Messy Situation: NAP inconsistencies and a suboptimal forced official website

[Lloyd Silver]

This client is an insurance agent of a large national company with her own office. Someone worked on her local SEO before and did a really bad job (to the point of me talking to someone at Google and them telling me it was one of the worst Google Places pages they've ever seen). I'm trying to see if I can fix things.

Here are the details:

1. She has a page on the national company website (think location page).

2. She also has her own domain which is serving the exact page that's on the national site. It does have a canonical link to the national page. She does not have the ability to make any changes whatsoever to this domain.

3. The prior company created a good number of citations. There are NAP inconsistencies and she was not given usernames/passswords to be able to login and make changes. All of these citations point to her own domain.

Since the ranking factors of the underlying website play a decent role in ranking a GMB page, my original plan was to build a page (Google deleted the old one for me, very helpful) and point to her location page on the national site. We're talking a massive site with huge domain authority. About half of her colleagues use their own domain for their GMB page and the rest use their location page on the national site.

Of course, there are all these citations out there pointing to her custom domain and most of those citations can't be changed easily due to the lack of a username/password.

And while I originally linked to her national page, that link was updated by Google given the prominence of the link to her own domain. So for now I'm stuck with.

I'm not sure if there's much I can do here. I don't think I can take advantage of the power of the national site due to all of the previous linking to her own domain. And I can't build up the authority or even really optimize her current domain because the company doesn't allow it (I can do some keyword optimization but that's about it).

Am I missing anything here? Any other suggestions to get a little oomph to this page?

FYI, the page is showing up when searching for agents of her company in the local area. And it was manually verified by the Google rep given the issues with the prior page. I'm sure I can optimize it more and will review once I complete Linda's new course. But it's not showing up when searching for the services she provides and that's obviously the goal.

Thanks

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Quick question - can you / have you already create an email from her own domain, and by using that email "reclaim" the listings pointing to her custom domain?

If the directory service has real people behind it, this has been a super successful tactic for me when I'm cleaning up someone else's mess.

If it doesn't, then I just make sure there are citations with the right info in more prominent/authoritative sites - even if that means paying (such as a yellowpages listing).

 

[Lloyd Silver]

Thank you. That's certainly a possibility and something that I'll try. That could be used to fix some of the NAP issues. But then there's still the question of which domain to target in GMB, although it looks like Gogole isn't giving me a choice (at least at this time).