Getting Listed in Google Places
-
How do I get listed in Google Places if I don't have a physical address?
EG: I am a medical health insurance company in Colo Springs, Colorado, but service 20 cities?
What is the best procedure? Getting a mailbox at Mailboxes, etc. or UPS Store?
-
Hi Greg,
As Edward has correctly stated, anything other than an actual, physical address is not what Google 'wants'. That being said, there are tons and tons of such listings in their index, but even a cursory glance at Google's spam fighting history over the past two years is a big indication, at least to me, that they are more committed than ever to upholding their guidelines and weeding out anything they consider to be violating them.
So, honestly, it might well be possible to get away with something like this for a month, a year, three years, etc., but taking such a risk means a day of reckoning would be looming over the business ever day and the business owner would never know when to expect their rankings to suddenly tank.
At present, Google is still very much allowing home-based businesses in their index, providing they hide their addresses, so this is probably the most common solution in what I'm assuming is your case. And if you feel concerned about publishing your home address anywhere, here is a list of directories that also allow you to hide your address, and this can help you with your citation building:
-
Not a good idea:
http://www.searchinfluence.com/2012/03/google-places-virtual-office/
-
Thank you for the information! Very helpful. Do you happen to know if getting a mailbox at a UPS Store would work. When you get a mailbox here, your address is not PO BOX XYZ, they actually give you a physical address (same as their location), and your mailbox number is a Ste. number.
Thanks for any insight!
-
Hi Greg,
In order to qualify for Google+ Local (which was called Google Places in the past), your business needs to meet the following criteria:-
Have a unique, dedicated physical street address (not a shared address, not a virtual address, not a P.O. box or any other type of box)
-
Have a unique local area code phone number (not a shared number or toll free number) that matches the city of location
-
Have in-person transactions with customers, either at your place of business (like a restaurant) or at their locations (like a plumber.
If your business doesn't meet all of these requirements, you do not qualify for inclusion and should not create a local account.
If you do have in-person transactions with clients and are operating out of your home, and no other businesses are operating out of the same address, you can use your home address and local phone number as your location. However, you must be absolutely sure that you comply with Google's rules regarding hiding your address. All home-based businesses and businesses that go to their clients' locales to serve must choose the hide address function when creating their page or they will be removed or penalized.
And, be sure you create only 1 Google+ Local page for your city of location - do not create other pages for the other cities you serve. That's not allowed.
I recommend that you study the Google's Places Quality Guidelines to be sure you know all the public rules:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528In addition to this, there are 'unwritten' rules that apply to optimizing your Google+ Local Page that require study as well. For example, in writing your business description on the + page, do not put any geographic terms, your business name or any links in the copy. There are a number of little taboos like that that you'll need to be aware of in going into this in order to avoid penalties.
It's so critical to get this right. If Local SEO is all new to you, you might like to read this:
The Rudiments of Local SEO
http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1344Hope this helps!
-
-
Sign up for Google+ Local using your residential address, and then make your business address private in the listing. This will still list your city and you can set your service area to include the surrounding areas.
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
-
Google indexing site content that I did not wish to be indexed
Hi is it pretty standard for Google to index content that you have not specifically asked them to index i.e. provided them notification of a page's existence. I have just been alerted by 'Mention' about some new content that they have discovered, the page is on our site yes and may be I should have set it to NO INDEX but the page only went up a couple of days ago and I was making it live so that someone could look at it and see how the page was going to look in its final iteration. Normally we go through the usual process of notifying Google via GWMT, adding it to our site map.xml file, publishing it via our G+ stream and so on. Reviewing our Analytics it looks like there has been no traffic to this page yet and I know for a fact there are no links to this page. I am surprised at the speed of the indexation, is it a example of brand mention? Where an actual link is now no longer required? Cheers David
Algorithm Updates | | David-E-Carey0 -
How long does google take to re-ranking pages in results?
I mean when google dance, the pages in results go up and down frequency every minue, but finally your page will rank in any position in google, what is the time when you get another position in google
Algorithm Updates | | engtamous0 -
Google domain search
Hello all, I'm a newbie to SEO, so you'll have to bear with me. I just started a website LangleyHomeSaerch.com a few months ago and am having trouble ranking with google. When I search "Langley Home Search" with Yahoo or Bing, it comes up on the first page. However when I search it with google it doesn't seem to rank even in the first few hundred pages. The only way I can get a match from google is if I search "Langley HomeSearch" or "LangleyHomeSearch". I know due to google's newer algorithms that there is less importance put on domain name matches, but is this normal, or is there anything I can do to improve it? Thx, Colby Langley, BC
Algorithm Updates | | colbygedak0 -
Pages fluctuating +/- 70 positions in Google SERPs?
I've got some pages that appear somewhere around #25 in Google. Every now and then, it just goes away from the top 100 results for a few days (even up to a week) and then it comes back. I've got other pages that rank around #8 which falls down to about #75 for a while and then it comes back. But while a page may be gone from the top 100 results in the US, it still ranks at about the same place everywhere else in the world (+/- 10 positions). I've seen this happen in the past but never it happened so often. What gives?!?
Algorithm Updates | | sbrault740 -
Local Listings vs. Spreading Too Thin
Hello SEO Community, I'm trying to find the right balance between adapting to Googles move towards local listings and not spreading out my site too thin. We provide our services nationally and currently have local city listings (i.e. http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/city/IL-Chicago) but these do not show up in the SERPs for individual products + city (i.e. Building Analyst Chicago) So I could make individual pages for each product in each city, but that would exponentially increase the number of URLs on the site and probably inundate me with duplicate content. Is there a better way I could take advantage of local listings without creating all the duplicate content and other problems that would arise with individual URLs? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
URL is starting to appear capitalized in Google Search Results. How come?
Our domain (www.absoluteautomation.com) has just today started appearing in search results as www.AbsoluteAutomation.com. Any ideas why?
Algorithm Updates | | absoauto0 -
Why does Google Alerts call my website a blog?
Our company started a WordPress blog about 14 years ago. It has since added a third-party forum, a user-submitted photo gallery, and a huge database of searchable products. We also have almost 4000 posts. With all that said, Google Alerts often lists our content under blogs rather than websites. Sometimes it shows up in both? Does anyone know what criteria Google uses for determining the type of content, and how we can signal to them that we are a website?
Algorithm Updates | | TMI.com0 -
Rankings changing every couple of MINUTES in Google?
We've been experiencing some unusual behaviour in the Google.co.uk SERPs recently... Basically, the ranking of some of our websites for certain keywords appears to be changing by the minute. For example, doing a search for "our keyword" might show us at #20. Then a few minutes later, doing the same search shows us at #14, and then the same search a few minutes later shows us at #26, and then sometimes we're not ranked at all, etc etc. I know the algorithm changes a lot, but does it really change every couple of minutes? Has anyone else experienced this kind of behaviour in the SERPs? What could be causing it to happen?
Algorithm Updates | | d4online0