Google Places listings showing for businesses in different states.
-
Hi Moz Community
I have a client with 4 x active Google Place listings in different locations all within in the same state of Australia (Western Australia) and all with the business name 'Crawford Realty' as per Google place guidelines.
When searching for 'Crawford Realty' Google returns listings for real estate agents near a town called Crawford in a state called Queensland which is across the other side of the country.
See screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/43p6LdtW
Does anyone know why my Western Australian business listings wouldn't be showing when searching in Western Australia and why the listings for a town in Queensland, across the other side of the country would be showing.
Thanks in advance,
Freddy
-
Thanks Marcus! Appreciate the feedback!!
-
Nice answers on this thread, guys. This is certainly an interesting scenario - one in which the legal name of a business includes a geographic term. I'm sure this occurs all the time, but this is actually the first time I've ever seen it brought up, believe it or not. Suggests that multi-location businesses should, perhaps, not name themselves after a city. If your small business is planning to expand into a franchise, maybe you should pick a less geo-centric name. Food for thought.
-
Hey Freddy
I think Vadim has pretty much nailed this but let me see if I can expand on that a little for you.
Most terms are not 100% specific and Google has to interpret what they believe the user is looking for. There is some context (location of searcher) but they don't have complete certainty in what the user is looking for.
Here is an example: When someone searches for 'marcus miller' I would like to think they are looking for me. Unfortunately, 99.9% of searches for 'Marcus Miller' are going to be for the super cool jazz composer / musician and not the super cool geeky SEO from Birmingham UK.
So, lets review this search term 'Crawford Realty'
What are the possible interpretations of this term?
- A business called 'Crawford Realty'
- Reality businesses in a place called Crawford
So, Google hedges their bets and shows the business called 'Crawford Realty' and a list of realty companies in the location called Crawford.
So, why are Google not showing your local listings here?
If the interpretation is for a brand name or a business type in a given location you are not fitting both of those descriptions. If someone searched for your business type + a location where you have an office then that would be a good fit for a localised result for your business.
So, if I search:
real estate Karratha
or
realty karratha
Then I find your local business offices in the local results as we would expect. On page two but they are there:
https://plus.google.com/116505937244694341152/about?gl=uk&hl=en
_Unclaimed I may add so there is certainly some work to be done here! _
Summary
Google has to take a search term and try to understand what the intent is beyond that term and the truth is 50% may be using the term to search for one thing and 50% for another. They have other elements of context such as searcher location but they attempt to serve up results that work for both sets of users. In this case I would imagine they believe that the higher percentage are looking for the business by it's brand name so you get the first listing.
Beyond that your business does come up on a location by location basis when folks search for the location + business area.
Hope that helps!
Marcusrealty location A
-
Hi Freddy,
Google thinks that by entering Crawford you are entering the city + Realty therefore those results.
Searches for Crawford Reality + location , as in Western Australia, or even for me just Australia, would return normal results as in this case google interprets the search query as business name + location, vs city + business type as above.
Does that help
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
-
Same URL-Structure & the same number of URLs indexed on two different websites - can it lead to a Google penalty?
Hey guys. I've got a question about the url structure on two different websites with a similar topic (bith are job search websites). Although we are going to publish different content (texts) on these two websites and they will differ visually, the url structure (except for the domain name) remains exactly the same, as does the number of indexed landingpages on both pages. For example, www.yyy.com/jobs/mobile-developer & www.zzz.com/jobs/mobile-developer. In your opinion, can this lead to a Google penalty? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vde130 -
Why Did My Google Crawls Hit A Wall?
Hello, One my the sites I work with, http://www.oransi.com, has seen a significant decrease in crawl Googlebot activity in the last 90 days. See screenshot. This decrease in crawl stats runs in conjunction with less Kb downloaded per day & an increase in how much time it took Google to download a page. The client did just go through a redesign, however that happened on 4/16/15, which was after the decrease in Googlebot activity, so that should not be the issue. Same could be said for the mobilegeddan algorithm change. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 5u1lM6B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
Google still listing old domain
Hi We moved to a new domain back in March 2014 and redirected most pages with a 301 and submitted change of domain request through Google Webmaster tools. A couple of pages were left as 302 redirect as they had rubbish links pointing to them and we had previously had a penalty. Google was still indexing the old domain and our rankings hadn't recovered. Last month we took away the 302 redirects and just did a blanket 301 approach from old domain to new in the the thinking that as the penalty had been lifted from the old domain there was no harm in sending everything to new domain. Again, we submitted the change of domain in webmaster tools as the option was available to us but its been a couple of weeks now and the old domain is still indexed Am I missing something? I realise that the rankings may not have recovered partly due to the disavowing / disregarding of several links but am concerned this may be contributing
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Hide Aggregation from Google?
Google isn't a fan of aggregation, but sometimes it is a good way to fill out content when you cannot cover every news story there is. What I'm wondering is if anyone has continued to do any form of aggregation based on a category and hide that url from Google. Example: example.com/industry-news/ -- is where you'd post aggregation stories but you block robots from crawling that. We wouldn't be doing this for search value just value to our readers. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | meistermedia0 -
Google webmaster tools showing "no data available" for links to site, why?
In my google webmaster account I'm seeing all the data in other categories except links to my site. When I click links to my site I get a "no data available" message. Does anyone know why this is happening? And if so, what to do to fix it? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nicktaylor10 -
Links how long do they show?
How long do links show for in software such as Majestic ect once the link has been removed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Google showing high volume of URLs blocked by robots.txt in in index-should we be concerned?
if we search site:domain.com vs www.domain.com, We see: 130,000 vs 15,000 results. When reviewing the site:domain.com results, we're finding that the majority of the URLs showing are blocked by robots.txt. They are subdomains that we use as production environments (and contain similar content as the rest of our site). And, we also find the message "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 541 already displayed." SEER Interactive mentions that this is one way to gauge a Panda penalty: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/100-panda-recovery-what-we-learned-to-identify-issues-get-your-traffic-back We were hit by Panda some time back--is this an issue we should address? Should we unblock the subdomains and add noindex, follow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
We are ignored by Google - what should we do?
Hi, We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case. 1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story. 2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us. Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search. Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0