Google Places optimisation for service franchise, 150 franchisees with no physical addresses?
-
So we have a client who is a plumbing franchise with about 150 franchisees across the country.
Because its a plumbing franchise the businesses don't have street addresses (apart from the franchisee home addresses but we don't want to use those)
We used to have bulk uploaded listings for the franchise locations and used the GPO address is the suburb/city as the address and got away with this fine for years. Google has copped onto this and asked for reverification of the listings by post now. So my question is what's the best way to optimise places for 150+ locations.
As a quick fix, we're going to add a new places location as the master franchise HQ office (address exists). We can then add all the suburbs/areas serviced into this location which may or may not show up for local searches in those areas.
We could potentially verify all listings by mail by using private mailboxes but mail verify on a mass scale like that is likely to be flaky not to mention an admin nightmare.
Does anyone have an experience with this and how they got around it?
-
I work for a language school that has offices in different cities. We're planning on setting up a Google Places page for each of the schools. They all have different addresses but use the same national phone number. Is this going to be a problem?
-
Brendan-
Just worked with a client in a similar situation and this is what we did. We got every single remote franchisee registered with their own google places and then we hid their addresses in google places because they were all their home addresses. We are crushing the competition and we added 1,100 google places listings in less than 12 days.
Your welcome!
-
Hello there- just curious how much would you charge me for 10 local google listing and i do a local phone # and addresses. [email protected]
-
Sorry, I was indicating that Google requires every business to have it's own phone number and location address; not that I agree with them. I think that they need to come up with a better solution to deal with small business owners that may not have a store front and they absolutely need to work on other Google places aspects; the main one I have been seeing is their reviews section - a competitor or activist can write some pretty false accusations and there is basically no way of getting that review removed. Hopefully they will find better solutions to their ongoing Google Places problems.
-
Completely disagree - the business is a national plumbing franchise so doesn't have physical offices/locations in every suburb/city they service.
There are a handful of the bigger franchisees within the group who have dedicated offices but most are locally owned businesses, 3-5 staff operating 2-3 vans and trucks and don't have a dedicated office in the location they service. On top of that the company has a 1300 number that goes to a central call centre so again no individual numbers per location. (The franchises are all individually owned companies not owned or run by the master franchisee)
Google Places deals with this scenario very poorly and mobile businesses very poorly in general - right now our new strategy is working well so running with that until Google can come up with a better solution.
-
If the business does not have a physical location (150 different physical locations); then it should not have a google place page. Google is extremely smart when it comes to having a business that has no physical location and is using a po box or a home address. Every location should have its own phone number as well as its own address. You should just tell your client that there is no way getting around it.
-
Thanks for the update! It's always interesting to hear what people ended up doing. If you're interested, consider writing up a post for YOUmoz when all of this is done. Martin is right, it's a post waiting to happen!
-
Thought I'd post an update on this thread - we setup the central listing located at HQ and added all the suburbs/cities the franchise services. Not showing in any searches apart from those where HQ is located which confirmed what I thought would happen.
Right now we're looking at scrapping all listings, starting from scratch and adding each suburb at the franchise owners home address and hiding the listing. Big job to manage but no other way to do it at this stage....costing the company big $$ with these listings out of action, GOOGs really needs to come up with a better way of verifying listings.
-
Hi All,
I thought I'd jump in here. Some good and creative discussion here, and Martin's comment regarding David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors is an important one. Definitely, though, a ton has changed since the 2010 study (which I had the fun of participating in) and I can hardly wait to see how the 2011 turns out. The rollout of Place Search last October has really shuffled the deck.
Tbone, I know the hope of your question is to find a workaround for this client whose franchises have no address, and while weaknesses in Maps/Places certainly have created some rather staggering loopholes, I'd like to throw a question into the mix:
Have you explained to your client that his business does not fit Google's definition of Local and that, rather than gaming the system and incurring the potential future wrath of the bots, he may need to do what other business are: changing his business model so that it is an authentic Local fit?
When the phone book was invented, you had to have a phone number to get listed. Local is equivalent, and the requirements are a unique local area code phone number and address. I genuinely believe that the quality of everyone's user experience is dependent upon business owners following these two guidelines, rather than attempting to come across as having a physical location where none exists.
Eric Enge did a great interview with Carter Maslan a while back that dealt, in part, with franchise businesses (http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml), and while your client cannot legitimately claim a Place Page for his non-physical locations until he changes his business model, he can at least follow the lead of creating a Place Page for his headquarters and city landing pages on his site for his service areas.
In my own work with Local clients, I try to teach them a civic-minded approach to the scenario. When they don't fit Google's definition, I encourage them to follow Local news to see if Google's rules change to include other types of business models than they currently do. I get phone calls every week from people who either don't understand the definition of Local, or do understand it and want to bend the rules, and I see these calls as a great opportunity for educating folks.
Good luck with your client. He's in a tough spot until such time as Google decides to broaden its definition of Local.
-
Haha.
-
"Surprised there's not more about this in discussion forums as would imagine that other franchise businesses face similar issues."
I've noticed this as well.
It appears (though I've no proof) that many SEOs are playing their cards very close to their chest with Places following last October's update -- not least because of the rapidity of changes since, and the struggle to stay abreast of them.
SERPs for local search queries have evolved and local search is a completely different ball game compared to the days of the 7-pack. As such, there's been a rush to take advantage of the opportunities that have presented themselves.
It's a YouMoz post waiting to happen, except that by the time you've written it, Google will have changed something again..!
-
Thanks for the replies guys.
Have done quick a bit of trawling on this and so far no loopholes that I can see any more. Surprised there's not more about this in discussion forums as would imagine that other franchise businesses face similar issues.
Going by the rule book and google TOS seems the only way legit way to do is setup the single listing at HQ add the franchise locations in the coverage list areas but my feeling is the rank will be pretty weak compared with other competing local places listings who are highly optimised around that location & location specific terms, although leveraging user reviews over the long term would potentially resolve this.
Waiting on the postal verification so will report back how we go once live and then with a handful of reviews.
-
Wow, I'd say your ideas are pretty good, but they're getting wise to stuff like this. I guess they want the name to actually mean something lol. You could possible use the private mailboxes and have them forwarded to the central location, but I really have no experience with this. Good luck though whatever case!
-
This is a very grey area, but one I feel I am qualified to answer.
I'll be frank: there have been numerous loopholes in the Google Maps (and now Places) system over the past few months. Many of these have now been closed. Even the top local SEOs are struggling to keep up, with all eyes resting on this year's collaborative study from David Mihm for some valuable insights (see 2010's here).
I'm not going to go into too many details, but suffice to say if you managed to exploit them at the time, it's a case of counting yourself lucky: your listings are likely to be intact.
You need two things for a Places listing first and foremost: a unique physical address and a unique phone number. Even if you can get around the phone number issue (which doesn't take too much imagination), it's a much harder premise to get around the physical address issue without using clients' addresses (bad idea!).
G know this, and so they've enforced verification by post only in many (if not all?) instances. I've read that this may be a temporary restriction to prevent certain groups of spammers doing their thing, but I'd be surprised to see wide scale telephone verification in place again.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Dates on Google Search Results
Hello, I manage htts://globalrose.com When I search on Google for "Yellow Roses", "Yellow Roses Globalrose", or any search that might bring up one of our pages, sometimes our search results appear with dates right before the description. Does anyone know what this mean? Why they appear on some and not other pages? Here is a search result for example: Example Google Search Can someone please help clarify this for us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalrose.com0 -
Change of Address in Google Search Console
I have merged domains before and it went rather smoothly following the Moz Guide - https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects . I've got a new challenge ahead of me though in that a client is buying the blog subdirectory associated with another domain. So it's the blog only, not the complete domain therefore a change of address for a site section doesn't exist. I believe the course of action will be the same except we'll just skip the change of address step since the original owner wants to maintain the TLD. Part of the contract is that we'll get the content which will be ported over to our domain and he'll maintain the 301's as requested and into perpetuity. Our domain is not brand new and has some credible links. Anyone encounter a transition of a partial domain before? Thanks for your help/suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
There is no change of address pending for your site
Hi everyone. Google has recently started using our old .net instead of .com in the SERPS. I went to do a change of address for the old http://www.sqlsentry.net and it gives me the "There is no change of address pending for your site." I've tried for both www and non-www and still get the same result. All pages seem to be redirecting to the new site with no issues. Is there anything else I can do to change this? Or is there a step I'm missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Google is squashing my rankings, insight please?
Last year with penguin, our rankings took a hit. We have worked hard, tirelessly, to recover. Last june we had no social media. We had an old website. We completely updated our website to responsive design, over 500k pages. We post daily fresh content, we expanded into social media. We now have 100k followers on Facebook. We are seeing thousands of Google + in the last few months, and not by hiring a single SEO consultant, and we use no ad-words or any paid advertising (except for adsense, limited on our site). We got thousands of Google +1's simply by sharing content in different circles and they liked us the old fashioned way. And yet our rankings have actually decreased. Just Saturday night, suddenly rankings that were on page 2 of Google dropped to page 5. Rankings on page 5 dropped to page 13, over night. Mind you, last year (prior to the penguin update), those page 2 and page 5 rankings were in the top 3 spots on page one. So its been quite a fall. We are doing something wrong, and I don't know what it is. The overnight rankings drop did not correspond with anything we did whatsoever. They just literally dropped abruptly. here is our site: (redacted for privacy, thanks for answering my question!) here is a sample of a fallen ranking. Friday, for example, we ranked on page one of google in this search:(redacted)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marshill
and now we are on page 3. I am open to ideas, suggestions. I want to raise our D/A and have worked hard over the last year to do so, but it doesn't seem to be working too well. Do i have bad inbound links? Is our site not a quality enough user experience? Outside advice is well received. Thank you to anyone who can lend their insight. 🙂0 -
How does google recognize original content?
Well, we wrote our own product descriptions for 99% of the products we have. They are all descriptive, has at least 4 bullet points to show best features of the product without reading the all description. So instead using a manufacturer description, we spent $$$$ and worked with a copywriter and still doing the same thing whenever we add a new product to the website. However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too. I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content. I am asking it because we are a relatively new ecommerce store (online since feb 1st) while we didn't have a lot of organic traffic in the past, i see that our organic traffic dropped like 50% in April, seems like it was effected latest google update. Since we never bought a link or did black hat link building. Actually we didn't do any link building activity until last month. So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings? I see that our organic traffic is improving very very slowly since then but basically it is like between 5%-10% of our current daily traffic. What do you guys think? You think all our original content effort is going to trash?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serkie1 -
Google and private networks?
I have one or two competitors (in the UK) in my field who buy expired 1 - 8 year old domains on random subjects (SEO, travel, health you name it) and they are in the printing business and they stick 1 - 2 articles (unrelated to what was on there before) on these and that's it. I think they stick with PA and DA above 30 and most have 10 – 100 links so well used expired domains, hosted in the USA and most have different Ip’s although they now have that many (over 70% of their backlink profile) that some have the same ip. On further investigation none of the blogs have any contact details but it does look like they have been a little smart here and added content to the about us (similar to I use to run xxx but now do xxx) also they have one or two tabs with content on (article length) that is on the same subject they use to do and the titles are all the same content. So basically they are finding expired 1 – 10 year old domains that have only been expired (from what I can see) 6 months max and putting 1 – 2 articles on the home page in relation with print (maybe adding a third on the subject the blog use to cover), add 1 – 3 articles via tabs at the top on subjects the sites use to cover, registering the details via [email protected] and that’s it. They have been ranking via this method for the last couple of years (through all the Google updates) and still do extremely well. Does Google not have any way to combat link networks other than the stupid stuff such as public link networks, it just seems that if you know what you are doing you get away, if your big enough you get away with it but the middle of the ground (mum and pop sites) get F*** over with spam pointing to there site that no spammer would dream of doing anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Howcome Google is indexing one day 2500 pages and the other day only 150 then 2000 again ect?
This is about an big affiliate website of an customer of us, running with datafeeds... Bad things about datafeeds: Duplicate Content (product descriptions) Verrryyyy Much (thin) product pages (sometimes better to noindex, i know, but this customer doesn't want to do that)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0