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A business with two to three locations should want a branded Knowledge Graph result to appear nationwide, and both the branded and local to appear around the regions where the business locations are

Some local businesses with one location have a strong brand presence, and Google actually has a hybrid Knowledge Graph panel result for this. It combines features of the both the brand and local panel.

It’s important that you check your business’s listings on as many of these high-quality directory sites as you can. Your main goal is to ensure that your company’s name, address and phone number (NAP) is correct and consistent on as many of these citation sites as possible.

In April 2019, Google was experimenting with a new local SERP that highlighted alternative directory sources for the same query. At the time, we saw an example in the wild for Germany. Now, an updated version of the SERP featuring branded directory buttons appears to be live in the UK, Belgium, Spain, Greece, and France – if not already throughout Europe.

If you find a sluggish market, your client can become a winner with the right strategy.

The higher a business appeared in the local finder, the more stable it tended to be throughout the year. The lower a business appeared in the local finder, the more erratic its position was as the year moved along.

If either of these brands were your agency’s client, you would need to take Tansy’s wins column and build your strategy from it. Your strategy could include recommendations for: Primary category adjustment based on ranking goalsWebsite development and optimizationLink developmentPhotographyReview acquisition, including both numbers and recency, as well as review languageCustomer service improvements via owner responses and Q&A usage

The content on the specific URL you link to is important and impacts ranking in the local results.  For most businesses, it makes sense to link to the homepage since that URL has the most authority, backlinks, and relevance.  However, for some businesses that qualify to have multiple listings, using a strategy like this can help provide better results.

Keywords in GMB landing page title

Quality / authority of inbound links to GMB landing page URL

Topical (Product / Service) keyword relevance across entire website

In addition to adding the local news carousel, Google also is adding a “Popular on Twitter” carousel for queries on local news topics. While local news organization tweets may be included, the feature will also pull in tweets from a range of sources it deems to have local authority on those topics.

November 5, 2019We started seeing huge changes in the local results (map packs) on this date.  Every client I checked had shifted and most of them were major.

I notice this every time there is a major shift in local rankings.  You’ll start seeing spam that wasn’t showing before.  If you work in an industry that has a lot of spam, I would almost expect this to happen.

I am hearing a lot of stories over at the Local Search Forum about listings vanishing.  If this is the case, it’s a strong possibility that your listing is filtered.  Listings that are near the same location of another business or share a website/phone number can have their ranking suppressed or missing altogether from the local results.

While it’s true that edits are tied to your whole Google account, it is the consistency and reliability of your edits that truly give you influence. There are a series of checks and balances that allow factual edits to grant you more trust. I have seen edits from a Level 3 guide get accepted immediately and those from a Level 8 guide go into a ‘not applied’ status immediately

Since the criteria to become a Local Guide is entirely based on the quantity of actions taken (rating/reviewing a business, suggesting business edits, etc.) rather than quality, it’s extremely common for bad actors to become a Local Guide

State of the Local SEO Industry 2020 survey found that, out of all factors, GMB elements (which include categories) have the greatest impact on local pack rankings.

take your list of keywords and enter them into your choice of free or paid keyword research tools to discover which terms have the highest potential search volume.

Finally, refine your list down to a smaller set of terms that combine the highest search volume with being most relevant and important for your company. In most cases, this is the list you’ll move ahead with, although there are some cases in which you would choose to target lower volume search phrases because they are either a) less competitive, or b) a more exact description of what your business is.

If you have your site set to detect a visitor's location and show content based on that, I would recommend the following: Serve a unique URL for distinct content. For instance, don't show English content to US visitors on mysite.com and French content to French visitors on mysite.com. Instead, redirect English visitors to mysite.com/en and French visitors to mysite.com/fr. T hat way search engines can index the French content using the mysite.com/fr URL and can index English content using the mysite.com/en URL. Provide links to enable visitors (and search engines) to access other language/country content. For instance, if I'm in Zurich, you might redirect me to the Swiss page, but provide a link to the US version of the page. Or, simply present visitors with a home page that enables them to choose the country. You can always store the selection in a cookie so visitors are redirected automatically after the first time.

Google's policies aren't as inflexible as you're trying to portray. The same Google page you quote also says that intent ought to be a major consideration (just as when evaluating pages with hidden content). Also, why would Google's guidelines prevent you from using geotargeting without an immediate redirect? Just because you don't immediately redirect search users to a different page doesn't mean you have to ask for their zip code instead of using IP-based geotargeting.    Lastly, I don't think using such redirects from SERPs improves user experience at all. If I click on a search result, then it's because that's the content I'm interested in. It's very annoying to click on a search result and get a page completely different from the SERP snippet. And what about someone who is on business in a different country? Search engines already provide different language localizations as well as language search options to favor localized pages for a particular region. So if someone goes to the French Google, they will see the French version of localized sites/pages. If they're seeing the U.S. version in their SERP, then it's because you didn't SEO or localize your pages properly, or they deliberately used the U.S. version of Google. Don't second guess your users. Instead, focus on making sure that users know about your localized pages and can access them easily (by choice, not through force).5 days ago, 17:00:11 – Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate Bill Hunt Frank your spot on as usual. We still keep chasing this issue and as I wrote on SEW last year in my article on language detection issues http://searchenginewatch.com/3634625 it is often more of the implementation that is the problem than the actual redirect.    Yes, it is exactly cloaking (maybe gray hat) when you have a single gateway such as "example.com" and if the person comes from Germany they see the site in German language or English if their IP was in New York. Engines typically crawl from a central location like Mountain View or Zurich so they would only see the English version since they would not provide signals for any other location. Where you really get into a tricky area is if you set it so that any user agent from a search engine can access any version they are asking for and let them in yet a human is restricted - sort of reverse cloaking. If Mr GoogleBot wants the French home page let him have it rather than sending him to the US homepage.    With the growth of CDN's (content data networks) I am seeing more and more of these issues crop up to handle load balancing as well as other forms of geographical targeting. I have a long list of global, multinational and enterprise related challenges that are complicated by many of Google's outdated ways of handling kindergarten level spam tactics. Sounds like a SES New York session...