Will signing up for Google Places affect my national rankings
-
OK, Here is a question which I can't find but think people have thought about. I would like to know others opinion.
I have had a site that ranks well under generic national keyword terms. (not geographically specific) Its a small website, only 10 pages.
We get 85% of our business from online applications. These applications come from all over the united states.Our SERP rankings generate 70% of all our traffic.
My question is this: we operate in a state where we don't do business. We are a virtual business. Should I sign up for google places? Will It hurt my national SERP rankings?
-
My pleasure - sounds like your experience will be your most powerful asset! Sincere wishes for success!
Miriam
-
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Although I have been on the vendor side of the equation for over 7 years doing SEO, SEM & Consulting, I am now on the client side and making these decisions take on a whole new importance.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond.
-
Hi Fidelity One,
Thank you for clearing that up for me. I misunderstood your business as a virtual one. Your questions is one I have seen commonly asked, and one for which no Local or Global SEO firm that I know of has every published a firm answer. Google certainly hasn't. You can see a small discussion on this topic in the comments on a post of Rand's from last year:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local
Here is what I can tell you, but please take this advice in the form of an opinion rather than a hard fact. Local and organic SERPs are running on two separate, distinct algorithms. Let's think, for example, of a franchise like McDonalds. They have a national headquarters and are an international business, but they also have Place Pages for each of their storefronts. Google is not going to think McDonalds is located at 21 Center Street SmallTown USA because they've got a Place Page for a storefront there, right? Granted, few businesses have the fame or clout of McDonalds, but the same factors should ostensibly apply to any business.
In your shoes, I would view Local as something I was doing in addition to my traditional SEO. In fact, you could start this out extremely small as an experiment (with, of course, stat tracking software in place). Instead of going the typical route of a purely local business, implementing geographic data sitewide, you could create just one page on your website with a locally-optimized URL, title, header, content, business name, street address and local area code phone number. In creating your Place Page, you could do what franchises do and link the Place Page directly to this URL instead of to the homepage of your website. Then, you could watch over a period of, say, 6 months to see what actual effect this has had.
Does your organic traffic drop in any way? How about your rankings?
Are you getting new visibility and links thanks to your local promotion? New traffic? New phone calls and business?
My guess is that you would NOT see any detriment to your organic standings, but because of the unwieldy and honestly unpredictable nature of Local in Google, you should treat your case as a distinct experiment. If you are new to Local, you need to know coming into this that Google Places/Maps is notoriously buggy and that folks like myself and Mike Blumenthal have been blogging about the crazy bugs in the system for years now. Stats were recently published that 8 million users have signed up for Google Places, but Google continues to pursue their policy of not offering real, meaningful customer support. When things go wrong (and they often do) getting help can be virtually impossible unless you've got an in with Google.
I don't want to scare you off, but do want to be sure to add this cautionary note if you are entering Local for the first time.
The other thing to remember is that Places is not actually an opt-in venue. If your address exists anywhere on the web (such as in a yellow pages ad or other directory), Google can create a Place Page for your business without any action on your part. So, if your address is already out there anywhere, this is all the more reason for you to actively participate in Local so that you have at least some control over your data.
I hope my thoughts have helped you to reach a decision about this important step! Thanks again for coming to Q&A to ask your question.
-
We are located at a physical address and people can come through the door and work with us one to one, however that is not the preferred method.
My bigger issue is that if we only have one physical address and register it with Google Places, will it affect the rankings we are receiving in other areas of the country.
For example, in some cities, we are on the first page under the term "city"+keyword, but if I register our corporate address with Google Places, will it affect the other local SERPS?
-
Greetings Fidelity One!
Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. If am correctly understanding your description of your business as being a virtual one, then this is not a question of rankings but rather one of appropriateness. Virtual businesses are not deemed to be Local by Google.In order to qualify as local, you must have a real physical street address (not a P.O, box or virtual office, a unique local area code phone number and a legal business name. Clients must either come directly to the street address to do one-on-one business with you or your staff must depart from the physical street address to do business with clients (as in the case of chimney sweeps, carpet cleaners, etc.)
If any of these criteria do not fit your business model, then Local just isn't the right space for you.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Does Google use dateModified or date Published in its SERPs?
I was curious as to the prioritization of dateCreated / datePublished and dateModified in our microdata and how it affects google search results. I have read some entries online that say Google prioritizes dateModified in SERPs, but others that claim they prioritize datePublished or dateCreated. Do you know (or could you point me to some resources) as to whether Google uses dateModified or date Published in its SERPs? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | Parse.ly0 -
Does Site Size Influence Rank?
The Scenario:
Algorithm Updates | | kchandler
Currently one of my clients has 7-8 products that they sell on their website. For each product they have two different pages one with the product info and one with a video demo. So the pages began to split their authority as they began receiving new links. Since only one of the two pages for each product rank i suggested that we combine the two and redirect the video page to the product page to increases it's authority and rank. The Clients Response:
After explaining my reasoning and next steps the client mentioned that he thought a site's size was a ranking factor. I had never heard of this before so i told them i would do some research to prove my point, after a little digging around i am now even more confused. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-size-ranking-17044.html http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4591155.htm The Question:
Does a websites size/amount of content indexed in Google actually effect your sites ability to rank? I look forward to everyones feedback, thanks Kyle1 -
Drop in Traffic from Google, However no change in the rankings
I have seen a 20% drop in traffic from google last week (After April 29th). However when I try to analyze the rank of the keywords in the google results that send me traffic they seem to be the same. Today (6th March) Traffic has fallen further again with not much/any visible change in the rankings. Any ideas on what the reason for this could be? I have not made any changes to the website recently.
Algorithm Updates | | raghavkapur0 -
Can a google data refresh knock your pages out of the rankings?
I see that around mid November 2013 a handful of my sites pages dropped off of Google completely. It was around the data refreshes in November, and while everyone says it doesn't effect that much I was wondering if anyone knew if it could knock some of my pages out of the rankings for a specific keyword. Note - we had previously held muliple listings for different pages on our site for this particular keyword. Google kept the highest ranking and knocked the lower ones off. See attached image of our keyword ranking history to see what I mean. DcJJM0M
Algorithm Updates | | franchisesolutions0 -
Related Searches in Google
Hello, We're helping a client remove/minimize some negative information about their brand in Google's search results. Just curious about your take on if the related searches that appear at the bottom of Google search results can in any way be influenced or if it is more a combination of so many factors that any one person or organization wouldn't be able to change very easily? I've heard the related results could be influenced if enough queries generated overtake the "negative" queries done initially but I feel like that is venturing into black hat land a bit. thanks -Mike
Algorithm Updates | | mattmainpath0 -
How Google Determines Sitelinks
Does anyone have authoritative information on how Google determines which links to use as sitelinks? I thought I saw that Top Landing Pages was a metric Google used (in part).
Algorithm Updates | | joshfialkoff-778630 -
Site Usage Statistics and organic ranking
I'm not sure if anyone has tested this properly but i'm begining to suspect that google is using site usage statistics as a site quality guide and ultimately as a ranking variable. The this what i've seen so far on one of my sites (site A) Week 1= bounce rate (83.88%), Avg time on site (0:0:57), Pages/visit (1.28) no changes made to the site apart from the usual link building. Week 2: Traffic drops by 30%, Keywords generating traffic drops by 39%. Bounce rate (87.25%), Avg time on site (0:0:43), pages/visit (1.21). I replaced all affiliate links on my homepage to internal pages where the chunk of the content is and did a reconsideration request. Week 3: Traffic goes up by 30%, keywords generating traffic goes up by 65%, Bounce rate (30.41%), Avg time on site (0:3:02), Pages/visit (3.74). This is not the most scientific test but surely google must be using these variables and a ranking factor? Anyone seen something along these lines or have thoughts on it?
Algorithm Updates | | clickangel0 -
Did google change their algorithm over the past week?
I did some home page optimization with the seo moz on page key word optimization tool and we are now back in the top three in the past week (after dropping to page 3 a month or so ago). It seems that google has gone back to combining google places with organic searches. Has anyone else noticed this type of change? I did read some posts about panda 2.2, which seems to explain some of these findings. I am wondering if things are in flux or they may be more stable this way? Thanks for the insights.
Algorithm Updates | | fertilityhealth0