Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Linda,

Thank you for the input.  If you google "austin wedding photographer" you will likely see 2+ listings with the word "Austin" in the listing, leading me to believe perhaps they aren't as strict on that anymore?  Also in a number of highly regarded Local SEO articles, I had read adding the full keyword string can help.  I am trying to change the name back to just photojennette but Google says I must wait a period of time before changing.

Next, the address is not a home address.  Yes she does most of her work at her house but the address is actually a business where she can meet clients and is an actual storefront.  It's a mail service with a coffee shop where she consults with clients.  Again, if you look what google is actually showing for the term, you will see that almost all of the photographers listed have home addresses showing for the businesses.  (you are likely not from Austin, but I am and I know the addresses are their homes which I think is really dumb because they are publicly telling people where they live.)

I am a patterns person.  If I saw a pattern that seemed to support your statement besides the fact that my clients listing isn't at the top, I would definitely agree with your comments but they simply don't apply to what I am seeing Google place at the top of the results.

deleted for privacy.

deleted for privacy.

I really don't think Google likes it when you release a website that big.  It would much rather you build it slowly.  I would urge you to have main pages and noindex the sub categories.

I have another thread going where everyone is saying to keep both the Places profile as well as the Google Plus Local profile I have for my company.  I have another person telling me that it has a negative effect to have both accounts at the same time so I'm assuming thats why the listing never comes up on places unless you zoom all the way into the map to the address of the storefront.

With that being said, can anyone provide some good tips for ranking first page on google maps?

Goole Plus Local - https://plus.google.com/114370561649922317296/about?gl=us&hl=en

Google Places - https://plus.google.com/103220086647895058915/about?gl=us&hl=en

Well I wish Google would get on it and hurry up and merge them because the listing is hard to find on Google Maps and never comes up in the front page map.

I do have a google places listing as well as a google plus local profile for photojennette set up.

http://plus.google.com/114370561649922317296

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=photojennette&ie=UTF-8&ei=ZcGwUf-4E4nJrgHTk4BY&ved=0CAsQ_AUoAg

Is this what you're talking about?  I actually have another forum post about deleting one of them and have been advised that google will merge the two in the coming months.

deleted for privacy.

the question has been answered perfectly!  Thanks

I ran AHrefs and got ahref rank of 99.1.  Ive never used the site before, is that good?

I need to bump this and offer more information.  Both accounts are fairly new, and I just want to know what the negative effects of deleting the google places profile would be?  There's no reviews on it, I'd rather it not show up because it has a map for the cover photo instead of our branding, and its a mailing address anyway, not an actual studio because the photographer works from home and doesn't want to list the home address publicly. Thanks in advance.

So WMT is the best place to see whats actually pointing at the site?  I actually see a few domains on WMT that I know for a fact have 301 redirects on them so there is literally no way it could be pointing to my website anymore.

Also its much different.  WMT is saying I have 65 domains linking and OSE is saying like 18.

Webmaster tools is telling me I have a bunch of websites pointing to my website, and I have been adding links as of the last 3 weeks which WM Tools is already seeing.  Open Site Explorer isn't really showing any of them?  My site has gone from bottom of page 5 to page 2 in just 3 weeks so I'm happy about that but can anyone explain this to me?

Yes but i would strongly suggest just having one website and then 301 redirecting the other.

I got caught a year ago with 4 different websites all with the same content and links between them and that is straight negative SEO.  Brand that baby, and then light it up with SEOmoz tactics : )

just thinking that it might be better to have all reviews on the google plus business page as it is better branded and if people come looking and im splitting traffic, +1s, shares, and reviews its likely going to be worse in the end to have two.  On top of that, we don't really have customers come to us.

I'm looking into this because I'm wanting to find best practices for showing on the front page map.  I've always been in markets where the map didn't show so organic listings were my game.  Now I'm SEOing for a wedding photographer and the map shows (which is stupid because most of them don't have actual storefronts.) and now the map is part of the game.  Any thoughts on both issues would be greatly appreciated.

It seems like the two are redundant?  Any official word on this?  I'm fairly OCD about things being tidy and I dont want to split my reviews / shares / etc between two profiles.  Are they not the same thing?

I searched for my company, both my plus business page and my places page came up.  I attached a SS of the situation.

placesvplus.png

so my motto for SEO is if its too easy, Google wont like it... Meaning, if buying your-target-keywords.com used to mean you would be ranked first, thats not the case anymore.

is there anyone here that disagrees with the below example.

commercial-construction-company.com with great content and links (meaning SEO)  = samscontractors.com with great content and links (meaning SEO)

basically the name doesnt matter so long as its an honest website with great content.  On the flipside, your missing out ob a branding opp and when was the last time you saw "keywords.com" at the top of page 1?

I have always found it is much better to buy the URL that has the name of your company in it.  I once created a website for a friend who had a carpet cleaning company and at the time knew nothing about SEO.  I registered the keywords.com which happen to be "austincarpetclean.com" and the major problem I found with that is that people never knew who they hired to clean their carpets, and sometimes left my friends company bad reviews when my friend hadn't even done the job.  The word "confusing" is a major issue when it comes to the post 2012 Google.  NOW if I had registered the name of his business say it was "Jones Carpet Cleaning" at www.jonescarpetcleaning.com I would still have had some keywords, and would have branded it correctly.  Hope this helps.

Can you say that last paragraph again in a different way?  I think there's a typo that's making it hard for me to understand.

so if there is a root domain with 100 links, it's not a negative so long as they are natural?