Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jesse, Thank you for coming to Q&A to ask your question! Here are Google's Places Guidelines in full for your perusal: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 The main rule that applies to the situation you are describing is this one: "Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing." The clients you are describing are certainly making in-person contact with their clientele. Google is well aware of the fact that there are millions of go-to-client businesses (chimney sweeps, landscapers, window washers, etc.). The trouble is that they have tended to treat these business models as though they were less deserved of their attention, not offering very specific guidelines for them. But, basically, any business that makes in-person contact with its customers qualifies as local. Whether the customers come to you or you go to them doesn't matter. So, if the home is the office from which the business owner is going out to serve his customers, it is perfectly accurate to list his home address as his headquarters. What I have found to actually be the most difficult aspect of this in the years I've been doing Local SEO is that many business owners who operate out of the home are concerned about privacy. Some do not want their home address out there on the web either because they simply value privacy or because they are concerned that customers may come by their home expecting it to be a walk-in office. So, this is something that each home-based business has to make a decision about: is inclusion in Google Places worth these risks? If they are truly competitive, the answer will probably be yes, because non-inclusion pretty much means invisibility. Regarding P.O. Boxes, virtual offices and the like,  this is not an allowed option, as stated in the guidelines: Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed. Regarding Google's service radius tool - be careful using this. There is little evidence that it helps one to rank in cities outside of one's physical location, whereas I have seen evidence that using the tool too broadly can have a rather negative effect. I prefer not to use it for my clients. Over the years, I have often written about the need for Google to start treating this massive number of go-to-client business models as equally important. They've introduced things like the service radius feature, but I feel that isn't really a worthwhile instrument at this point. It's better to focus your Place Page (and other local profiles) on your single physical location and then use your website to build out geographic content for the different towns/cities/counties you service. At any rate, hope this gets you off the on the right foot! Miriam

Under normal circumstances, the meta descriptions will change quite dynamically as Google crawls your site. It also changes dynamically depending on the query. But, I've head and read that in certain Google local searches, you can throw these expectations out the window. I found this especially disheartening thread over at Google Places support forum where other users are experiencing similar frustrations. Apparently Google Local caches their snippets differently, and at this time there seems to be no valid solution for correcting it. If anyone stumbling upon this thread has come across a solution, please share in the comments.

I found alot of conflicting info on the topic... It appears in September of 2010 they did change it, but I think it is only enforced and it is almost even worded as if you just cannot elicit the content of the review... But It seems to be sort of a grey area as alot still do it and flourish (much like everything else in Google) I have never personally tried this incentive strategy myself  but Have done the citation route many times and seen EXTREMELY good results. And in my look around incetivizing increased reviews by over 100% (of course) so this may have been why they stopped it, as those with the most money could have the most reviews causing an unfair advantage (but isn't that sort of true in everything?) Just in my personal opinion since I am not a lawyer nor do i work for Google Incentive's for reviews are good for all as long as you are not incentivizing the content 1. Customer - Get the chance to either come back and enjoy another meal/service or If they had a bad time the owner gets to try to make it right... 2. Perspective Customer - They get to learn about the experience and see the transpareny of the owner either rectifying or not. (of course i understand some clients/customers are unreasonable, but hey it is a part of being in business 3. Business They get the Benefits in both Word of Mouth and Search Engine Marketing plsu the chance of repeat business OR the chance to right a wrong therefore helping brand image. It also entices the business owner to strive to be better to make sure they do not incentive themselves into a bad review But hey this could get you in trouble, but their are lots of risks taken every day in business, must weigh the ROI potential. w00t!

Awesome. Thanks everyone. WhiteSpark looks great.

You are very welcome, John!

Greetings! Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your important question. This interview with Eric Enge is over a year old now, but his advice holds true, in my opinion: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml The part of the interview relating to your scenario is this: Eric Enge: Let’s say you have more than one location, 100 for example. In your view, is it helpful to have individual pages on the website for all of the locations? Also, is it helpful to have the Google local business center linked to each of those individual pages rather than having 100 locations that point to a single web address? Carter Maslan: I can tell you what I think the ideal end state is, and there are various levels of getting there. Ultimately, we would like to have the store-specific page known so that people can just click through and see today's specials and any kind of adjustments for that particular day. We would love to have all of that information on a direct click to the most specific page for that location. That’s what we encourage, but there are still a lot of chains and things that just link to their top-level domain. I guess it's a split answer. We want to get to a store specific page, but we are not uniformly there across all of the businesses. Eric Enge: Could that potentially be encouraged by making it a ranking factor, for example? Carter Maslan: Yes. I guess there are two sides to it. If you create a store-specific page that really just has an address, it wouldn't be as helpful as having some genuinely good content on the page that the user would really appreciate having as the first click-through experience. That’s what I think we need to work through. We don't want to arbitrarily tell people that they must create a store-specific page, because we are really just trying to find the most useful page for that business. That’s why I am not so definitive on the store-specific page or not. I really just want what’s best for the retailer, store or businesses, first and foremost giving the user what he would want to see when he clicks on that business. Eric Enge: Say you have a store-specific page that lists specific and individual things about just one store location. Depending on the kind of business that could be an inventory list that shows you've got extra stock? Carter Maslan: There is a chain of stores that carries yoga equipment that my wife really likes. They have special yoga instruction, carry special brands, and host lectures on some special days. There are all kinds of things that the retailer does that relate to that specific store location, and there is also a general corporate catalogue page. So this is not black and white, and even though we want to encourage it, it's not that there is a definitive guidance saying companies need to have that page. Eric Enge: Obviously it’s good if there is a quality page with information unique and specific to each location. Carter Maslan: Yes, that's great. If we know that there’s good information about that page, then that helps on search and the snippets that we can show on the search results, because we know that the page is referencing that place. It does help even if it ends up not being the page that you list as your primary homepage. If there is good content that we know is content about that place, then it helps us do a better job with query results. If a company has a page that's store-specific and talks about its class schedule, and there is one that says its holding Tai Chi class tonight and someone is searching for places to do Tai Chi, then that helps us to score it. If a lot of people have found that page helpful about the Tai Chi class, then when people search for Tai Chi we would know that that location has something to do with Tai Chi. Now, bear in mind that Eric was stating this as an opinion of best practices rather than an official statement from Google, but barring having a distinct website for each of the franchise's locations, yes, having a unique page for each business will be a good idea. And, of course, each location must have its own local area code phone number and street address. This will qualify each branch to have a unique Place Page which can then link to its respective landing page on the website. Parting advice - do make an effort to make the landing pages unique. Don't just cut and paste copy, changing the address and phone number. Write unique copy about each business! Hope this helps! Miriam

I've already seen great results just by submitting XML-video sitemaps. To facilitate interpretation for search engines a description of the video's content should be made in writing. One best practice could be to place the video's description in HTML in the same section where the video is placed. Emphasize the video by constructing a class like or a similar indication in the source code and place all information concerning the video (video, title and description) into this class. That way, a search engine should better understand the connection between this information. Like so: ## Video: Keyword Here is a short description of the video Here is a Whiteboard Friday Video with some further information: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080

Hi Rahul & Robert, If I've understood your questions correctly, you want to know how one becomes a third party image provider in Google Places so that linked images are showing up on Place Pages from your body of data. I want you to both know that I have researched this and have also spoken with Mike Blumenthal (imo the top Local SEO in the country) to be confident that my facts are correct. As I mentioned before, it is up to Google to decide with whom it partners for this service. There is a form somewhere for submitting a request to become a Google partner, but for the life of me, I couldn't find it and Mike wasn't sure where it was either. It may be somewhere within this set of pages: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mapcontent/ I spent about 10 minutes hunting for it to no avail, so it seems it's not very obvious, but maybe with some more searching, you can turn up the form. What you can typically expect is that Google is only going to partner with very huge companies able to provide a huge set of data. If you are small, it won't hurt to contact Google (if you can find that dratted form) but I would not expect to become a partner. Other than being a partner, there appears to be a more random sourcing of data from various sites using rich snippets, so that is something you both might want to investigate further. I sincerely hope this answer helps. Miriam

i have this happaning for a couple of clients, I cannot say for sure why it works for them and not others, but it happaned after I added images to their listing. I added cutout images by the way just in case it makes a difference, they certainly look better as local images are a bit small.

Thanks for your response. A few weeks ago we actually posted the pictures right on the page. This page is indexed / followed- everything. Google hasn't penalized the site or anything like that. If anything, it is helping his visitors by showing his work. So I guess until Google can "see" the image, keeping them on the page will be the best option. Thanks!

To me, this is a bit like finding a successful infographic and then asking "Isn't image content killer link bait?". Video, like image, is a medium for content delivery - rather than a type of content and this is how it should be considered in the context of link bait. Video content can be excellent link bait, but the form itself is not by default any more "linkable"  than images, words or applications. "Linkbait video" it requires a specific approach which often doesn't tie in very well with commercial interests. For someone to link to a video, there has to be specific value in the experience of watching it through -- this can be an aesthetic experience, humour, instruction or exciting delivery of information. for more information and advice on what makes a "linkable" video - check out this blog post on the topic - http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/creating-awesome-videos-for-seo/ There are also some specific problems with using video for Link Bait If you don't secure your video properly, the content can be ripped and uploaded to YouTube. As you rightly pointed out, Youtube is the worlds second biggest search engine, which means that individuals will use it to find your video content, rather than your own site. This means that often a lot of your earned links will go to an erroneous YouTube channel, rather than the targeted domain. Video is invasive when embedded on a website. Unlike reading or looking at an image, watching a video is an active and engaged process. You cannot skim read a video and thus, if someone embeds a video on their site - it has to be because they want their readers to temporarily disengage from their own content and spend the time watching the thing through. People don't link to mediocre videos. The internet is awash with average video content, the vast majority of which is on YouTube and never gets watched or linked to be anyone. While you can always pick-up a few links with an average blog post, PDF document, infographic or plugin, run of the mill video will get you nowhere. So, yes, Video can be great link bait - but there's a lot of risks involved and you have to do an exceptional job really get the links coming in. I would encourage you to have a play and put something out there, but don't expect to get it right first time. Videos can be valuable even if they don't get links as they offer the opportunity for blended organic results, video results, exposure on YT and can help improve the overall richness and quality of your site.

There may be restrictions with paid advertising, but that shouldn't be a problem as you're talking about organic SEO.

Seems like you could just add a second place page with no problems. That's what all the big chains do and they all point to the same URL on a site. For example, Chipotle has a different place listing for all their locations and they all just point back to www.Chipotle.com

In all my years doing local search marketing the only bad reviews I have been able to get removed on Google are those that include profanity or "inappropriate content"  and even those have required many email exchanges with Google. Have you read this: http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187622 Also remember to make it easy for your clients to post review by placing you places link on email campaigns and social media profile pages. Good luck!

Hi! thanks for your reply. I've already updated the account and it says 100% complete Some information is also imported into the hotel finder like comments and the description. Other data, like images for example, are imported from other sources and I was wondeirng if anyone knows where these data come from. I think the images are labeled with "VFM Leonardo". I've also read, that Google relies on data from yellow pages.. The hotel finder is still in beta, but I hope that there will be some official information about how to maintain/optimize hotel finder entries. I was just wondering if anyone had some additional information on this topic. Cheers!