Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
P.O Box VS. Actual Address
-
We have a website (http://www.delivertech.ca) that uses a P.O Box number versus an actual address as their "location". Does this affect SEO? Is it better to use an actual address? Thanks.
-
Hi Anton,
If yours is a local business serving local customers in person, then, yes, a P.O. box will severely limit your local search marketing. Because P.O. boxes are not considered legitimate physical addresses, you'll be unable to build a full set of citations for the business, and that will likely hamper your local search ranking efforts.
Definitely better to use an actual address! Hope this helps.
-
Hi Anton,
You really only need to worry about having an actual address if your customers come to you, i.e. retail stores, restaurants, mechanics, etc.
I can't access the site you reference, but it looks like it's probably a courier service or something along those lines. In that case, your serving the customers at their location, in which case they don't really have a need to know your actual address, just what areas you service.
So no, you're not likely to see any affect on your SEO by providing an actual address as opposed to a P.O. Box.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do I need to put the company name in the SEO Title box in Yoast?
I am optimizing Title Tags for a WP site. I am getting ready to add keywords to the Yoast SEO. I noticed the long company name is currently the Title Tag - I choose 2-3 keyword phases per page- what do I do with the long business name? In my own site I can post up 70 characters of keywords in the Title box and my company name appears after a pipe in the browser with my the keywords ahead of it? As Follow on my Site: Title, Tilte, Title - Company Name. Thank you! Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph.Lusso1 -
Onsite SEO vs Offsite SEO
Hey I know the importance of both onsite & offsite, primarily with regard to outreach/content/social. One thing I am trying to determine at the moment, is how much do I invest in offsite. My current focus is to improve our onpage content on product pages, which is taking some time as we have a small team. But I also know our backlinks need to improve. I'm just struggling on where to spend my time. Finish the onsite stuff by section first, or try to do a bit of both onsite/offsite at the same time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Location.href vs href?
I just got off a Google Hangout with John Mueller and was left a little confused about his response to my question. If I have an internal link in a div like widgetwill it have the same SEO impact as widget John said that as you are unable to attribute a nofollow in an onclick event it would be treated as a naked link and would not pass pagerank but still be crawled. Can anyone confirm that I understood it correctly? If so should all my links that have such an onclickevent also have an html ahref in the too? Such as widget Many times it is more useful for the customer to click on any area of a large div and not just the link to get to the destination intended? Clarification on this subject would be very useful, there is nothing easily found online to confirm this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
One company, two address. How do I handle footer NAP?
I have a client with two address that fall under the same brand. One address is in CA and the other is in NY. I have a single domain and will be creating separate landing pages for each location but wanted to know how I should handle the NAP in the footer of the other pages. Should I list both NAPs, one NAP or neither NAPs in the footer? Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalWorkboots0 -
Shopify Product Variants vs Separate Product Pages
Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors. I have two routes I could take: a) Make 50 separate product pages Pros: -Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats. -Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat). Cons: -Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color) b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants Pros: -More elegant and organized -NO duplicate Content Cons: -Losing out on color specific search terms -Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions. Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
Help - .ie vs .co.uk in google uk
We have a website that for years has attracted a high level of organic searches and had a very high level of links. It has the .ie extension (Ireland) and did very well when competing in the niche market it is in on google.co.uk. We have the same domain name but in .co.uk format and basically redirected traffic to it when people typed in .co.uk instead. Since the latest panda update, we have noticed that the number of visits organically has dropped to a quarter of what it was and this is continuing to go down. We have also noticed that the .ie version is no longer listed in google and has been replaced by .co.uk. As we've never exchanged or submitted links for the .co.uk domain this means there are only links indexed in google. Is there any way I can get google to re-index the site using the .ie domain rather than the .co.uk domain? I am hemorrhaging sales now and becoming a much more withdrawn person by the day!!! PS - the .co.uk domain is set up as a domain alias in plesk with both .ie and .co.uk domain dns pointing to the the same IP address. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rufo
Steve0 -
Schema.org Implementation: "Physician" vs. "Person"
Hey all, I'm looking to implement Schema tagging for a local business and am unsure of whether to use "Physician" or "Person" for a handful of doctors. Though "Physician" seems like it should be the obvious answer, Schema.org states that it should refer to "A doctor's office" instead of a physician. The properties used in "Physician" seem to apply to a physician's practice, and not an actual physician. Properties are sourced from the "Thing", "Place", "Organization", and "LocalBusiness" schemas, so I'm wondering if "Person" might be a more appropriate implementation since it allows for more detail (affiliations, awards, colleagues, jobTitle, memberOf), but I wanna make sure I get this right. Also, I'm wondering if the "Physician" schema allows for properties pulled from the "Person" schema, which I think would solve everything. For reference: http://schema.org/Person http://schema.org/Physician Thanks, everyone! Let me know how off-base my strategy is, and how I might be able to tidy it up.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mudbugmedia0 -
External 404 vs Internal 404
Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0