Two Offices with one website in one Metro area

[Brian]

I am working with a one attorney that added a new office location in the downtown of a major city last spring. Up until that point he had one office located in a suburban community. Last spring we updated express update Localeze and Acxiom with the new downtown office address and phone. We also added additional citations and then claimed the downtown office in Google Places. We now have two places listings (one for the suburban office and one for downtown)pointing to two different pages of the same website.

Are we violating Google's rules with this approach?

If we are what should we do? Do we revert to a single listing places listing? Create two websites.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Brian,

No you are doing it right, based on what you said. Having 2 listings for 2 locations and one site is just fine. There are a couple finer points that are important to mention though.

1 listing per location is definitely allowed - no problem there. As long as they are REAL staffed offices. I mention that because I help lots of attys on the G forum who get suspended because they set up virtual offices partly to game Google and partly to help make it look to clients like they have an office in that city, when in reality no one is at that other office and clients REALLY only come to the main office.

But even if 2 actual offices the other issue, besides what the guidelines allow, is trying to avoid Google MERGING the 2 listings into one mishmash mess of data. That happens often and is a problem. It's a mess to fix and bottom line, one of the listings disappears into the other so then you only have one location showing.

To avoid merges each location MUST have a separate phone number. PLUS best practice is no MIXED NAP anywhere on the site. Say "2 locations to serve you - click here for our North Side Office - Click here for our South Side Office". Same thing on contact us page. But if you have NAP for both locations in the footer or contact us page it CAN contribute to merging.

Hope this helps and best of luck! Holler of you have more Qs.