It’s always a good thing to be a the top of the search engine result pages and for local brick and mortar businesses that means showing up in the search engines’ map sections.  Just like their regular search result placements search engines have algorithms for their local / map results.  One of these is your phone number. All things being equal it is better to have a local number for showing up in these results, but what you really don’t want to do is have a shared number.  Many of our clients are small businesses that share space with other small businesses.  For example, several massage therapists might share the same office building, front desk staff and phone number.  While this can be a great way to save costs, it can be a killer for local rankings.

We’ve certainly seen situations where until business B got a different phone number than business A they couldn’t rank well.  Once they got their own number the situation completely changed.  So, if you’ve set up your local listing and can’t figure out why you’re not showing up and you have a shared number it’s time to make a change.

His conclusion may be less than accurate, or in other words there may be more going on here than meets the eye. Take the search term “Utah Dentist”  as seen in this image.

There’s a definite cluster of dentists down in the Orem area.  Given Mike’s conclusions about all non centroid factors mostly being equal we would expect to find these are the strongest listings in the state, but they aren’t.   Take for example, listing D “University Mall.  Mall Dentist Group.”  It does have the term “Dental” but this is a very weak listing.  The website is not a dentist website, there are 3 reviews but they are all for the mall, none for the dentist and the listing is not very complete.  Compare that against the listing up in Salt Lake City for “Warr Dental”  They have 21 reviews, their listing is verified and well filed out and  they also use Dental in their title.

Mike suggests optimizing for your state.  In most situations we believe this would be the wrong thing to do.  Most people will not search statewide for a dentist, restaurant, car dealer or just about any other service provider.  They will look to their city.  In rural areas, where people are willing and accustomed to driving a good distance, they’ll check the cities, by name, that are closest to them.

Not ready to give up optimizing for state search yet?  Have a look at this result for Orem where there was a cluster of dentists in the statewide search for Utah.

With only one exception, the good old University Mall Dental Group, a weak statewide result, none of the listings show up in both.  Given this you really may have to make a decision which you want to show up for in Google local your city or the state and we think you should put your bid on your individual city.

What you’ll commonly see once there are two listings for a business is that they gather slightly different information.  For example, Google will assign the pages that link to the business differently to the different listings.  This means that one listing may have some of the pages that link to it while the other link shows different pages.  Anyone researching the business gets a partial picture of the business.  And it’s not just linking pages.  Because different users find different listings, one user might leave a review on the first listing while another user leaves a referral on the second listing.

To make matters worse Google doesn’t provide a clean way for a business owner to consolidate the listing.  The best thing for searches would be if the business owner could go into Google’s Local Business Center claim both listings and then click a button to consolidate listings.  Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t exist.  Instead after claiming both listings a business owner is forced to choose which one to suspend, potentially leaving out reviews and third party pages that link to the business.

Ultimately, the best case scenario would be for Google to handle all of this automatically by simply looking to see if the phone number  and address are the same and if the business name is similar.  However, until this happens they should implement a clean consolidation feature in the Local Business Center.