Posts Tagged ‘Local’

What is Google Places?

After writing yesterday’s post about the recent policy change at Google Places, it occurred to me that many of you may not even know what Google Places actually is. I’d like this post to serve as your introduction in to the world of Google Places and local search optimization.

In the internet age Google Places is arguably one of the most important free tools that all small businesses must take advantage of. But you wouldn’t know it to read Google’s own description:

What is Google Places?

Google Places allows business owners to update and manage their physical business location information. This information can be used to update their business listing so that it appears correctly within Google Maps and associated Google properties and search and Display Network sites.

Local business owners the world over thank you for downplaying a directory service so critical that it has the potential to make or break a company, Google.

While Google’s answer to the question “What is Google Places?” is accurate and quite succinct, it doesn’t emphasize just how important it is for every local business trying to operate in today’s marketplace. Google Places is arguably the single most important local directory on the web, and as you undoubtedly know by now, people rely on internet search to find just about everything.

Local Internet Search

An increasing number of people are searching the internet for more than just news and information. Instead of cracking open the old Yellow Pages, most people now turn to the web for local searches for anything from home service providers, like plumbers and house cleaners, to searches for nearby restaurants and shopping. And people often perform “local” searches not only for their own area, but for places they plan to visit, be it for business or vacation. Think about it – When was the last time you yourself used the phonebook to find a dentist or a landscaping company? It’s probably been a while because according to Google, 97% of consumers now look for local businesses online! With 80% or more of all web searches being done using Google, it’s clear that all business owners need to know how to get their businesses some exposure to users of the search giant.

Google Places (Local) Search Results

The reason Google Places is so important is because local results are displayed within the standard organic results for any search you might do that Google considers “local”. While it helps narrow results down, it’s no longer even necessary for useres to search the name of a city or town in conjunction with the product or service they’re seeking. This is because Google generally knows our locations – especially on mobile devices. We can always change our location settings if Google doesn’t get it exactly right or if we’re looking for services in another area. (click screenshot to the right to view a larger version with location settings and local/Places results highlighted).

In the unlikely event that you’ve never seen local search results with Google Places listings, here are some examples of local businesses in your area and so you can see how they appear in local search results:

• Plumber
• Grocery Store
• Pet Store
• Landscaper
• Dentist

Notice how you didn’t have to actually go to Google Maps to see these “local” results? They show up right in the standard Google search results pages. But did you notice there are never more than 7? This is why where things get tricky. Depending on the type of search you do, the size of the area you live in and the number of related businesses offering related services, Google may show 1, 3, 5 or 7 local results, but the “local pack” generally shows 7 results. Of course they’re always testing changes as well, to see how users interact with different layouts.

Claiming Google Places Listings

Now, think about how many competitors you have in the area or just how many businesses fall in to a related category. Clearly it’s important to do anything you can to get a leg up on these other businesses to ensure you’re showing up in at least one of the top 7 “local” positions. But how?

For starters, you’ll need to either claim or create your listing. Go to Google Maps and search for your business and location. More than likely you’ll find a listing, and if you do, you simply need to click on the link that says “Business Owner?” in the upper right-hand corner. This will start the initial claim process which will require you to verify that you are in fact the business owner by inputting a pin number. This pin can be sent instantly with an automated phone call or a postcard can be sent within a few weeks. If you don’t find a listing, you’ll have to go to Google Places and create it, using a Google account. Aside from the fact that you need to claim a listing in order to optimize it, claiming it alone boosts its importance in Google’s eyes.

Once you have a claimed listing, you need to optimize it for search. Google’s quality guidelines detail the general “dos and don’ts” of optimizing your Places listing, but the main points are that you need to be accurate, truthful and add as many details as possible, including photos and videos. Like any of Google’s search algorithms, their local/Places ranking algorithms are kept secret, but search engine optimization specialists have been able to study which listings rank well in order to learn how to best optimize listings. Over the past several years, David Mihm has surveyed experts about the most important local search ranking factors and he produced another detailed report last June which you can read here.

Citations

Among the key takeaways of this survey is the point that you should use your registered business address, phone number and company name, as well as any other information that Google can easily verify by checking listings on other websites. The more directories and other websites that have information that exactly match what is used in your Google Places page the better. These other listings are called “citations” and it is widely believed that the volume and quality of other citations on the web are among the most important Google Places ranking factors, beyond simply accurate information and a claimed listing.

Google Places Optimization

Let’s now discuss how you can optimize your Places listings. To aid us in this discussion, we’ve included screen shots which you can click to enlarge.

Basic Information

As I mentioned, you want to be as accurate as possible with any and all information you include in your listing. This starts with the “Basic Information” section which includes company name, address, phone number and website URL. Additionally you can choose up to 5 categories. You can create your own but it is strongly recommended that you use some that Google suggests as you begin to type in these fields because these are categories they’ve chosen and fully recognize. It isn’t the end of the world if some of your categories aren’t options supplied by Google, but you should at least make an effort to find existing categories that relate as closely as possible before creating your own. While these are of course subject to change, Mike Blumenthal has put together a comprehensive list of the currently supported Google Places categories and even built a search tool for you to browse through your options.

Service Areas and Location Settings

Depending on the types of products and services you offer at your business, this section can be a bit tricky. As you’ll see in the screen shots to the right, there are 2 options. For those that only deal with customers at a bricks and mortar location, like a retail store, you’ll want to choose the first option – “No, all customers come to the business location”. This option works for most businesses, but what about home services companies like plumbers and electricians?

Businesses that serve customers at their own locations will want to select the second option – “Yes, this business serves customers at their locations”. If you do go with the second option, you’re then presented with additional options, much like the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books we all read as kids…. Okay, it’s not that exciting because I can’t tell you that “you’re the star of the story”. Essentially Google just wants to know what areas you serve and you can either specify a radius from your business address or add in a list of specific zip codes and towns/cities. Additionally you’ll need to decide whether or not you want your business address displayed in your listing. For further details on this option, I recommend reading our blog post on the recent Google Places policy change, because if you choose to display your address but you don’t serve customers at your location, Google may remove your listing.

Hours of Operation

In this section you can choose to not specify hours or list hours that your business operates for specific days of the week. This includes the option to check boxes next to days of the week that your business is closed. You can even choose 2 sets of hours for each day if your days are ever split.

Payment Options

Payment options are even more straightforward than the hours of operation. Essentially Google offers twelve payment type options for you to select from and you just check the box next to those that you currently accept.

Photos and Videos

As I mentioned earlier, Google would like you to be as detailed as possible with your listing and this includes adding photos and videos. You can add up to 10 photos, although users may see additional photos you didn’t specifically add. This is because Google often pulls in other images from around the web in an effort to provide users with the most helpful pictures related to the business. For more details on how these additional images are chosen and how you can have them removed, check out this Google support article.

If you have videos you would like to add, Google Places requires that you first upload them to YouTube. Once your videos have been uploaded you’ll need to copy and paste the URLs in to your listing. This is by no means a required field, but given the added weight Google gives to more complete listings, we recommend utilizing it if you have any videos available to upload.

Additional Details

The additional details section is a fully customizable area that allows you to add any details that you were unable to include in any of the other sections. It’s unclear what Google does with the information included in these fields, especially given that they stopped displaying this information in listings some time in 2011. But again, we recommend including any and all details.

Google Places Problems

Unfortunately, even if you follow Google Places best practices, the directory seems to still have some bugs to work out. As I mentioned earlier, they currently never show more than 7 local results, but there could be literally thousands of competition companies in a “service area”. Presumably Google is working on a way to account for this issue, but as of today (4/2/12), it’s a big problem for a lot of local business owners.

Another issue is one of the primary ranking factors – proximity to the centroid. The centroid is essentially the map marker Google uses if you just search the name of a city or town. If you then couple that city/town name with a search for a service or product, you’ll often notice that the top 7 local results all have locations very close to the centroid. This doesn’t make a lot of sense if, for example, your business is the largest construction company in Boston, but your physical address is in a suburb like Brighton. Some business owners have attempted to account for this issue by buying a PO Box as close as possible to the Google centroid, however this is against Google’s policies and will get your listing removed. Mike Blumenthal notes that Google seems to be trying to resolve this issue, to some extent, through “location sensitivity”. This still doesn’t deal with the fact that they never show more than 7 local results, placing less weight on proximity to the centroid is at least a step in the right direction.

Advanced Local Search Optimization

I’ll talk in detail about how to further boost your Google Places listing’s ranking, including through reviews and citations, but I think you have enough to get you started. The bottom line is that every business should have a claimed and optimized listing in the Google Places directory, especially local businesses. Even those that don’t operate a strictly “local” businesses should get their businesses listed just to help expand web presence, but claiming and optimizing Google Places listings is critical to all local business owners.

Google Places Policy Change – Hide Your Address if You Don’t Receive Customers at Your Location

So you’ve finally started to build an online presence for your business or organization, huh? You’ve probably got a new website, a blog, Facebook and Twitter pages, and you may have even taken the next step and created your Google Places listing. But did you know that you may now be in violation of Google Places policies? Whether you’ve already claimed your listing or not, you need to know about this change to prevent your listing from being removed. Over the last several days, the SEO blogosphere has been buzzing about the following, unannounced addition to the Google Places Quality Guidelines:

If you don’t receive customers at your location, you must select the “Do not show my business address on my Maps listing” option within your dashboard. If you don’t hide your address, your listing may be removed from Google Maps.

If you’re familiar at all with Google Places, you know that this is not only counterintuitive based on the idea that you should provide as much information as possible in your listing, but in the past hiding your address actually negatively impacted your rankings. As Miriam Ellis explains in her write-up at SEOMoz on the new policy:

Why People May Panic Over This Guideline Change

Back in early 2010, Mike Ramsey of NiftyMarketing.com published his results of an experiment with the then-new ‘Hide Address’ function in Places. He documented an immediate drop in rankings after choosing to hide his address. Others reported similar incidents, and it became standard knowledge in the Local SEO community that hiding your address was almost certain to result in invisibility. Business owners and SEOs who read about this at the time may now be concerned that Google’s new policy will solicit the demise of their local rankings.

In November of that same year, Mike Blumenthal reported that the ‘Hide Address’ function no longer appeared to be negatively impacting the newer blended local/organic results, but that it still appeared to be affecting the 7-pack and Maps-based results.

Miriam goes on to note that Blumenthal points out in a comment on her own company’s blog that the latter point is even far less important today because almost all local searches are now producing these “blended” results:

Before Venice, the hiding of your address punished your listing. Now that virtually all displays are blended and there is no longer a ranking disincentive, Google is attempting to clean up their approach to businesses based on whether a user should/could use Maps to find them.

Before linking you to a number of other posts for various opinions on this change from other SEOs, let’s briefly talk about what this means. We’ve seen Google itself “hide” a lot of data over the last year. From all of the service areas you list to information you supply in the “Additional Information” section (even though they still ask you to provide as many details as possible in all of these fields), it’s been difficult to guess where Google is taking things. But this “hide your address” change is a complete 180° and it can be difficult to determine whether or not the new rule applies to your business.

For example, our friends at iMarket Solutions develop websites and manage local SEO for plumbing and HVAC contractors, so this is an important change for their clients. Generally speaking, it would stand to reason that all “home services” companies (plumbers, HVAC contractors, electricians, carpet cleaners, etc.) would be impacted by this change, because by their very nature they do work in their customers’ homes, not at their own location. You can read iMarket’s take on the policy change here. Google’s goal is to provide the most relevant and high quality results to searchers, so it stands to reason that they would want to show addresses only for the types of companies that receive customers at their location, as Blumenthal notes in his detailed write-up on the new policy:

I see the issue somewhat differently. Certainly Google has a right to create guidelines that affect quality as they see fit. And this policy is mostly rational. Or rather its intent is. Its goal is to provide Google Map users with locations that they can drive to and have a reasonable expectation of finding “somebody at home” there.

That’s a great point, but why is Google calling businesses to ask if they serve customers at their locations, and then removing their listings without warning? The worst part is, they’ve been doing this before making the still unannounced policy change. Mike Blumenthal, while more receptive to the change than others, does note the following issues with the way Google has been rolling this out:

1) Penalties should never precede the public policy which was the case here by a number of weeks. We were seeing this in the forums and with Andrew Shotland’s post long before it was publicly acknowledged. Change the policy, publicize the change and then enforce.
2) The initial phone calls that Google makes to inquire about whether a home business deals with customers at home should be cooperative not confrontational. If you are going to call SMBs then help them know that they have inadvertently stubbed a toe in regards to a new rule and ask them to fix it. Why anger or create fear in a potential customer when you don’t need to?
3) If after some period it has not been fixed and the SMB has been alerted THEN remove the listing. It would be ideal if you then properly communicated to the business as to why.
4) The policy is written in such a way as to be somewhat illogical… as Miriam Ellis pointed out in her post. If you take it literally then there would be many businesses that would be in violation of the policy. The reality is that world is more complicated and Google’s guidelines need to reflect that granularity.

And what about the issue of supplying an address for trust? Mike provides a work-around for these situations as well, although this seems to border on attempting to “game the system”:

What if a business wants to show a location for trust reasons, shouldn’t they be allowed to?

The still can. They just need to be sure that when Google calls and checks up on their listing that they say that they do in fact conduct business at that location and be prepared to handle a drive up client if one were to come. The reality is that most businesses would accept a visit at the location and would conduct other business there if appropriate or necessary. They need to communicate that to Google if asked. I am positive that if that Google caller had asked Andrew Shotland if he could come over and sign a $10,000 contract at this (home) location, Andrew would have said yes even if it meant cleaning out his den.

Google is trying to achieve a compromise between the reality of home based businesses and the need for users of Maps to be reasonably assured that they can drive someplace if Maps says they can.

This actually raises another interesting question – What about businesses, that allow customers to stop by and make payments? Presumably it would improve the quality of the listing, in Google’s eyes, to provide an address for those that might need directions to the location.

For those who have a more advanced knowledge of how Google Places works and who have worked hard to create and claim business listings all over the web, there is some good news:

How does this affect citations?

Again, not at all. Just because you are hiding your address in Maps does not mean you are hiding it to Google. You will still need to get citations the way you always have. Citations are based on NAP and NAP needs to be everywhere. Thus the desire to hide your address for privacy purposes has never been entirely logical. The only reason to hide your address then or now was to be sure that clients didn’t drive to your home only to find that no one was there.

As others have noted though, this isn’t just about home based businesses. As Miriam notes in that post – without an address displayed, how will you be able to find the closest contractor to your home now and possibly avoid additional travel charges?

Mike Blumenthal thinks this only applies to home based businesses, which would be a relief:

If this guideline only applies to home based businesses (which appears to the case) then perhaps Google needs to make that explicit in the documentation. Not every rule need apply to every business. Alternatively they could rewrite the guidelines in a more general way. Instead of making the criteria whether customers visit a location, make the criteria whether business is conducted in a face to face way (to include vendors etc) at that location.

It’s unclear why Mike is assuming that because the new guidelines don’t indicate that they only apply to home based businesses. To get you thinking about whether you need to hide your address, consider the list of types of businesses that SEO Igloo Blog put together. And for further details on the new Google Places “hide your address” change, be sure to read these blog posts on matter at SmallBusinessCoach.com and Catalyst eMarketing.

We’re on the fence about whether this is the best move at this point, but like everything Google does, it will likely change a dozen more times in the next year, but as it stands now, Miriam’s summary of the situation seems to make the most sense (though it should be noted, she’s not a fan of the change):

Clarifying Your Business Model, According To Google

Thanks to Google Places Help Forum Top Contributor, Mike Blumenthal, I feel that I have arrived at a fairly clear understanding of how Google is now classifying different business models. I’d like to pass this information on in hopes that it will help you determine whether your business needs to hide its address on its Place Page.

Type A
Your business is brick-and-mortar and serves all customers at its location. Show your address.

Type B
Your business is home-based and serves some customers at your home and some on the road. Show your address and use the Service Radius tool.

Type C
Your business is home-based and does not serve any customers at your home. Hide your address.

I believe these are the parameters in a nutshell.

Setting aside the fact that there seems to be too much emphasis on “home” businesses, I think the point is clear. If you serve customers exclusively in their homes, rather than at your business location, the new policy dictates that you should hide your address. So I might have added:

Type D
Your business is brick-and-mortar but ONLY serves customers at at their homes or otherwise offsite. Hide your address and use the Service Radius tool to identify all areas served.

That about sums it up, but it doesn’t explain why Google is completely removing listings without warning. Rather than roll it out this way, why wouldn’t they just look at the categories used in the listings and “auto-hide” the address based on the type of business? This could obviously lead to other issues if incorrect categories were chosen (often done automatically by Google before a listing is even claimed), auto-hiding an address is certainly better than completely removing a listing.

Depending on how reliant you currently are on Google Places to generate business, you may or may not want to update your listing right way. At the moment it seems that most of the listings that should be impacted are still showing addresses. But, if you don’t receive customers at your business location, we strongly recommend you keep a close eye on your listing over the coming weeks and months. Also, be prepared to answer questions about whether or not customers come to your location if Google calls you out of the blue, as explained by Mike Blumenthal above.

As always, contact us today if you have other questions about this new Google Places change or you need any help with your local SEO and directory submission efforts.