Moz Local SEO Checklist

[James Watt]

Linda asked me to share this great post Miriam Ellis just did over at Moz.

https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist

This article's a great 20,000 foot view of local SEO, broken out by type (multi-location brick and mortar, from-home SAB, etc).

If you're a little in and out of the local game, this article's an especially great link list for a bunch of best practice in-depth articles on different specifics. Everything from Whitespark's accepted abbreviations for addresses to one of my favorite on-site technical audits.

If you're looking for a little validation that you're doing all the right things for your own business, or you're thinking about overhauling your process list for clients, this would be a good article to spend a little time with.

In an article that covers so much ground there's a ton of potential discussion points, but one thing that I saw that seemed a little strange was the author's way of handling NAP and Schema for multi-location businesses.

They recommend including full NAP in the footer for all locations if you have 10 or less locations... I've always kept that separate (only the NAP and schema for one facility on any given page), with a potential combination if there's only 2 locations. What's everyone else think?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks so much for sharing that for me James!

Miriam is the best!

I'm with you James on the multi-location part. But I wonder if now that Google doesn't get so confused or merge listings very often anymore, if it's less of an issue.

What do you guys think?

 

[Tim Colling]

This is a great article. Thanks for posting the link here!

 

[JustinB]

I saw the article in my feedly earlier this morning, definitely check it out. It has a pdf version but watch out the links aren't clickable so if you want to look at the resource links go back to the original article linked above.

(my first post)

 

[James Watt]

Right on, thanks for the reminder. Welcome to the forum Justin!

 

[MiriamEllis]

James, thank you so much for the kindness in featuring my post in a thread here. My thanks to Linda, too, for suggesting it.

JustinB - we just took a second look at the .PDF file. Downloading it, we are able to click on the links inside the .PDF, but you do have to hover over them. I am wondering if this might be a browser issue, or maybe even a resolution issue? Links should be clickable.

Regarding multiple Schema NAP in footer - I have not seen Google have any apparent problems with this in recent times, such as merging. So, that's my own experience on that, but if others have had a different experience, I'm always eager to learn. Obviously, in the past, merging was a SERIOUS problem, but as Linda mentions, this seems to have become significantly less of a problem. So, from a user standpoint, I believe the benefits of having clear NAP in as many places as possible outweigh any risks their might be of merging.

Again, I am just so appreciative of the mention of the post. It's my hope it may useful to agencies who are training new staff, or for you veterans who just want to be sure you're ticking off all the many steps in a Local SEM campaign.