Location in business name for listings

[LiamMcArthur]

A while back, I changed 26 of our business listings on Google so that the business name included the city, for example: "Business Name Sheffield", "Business Name York", "Business Name Doncaster".

It looked consistent, it was easier to read in Google Maps when searching for Eden Mobility and even better - it may have been the cause of positive impacts in our local rankings. Using the Moz Local tool, I'm now looking at rolling out this change out throughout ALL of our business listings on the web, including Factual, Yelp etc etc... Does anybody have thoughts on this? At the back of my mind I can't help but think that I should be consistently using ONLY the business name throughout all of my online business listings. Will Google consider each of these locations as separate business entities? Here's something I found in Google's guidelines:

Adding unnecessary information to your name (e.g. "Google Inc. – Mountain View Corporate Headquarters" instead of "Google") by including marketing taglines, shop codes, special characters, hours or closed/open status, phone numbers, website URLs, service/product information, location/address or directions or containment information (e.g. "Chase ATM in Duane Reade") is not permitted.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I've seen some big businesses such as ASDA doing the same thing I'm doing - but I'm undecided!

[MattAntonino]

As you have already found, the guidelines are fairly clear. Unless the location is part of the name (their example is Holiday Inn Salem) then I wouldn't do it. Your competitors and others may be "getting away with it" but that's exactly what they're doing - it's not right and they'll eventually get pulled up on that.

I guess the question is a question of winning now vs winning long term. You may be able to keep it in there and win for a while then change and no issues. But you may have to change later on and take a bit of a knock for not doing it right the first time. It's hard to predict but if you feel confident in beating the system, keep it. I wouldn't - I'd go with strict business name per the guidelines.

It's one thing to mess with Google in SEO (offsite, etc.) but it's another to use one of their own products incorrectly. Highly likely to get 'caught' on it.

[LiamMcArthur]

That's exactly how we feel. We don't want to get hammered on the next update with it being against their terms. The example of "Holiday Inn Salem" is an interesting one. If I search for "Holiday Inn" around my location, I get various results including "Holiday Inn York" and "Holiday Inn Lincoln".

Acceptable: "Starbucks", "Macy’s", "Holiday Inn Salem", "U.S. Bank ATM", "University of California Berkeley"

It looks to me that they're essentially trying to achieve the same thing we are.

[MattAntonino]

Holiday Inn actually names those businesses by location though. So that's their "real name."

http://www.holidayinn.com/hotels/gb/en/hd/australia/sydney-hotels?cm_sp=OSMAM-HI-AA-EN-HED-AIX-MHR-Sydney

Even on their own site, it's "holiday inn sydney" etc. It's not "Holiday Inn" with a location. It's a slight but important difference.