, bing etc... with the physical address?
-
Hi Nathan,
Dorothea is correct about P.O. boxes being forbidden in Google's local products. However, phone verification is not a solution, as Google will not offer this for every business - only some of them. If this is the case for your business, and you are not being offered a phone verification option, then postcard is the only way you can verify your business.
What is the exact situation with this business? Why can't mail be delivered to the brick and mortar location? I know there are some parts of the U.S. where the post office does not deliver mail to homes and businesses, but only to P.O. boxes. Is that the case with your location? If so, my best suggestion would be that you go through this troubleshooter and see if it leads you to Google's new verification issues phone number:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1399021&page=ts.cs
-
Use phone verification. Much faster and much easier.
-
I understand that, but how can you verify a physical address if you get mail at a PO box?
-
Using a PO Box address on Google+ Places is one of the big DON'Ts. Google is against using PO boxes and in most cases they can even figure out that the address you declared isn't the real one. When this happens your Google place page gets deleted. Submitting your business again won't be very easy...
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
-
SEO Drop
Over the last few months my rank has dropped by around half and for the life of me I can’t see why. There are no warnings on Google Console. Am I missing something? Website: thespacecollective.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
How do you report SEO audit findings?
Hello, Mozzers! I'm curious to know how you report SEO audit findings. Do you use a spreadsheet? A presentation? A formal report? Or maybe something else. If you have a favourite audit template, I'd love to see it. A second question: what things do you report in an audit? I currently report crawl findings, authority and trust, link profiles, and competitive analysis. I also investigate a site's security—that's not usually part of an audit, but site owners need to know about it. What do you report to your audit customers? Thanks for sharing your auditing wisdom!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
Massive local + national disconnect in rankings (local deindexed)
I asked the question originally on webmaster central. I tried RickRoll's solutions (but it doesn't seem to have solved the issue). Problem below: I've been noticing for some time that certain pages of our site (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent) have been deindexed locally (or very low ranked), but indexed nationally (well ranked). In fact, it seems that the actual page isn't ranking (but the blog https://www.renthop.com/blog is). This huge mismatch between national vs local rankings seem to only happen for Boston & Chicago. Other parts of the country seem unaffected (and the national & local rankings are very similar). A bit of a background (and my personal theory as to what's happening). We use to have subdomains: boston.renthop.com & chicago.renthop.com for the site. These subdomains stopped working, though, as we moved the site to the directory format (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent). These subdomain URLs were inactive / broken for roughly 4 months. After the 4 months, we did a 301 from the subdomain to the main page (because these subdomains had inbound external links). However, this seems to have caused the directory pages to exhibit the national/local mismatch effect instead of helping. Is there anything I'm doing wrong? I'm not sure if the mismatch is natural, if the pages are getting algo penalized on a local level (I'm negative SEOing myself), or if it's stuck in some weird state because of what happened with bad sub-domain move). Some things I've tried: I've created webmaster console (verified) accounts for both the subdomains. I've asked Google to crawl those links. I've done a 1-1 mapping between individual page on the old site vs the new directory format I've tried both doing a 301, 302 and meta-refresh redirect from the subdomains to the directory pages. I've made sure the robots.txt on the subdomain is working properly I've made sure that the robots.txt on the directory pages are working properly. See below for a screenshot of the mismatch & deindexing in local search results (this is using SERPS - but can be replicated with any location changer). Note the difference between the ranking (and the page) when the search is done nationally vs in the actual location (Boston, MA). I'd really appreciate any help.. I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure this out (as well as experimenting). renthop%2Bboston.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lzhou0 -
Any Angular2 SEOs?
We are having a few issues with blog integration into an Angular2 website and would love an SEO referral. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinadvisor0 -
Business Listing sites SEO
How websites like justdial, askme, indiamart, tradeindia do their search engine optimization? Is it different from normal seo? please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
SEO Benefit to SSL Certificate
Our site does not have an SSL certificate. I have read that in the process of adding one of URLs need to be redirected and that some link equity can be lost. Implementing an SSL certificate sounds somewhat complicated and far from risk free. Is there a tangible SEO benefit to upgrading to SSL? Will doing so help SEO in a tangible manner that justifies the cost, time and aggravation? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan12 -
Reviews and Other Content in Tabs and SEO
Hello, We are redesigning our product page and have considered putting our customer reviews in a 'tab' on the page, so it is not visible to the user until they click on the tab. Are there any SEO implications of this? Right now, we do have problems with this because we use a third party tool for our reviews and they are in javascript, so they do not get crawled, but going forward we will be using our native platform. We want the text of the reviews to get crawled and indexed. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colbys0 -
Video SEO
Hello All! I'm wondering about the best way to link build and carry on my video trend. I love to create video's with all of my articles as I feel it adds an extra element to just boring old text! The problem is that my current 25 links from Youtube are all NoFollow. This didn't originally bother me, but it's starting too. Is there a couple of websites that I could upload my article/ video to and gain a link from in a similar manner? Come to think of it, is this a good SEO tactic to use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0