Why do I rank locally above the 7 pack?

[Chris McCreery]

Well I have spoken to two separate csrs now and both told me the same. If it was an individual named lawyer and they left the practice and the firm wasn't in their listing name wouldn't it display as "closed"?

They mentioned if they moved to a new firm then they would create a new listing and prepend the firm name to the attorney name.

Sounds like maybe the csrs aren't fully aware of the best practices


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[marcus118]

Hi Marcus,

As long as they have different phone numbers, different business names, and different suite numbers, it should be no problem. That's a very common situation with doctors, dentists, lawyers, and real estate agents. Google knows how to deal with it.

Thanks Darren. In my case there are no suite numbers. They literally share the exact same space. What's more is that the 2 business owners have a history together where they shared a law firm but then split into 2 independent firms but still share office space.

It's a bit unique to say the least and my head has been spinning all week trying to figure this out.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Marcus, I pointed out the fact that it looked like this was one practice or they were partners and you didn't explain they used to be and are no more, so I didn't know the current situation.

One thing they need to do for sure is clean up every single instance of the Hackett & Harris firm name on the sites. And be sure Harris is not mentioned on Hackett's site or vice versa. Google algo catches everything and that name is all over, telling Google they are really partners in the same practice or one works at the other firm.

Pure sharing of offices, 2 separate practices is tricky even when there isn't all this merged history evidence. I've seen it come up occasionally with Chiropractors too.

It's complicated by the fact that many attys have fake locations just to rank in surrounding cities by "saying" they are in another attys office but they really are never there. So I think Google may have a pretty sensitive trigger about attys that share offices because it's so often abused.

However often in these cases a BK atty is not going to share an office with a direct competitor for obvious reasons, he's going to share with an Injury attorney. So in your case Marcos they have similar practices, directly compete and are going to have lots over overlapping cats. I think to the algo OR a manual review, all things considered, this is going to look like one big practice, trying to get more visibility with 2 names and listings.

Not much you can do except try to make your client as different from the other listing as you can. Maybe if neither is ranking well they could agree to split KWs, since they are evidently still on good terms I assume, since they are still living together. Then one would maybe rank for certain practice areas and the other for the others.

 

[marcus118]

Thanks Linda. Sorry for the upfront confusion - I didn't know of the history at the time of this original post. I just started the local work for this client and discovering new things every day.

I might suggest we throw in the towel with regards to local and just focus on organic. Way too much going on here and even if I clean it all up there's still likely to be confusion here.

Thanks

 

[chadkimball]

She's like a kindergartener playing a match game. Super smart but easily confused. Give her broken or duplicate pieces and she has a hard time putting it all together.

I'd say she's more like a robot kindergartener playing a match game. Programmed by super smart people but still easily confused.