During last week’s webinar, Andrew Shotland, proprietor at Local SEO Guide, walked through Google My Business (formerly Google Places) issues for multi-location businesses and provided some tips for how to deal with them.  He also provided detail on on-page local SEO tactics including schema.org markup that can improve the display of search results for consumers.

Here are some of the highlights from the webinar:

• Questions multi-location businesses should ask before deciding on linking to homepage or location page on Google My Business: How many locations?; Which page has “authority” (links)?; and which is the preferred landing page?
• On Google My Business, do not create new listing when rebranding. Simply change name of business on listing.
• When changing locations, once again, do not create a new location, but update location once the location opens.
• While it will take a long time to update, when actual address is missing from maps, some of the primary places to go to update the mapping data include: Google Map Maker, TeleAtlas, TomTom, and OpenStreetMap.
• It is good to list multiple practitioners at single location (real estate agents, doctors, etc.) but try and differentiate them somehow with different phone numbers.
• Be the first to upload photos to your Google My Business page in order to prevent other, unrelated pictures from becoming your business profile image.
• In Google Carousel results, the top two-thirds of your profile photo will be what users see when you show up, so optimize the picture accordingly.

Check out the entire presentation below:

For access to all of our past webinars and a look at what’s to come, visit http://bit.ly/LSAwebinars.