Google+ Local Listing - No Physical Address
-
Hi everyone,
I have a client who won't be renewing his lease for where he conducts his business. Instead he will be working from home. That being said, he does not wish to have his personal address details showing within his local listing.
Is there any other way to still show for Google Local without a personal or business address? Is a PO box possible, other there any other alternatives?
Thanks in advance.
Leo
-
That's great to hear, Leo, and we are so glad to have you here!
-
Thanks Miriam for the additional resource.
I'm new to the community but seeing the level or responses I received I must say you all are fantastic and incredibly helpful.
Thanks again and all the best.
Leo
-
Hi Leo,
Tom has linked to a very important piece from Local Visibility System regarding directories that allow you to hide your address. The author, Phil Rozek, actually wrote a more recent follow-up piece to this, so do check this out here:
So, start with the article Tom linked to and then follow up with the one I've linked to, as it provides further citations sources that enable one to hide the address.
If the client does want to explore options other than his home as his location, then P.O. Boxes and Virtual offices must be avoided. Instead, he would need to rent a real office - perhaps from a company like Activspace.com, which gives you a real front door and phone hookup. But, honestly, countless businesses are run out of the home and Google gets this. Fortunately, many of the top directories support the hide-address feature, and while there are some directories your client won't be able to be listed in, putting him at something of a disadvantage in comparison to competitors who don't need to hide their address, there are still many place he can be listed.
Do be prepared, of course, to follow up this change of address with a great big citation cleanup campaign so that you can bring all mentions of his old address into compliance with his new location.
Good question! Glad you asked it!
-
Thanks for your thorough response Tom. Much appreciated.
-
Hi Dana,
Thank you that means a lot to me.
Your friend,
Thomas
-
Excellent answer Tom. I tuned in because I didn't know the answer to this one and yours was superb.
-
You must do fase to face business at the address
-
Hi Leo,
No google no longer use just a po box for google
Business Location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.
- Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations.
- If you need to specify a mail box or suite number within your physical location, please list your physical address in Address Line 1, and put your mail box or suite number in Address Line 2.
- Use the precise address for the business in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
- Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
- Individual practitioners may be listed individually as long as those practitioners are public-facing within their parent organization. Common examples of such practitioners are doctors, dentists, lawyers, and real estate agents. The practitioner should be directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours. A practitioner should not have multiple listings to cover all of his or her specializations.
- Departments within businesses, universities, hospitals, and government buildings may be listed separately. These departments must be publicly distinct as entities or groups within their parent organization, and ideally will have separate phone numbers and/or customer entrances.
- Businesses that operate in a service area, as opposed to a single location, should not create a listing for every city they service. Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.
- If you don't conduct face-to-face business at your location, you must select "Yes, this business serves customers at their locations" under the "Service Areas and Location Settings" section of your dashboard, and then select the "Do not show my business address on my Maps listing" option.
- Do not include information in address lines that does not pertain to your business’s physical location (e.g. URLs, keywords).
- Anytime the address for your business changes, you’ll have to verify again. You also won’t be able to update the business’s name until the verification process is complete.
https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en
http://searchengineland.com/investigating-google-places-hypocrisy-for-address-less-businesses-59998
Hop this was of help,
Tom
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
-
Can I use PO boxes as an actual business Address?
Hi mozzers, A potential future client(electrician) covers 40+ locations in one region(local SEO) but only has 1 address. He wants to rank for at least 5 to 7 main locations which he has PO boxes for. Can I use these as addresses on his website or will it be seen as violating the google guideline? If it is no good what should I do? Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Google Places Creation
Hello, I am currently managing 200 clients for which I have to create Google Places. Can I create 200 different places for each client, and manage all them from one Gmail account? If one client doesn't want to continue the contract, can I transfer the managing of the place to another account?
Image & Video Optimization | | cvissi0 -
Anyone notice significant impression drops in Google Places on February 20th?
We've read reports, heard from colleagues and some of our clients have experienced a drop in impressions starting on February 20th. Going from an average of 500+ impressions to 10-30. Anyone else experiencing this?
Image & Video Optimization | | WrightIMC0 -
Google Local Page Not Showing in Search Results
Hi! I am having an issue with our business's Google+/Local/Places/whatever-the-heck-you-call-it-these-days page not showing up in search results. I work for a company called Nexxtep Technology Services. We are located in Valdosta, GA. We have a Google+ page that's filled out nicely and I would love it if it would show up next to the search results when you search "nexxtep technology services" or "nexxtep valdosta" in Google. For some reason, it does not. I have a feeling what might be a source of the issue...we have developed and hosted websites for clients, and we used to put a link to our site in the footer. Now, I know that's not a good thing to do. We don't do that anymore, and I have since removed those links from existing sites. I removed them almost 6 weeks ago now. Should I give Google a little more time to crawl these sites again? Any guidance would be tremendously appreciated. Thank you for your help!
Image & Video Optimization | | nexxtep0 -
Timeline For Local Prospect
Hi Mozzers, I need a judgement. I've been approached by a deck building company whose business is local. They do have an existing web site, but almost no content or indexed content. Their visibility online is very close to zero. They are also a seasonal business, with people getting interested in decks from April through June by which time they would be expecting a result. There is one very large competitor and many smaller ones. This gives me 6 months, starting from very close to scratch. Would you take it on? Discussion and debate welcome.
Image & Video Optimization | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Google Image Search?
We get very little search traffic from the images on our site & I can't necessarily figure out why? We post a ton & tag them correctly, we've got to be missing something? We are a Wordpress blog, can anyone provide some quality articles on Image search or have suggestions that should help to get more traffic? Our site does fairly well, as we get over 100k/visits a month, so we'd really like to get more traffic from our images.
Image & Video Optimization | | seointern0 -
Unique content for local pages
Hi, working on a website of a retailer who has about 100 shops accross the country and every shop has a page on the corporate website. Some questions about content on these pages: is it ok to add links to the brands they sell in those shops on every business-page? It's a link to the product listing they sell of that brand I wrote a generic text about the business where I can replace city, street it's located, ... Is it ok to use that kind of text on the local business pages? anybody some ideas I can write about on those loca business pages?
Image & Video Optimization | | nvs.nim0 -
Google Places weblink advice
In your Google Places listing on the website link option should this point to a specific location based page for your business? For example my company have several locations in different towns and cities, at present they all point back to the homepage, but should they point back to a specific location based page on the website as I am sure Google looks at the website link for location based text and it its pointing at the homepage which has generic title and h1 tags etc and does not cover location based text then the Google Places listing ranks lower as it displays the meta title in the places result? This is the only thing I can think of because the listings that appears top 2 have no additional info, no photos, no reviews etc while my listing has a description, images, video etc and the centroid location is nearer to the centre of the city than many of the others so I am at a loss again to work out why Google is ranking this so poorly in Local Search?
Image & Video Optimization | | idv0