Multiple Businesses at the Same Address - Avoiding Google Places Trouble

[TheSEOWiz]

I'm trying to avoid problems with Google Places; this is like "address confusion", but is rather "business confusion".

We have a gym at a street address with a suite number, and a number of personal trainers who work out of the gym.  Several of them have their own websites and their own Google Places pages.

1 trainer has a Yelp account that lists the gym's street address including the suite number, and a Places page with the gym's street address.

2 trainers have the gym's street address on their personal/individual business websites, 1 with and 1 without the suite number.

Is any of this going reduce Google's confidence in the accuracy of which business is really at the street address and suite number?

What should we tell/require of our trainers in relation to this, if anything?

Is there a chance Google will merge the Places pages?

Am I paranoid?  (Google Places sometimes does at it wishes, to the dismay of several of my clients.....)

I do know that there are often many businesses in a building, each with their own suite numbers, and nothing bad happens.  But ours is a case of multiple personal training businesses (including the gym: a small personal training studio) all at the same address And suite number.

Thanks for any insight or ideas!

[AlanMosley]

You are not pariniod, google may merge them.

Assuming your business is showing at the moment, make sure you fill in all areas, upload images, get some reviewsmake sure your listinfg looks the most valuable. you can contact google if the do merge, but you want to aviod it if you can

[MiriamEllis]

Hi The SEO Wiz, You are definitely not paranoid, and there are several real dangers here. I'm thinking hard about the best advice to give here. Let me start jotting down some notes for you.

1. The part of the Google Places Quality Guidelines that allows multiple practitioners within a practice to have unique Place Pages is this:

"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"

So, a typical scenario for this would be a law firm with 3 lawyers. The law firm can choose to have 1 Place Page for the practice and 1 for each lawyer. But, typically, all Place Pages are going to be pointing either to the domain name or to the lawyer's landing page (ie: goodlawfirm.com/brandon-jones-attorney-at-law). What is complicating your scenario is the fact that some of your trainers have their own websites. So, not only are they linking to different websites while using the same street address, they are being inconsistent in their publication of the address.

2. The address MUST be the same across all citations. So, for starters, you need to send a memo to every trainer at your gym telling them that they have X amount of time to insure that all Internet references to them, including their own site, review sites, and directories, are correctly displaying the address of the gym, suite number and all.

3. Another point of serious concern is that I would bet that your trainers have duplicated categories. It's a little known fact that in the scenario described in point #1, none of the lawyers can use the same Place Page categories as one another or as the the main office Place Page. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that your trainers are using at least some of the same categories.

So, one guideline would need to be that they cannot duplicate categories on their Place Page and this is where this gets really hairy. How are you going to organize this? If you've got, let's say, 10 trainers, do you get them all together for a meeting a plan out who gets what categories, while being certain that the gym's main Place Page gets to use the main categories that are important to the business. You can use a category tool like Mike Blumenthals at:

http://blumenthals.com/index.php?Google_LBC_Categories

...but this is really going to be tough because of the fact that... It's a best practice to use at least 2-3 of Google's pre-set categories on any Place Page. So, if the main office gets to use 'gym', 'health club' and 'sports club', what do your trainers get to use? If 4 of them teach yoga, only one of them can be allowed to use 'Yoga Studio' and 'Aerobics Instructor'. Great potential for unhappiness between them, and in fact, if Yoga happened to be one of your gym's biggest draws (it's so big right now) you might want to use that 'Yoga Studio' category for yourself. So, you can see that this is messy. You could run every search you can think of in the category tool and figure out if there is are any pre-set categories that could be uniquely used by each instructor without taking anything away from the gym's ability to take advantage of the 5 most important categories, but it's going to be tough to organize an implement. The balance can be made up with non-pre-set categories, but be sure they adhere to the guidelines about this...categories describe what a business IS, not what it DOES. So, trainers can't use things like 'pilates instruction'. They'd have to use 'pilates instructor'.

4. And this still leaves us with the initial problem of the multiple websites at the same address. If you could get point #3 sorted out, then this might be the solution:

• Tell instructors that if they wish to use the gym's address, their Place Page must link to a landing page about them on the gym's main website. You would create a unique page for each instructor and link to it from the Place Page, ensure that the street address is consistent across all sources, assign available main categories for each instructor and allow them to upload their unique photos and videos to personalize the page. This would reduce your risk of merging and the risk or Google losing trust in your overall data and profile.

• If the instructors do not find the above appealing, you must revoke their rights to use the street address of the gym on their Google Place Page or anywhere else on the web, including their website and their citations. They will need to be certain to remove all references to the gym's address from all possible sources. They can then, of course, go ahead with the promotion of their own websites, but not under the gym's name or address. They would need to have their own street address to qualify for inclusion in Google Places.

Unfortunately, neither route is going to be simple to organize or implement, but given the current competitiveness of the fitness industry, it's vital that you take serious steps towards protecting the gym's ability to be trusted and rank. I would actually be surprised if merging hasn't already occurred. I've done my best to define your potential options within the scope of Q&A, but this may be one of those areas where you're going to need to work with a Local SEO to hammer out all of the details, due to the complexity of the scenario. Hope I've gotten you into the right mindset about this. Good luck! Miriam

[TheSEOWiz]

Thank you for the answer and confirmation.

Our Google Places account is all filled out. Yes, we certainly want to avoid any Places merging.

[TheSEOWiz]

I appreciate the answer and detailed feedback.

I can understand why having the gym's street address Without the suite number on a trainer's website could actually be worse; hadn't considered that.

Yes, duplicated categories in Places....No good. Luckily no merge yet.

We're going to add a term in the contract with the gym's trainers about use of the street address: Not allowed on any online account (Places, Yelp, etc.).

Fortunately the gym owner is supportive of getting this taken care of and is dealing with the trainers. Your feedback helped. Thanks!

Thank you for your time and insight.

[MiriamEllis]

You're very welcome. Thanks for participating in Q&A!

Miriam