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Are You Aware of This Threat to Your Google Maps Listing?

Last Updated: January 19, 2017

Do you have a Google Maps listing for your local business? When was the last time you checked it? Google Maps listings are under constant threat of being altered without the manager’s knowledge or consent. In this blog post, we’ll examine what’s behind this chronic problem, how it can impact you, and what you can do to protect yourself.
Let’s jump in, shall we?

Anyone Can Edit Your Google Maps Listing

First things first: How can your listing be changed without your say-so? It’s surprisingly easy these days.
Google essentially allows all of its users to edit other business’s listings with the simple click of a button. When a user clicks “Suggest an Edit,” they submit proposed changes to Google regarding any piece of information, such as phone number, street address, business hours, website URL, and business name. Google then decides whether to accept the changes or not. Typically, Google keeps a suggested edit when multiple people submit the same one, but there doesn’t appear to be a hard-and-fast rule for how it makes its decisions. However, no matter the case, Google does not involve the listing owner whatsoever in its decision. Furthermore, when Google decides to sustain an edit to your listing, it will not notify you.
Making matters worse, these community edits don’t show any information about the user who made the change. In other words, Google offers no accountability for random, unsubstantiated edits from anonymous users. Desperate businesses can easily sabotage their local competitors with zero consequence.

It Can Happen to You

In fact, a nightmare scenario played out back in November when nearly 60 listings for insurance companies all had their phone numbers changed to the same one—which had no connection to any of those companies. Instead, this new phone number directed callers to a lead provider, who would then sell these leads back to the insurance companies who owned the edited listings. Effectively, the victimized companies now had to shell out money for their own leads.
You can read all about this debacle over on Search Engine Land.  Hopefully, it proves to be an extreme fluke. However, it’s a cautionary tale of the damage that can happen when you’re not paying attention to the information on your Google Maps listing. Your listing may be displaying the wrong information to your visitors while you’re none the wiser.
When Google shows users the wrong information about your business, they won’t be able to get in touch with you. You’ll lose customers as a result. Plus, since this information will now conflict with the rest of your business information on the web, your rankings could be negatively affected. When your listing is edited by another user without your knowledge, the damage can be far reaching.

Protecting Yourself Is Easy

The above example is exactly why we urge business owners to actively and regularly check on their Google Maps listings. If you check your listing just once a day, you’re likely to catch any incorrect changes, fix them, and minimize damage to your rankings and daily business operations.

1. Don’t Google Yourself

But beware: Do NOT google yourself to check your Maps listing. Few people know this, but regularly googling yourself actually causes significant problems for your search rankings. As we explained in our blog post, “The Ins and Outs of Googling Yourself”:

In your own, individualized Google results, you can drive your placement down in the listings by repeatedly searching for—and not clicking on—yourself. This certainly happens for your own personal search engine results, but if you do it enough, it’s also conceivable that you could impact your rankings when other people search as well!

Googling yourself is equally damaging to any PPC or AdWords campaigns you’re running. When you google yourself without clicking on anything, you spike your number of impressions without adding to the number of clicks. This lowers the click-through rate (CTR) of your ads, which drives down your Quality Score as a result. Read more in our blog post, “When Pay-Per-Click Becomes Pay-Per-Search.”

2. Use Your Google Account

Thankfully, getting around this problem is fairly easy: Just sign in to your Google account and peek at your Maps listing through the dashboard, instead. The whole process only takes a couple of minutes, and it’s well worth the effort when you consider the alternative and its downsides.
In addition, the majority of small business owners rarely ever check on their Google Maps listings. This is what leaves so many of them vulnerable to sabotage. So if you start checking yours on a regular basis, you’ll be way ahead of the competition!

No Excuses

Too busy or can’t remember to check your listing every day? For less than $10 a month, Prospect Genius can do it for you! Check out our MapTrax™ service to learn more.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Now that you’re aware of this problem, which is facing local business owners everywhere, you have what you need to prevent it from hurting your business. Good luck!

Google My Business Updates You Need to Know About

Last Updated: September 29, 2016

If you’ve been frustrated with how difficult it is to monitor activity on your Google My Business account, you’ll be relieved to hear about some updates that just rolled out.
Most notably, business owners are excited about an update that now pushes notifications to your dashboard. You can see in real time things like new customer reviews, location status changes (e.g. published, disabled, or pending verification), and NAP data updates.
In short, the new Google My Business API V3.1 makes it much easier to keep tabs on your listing.
Check out Mike Blumenthal’s write-up to learn more about other noteworthy updates. And be on the lookout for these new features of Google My Business, which you should start seeing in the next couple of weeks.

Don't Believe Us About the Importance of Accurate Listings?

Last Updated: June 23, 2016

We tell our clients over and over again that the accuracy of their online listings can make or break their advertising efforts. If your listings don’t have accurate, consistent information across the board, then you’re fighting a losing battle.
Our lectures are often met with skepticism. How important could all these little listings really be? 
In Moz’s latest “Whiteboard Friday” video, George Freitag explains why listing accuracy is vital. Here’s an industry leader repeating exactly what we’ve been saying for years:

Google takes trust very seriously. So how does Google determine trust? That is where listing accuracy comes into play. Listing accuracy is Google’s method for determining whether or not it can trust a local business search result.

How Does Google Use Listings?

When we talk about “listings,” we’re referring to any webpages mentioning your business name, address, and/or phone number. These could include review sites like Yelp, directories like Whitepages.com, and even local news sites. Google uses these to figure out how credible your business’s information is. If the information in these listings all match what’s in your Google My Business profile, then Google will be more inclined to present your business as a local search result because the information seems trustworthy. However, on the flip side, if there are several online listings with information that clashes with your Google profile, then Google will be less likely to display your business. It won’t feel confident it can trust your information.
At the end of the day, it comes down to the reliability of information. Google wants to keep its users happy. The only way to do that is to provide them with information that’s consistently correct.
Therefore, keeping accurate listings across the web is a vital element of local search optimization. You have to keep your existing listings updated with all the right information. You also have to fix any other incorrect data floating around on the web. You may not know about this incorrect data, but Google will.

What If I Can’t Find Every One of My Listings?

Because it’s so difficult to find incorrect data in obscure places on the Internet, many small business owners have trouble asserting their presence in local searches. But this is how you can benefit from working with a local SEO company like Prospect Genius. An SEO specialist can do a deep audit of your existing web presence, find the errors you can’t, and fix them. This will give you the highest level of accuracy possible and boost your presence in local searches.
For all the details about listing accuracy, we strongly recommend you watch the full video over on Moz.
And, of course, reach out to us if you have any questions!

Has Google's Security Gone Too Far?

Last Updated: September 17, 2015

Security lock
Surprise, surprise: Google is making life more difficult for local business owners and online advertisers. This time, the problems have to do with Google’s new security measures, which have become markedly stricter in the last year. While tightening security is a good idea in theory, it’s been extremely problematic in execution, as it has created quite a mess for the many business owners who share access to their Google My Business accounts with their advertisers.
Here’s what you need to know about Google’s security pain points so you can avoid being locked out of your account and keep your advertising on track.

Claiming Your Listing Is a Pain

If you are the owner of your Google My Business listing, then you don’t have to worry about trying to claim it. You can easily make your online advertiser the manager of your listing. However, many Google My Business accounts are created by a hired SEO company or online advertiser; when you stop working with that company, they abandon your listing without giving you back ownership. That company still technically owns your listing, but now you don’t have access to it because you don’t know the log-in information.
Trying to claim these types of listings has always been challenging, but Google has made it even more difficult recently. When you (or a new advertiser) try to claim your listing, Google will first contact the current owner of that page. However, since the current owner is your former SEO company that no longer cares about your business, it’s unlikely to respond to Google’s request. Your listing will be stuck in limbo for at least 1-2 weeks while Google waits for a response from the owner. If there’s no response after a few weeks, Google will give you the option to claim your listing yourself by phone or e-mail—but this will only work if you have a corporate e-mail domain. If this doesn’t work, you may have to create an entirely new listing from scratch and start over.

Solution

You can avoid these delays by requesting your Google My Business account information as soon as you stop working with an online advertising provider. You may also want to consider creating an e-mail address on your company’s website domain.

Good Luck Logging In to Your Own Account

“But if I know my username and password, shouldn’t I be in the clear?” Technically, yes. However, you may still run into problems logging in if you don’t regularly visit your account. Google takes any significant absence (we haven’t pinpointed the exact time period yet, but it seems to be at least several months) as a sign that your account has been compromised. As a result, Google will grill you with hyper-specific security questions to make sure it’s really you signing in. This may also happen if you forget your password or try logging in from a new device or physical location.
Some of these questions include:

  • On what date did you create this account?
  • What other Google apps and products do you use?
  • What is the date when you first started using these products?

In many cases, Google may also ask you for your mobile phone number so it can text a PIN to you, which you will then have to verify manually. Of course, because the vast majority of users won’t be able to recall the exact day and month that they created their accounts, the authentication process can get complicated and frustrating very quickly.

Solution

Be sure to log in to your Google My Business account on a regular basis (at least once per month). Not only will this prevent Google from thinking your account’s been compromised, but it will also help you remember your username and password. You can also turn off your two-step authentication process (which is an optional user setting) so that you aren’t prompted to verify your account every time you sign in from a new device or location.

Your Advertising Could Take a Hit

When Google’s security measures present these kinds of problems, your advertising efforts will suffer greatly. If you’ve hired an online advertiser, they won’t be able to claim your listing and, therefore, won’t be able to optimize your local search performance. Not only will they not be able to do their job, but they could potentially get blocked from your listing altogether if they try accessing it without the proper credentials. Even if you’re performing your own advertising, you won’t be able to do much if you can’t log in to your own account.
Here’s the bottom line: If you can’t log in to Google, you can’t manage your listing. If you can’t manage your listing, you can’t keep it updated to ensure it matches all of your other online content. If your Google listing doesn’t match your online content, your local search performance will take a serious hit.

Is Your Google My Business Listing Being Sabotaged by… Google?

Last Updated: July 16, 2015

If you have a Google My Business account, the greatest force working against you may be Google itself. Here’s what you need to watch out for.
Young business man under stress

Google Makes Updates Without Your Knowledge

Many local business owners and advertising providers alike have noticed that, every so often, little details on their Google listings are suddenly changed without their consent. For users who have been affected, it’s incredibly frustrating. You spent a lot of time and energy setting up your listing and making sure all the information was filled out accurately, but now it looks like someone else updated your account with a totally different street address or phone number. As it turns out, that “someone else” was probably Google.
Around 10 years ago, your local competitors were your biggest threat online. It didn’t require much technical savvy to sabotage each other’s listings. They could go into Google, claim your listing as their own, and alter all of the information in it without much difficulty. As Google’s interface and security features became more sophisticated, the frequency of these sabotage incidents dropped significantly. Now, however, Google is the one you have to watch out for.
While Google’s intentions aren’t bad, the outcome is the same: your listings are being altered without your consent. Why is this happening? Ironically, as Google pushes for accuracy above all else, it’s chasing its own tail. It automatically scans the web for citations of your company—i.e. mentions of your company name, address, phone number, or URL—to make sure everything matches. If there’s a citation out there that doesn’t match what’s on your listing, Google might decide to update your listing for you so it does match. Unfortunately, this conflicting information is usually from an outdated  listing on an old directory site, so the update is incorrect.
Google might also update your listing in response to a user who reported that the information in your listing was incorrect. Little does Google know, its effort to maintain accuracy on all of its listings often backfires.

Google Un-Verifies Listings at Will

While the automatic updating is certainly frustrating, it’s nothing compared to Google’s automatic un-verifying of your listing. It may do this for multiple reasons, but it most often happens when Google deems an account “inactive.” In the Google and Your Business Help Forum, Google’s Jade Wang explains:

In some cases, we may contact Google My Business users via email to confirm that they are still actively managing a business page. If a user is unresponsive to our attempts to contact him or her and has not logged into Google My Business for a significant length of time, then we may unverify pages in the account. We’re doing this in order to continue to provide users with the best experience when they’re looking for local businesses like yours.

Matt McGee of Search Engine Land confirms that this “significant length of time” of inactivity is at least six months. Although Wang claims that Google will notify a business owner before un-verifying, this doesn’t always happen, as we’ve seen firsthand with many of our own clients.
While inactivity is the most prominent reason for Google to un-verify a listing, other reasons include multiple listings and multiple advertisers. Sometimes, if a business has a listing for each of its multiple locations, Google sees the various addresses and phone numbers as “conflicting” with one another and randomly chooses one listing to un-verify.
Other times, Google will un-verify a business’s listing if it is being accessed and updated by more than one advertiser. That’s because it thinks something fishy is going on if account managers are logging in from disparate locations. (This is just one of the many reasons we advise against working with more than one advertiser at a time.)

Constant Vigilance Is Crucial

To avoid trouble, Jade Wang advises, “It’s a good idea to keep an eye on the inbox associated with your Google My Business (Locations) account. It’s also a good idea to regularly log into Google My Business (Locations) to confirm that your business information is current and accurate.”
We’ve always said that business owners have to be more proactive about their advertising, and this is just another reason why. You must track your listing(s) frequently to make sure it’s always accurate and in good standing.
However, we also understand that most business owners don’t have the resources to constantly track their listings. Frankly, after you been out on the job all day, it’s hard to find the time or energy to scan your Google My Business account for any red flags—and that’s if you can even remember to do it at all.

MapTrax™ to the Rescue

Thankfully, there are services out there like MapTrax that will do all the tracking for you. MapTrax monitors your listing daily and automatically alerts you of any changes to your company’s address, phone number, or URL, and if the listing has been suspended or un-verified. This way, you can immediately address any problems that may arise.
For only a few dollars per month, MapTrax provides insurance and peace of mind without requiring you to lift a finger. Our system does all the work for you! It will protect you from spammers and other wild cards, as well as Google itself, that could do harm to your company’s listing.
If you sign up in July, you can get MapTrax for just $5/mo. That’s 50% off! It’s very reasonably priced insurance that will save you time, money, and future business.