9 Common Ways To Bork Your Local Rankings In Google

It’s not surprising that small businesses make mistakes in Google Places when setting up and claiming their profiles. It can be confusing and the guidelines even change over time. So, here’s a list of some common mistakes to avoid.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written a “what not to do” article (see What NOT To Do On Local Business Websites). But it’s worthwhile to emphasize some of the things I still see local businesses doing wrong in Google Places, since some of the more common stuff results in needless frustration and delays.

Nine Common Ways To Bork Your Local Rankings In Google

Again, do not try these at home!

1. Use a post office box for your address

I know it doesn’t make sense – this should be alright to do for businesses which do not have physical addresses, and you may even find some competitors doing it, but Google Places doesn’t like it. If you register a new listing with a P.O. box, you can expect it won’t rank for many primary keyword combinations. (For background on this subject, read about Google Places and businesses without addresses.)

So, find a street address to use for your business. Use your home addresss (often not ideal for privacy/security reasons), or partner with another business that will allow you to share their street address, or contract with a company that provides mail service with a local address.

2. Add directions into your street address

Including directions in the street address field (ex: “on corner with Elm Street”) can result in your map location being messed up and/or can cause Google difficulty in linking information from other business directories for your listing.

Either leave the directions up to Google’s automated map features, or include the helpful directions in the description field, if you absolutely must.

3. Tell Google not to display your address

This often goes hand-in-hand with businesses that use P.O. box addresses, but not always. What’s confusing about this is that Google Places provides this as an option, but they neglect to tell you that it may royally affect your ability to rank. The reason is that they prefer to show business locations on the map, and their algorithm is instantly dubious of any business that obscures its office location.

So, if you’ve traditionally used a P.O. box and are thinking of switching to your home address in combination with not displaying it, then think again. Okay, theoretically, you might be able to develop enough credibility with Google Places to overcome whatever governors they have on rankings for address-obscured companies.

But in practice, this is such an uphill battle with no information or feedback from Google about your status that you might as well avoid the beating at the begining and simply don’t toggle your address display off.

4. Use product names and place names in the business category field

It’s confounding that these are free-form, and it’s silly that Google doesn’t merely warn you if they detect a place-name in this data field for your Place page. But what Google wants here is just the business type, such as “Accountant”, “Florist”, “Attorney”, or “Electronics Shop”.

Do not put the names of products here (generally), nor your city names, even when combined with the category name. Google really hates this and it might even get you dinged!

5. Use a call tracking number as your business’s phone number

There are folks that have a fetish for statistical data who like to argue with me over this one, but there continues to be a pretty good consensus among those of us who are expert consultants for local SEO as to our stance on the matter.

Using an alternate phone number makes it harder for Google to match up your data from multiple sources across the local ecosystem, which can reduce your ability to rank.

For most small, local businesses, rankings and performance in search results ought to trump the desire to have tracking to see where your phone calls originate. Performance is a necessity, and analytics in this case is a comparative nice-to-have!

Google has come out and officially stated not to use tracking numbers, too: “Types of phone numbers that should not be included are: call tracking numbers and phone numbers that are not specific to a business location.”

6. Post some shill reviews in Google Maps

Getting your employees to help you in posting positive reviews for your business, and/or posting negative reviews about your competition, could result in your listing getting flagged by users and automated algorithms.

People can often sense that a review may be false, and this can result them stating their suspicion outright in their own review under your listing, for all to see, or they may report the listing to Google.

Either way, any juice you got from those reviews might get revoked along with anything else you’ve touched in Google. False reviews are against the law, too, so stay away from this dishonest, bad practice. Instead, harness the power of reviews in acceptable, positive ways.

7. Make radical changes to your business name, address or phone

Changing your address or business name in Google Places is highly risky to the stability of your rankings. Google canonicalization algorithms may struggle to match up your data from across the Web afterwards, and it could even cause your listing to get flagged as potentially compromised or as an attempt to manipulate.

Expect a few weeks of disruption to your rankings at minimum, assuming you can change all the various citation references out there to match. If you can’t get them to mostly sync up consistently, then expect longterm ranking impact and perhaps also ongoing problems in terms of duplicate listings, too.

If you occupy a really great ranking spot, you might consider leaving it as-is.

8. Add lots of fictional office listings in each city all over your metro area

Once you’ve poisoned the entire pond, the negative effects will eventually come back to roost with the rankings of your real, original location!

You may think you can add listings all over without Google detecting it, but your competitors will “helpfully” flag each listing and tell Google that you’re not really there. Expect to have your faux listings tank in the rankings and they’ll take your real, original listing with them.

9. Ignore that your map pinpoint location is completely off

You may be an ADD, multi-tasking, stressed-out small business owner, but this is something you’d better pay attention-to or it can irritate potential customers, reduce your walk-in traffic, and even get your listing erroneously flagged as out-of-business before your realize it.

So, check your map location and use the tools to correct it if you’re significantly off.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be publishing this list. After all, these items result in loads of work for those of us in local search marketing. However, untangling borked business listings is more difficult than setting up a fresh, new business profile completely from scratch.

So, avoid these bad practices so that you can spend more energy on further promotion efforts, rather than trying to correct something that’s been borked!

Source: http://searchengineland.com/9-common-ways-to-bork-your-local-rankings-in-google-99336

The Essential Guide to Setting Geographic Target in Google Webmaster Tools

We all know that Google Webmaster Tools enables the setting of a geographic target. By setting such a target country/location, webmasters are giving a specific signal to Google about the country/location that they want to focus on.

What if I want to set a Particular Country?

If your business is focused on a country specific target audience, you can make the appropriate setting on the Google Webmaster Tools, so that, you are able to target your country of choice.

For e.g. Say the target of your website is the US market. So, by setting “United States” as a geographic target, you will be able to focus on appearing at the top of the search engine rankings displayed by www.google.com (US).

The following figure explains how you can set a particular country as a Geographic target in Google Webmaster Tools:

The Advantage

• You can experience better results in the Country Code Top-Level Domain of Google that has been targeted.

The Disadvantage

• You won’t be able to see extensive results in the search engine rankings of other countries

What if I am Not Setting a Geographic Location?

If you don’t want to target a particular country, you just need to keep the box unchecked as shown in the figure given below:

Advantage

• You will be targeting a global audience, across all countries

Disadvantage

• You won’t be able to see extensive results in the search engine rankings in a particular country

Having gone through the various advantages and disadvantages, you might wonder whether I can combine both these options to get the best of both worlds. Yes you can.

What if I want to Give More Importance to a particular country and also get the ‘Global’ Advantage?

First, set a geographic location that you want to focus on and then take the next step. This step is both, important and challenging. As a webmaster, to experience benefits of going global, you need to create backlinks keeping in mind the other geographical locations as it will help your website experience global visibility.

For e.g. You want to focus on a target audience based in the United States, but you still want to receive traffic from other countries. In this case, you need to set United States as your geographic target by ‘ticking’ the check box and choosing ‘United States’ from the drop down menu. After that, you can focus on attracting backlinks from other geographic locations.

But, this is an exception and can only happen in certain cases where your business is targeting a global market, but most of your clients are from a particular country.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-essential-guide-to-setting-geographic-target-in-google-webmaster-tools/30662/

Top 7 Tricks to Rank in Google Places

If you’ve worked with Google in the past you’ll know just how hard it is to rank for Google Places for many searches. It’s also apparent how important Google Places have become – they often take up the top parts of the page for a search term. So even if you rank first for a certain keyword, you could see three to six Google Places ranking above you. The question is, what tricks can you use to secure your spot?

1. Set Up

First of all you have to set up your business page, which can be done by completing your profile on Google Places. All you need is a Google Account which is free and easy to set up, then onto the more interesting stuff.

2. Citations

If you don’t know what a citation is (you should if you’re reading this), it is basically a mention of your business on another site. As close as you can get to the exact match of your Google Places listing the better. So if you have your link, description, contact information or anything else, make sure it matches to your Google Places page. This will also help your organic rankings as well – it serves a dual purpose.

3. Get Listed

This is important to get the best citations. They can come from pages such as Yahoo, Superpages, Insiderpages, Angie’s List and many more, but these are the ones that are regarded as giving you the most juice. This will allow you to give Google all the relevant information about your business. You will want to make sure that your details are comprehensive because filling out as many fields as possible can really help with your rankings for all different kinds of search phrases.

4. Make Sure of the Accuracy of your citations

You will need to go back and check that all your existing citations are correct, as well as the ones you are getting listed – there is no point in getting listed with the wrong information. Make sure your citations have accurate names, addresses and the correct phone numbers. It has even been thought that providing a physical address can help your placing. It is important to ensure that your website details are correct but more importantly that the data on your website is correct and the same as these citations.

5. Build more local links

Not simply the general SEO link building back to your site, but more local links that mention your business name, address, phone number and URL. As with normal SEO you can include them in forms of social media and posts, but it would be beneficial to get these links from other sites such as bloggers, business sites and directories because they act as a sort of review.

6. Reviews

Now onto reviews and as hinted above, reviews are strong links that show trust. Reviews are important to both getting the citation indexed and ranked highly in Google as well as propelling the Google Places listing. You will want to get as many reviews as you possibly can on as many different sites as you can, this will help a lot in improving your ranking. You can get people to review by encouraging customers and suppliers to do it, or by securing mutual agreement reviews from businesses in the same industry to help get the review ball rolling.

7. Make updates to your places page

Just by changing the main areas of your Google Places page, you can create a jump in rankings. You don’t have to edit the images and videos, but in my experience, just by editing the description and related areas can make a difference.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-7-tricks-to-rank-in-google-places/30785/