Google Places - Should my category choice be manual keywords or selected from default list

[PeteC12]

Hi All,

I have a carpet cleaner hire business and am new to google places. I have been doing my listing for it but can't seem to work out whether I should choose one of the default choices in the categories and leave it as that (in my case it would be "carpet cleaning services" or should I manually type some keywords as well as this ? So for instance, I choose the default - carpet cleaning services but also manually type in "carpet cleaner hire" , floor scrubber hire etc etc as other categories

Any advice or if someone could point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

Pete

[FCBM]

From my experience Google uses the manually input categories in conjunction with other listing data. I would select carpet cleaners and floor care (if they have that) and then in the about section use some anchor text going back to individual service pages,

eg. We provide

Carpet cleaning (link to carpet cleaning page) and other floor care related services.

Also make sure to get your other listings in order and use https://moz.com/local/categories/category/Carpet Cleaning Service for getting your categories consistent.

[SeanMaki]

Choose the most relevant primary category, in this case I would pick the default "carpet cleaning services."

Unless there is another category or service that is not described by that one category, I would not add additional ones.  Your example seems like your trying to stuff as many keyword as possible, including synonyms.

For example, "Carpet cleaning hire" is essentially a duplicate of carpet cleaning services, but if they also do upholstery, you could add the category upholstery cleaning.  Having less (or only one) category will place the most weight on those services.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Pete,

I'm puzzled by what you are asking. I didn't think custom categories were available any longer, as I thought pretty much all dashboards had been upgraded to the newer Google And Your Business > Google My Business dashboard, which should not allow custom categories. Unless I've totally missed something, I don't believe custom categories exist anymore as an option in GMB or MapMaker.

[PeteC12]

Many thanks All. This has answered my query.

Pete

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