Is your business Legit?
Legitimate Business Listings
Today we are discussing how being honest with Google can help your Google Places ranking.
Little white lies or just LIES
Try to think of Google Places as a real person, okay lacking personality or gender but it has its flaws like a human being and makes mistakes all the time.
So….you tell your customers
yeah we are the cheapest around and we stock that product you want and we can deliver it to you by tomorrow
when in fact you’ve just duped some poor sucker and wasted his/her time just so you can potentially sell them some other crap they never intended on buying.
In fact I bet most of us has been victims of bad selling, isn’t it annoying and infuriating?
With this in mind imagine Google constantly having to listen to your lies. Again and again your updating your details with things that aren’t true to your business, what will the overall consequences be?
For example:
Your business is called ‘Plumberz R Us’ and your website is plumberzrus.com
That’s a registered domain name, assuming your basic meta data also informs Google Bot that this is your name also. Then you have reviews from third party websites as well, such as Qype, Freeindex.co.uk that all have your business address, telephone number and website registered, which Google is told to crawl every 30 days and updates this information shared with your Google Places listing.
It will find your real business name and address it just will there’s no hiding.
How does Google collect my business information?
- Third party websites/blogs and directories such as Qype & Freeindex
- Your website site index (all the pages you have indexed with Google)
- Back links – every time another site talks about you this is relayed back to Google unless no follow or specific spider blocks are in place.
“Errrr just one more thing”
Dedicated to the late great Peter Falk!
Google loves to play Columbo and it needs to when you think about all the data it holds and the sheer volume of businesses who are trying to beat the Google Places results.
There’s very little you can hide from Google spiders and if there is any trace of your business online it will know about it.
Remember at the end of Columbo he’d always get the bad guy, even if you thought he was oblivious.
Honesty Pays with Google Places
Use our 3 simple Google Places help rules to ensure that your business listing has the best possible chance to get found on the first page:
- Business Name: Keep it real use your business name as known in the real world
- Category Spamming: Come on this is just stupid, it may work for a short time for some older listings but in the end will kick you in the ass. Use accurate categories such as ‘restaurant’ ‘take away’
- Address: Register your business with your real business address
Maybe you have already broken some of these simple rules and now that you have read them from the Google maps experts and realized maybe now is a good time to start playing by the rules set by Google.
What if I’ve been really bad and I can’t get my listing to show up?
If your business is not showing, maybe pending in your account status or even worse ‘suspended’.
You have probably passed the point of just clearing out the spam and need expert help to get you back on the first page.
If you have found our post useful and would like any more information please contact our office and speak to our expert team of Google Places advisers.
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