Google Places optimisation for service franchise, 150 franchisees with no physical addresses?

[Brendo]

So we have a client who is a plumbing franchise with about 150 franchisees across the country.

Because its a plumbing franchise the businesses don't have street addresses (apart from the franchisee home addresses but we don't want to use those)

We used to have bulk uploaded listings for the franchise locations and used the GPO address is the suburb/city as the address and got away with this fine for years. Google has copped onto this and asked for reverification of the listings by post now. So my question is what's the best way to optimise places for 150+ locations.

As a quick fix, we're going to add a new places location as the master franchise HQ office (address exists). We can then add all the suburbs/areas serviced into this location which may or may not show up for local searches in those areas.

We could potentially verify all listings by mail by using private mailboxes but mail verify on a mass scale like that is likely to be flaky not to mention an admin nightmare.

Does anyone have an experience with this and how they got around it?

[mrformulaone]

I work for a language school that has offices in different cities. We're planning on setting up a Google Places page for each of the schools. They all have different addresses but use the same national phone number. Is this going to be a problem?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Brendan-

Just worked with a client in a similar situation and this is what we did.  We got every single remote franchisee registered with their own google places and then we hid their addresses in google places because they were all their home addresses. We are crushing the competition and we added 1,100 google places listings in less than 12 days.

Your welcome!

[Yogi-275550]

Hello there- just curious how much would you charge me for 10 local google listing and i do a local phone # and addresses. yellowcab4u@gmail.com

[junioruf]

Sorry, I was indicating that Google requires every business to have it's own phone number and location address; not that I agree with them. I think that they need to come up with a better solution to deal with small business owners that may not have a store front and they absolutely need to work on other Google places aspects; the main one I have been seeing is their reviews section -  a competitor or activist can write some pretty false accusations and there is basically no way of getting that review removed. Hopefully they will find better solutions to their ongoing Google Places problems.

[Brendo]

Completely disagree - the business is a national plumbing franchise so doesn't have physical offices/locations in every suburb/city they service.

There are a handful of the bigger franchisees within the group who have dedicated offices but most are locally owned businesses, 3-5 staff operating 2-3 vans and trucks and don't have a dedicated office in the location they service. On top of that the company has a 1300 number that goes to a central call centre so again no individual numbers per location. (The franchises are all individually owned companies not owned or run by the master franchisee)

Google Places deals with this scenario very poorly and mobile businesses very poorly in general - right now our new strategy is working well so running with that until Google can come up with a better solution.

[junioruf]

If the business does not have a physical location (150 different physical locations); then it should not have a google place page. Google is extremely smart when it comes to having a business that has no physical location and is using a po box or a home address. Every location should have its own phone number as well as its own address. You should just tell your client that there is no way getting around it.

[KeriMorgret]

Thanks for the update! It's always interesting to hear what people ended up doing. If you're interested, consider writing up a post for YOUmoz when all of this is done. Martin is right, it's a post waiting to happen!

[Brendo]

Thought I'd post an update on this thread - we setup the central listing located at HQ and added all the suburbs/cities the franchise services. Not showing in any searches apart from those where HQ is located which confirmed what I thought would happen.

Right now we're looking at scrapping all listings, starting from scratch and adding each suburb at the franchise owners home address and hiding the listing. Big job to manage but no other way to do it at this stage....costing the company big $$ with these listings out of action, GOOGs really needs to come up with a better way of verifying listings.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi All,

I thought I'd jump in here. Some good and creative discussion here, and Martin's comment regarding David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors is an important one. Definitely, though, a ton has changed since the 2010 study (which I had the fun of participating in) and I can hardly wait to see how the 2011 turns out. The rollout of Place Search last October has really shuffled the deck.

Tbone, I know the hope of your question is to find a workaround for this client whose franchises have no address, and while weaknesses in Maps/Places certainly have created some rather staggering loopholes, I'd like to throw a question into the mix:

Have you explained to your client that his business does not fit Google's definition of Local and that, rather than gaming the system and incurring the potential future wrath of the bots, he may need to do what other business are: changing his business model so that it is an authentic Local fit?

When the phone book was invented, you had to have a phone number to get listed. Local is equivalent, and the requirements are a unique local area code phone number and address. I genuinely believe that the quality of everyone's user experience is dependent upon business owners following these two guidelines, rather than attempting to come across as having a physical location where none exists.

Eric Enge did a great interview with Carter Maslan a while back that dealt, in part, with franchise businesses (http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml), and while your client cannot legitimately claim a Place Page for his non-physical locations until he changes his business model, he can at least follow the lead of creating a Place Page for his headquarters and city landing pages on his site for his service areas.

In my own work with Local clients, I try to teach them a civic-minded approach to the scenario. When they don't fit Google's definition, I encourage them to follow Local news to see if Google's rules change to include other types of business models than they currently do. I get phone calls every week from people who either don't understand the definition of Local, or do understand it and want to bend the rules, and I see these calls as a great opportunity for educating folks.

Good luck with your client. He's in a tough spot until such time as Google decides to broaden its definition of Local.

[Hondaspeder]

Haha.

[MartinOddy]

"Surprised there's not more about this in discussion forums as would imagine that other franchise businesses face similar issues."

I've noticed this as well.

It appears (though I've no proof) that many SEOs are playing their cards very close to their chest with Places following last October's update -- not least because of the rapidity of changes since, and the struggle to stay abreast of them.

SERPs for local search queries have evolved and local search is a completely different ball game compared to the days of the 7-pack. As such, there's been a rush to take advantage of the opportunities that have presented themselves.

It's a YouMoz post waiting to happen, except that by the time you've written it, Google will have changed something again..!

[Brendo]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Have done quick a bit of trawling on this and so far no loopholes that I can see any more. Surprised there's not more about this in discussion forums as would imagine that other franchise businesses face similar issues.

Going by the rule book and google TOS seems the only way legit way to do is setup the single listing at HQ add the franchise locations in the coverage list areas but my feeling is the rank will be pretty weak compared with other competing local places listings who are highly optimised around that location & location specific terms, although leveraging user reviews over the long term would potentially resolve this.

Waiting on the postal verification so will report back how we go once live and then with a handful of reviews.

[Hondaspeder]

Wow, I'd say your ideas are pretty good, but they're getting wise to stuff like this. I guess they want the name to actually mean something lol. You could possible use the private mailboxes and have them forwarded to the central location, but I really have no experience with this. Good luck though whatever case!

[MartinOddy]

This is a very grey area, but one I feel I am qualified to answer.

I'll be frank: there have been numerous loopholes in the Google Maps (and now Places) system over the past few months. Many of these have now been closed. Even the top local SEOs are struggling to keep up, with all eyes resting on this year's collaborative study from David Mihm for some valuable insights (see 2010's here).

I'm not going to go into too many details, but suffice to say if you managed to exploit them at the time, it's a case of counting yourself lucky: your listings are likely to be intact.

You need two things for a Places listing first and foremost: a unique physical address and a unique phone number. Even if you can get around the phone number issue (which doesn't take too much imagination), it's a much harder premise to get around the physical address issue without using clients' addresses (bad idea!).

G know this, and so they've enforced verification by post only in many (if not all?) instances. I've read that this may be a temporary restriction to prevent certain groups of spammers doing their thing, but I'd be surprised to see wide scale telephone verification in place again.