Best practices for a local business move
-
My client is a chiropractic office that will be moving to the next town over in about 3 months. What are people's best practices on how to best accomplish this SEO-wise so as to not lose too much in terms of rankings, current organic traffic and citation listings?
-
Hi Brian,
There is so much confusion surrounding this very common topic because Google has repeatedly changed their stance. The thread Amber has pointed to on Linda's forum quotes the most current Google policy on this. Linda's thread doesn't link to the source of this, so I will here: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/S6APN5ijnOQ
And here is the complete language of what Google staffer, Jade, wrote:
Verified business owner of a page, and is your business moving locations? Here's what you do.__Edit your address in Google Places for Business or in the Google+ page admin area, whichever you are using to manage the page. This will either make a new page or edit the address on the existing page. It may take a week or two after editing your address before you see an update. At this point, you may need to go through a verification process again. Don't worry -- this is normal.__If you see a page that's still got the old address, click on Report a problem and mark that location as closed. Provide the link to the new address or information about the new location if possible. You can find more instructions on closing a location here: http://goo.gl/YZIjq*Now, remember, following the above steps must be followed up by a citation cleanup campaign. You need to find all web-based references to your old address and edit them so that they reflect the new address. This is very important.
-
If you're just 3 months away from the move, it's time to revise (vs. create anew ) the landing page(s) that will reflect your new location and get those online asap, so your organic results can start percolating.
-
There was a Mozinar recently called A Foolproof Process for Scrubbing Your Local Footprint Squeaky Clean that can help you keep your listings up to date. There is a list of free and paid tools in there that can help you out.
-
Your best approach would be to edit the address in Google Places for Business rather than marking it closed and creating a new listing for the new address.
Linda Buquet addresses this topic in detail here-
Hope this helps!!
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
-
Best practice recommendations for enabling multiple languages on your site?
I find that the advice for multi-language sites is always tied with multi-region, but what about US only sites that want to be multi-lingual? What are the best practice recommendations there? HREFLANG tags necessary? TLDs? Do you need to purchase yoursite.us , yoursite.sp , etc.. or would yoursite.com/en yoursite.com/sp suffice? Should the extensions be region based even if the language is the only difference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emilydavidson0 -
Best SEO url woocommerce, what to do?
Hi! Today we have our product categories indexed (by misstake) and for one of our desired keywords, a category have the nr 1 rank. By misstake, we didnt set nofollow, noindex on our categories, just tags, archives etc. We are now migrating to from Ithemes Exchange to Woocommerce and ime looking on improving our SEO urls for the categories. For keyword "Key1" we rank with this url: http://site/product-category/Key1. The seo meta title and description where untouched when we launched the site last spring so it doesnt look so good.. The plan is to stripe out product-category and instead ad some description ( i have a newly written text of 95 words, 519 letters without space with they keyword precent 5 times in a natural way ) to that particular category and have the url as following: http://site/key1 and then have a 301 redirect for the old http://site/product-category/Key1. What do you think of this? What shall i consider? on the right track? Grateful for any help! // Jonas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knubbz0 -
Please share best practices for subfolders and paths in a domain name
I am seeking feedback on the best way to proceed with regards to a project I am working on. Say for example the domain was domain.com and this site wanted to target specific markets such as realtors, attorneys, churches, and restaurants. Which URL structure would be better? domain.com/industries/attorneys or domain.com/attorneys Can I get your feedback along with any supporting articles. This is for a large ecommerce site but these particular pages are solely going to be used for marketing purposes to bring those site visitors to the website to let them know we understand their needs. Thanks for your help> Malcom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrintPlace.com0 -
Question on Moving Content
I just moved my site from a Wordpress hosted site to Squarespace. We have the same domain, however, the content is now located on a different URL (again, same base domain). I'm unable to easily set up 301 redirects for the old content to be mapped to the new content so I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a workaround. Basically, I want to make sure google knows that Product A's page is now located at this new URL. (www.domain.com/11245 > www.domain.com/product-a). Maybe it's something that I don't have to worry about anymore because the old content is gone? I mean, I have a global redirect set up that no matter what you enter after the base domain, it now goes to the homepage but I just want to make sure I'm not missing something here. Really appreciate your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheBatesMillStore1 -
Best Practice for setting up expert author contributing to Multiple Sites?
If a single author contributes to multiple sites, should each site have its own author page (tying to the same single gg+ account)? Ex. One author > one gg+ account > multiple author pages (one per site) Or, should all sites publishing his content link to a single author page/bio on a single, main site? Ex. One author > one gg+ account > a single author page on one site (all other sites link to this author page) In this event, where would the 'contributor to' link point for the additional sites he is contributing to, the homepage? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen0 -
Best Approach to Get Backlinks for this site
Hello, What would be a good approach to gain backlinks for this site: www.nlpca.com The owners don't have much time to write content. I as the consultant have time but do not have the expertise the owners do. The people that run the site are authorities in the field. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Do 404 pages pass link juice? And best practices...
Last year Google said bad links to 404 pages wouldn't hurt your site. Could that still be the case in light of recent Google updates to try and combat spammy links and negative SEO? Can links to 404 pages benefit a website and pass link juice? I'd assume at the very least that any link juice will pass through links FROM the 404 page? Many websites have great 404 pages that get linked to: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fretardzone.com%2F404 - that was the first of four I checked from the "60 Really Cool...404 Pages" that actually returned the 404 HTTP Status! So apologies if you find the word 'retard' offensive. According to Open Site Explorer it has a decent Page Authority and number of backlinks - but it doesn't show in Google's SERPs. I'd never do it, but if you have a particularly well-linked to 404 page, is there an argument for giving it 200 OK Status? Finally, what are the best practices regarding 404s and address bar links? For example, if
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford
www.examplesite.com/3rwdfs returns a 404 error, should I make that redirect to
www.examplesite.com/404 or leave it as is? Redirecting to www.examplesite.com/404 might not be user-friendly as people won't be able to correct the URL in the address bar. But if I have a great 404 page that people link to, I don't want links going to loads of random pages do I? Is either way considered best practice? If I did a 301 redirect I guess it would send the wrong signal to the crawlers? Should I use a 302 redirect, or even a 304 Not Modified redirect?1 -
Best method to update navigation structure
Hey guys, We're doing a total revamp of our site and will be completely changing our navigation structure. Similar pages will exist on the new site, but the URLs will be totally changed. Most incoming links just point to our root domain, so I'm not worried about those, but the rest of the site does concern me. I am setting up 1:1 301 redirects for the new navigation structure to handle getting incoming links where they need to go, but what I'm wondering is what is the best way to make sure the SERPs are updated quickly without trashing my domain quality, and ensuring my page and domain authority are maintained. The old links won't be anywhere on the new site. We're swapping the DNS record to the new site so the only way for the old URLs to be hit will be incoming links from other sites. I was thinking about creating a sitemap with the old URLs listed and leaving that active for a few weeks, then swapping it out for an updated one. Currently we don't have one (kind of starting from the bottom with SEO) Also, we could use the old URLs for a few weeks on the new site to ensure they all get updated as well. It'd be a bit of work, but may be worth it. I read this article and most of that seems to be covered, but just wanted to get the opinions of those who may have done this before. It's a pretty big deal for us. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well Am I getting into trouble if I do any of the above, or is this the way to go? PS: I should also add that we are not changing our domain. The site will remain on the same domain. Just with a completely new navigation structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0