Does publishing your physical company address increase your Google Trust?
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The question is in the title: Does publishing your physical company address increase your Google Trust?
I.e. on the contact page of the website, providing a physical address. The address would match the WHOIS entry for the domain, and allow customers to contact you via post.
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Google keeps their algorithms private in an effort to reduce manipulation. What I can share is it seems logical Google would consider publishing a physical company address as an indicator that you are indeed a real business. It would seem more like a tick mark on a checklist which could improve trust factors for your website.
An excellent discussion which includes this topic is offered by Rand's future of link building webinar: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/future-of-link-building
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Yes. The address is one of the signals, this has been confirmed by Google. The address on your website doesn't need to match WHOIS though.
Here is an interesting article which takes the trust explanation further:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
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It's not mandatory that your physical address should match with Who is Info. Most of the times domain are registered with some other address and site physical add is diff.
Publishing physical address in website will help you in building trust. Even when u do local listing of site google matches both address and it will help your website appearing in Google Local Listing.
Also if you see from user point of view they will never trust of share credit card if site doesn't have physical address and even google has mentioned same thing after panda update that they don't like sites on which user doesn't trust or feel comfortable in giving there credit card details.
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It certainly would improve the trust of your site visitors. I have seen conversion increases of over 50% when clear ownership and contact information has been added prominently on a site.
Improving your Google trust is important. Improving your potential customer's trust is critical. Don't every forget it is as important to get more conversions from the visitors you have as it is to get more visitors.
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Google may, or may not, take into account the physical address but I know that the more discerning customer definitely does care.
I recommend to all of my SEO customers to add their physical address, even if it is just a PO Box, as it furthers Google's stated aims of adding truth and transparency to the internet.
