Lawyer network across the US

[Andiamo]

Hi,

We are working with a local law firm that has a network of lawyers across the country that they refer clients to when relevant. Given that each of these lawyers works independently as well as receiving referrals from our client, how does that work with local optimization? Can each location get its own separate Google Plus Local page linking to my client's site? Is it problematic to set up separate pages for each location on my client's site?

[phranque]

http://support.google.com/business/answer/2911778 [support.google.com]:

To add your local business to Google My Business, you must have a mailing address and meet our quality guidelines. If you’d like to promote a brand, product, organization, or any other entity without an address, you should instead create a brand page.

Local Google+ pages are designed for businesses that serve a particular locale. Local restaurants, hotels, dentists, hardware stores, plumbers, or repair shops, for example, are eligible to create a local page.

[martinibuster]

What's a brand page?

As far as the OP's question, the way I understand it, the reason why the law firm would like to optimize for nationwide areas that they do not serve would be to collect a referral fee from any settlement should the lawyer they refer to take the case. If that is the situation then I don't believe Google local is appropriate for it.

[ogletree]

Not to mention the other law firms might not like you making g+ pages for them. Especially if you use their address but your phone number and website. Those lawyers would rather just get the cases and not pay a referal fee.

This is unrelated but don't ever let your attorney tell those other lawyers what you are doing. I had a problem where an attorney explained in detail how he got cases to refer to the people he referred them to. As you can imagine they are now are biggest competitor in PPC.

[travelin cat]

We just recently completed something similar for a national network of medical clinics. The website we worked on has a single location and has individual pages for each clinic which have links to each clinic's website.

What the clinics do is completely different then what we did. They may, or may not, have G+ business pages. All we cared about is ranking our client well for specific industry terms so that their visitors could then find the individual clinic's information.