Google My Business Shared Address Problem

[vetofunk]

Hi,

I have an issue. Our organization shares a church with another organization. Years ago they claimed the address. They have their Google Business category set up as "Religious Organization". About 6 months ago we started sharing the same church with them. We are a total different organization. We now have a verified listing (same address but with STE 100 in it) with the main category being "Church". There are a few issues I am seeing:

1. When doing a search for our address, the icon is the default one, whereas all the other churches in the area show the church icon. Is this because they claimed the original address as "Religious Organization" and because we only have STE 100, even though labeled as Church, Google doesn't see it that way?

2. If you search for the location + church, neither of our organizations show, even after 6 months. They only show if you search for the organization name or address. Could this be because Google doesn't consider this address (therefore both of us) as a church and doesn't show it?

Here is our Google local listing and the one we share with. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/1018+Parkway+Dr,+Spring+Hill,+TN+37174/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x8863828b8f17015b:0x59fd9715acc7e144?sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi7h5DCqfbXAhXBc98KHXcyA4gQ8gEIKDAA

Thank you!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jeff,

I'm looking right now at your scenario and am going to jot down what I see as I go:

1. Searching from my location in California for "church spring hill tennessee", I see Community Baptist Church coming up #15 in the local finder view (to the left of the map).

2. In order for me to make Covenant Community Church appear in the local finder, I have to zoom in 2 levels on the map, at which point, your church appears at #20 in the local finder, with Community Baptist being at #11.

3. This indicates to me that your church (Covenant) is being impacted by a Google filter, like the Possum Filter (read: https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-possum) which has the effect of filtering out businesses that share a building or a category. I'm not positive this is actually Possum, because the two churches do have different categories, but I suspect it is a shared-building filter of some kind.

4. I'm assuming you are located near your church, and I would advise you to try to replicate what I am doing zooming in on the map, click by click, to see if your church then appears in the results. If you see the same results behavior that I have from my locale on the West Coast, that is further confirmation of a filter.

5. Some good news, is that if I search Google for just "Covenant Church Spring Hill TN", you are the ONLY entity that comes up, with it's own knowledge panel and everything. So, if I were new to town, and was of a Covenant affiliation, Google would be showing me your organization as a result. That's good to know! I'm also glad to see that the two churches have different phone numbers.

6. I would advise you not to worry about people searching for you by address. If I am looking for a church, I'm going to look up "Baptist Church Spring Hill," or "Episcopal Church Spring Hill". I'm not going to look for a church by typing "123 Main St." into Google or Google Maps, right?

7. I want to ask about your use of a suite number. Is your congregation actually occupying a different building on the church grounds than the Baptist community is? My guess is no on this, and that you are both using the same church at different times of the day. If I'm right about that, you should remove the suite number from your Google My Business listing and other local business listings. Google pays no attention to suite numbers, but you want to be totally accurate in how you represent your church's location, and use of a suite number does not prevent filtering (as we're seeing with our own eyes in your scenario).

8. It's up to Google who gets a place label icon (the little church symbol you see) and typical advice on that is that you need to build up authority to earn one. The fact that the Baptist organization has the symbol and the higher local finder visibility leads me to suspect they are simply the stronger "competitor". I know it's kind of weird to talk about "competitors" when we are talking about churches, but that is how we'd phrase this if we were talking about two businesses occupying the same location, and all of this leads me to my next point.

9. If you are concerned that the Baptists are outranking you in some way that would be preventing Covenant affiliated folks from finding your community, then you will need to conduct a competitive audit to see where the "competitor" is stronger than you are. Again, sorry for the business-type language! This recent post of mine (https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit) will walk you through the process of doing a basic audit, so that you can discover areas in which the Baptist church may have superior metrics that are causing it to outrank your church for a generic search like my original "church spring hill tennessee".

10. Always keep in mind that local results are not static. Because Google now sees the searcher as the centroid of truly local searches, this means that people living right next door to (or driving past) your church building may be seeing different local results than people who are doing the same search while being located up on Buckner Road on the north side of town. And, folks 30 miles away (like in Nashville) are likely seeing yet different results. I just mention this as something to always keep in mind when looking at the results.

If you take the time to do the audit referenced in point 9, and any questions arise from the data you total up, please feel free to come back to this thread and ask me. Thanks for the chance to look at your scenario.

[vetofunk]

Awesome information. More than I could ask for. We did already begin some link audits of the "competition" and will work on that. The church is newer than all the rest in the area, so we have some work cut out for us, but doing some brief research, not a ton of SEO going on in the community. If I have any other questions, I will be sure to add them, but again, really appreciate all this information...it's a great help!

[MiriamEllis]

It's my pleasure, Jeff, and I hope going through a formal basic audit, using the free spreadsheet that's in that blog post I linked to, will help you see exactly how your church might improve its overall metrics to become more visible. But those filters can be hard to overcome. Best of luck!

[Dalessi]

Just for input sake I just did a search using the term "Churches" with about a 2-mile radius on the map and both of the churches show near the top. Just keep trying to get some quality links back to your Website and you will start moving up more and more. PageRank and other factors are very important to ranking well. Especially "PageRank" from high-quality links coming from relevant websites.

Best Regards

[vetofunk]

Thanks for the extra input William. Yeah, it's a new site. I was mainly concerned about the shared address. Nothing I have ever seen before. We have ran some reports on local churches, as well as churches in general to see where to get some quality links and will be implementing that soon. I will keep everyone updated on what happens!