Citations, SEO and a skeptical client
-
What do you say to a client who recently purchased an online business and says 'I don't really care if the phone number or address on a directory is old or incorrect'?I've tried to explain the value from an SEO point of view, but he's not really buying it.Anyone encountered this skepticism before and if so, how did you handle it?
-
Intriguing title to this question!
You hooked me.
Important question: if your client has an online-only business, why does he have citations? Structured citations are normally restricted to local businesses that make in-person contact with consumers. Does your client interact face-to-face with his customers? If so, failure to correct citations is about the worst mistake he could be making in terms of reputation, rankings and revenue.
But, if your client's business model is virtual, he shouldn't really be creating local business listings and ought to get rid of them - especially any Google My Business listings as they would actually be a violation of Google's guidelines. However, if he has accrued non-structured mentions of his business (for example, social mentions, newspaper articles, blog posts, etc.) and they contain misinformation, the risk of neglecting this is that he is losing customers. If I'm correct in understanding that your client's business is virtual, I'd advise him to:
-
Get rid of all local business listings on the major local business data platforms
-
Make the effort to correct unstructured citations, unless he can afford to lose customers.
I'd give it the 'old college try' to make the client understand his profits are at being put at stake due to misinformation being published about his company and outline a sensible plan for addressing the issue (based on whether his business is truly local or virtual). Then, if the client wouldn't hear this, I'd let him go. In fact, I wouldn't serve a client who felt that bad data about his company could be neglected. I'd be foiled at every turn in trying to market his business and see progress. His attitude would be setting us both up for failure. Hope this helps, and good luck!
-
-
David nails it here. Most business owners understand they need SEO, but don't know how it actually works. They are often told, you need thousands of back links, and then the company promises them these links. You need to emphasize quality and remind them it takes time.
As far as convincing the client they need to update their information, I would emphasize how the search engines draw connections between different sites and if the information is wrong it may look at the business as inactive. I'm sure you've mentioned that you don't want customers calling the wrong number, but they probably responded with "no one gets the phone number from this site". However, if they are searching for the branded name of the business a business directories information may pop up and show the wrong info. Don't miss out on easy conversions. I would try and provide some information or articles showing why they need to follow your advice.
Hope this helps.
Chris
-
All clients are skeptical when it comes to SEO. Because they get bombarded daily with emails from India promising first place on Google. Basically you have to A show them a client you did SEO for and have them Google it for themselves or you have to do one keyword for them for free to convince them of the value.
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
-
Http or https for citations and link building
I'm wondering what version of my website I need to use on Google My Business and link building etc.. I have setup https and am using a 301 redirect for all http traffic. My question now is, do I need to go to all of my current citations/links and update them to https? I would think the citations/links in-place will hit the 301 and it won't matter what I set. Duplicate content isn't a problem since the canonical version of the page is https. I can't get a clear answer on the web and can't find anything on Google's site that suggests one way or the other. I'd just like to have some feedback from my fellow Moziopians 🙂 -fencepencil
Local Listings | | fencepencil1 -
Dental Practice Acquisition SEO
Hi Mozzers! I have an interesting online marketing challenge I would love to hear the community's thoughts and advice! My clients (a dental practice consisting of 3 dentists) are taking over (buying) the practice of another dentist across the hall (same address except for suite #), who is retiring (we'll refer to him as "retiree" from here out for simplicity). The retiree's dental practice has close to zero online presence. He has citations across the web (google listing, yelp, healthgrades, etc), but no website. My question is: How would you go about consolidating the web presence for my clients? We want to get the traffic for existing and potentially new patients searching for the retiree. The retiree isn't retiring right away. His presence for the next several months will be vital to my clients' success as he will introduce new patients to my clients and pass the torch, so to speak. Would you create a landing page for the retiree on my clients' website & claim/add my clients' NAPW on all of the citations? That seems to be the best & simplest idea I've come up with so far, but I would LOVE to hear if anyone has any creative thoughts or ideas. THANKS!
Local Listings | | Derrald0 -
Should I use a vanity address when creating local citations?
My client is opening a new location of their business in the Dallas area and has listed the location on their website under Dallas, but their technical address is Farmers Branch. They have not started any citation building efforts, so I will be creating all citations from scratch. Should I create citations using the vanity address containing Dallas or list Farmers Branch as the city?
Local Listings | | CaddisInteractive0 -
Unable to update client address in G+/Moz Local
Hello, I'm having an issue with Moz Local that involves a few complicating factors. I have a client who has moved to a new office and I was hoping to use Moz Local to help keep their NAP consistent during the transition. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the Google+ page that was set up for the business (and neither does my client). The client is relatively new, so we suspect the page was set up by the person/agency that set up their website previously. And since Moz Local gets the business address from the Google+ page it finds, and I can't access that page to change its address, I can't update the address in Moz Local. I DO have access to the client's website and Facebook account, and have already updated their listed address on those pages, but the Google+ page seems to still be a problem for verification. One of the other wrinkles is that since I have updated the Facebook page to show the new address, Moz Local has picked that up as a completely separate listing (a listing that uses an "and" instead of an "&" in the name). I was hoping to claim/verify THAT listing and see if I could merge the 2, but this other listing shows up as a separate purchase on Moz Local. I would prefer not to have to pay twice for the same listing, if at all possible. I would try to change the Facebook page name to use "&" instead of "and" in the hopes that Moz Local might recognize that it's the same business, but it looks like Facebook only allows you to change a page's name once, and I don't want to burn what might be needed to solve some other future problem. Lastly, the Moz Local listings are under another Moz account. I DO have access to that account, and can provide any specifics to the Moz staff if needed. To sum up: I can't change an address on Google+ and therefore cannot change the address on Moz Local. I'm not sure if this is a Moz Local issue, a Google+ issue, or (most likely) an issue on both ends, so any suggestions would be most appreciated. Thanks!
Local Listings | | BrianAlpert780 -
Google keeps updating/tweaking my Local business branch addresses ? to whats different in my citations and on page. how can I stop it?
Hi All, I have a number of branches as we have separate branch pages and separate google local listings for these. I have been trying to keep them in consistent for citation purposes but google keeps trying to tweak the address in the local listings. Sometimes for example , google is trying to remove the premises number from the Road e.g 78 Doncaster Road is the actual branch address but google local business wants it as Doncaster Road, I also see Google is wanting to sometimes remove the locality name etc?.. Also If the local listing has a county ( in America - you would have State) , google is sometimes wanting to remove this add United Kingdom in Country instead ?. Is this a problem and how to deal with it as I think this is obviously impacting my local rankings?. If i approve all these changes then do I need update all my citations and page addresses all the time ? Or can I just leave the suggested "Update" or overwrite googles suggestion with what I had originally. Does anyone else have this problem ? thanks pete
Local Listings | | PeteC120 -
Foreign languages and SEO: product description
Hi everyone, I have hit a brick wall with regards with the SEO of one of our sites. This is concerning a Belgium based webshop which sells toys. The server is based in the Belgium and the domainname ends also .be . They try to put as much possible dutch/belgium text on the website but the amount of this is very low compared to the english text on the website. The problem starts when they import product description from the main manufacturer which is in english. this means when the customer visits the website, it's dutch, but the product description is in english I have pointed out this but they pointed out the fact they import with 1 click 500 products, but it takes them ages to translate this to dutch. Now is my theory, the way they are doing this, will hurt their ranking a lot in the google.be search engine compared to their competitors to the point that less than 10% of their site is in dutch/belgium and the rest in english. I am thinking of the possibility of suggesting to let them use google translate to automatically translate the products before putting them on the website. It won't be a great translation, but it will stop hurting their ranking and will even contribute to increase their ranking. I thought they do this, and put a small link to the english version of the manufacturer. I would love to hear others thoughts on how to do this with as efficient and fast as possible.
Local Listings | | sami800 -
Looking for SEO Specialist Contractor!
Polyvore is looking for an SEO Specialist (Contract role)! Click here to apply: https://hire.jobvite.com/j?aj=oZv4Yfwg&s=Moz As an SEO expert, you will help acquire users to Polyvore through organic search. You will also be key to helping engineering team understand SEO best practices. Our ideal service provider is someone who has a deep understanding of SEO in the e-commerce space. Key Responsibilities Audit all Polyvore pages and help the engineering team understand their relative importance to SEO Provide SEO best practices for e-commerce space and help build out automated tools to ensure these best practices Help investigate issues related to SEO including but not limited to changes in organic search traffic Review upcoming designs from SEO perspective & suggest improvements before the changes are implemented What does success look like? Overall increase in organic search traffic to Polyvore A set of automated SEO tools that help catch SEO issues proactively A monitoring plan to catch SEO issues early (i.e. which tools to use, what to track, how to predict potential issues) Click here to apply: https://hire.jobvite.com/j?aj=oZv4Yfwg&s=Moz
Local Listings | | seomoz_polyvore.com0 -
Local Listings SEO: Which multi-location retailers are doing a super job with local listings? I'm also interested in finding retailers who are using schema.org microdata format to structure their store-level data.
Do you know of any enterprise level restaurant or retail chains that are doing a great job with their local listings content? Just looking for some links/examples of best practice executions. Also, I'm very interested in finding retailers or other multi-location businesses that are using schema.org microdata format to structure their local store location data.
Local Listings | | SeeMore2