Personal Injury Lawyer Wants to Rank in Tons of Cities

[danieljc]

- I see in other threads that the consensus is that SAB's don't have a ranking disadvantage but what about in industries (such as law) where none of the ranking competition are standard physical locations?

Correction to above (edit feature doesn't seem to be on): Where none of the ranking competition are SAB's and all are standard physical locations

 

[JoyHawkins]

#1 and #2 would actually be more of a violation than what he did before. You can't have an SAB listing for a business that also has a storefront. The only time you can have an SAB listing is if you are a business like a plumber where you go to your customers and in that case you don't have another listing as a storefront.

Ex: I was talking to a handyman on the forum and he had a listing in his town as a SAB. Then he decided to open an office in the city over and had 2 listings. One immediately got suspended. The moment he opened an office, he was no longer eligible for a second SAB listing.


I'm astounded that Google gave you that advice, although I see tons of cases where they give terrible advice.

I would stay start over with a new location but only if the location is actually staffed or you would just be repeating the cycle.

 

[Scott ClientClicks]

This is more practical advice than GMB advice, but I thought I'd share what worked for one of my lawyer clients.

They had a primary fully staffed office in one location, but needed another office in a nearby location closer to a different court. They wanted to avoid a Regus or DaVinci virtual office center for fear of penalty, but didn't want to pay for a full time office.

They set up an arrangement with another non-competing lawyer to lease an office and share the conference room and receptionist. Both attorneys now share the same address, but have their own websites and phone numbers. They both rank in the three packs for their respective categories in a major market.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that they are both in compliance with GMB guidelines since the office is staffed during the stated business hours.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Scott,

Did it work? I had a previous client do this but both offices were in the same town. They merged with another law firm and were going to shut down the office but then decided they really wanted to rank in the 3-pack twice so they kept the office open "leasing" from the other lawyer there.

Just checked with the new changes and the one location is now filtered. They used to be there twice.


However since they had 2 offices in the same city, I think that's what triggered the filter (not the sharing w/ the other dude).

I would be cautious with this approach. If someone decided to show up there or take pictures it might be easy to catch on to. GMB support is asking for photo proof like crazy lately for this exact reason. It's getting much harder to skirt around the rules.

 

[Scott ClientClicks]

Joy - I just checked and both attorneys sharing the address are still ranking in the pack for their respective categories. One is an immigration attorney and the other is a criminal attorney so they are not in the same pack.

In this case, there weren't any issues about having two addresses in one city.

I always advise my clients to get their business name in the lobby directory. I've found that even some virtual office companies will do that for an extra fee. Hopefully that will help for photo support.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Scott,

If they're not the same type of attorney, they're not competing. What is getting filtered is a scenario like you have 25 personal injury lawyers in the same building using a virtual office and all of them are competing for "personal injury + city". In cases like that, Google is usually keeping 1-2 and filtering the rest kind of as "duplicates".

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Going to renew this thread with another similar question.

I have a lawyer setting up a new practice, but will not have a dedicated office yet, only meeting on appointments at a rented space.

My client was previously working with another more established lawyer and using his space. Client's practitioner GMB listing is verified (with many good reviews) at this shared location address. All citations are listing this same address as well.

Options that came to mind
- Leave the address alone for now until he gets dedicated space. (Might be a few months) Potential clients will most likely call him first, so he won't be losing any walk-in business. He will tell them the proper meeting address over the phone.
- Change the address to another address (like his home) and hide the address. Would be an SAB at that point. Is that allowed for lawyers?

Thanks

 

[gyitsakalakis]

My .02: Option 1

 

[JoyHawkins]

Definitely Option #1. A lawyer as an SAB would look rather odd IMO, plus you'd have to update citations which isn't a great idea for a temporary location.

 

[HangTenSEO]

Really good read.

I work with 2 clients where we are targeting multiple locations that they don't have offices in and thus far have managed to do really well by optimizing pages for those locations.

One thing we have done is blog about projects/work specific to the locations that we are targeting and link to those posts from each main location page.

It's sort of a silo approach to building out a location.

Now for this method to work, you have to have conducted business in the cities you are targeting, blog about the work using location based language and then add local backlinks to the blog posts.

Obviously with Lawyers you will probably have more competition, but I rarely see this method used where rich content is developed specifically around a location. Normally they might have a location page and a temp office, but rarely blog about the cases/business they took on in those locations with any depth.

 

[gyitsakalakis]

Really good read.

One thing we have done is blog about projects/work specific to the locations that we are targeting and link to those posts from each main location page.

Smart.