Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Adam,

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. I'm the SEOmoz Local SEO associate, but I'm actually going to ask one of our traditional SEOs to step in with a reply. It looks to me as if you are offering a virtual service, so this is not, per se, a Local SEO question.

On a side note, one thing I did notice is that I see no physical Australian address in the footer of your website. That would certainly be a place to start. Please hang in there while I ask some of our other mods to help.

Miriam

Hi All!

I want to be certain I'm understanding your query correctly. Are you saying that you want the client to rank organically for 'insurance' or that when you search for 'insurance' local results (with a grey pin) are coming up but that your client is not included amongst them? Please, explain. Thanks!

Miriam

Hi Again OCsearch,

If they've got just one office, then yes, having one Place Page would be an accurate representation of the business. I sympathize with how inadequate a solution this is for clients with business models like your client's. The alternative to this is for the business to change the way it thinks about its employees and assign one in each district as a sub-branch of the business. Let me explain this a little more thoroughly:

• Let's say the business is located in San Francisco. They create and claim a Place Page for their home office.

• Then, let's also say that the business sends out truckers from Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento and San Diego.

• Let's say that the business is willing to create a new position for one employee in each of those cities - let's call him the city manager.

• The city manager's duties involve overseeing the job assignments for each of the truckers in his city. And, his home address is now viewed as a local office for the main company. He is given a unique local area code phone number and mail relating to operations in his city is now to be directed to his home instead of the company headquarters in San Francisco.

• If this were the business model, then I think it would be conceivable for each city manager to have his own Place Page for his sub-branch of the company.

It's a big workaround, but not an impossible one.

Barring this, then, yes...one Place Page for the main office and the rest of your work will have to be organic. And, the client should understand that he should not expect to outrank businesses with physical addresses in other cities.

Does this explanation help? I hope so!

Miriam

Hi Erica,

It is my understanding that any address which is not a legitimate street address is prohibited and this would include UPS addresses. This has become especially problematic in parts of the country where mail has never or is no longer being directly delivered. I have heard from business owners in Colorado and Maine who live in such communities and they are out of luck. I find this to be a very unsatisfactory oversight on Google's part. They are excluding legitimate businesses because of the way the post office functions in many, many places. Perhaps we will one day see a fix from them for this.

What qualifies right now as a legitimate local street address is one to which customers can come to do business or one from which the company goes out to its customers. So, this automatically rules out any type of box because no one is working in the box

How good is Google at catching companies that bend this rule? Not terribly, but once they get onto a violation, they act swiftly and the offending business has little recourse to right things beyond requesting re-inclusion which is an iffy bet.

Hope this helps to further clarify things!

Miriam

Hi Ocsearch,

Keri is correct. The use of P.O. boxes and virtual offices is prohibited by Google's Places Quality Guidelines which you can read in full here:

http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

Here is the portion of the guidelines that speak specifically to your query:

Business Location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.

• Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed.
• Use the precise address for the business in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
• Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
• Businesses that operate in a service area, as opposed to a single location, should not create a listing for every city they service. Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.
• Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the hospital or clinic at large.
• Do not include information in address lines that does not pertain your business’s physical location (e.g. URLs, keywords).

So, basically, the business in question needs to make a critical decision: will they be willing to publish a legitimate address in order to receive the benefits of participating in Google Places? If not, then Google will not consider them to be appropriate for their index.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Gareth,

I've been asked to pop by this discussion. You've asked a great question, Others have contributed sound advice here. Your client is encountering some of the limitations of Google Places. Yes, you are restricted to 5 main categories, and in a sense, this system favors businesses with a narrower focus over those with a much broader one (like your client). The method that you have undertaken of focusing the Place Page on the business' 5 most important categories is correct, and then using organic SEO to pursue what else you can. But, because of the heavy slant towards local results in the SERPs, those things for which your client is not getting a mapped result will be at the bottom of the page or even further down than that. There isn't really a way to get around this that I know of, and I don't see Google changing this layout for some time to come.

Regarding the additional details field, it's my own practice with my clients to keep this pretty brief. I do believe that a stuffed additional details section could send a danger signal to Google, but what the threshold is, nobody knows. In any case, I do not believe these details carry a huge deal of weight as compared to, say, the contents of the website, particularly in competitive verticals. Now, if the business was the only one of its kind in a rural area about which Google had a paucity of information - then, yes, I wouldn't be surprised to see those additional details gaining a little traction. But in a competitive vertical in a suburban or metropolitan area, I would not expect anything you put in there to enable the client to outrank a competitor who has chosen one of the phrases as one if his top 5 specialties.

This is one of those areas in which it is critical to correctly the set the client's expectations. If they offer 25 different services, they should not expect to be #1 for all of them unless they are the only game in town. Google's results are more democratic than this, so the client is forced by the system to zone in on what their most popular services are with their Place Page, and do the best they can with organic for the rest. Don't forget, traffic comes from video marketing, social media and other forms of marketing, too! If the client wants to highlight other services, a creative approach to finding ways to promote them beyond Places deserves some thought.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Miriam

Hi Bjolley,

Thanks for coming to the forum to ask your question! I'm glad to see Members contributing their thoughts, but think a point needs to be clarified here.

This is not a case of claiming the 'best' profile and making it your client's authoritative Place Page  - it is a case of claiming the CORRECT profile - the one for the business' legitimate location.

At this point, if this were my client, I would not be worrying about losing a few reviews on his phony Place Pages. I'd be sweating whether his account would be penalized before I could report the bogus listings through Google's report a problem link.

Now, that being said, I have seen cases where Google has accidentally displayed the reviews for one geographic location on another location's Place Page, but so far as I know, there is no way to save the reviews. Tell the client they are lucky you are trying to clean up the mess and that going forward, they will need to work on building up new reviews over time to replace what has been lost.

As a final thought, before you report the incorrect Place Pages, why not copy the good reviews and use them as testimonials on the client's website? You might even try doing this with hReview markup code to see if Google will eventually pick them back up again and display them on the authoritative Place Page. But first things first...tell the client you've got to get that record cleaned up as best you can, and fast!

Good luck to you!

Miriam