Multiple Businesses at the Same Address - Avoiding Google Places Trouble
-
I'm trying to avoid problems with Google Places; this is like "address confusion", but is rather "business confusion".
We have a gym at a street address with a suite number, and a number of personal trainers who work out of the gym. Several of them have their own websites and their own Google Places pages.
1 trainer has a Yelp account that lists the gym's street address including the suite number, and a Places page with the gym's street address.
2 trainers have the gym's street address on their personal/individual business websites, 1 with and 1 without the suite number.
Is any of this going reduce Google's confidence in the accuracy of which business is really at the street address and suite number?
What should we tell/require of our trainers in relation to this, if anything?
Is there a chance Google will merge the Places pages?
Am I paranoid? (Google Places sometimes does at it wishes, to the dismay of several of my clients.....)
I do know that there are often many businesses in a building, each with their own suite numbers, and nothing bad happens. But ours is a case of multiple personal training businesses (including the gym: a small personal training studio) all at the same address And suite number.
Thanks for any insight or ideas!
-
You're very welcome. Thanks for participating in Q&A!
Miriam
-
I appreciate the answer and detailed feedback.
I can understand why having the gym's street address Without the suite number on a trainer's website could actually be worse; hadn't considered that.
Yes, duplicated categories in Places....No good. Luckily no merge yet.
We're going to add a term in the contract with the gym's trainers about use of the street address: Not allowed on any online account (Places, Yelp, etc.).
Fortunately the gym owner is supportive of getting this taken care of and is dealing with the trainers. Your feedback helped. Thanks!
Thank you for your time and insight.
-
Thank you for the answer and confirmation.
Our Google Places account is all filled out. Yes, we certainly want to avoid any Places merging.
-
Hi The SEO Wiz, You are definitely not paranoid, and there are several real dangers here. I'm thinking hard about the best advice to give here. Let me start jotting down some notes for you.
1. The part of the Google Places Quality Guidelines that allows multiple practitioners within a practice to have unique Place Pages is this:
"Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the hospital or clinic at large"
So, a typical scenario for this would be a law firm with 3 lawyers. The law firm can choose to have 1 Place Page for the practice and 1 for each lawyer. But, typically, all Place Pages are going to be pointing either to the domain name or to the lawyer's landing page (ie: goodlawfirm.com/brandon-jones-attorney-at-law). What is complicating your scenario is the fact that some of your trainers have their own websites. So, not only are they linking to different websites while using the same street address, they are being inconsistent in their publication of the address.
2. The address MUST be the same across all citations. So, for starters, you need to send a memo to every trainer at your gym telling them that they have X amount of time to insure that all Internet references to them, including their own site, review sites, and directories, are correctly displaying the address of the gym, suite number and all.
3. Another point of serious concern is that I would bet that your trainers have duplicated categories. It's a little known fact that in the scenario described in point #1, none of the lawyers can use the same Place Page categories as one another or as the the main office Place Page. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that your trainers are using at least some of the same categories.
So, one guideline would need to be that they cannot duplicate categories on their Place Page and this is where this gets really hairy. How are you going to organize this? If you've got, let's say, 10 trainers, do you get them all together for a meeting a plan out who gets what categories, while being certain that the gym's main Place Page gets to use the main categories that are important to the business. You can use a category tool like Mike Blumenthals at:
http://blumenthals.com/index.php?Google_LBC_Categories
...but this is really going to be tough because of the fact that... It's a best practice to use at least 2-3 of Google's pre-set categories on any Place Page. So, if the main office gets to use 'gym', 'health club' and 'sports club', what do your trainers get to use? If 4 of them teach yoga, only one of them can be allowed to use 'Yoga Studio' and 'Aerobics Instructor'. Great potential for unhappiness between them, and in fact, if Yoga happened to be one of your gym's biggest draws (it's so big right now) you might want to use that 'Yoga Studio' category for yourself. So, you can see that this is messy. You could run every search you can think of in the category tool and figure out if there is are any pre-set categories that could be uniquely used by each instructor without taking anything away from the gym's ability to take advantage of the 5 most important categories, but it's going to be tough to organize an implement. The balance can be made up with non-pre-set categories, but be sure they adhere to the guidelines about this...categories describe what a business IS, not what it DOES. So, trainers can't use things like 'pilates instruction'. They'd have to use 'pilates instructor'.
4. And this still leaves us with the initial problem of the multiple websites at the same address. If you could get point #3 sorted out, then this might be the solution:
-
Tell instructors that if they wish to use the gym's address, their Place Page must link to a landing page about them on the gym's main website. You would create a unique page for each instructor and link to it from the Place Page, ensure that the street address is consistent across all sources, assign available main categories for each instructor and allow them to upload their unique photos and videos to personalize the page. This would reduce your risk of merging and the risk or Google losing trust in your overall data and profile.
-
If the instructors do not find the above appealing, you must revoke their rights to use the street address of the gym on their Google Place Page or anywhere else on the web, including their website and their citations. They will need to be certain to remove all references to the gym's address from all possible sources. They can then, of course, go ahead with the promotion of their own websites, but not under the gym's name or address. They would need to have their own street address to qualify for inclusion in Google Places.
Unfortunately, neither route is going to be simple to organize or implement, but given the current competitiveness of the fitness industry, it's vital that you take serious steps towards protecting the gym's ability to be trusted and rank. I would actually be surprised if merging hasn't already occurred. I've done my best to define your potential options within the scope of Q&A, but this may be one of those areas where you're going to need to work with a Local SEO to hammer out all of the details, due to the complexity of the scenario. Hope I've gotten you into the right mindset about this. Good luck! Miriam
-
-
You are not pariniod, google may merge them.
Assuming your business is showing at the moment, make sure you fill in all areas, upload images, get some reviewsmake sure your listinfg looks the most valuable. you can contact google if the do merge, but you want to aviod it if you can
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
-
What do you do for U-NAP distribution for two business within the same building?
I have a hotel that has a restaurant within its building. Both the hotel and restaurant are owned and managed by the same group. There was a proposal to create a U-NAP distribution for the restaurant itself. Should there be any concerns regarding a U-NAP issue with the hotel given that they share the same physical address and the same URL? The Restaurant has it own landing page within the domain. It does not have building specific identifier like a suite number. Please advise if a U-NAP distribution for the restaurant will cause a material impact on the Hotel's U-NAP purity.
Image & Video Optimization | | JohnJimenez0 -
YouTube Filtering Business Videos as Inappropriate Making them Unavailable When Safety Mode Enabled
My client is a public banking software company and recently many of their videos are unavailable to those browsers with "Safety Mode" turned on. What elements within these innocuous videos could be triggering the safety filter? Is there anything we can do about it? I've already reviewed titles/descriptions and reviewed the transcripts for words like 'sex" but I can't find anything that could be inappropriate. Is there any way around this? Is there a process for having this status changed? Thank you
Image & Video Optimization | | RosemaryB0 -
What are the best practices for optimizing a site for multiple locations?
I have a client that operates in multiple states. I am trying to find a way to best optimize their website, but all of the best practices for "local SEO" seem to be for things such as restaurants, small businesses, etc. I am looking for a way to optimize for the industry keywords as well as location. Any best practices/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | Scratch_MM0 -
Google Places Images
Hi, i recently added a image to google places listing uploaded via the google places dashboard. It was uploaded about 3-4 weeks ago. The image is exactly 1024x1024 in size. I'm not sure whether google is not displaying it because its too big, or because it takes a while for google to start showing images for places listing. I was reading it can take up to 6 weeks. I don't want to have to wait 6 weeks, then find out the reason why the picture wasn't uploaded was because it was too big. Any suggestions on how i can find out which one is the case? Thanks, Matt
Image & Video Optimization | | Mattcarter080 -
Google Knowledge Graph - change bio image
I have a client who is a well known personality in a particular niche that I've done some general event and design work for, but he hasn't had interest in SEO or social help until this point. He is very displeased by the image that was chosen for his Google Knowledge Graph result when you search his name. The issue isn't due to a poor photo, but rather due to the site it links through to. Google has chosen to use a bio image for his Knowledge Graph result which links to an "anti-" site. This site is opposed to the organization he leads. If you click on the image, it sends you to an image result page backed by an article which is full of misinformation and overall negativity about this individual. The source is also listed under the image on the Knowledge Graph result, a source he doesn't believe deserves any publicity, especially in conjunction with his name. So, what best practices might you suggest should be employed to go about getting Google to choose a replacement image for his Knowledge Base bio? Optimize his own bio page and bio image on his website? Get an image on his Wikipedia page? Create a G+ page with the bio image? Integrate the rel author syntax into his articles pointing back to his bio page? He doesn't want this to become a public matter, so he's against posting the issue to Google's Help Boards or reporting it in a public fashion. I'm not sure what should be the best first steps and top priorities for him and am hoping the SEOmoz team is starting to see some trends with Knowledge Graph. Let me know your thoughts when you can. Thanks so much! iLqNW iLqNW.png
Image & Video Optimization | | windturbines2 -
Why do seomoz rankings not match mine in google for the same keyword?
SEO moz lists my site http://holmesbailbonding.com as listing 2nd for raleigh bail bonds but when I search I am getting different results even with a cleared cache. Just wondering what factors contribute to this and what I need to be doing more of to get my site to rank for Raleigh Bail Bonds in raleigh, nc. Thanks,
Image & Video Optimization | | MaddDogg0 -
How can I segment traffic in GA referred by my google places listing?
Apart from using a parameter in my url, how can i segment the traffic that comes from my google places listing from the google serp (not google maps). It'd be nice if you can specify a display url and destination url in places profiles like you can with adwords. cheers! marc
Image & Video Optimization | | lexnex0 -
Why does google places keep deleting the categories i set?
I have probably set them for each of my storage locations over 20 times now. They stick for a week, only to find them have all been deleted once again. Also, why are my competitors able to choose custom categories, where as I am not?
Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg0