Google Places for Mobile Businesses in many cities

[ocsearch]

How do you set up Google Places account for mobile businesses where the drivers get calls from their homes and service customers in their respective cities?

The problem is, the drivers don't want to list their home address as their business address, yet they still represent a service for a particular city.

Any ideas?

[inhouseninja]

Get a P.O. box or a "virtual office" in each city.   That's the only way I know to work around this issue.  Also, if one driver quits you can still keep the same address for Google Maps - just change the phone number.

[KeriMorgret]

Google really frowns on the PO boxes these days. I believe there are ways to indicate service areas. I'm flagging this question for one of our local experts to come in and comment.

[ocsearch]

Yeah I always thought this was a bad spammy idea...

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Ocsearch,

Keri is correct. The use of P.O. boxes and virtual offices is prohibited by Google's Places Quality Guidelines which you can read in full here:

http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

Here is the portion of the guidelines that speak specifically to your query:

Business Location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.

• 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.
• Use the precise address for the business in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
• Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
• Businesses that operate in a service area, as opposed to a single location, should not create a listing for every city they service. Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.
• Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the hospital or clinic at large.
• Do not include information in address lines that does not pertain your business’s physical location (e.g. URLs, keywords).

So, basically, the business in question needs to make a critical decision: will they be willing to publish a legitimate address in order to receive the benefits of participating in Google Places? If not, then Google will not consider them to be appropriate for their index.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

[EricaMcGillivray]

Do you know if they're also filtering out UPS addresses? My nonprofit has essentially a PO Box at a UPS store, but it has an actual address (looks like an apartment address).

[ocsearch]

The problem is they has some sort of business that send outs drivers all over the state of California. So I guess what you're saying is that they should just do one place account for their main office and call it quits eh?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Erica,

It is my understanding that any address which is not a legitimate street address is prohibited and this would include UPS addresses. This has become especially problematic in parts of the country where mail has never or is no longer being directly delivered. I have heard from business owners in Colorado and Maine who live in such communities and they are out of luck. I find this to be a very unsatisfactory oversight on Google's part. They are excluding legitimate businesses because of the way the post office functions in many, many places. Perhaps we will one day see a fix from them for this.

What qualifies right now as a legitimate local street address is one to which customers can come to do business or one from which the company goes out to its customers. So, this automatically rules out any type of box because no one is working in the box

How good is Google at catching companies that bend this rule? Not terribly, but once they get onto a violation, they act swiftly and the offending business has little recourse to right things beyond requesting re-inclusion which is an iffy bet.

Hope this helps to further clarify things!

Miriam

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Again OCsearch,

If they've got just one office, then yes, having one Place Page would be an accurate representation of the business. I sympathize with how inadequate a solution this is for clients with business models like your client's. The alternative to this is for the business to change the way it thinks about its employees and assign one in each district as a sub-branch of the business. Let me explain this a little more thoroughly:

• Let's say the business is located in San Francisco. They create and claim a Place Page for their home office.

• Then, let's also say that the business sends out truckers from Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento and San Diego.

• Let's say that the business is willing to create a new position for one employee in each of those cities - let's call him the city manager.

• The city manager's duties involve overseeing the job assignments for each of the truckers in his city. And, his home address is now viewed as a local office for the main company. He is given a unique local area code phone number and mail relating to operations in his city is now to be directed to his home instead of the company headquarters in San Francisco.

• If this were the business model, then I think it would be conceivable for each city manager to have his own Place Page for his sub-branch of the company.

It's a big workaround, but not an impossible one.

Barring this, then, yes...one Place Page for the main office and the rest of your work will have to be organic. And, the client should understand that he should not expect to outrank businesses with physical addresses in other cities.

Does this explanation help? I hope so!

Miriam