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You are here: Home / Archives for fake addresses

Top 3 Behaviors That Will Hurt Your Web Presence

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

At Prospect Genius, we’ve spent years and years perfecting our online advertising services and adapting them to meet Google’s changing standards. We do this so we can provide the most effective advertising possible and produce satisfying results. However, our efforts can only take a client so far if that client is doing things that are inadvertently sabotaging their online advertising campaign and web presence.
Man With Computer
To keep your campaign successful, stay on Google’s good side by avoiding these three behaviors at all costs.

1. Duplicating Content

Having duplicate content on your website is a major crime in Google’s world. If your site contains content that’s been copyrighted to another company, you have duplicate content. This is in direct violation of Google’s guidelines. Google’s bots are constantly indexing and scanning through webpages, and sooner or later, they’ll detect that your content is identical to someone else’s. When they do, Google will decide which page is the original source; the other page, presumed plagiarized, will be removed from Google’s index, never to be shown to users.
So while it may seem like you’re taking a shortcut by “borrowing” someone else’s content—or content that was written by an advertiser like Prospect Genius—you’re actually creating a situation where the duplicated pages will never rank for any search. Obviously, this will do serious damage to your web presence in the long run.

2. Using Fake Addresses

Some business owners think they can get away with using a fake address on their Google My Business listing. In doing so, real businesses are trying to put themselves in prime locations for local SEO, while shady businesses without a physical location are making up addresses out of thin air to seem legitimate. Regardless of your motivation, if you use a fake address on your Google My Business listing, you will be caught.
That’s because Google has a variety of tools, including cars and satellites, used to verify that businesses are actually located where they claim to be. When Google discovers that your business is not at the location listed, you’ll be slapped with a hefty penalty. Your listing will plummet in ranking or it might be suspended completely.
It’s a much safer bet to just stick with your real address. In fact, in 95% of cases, business owners will get good rankings just by following the rules. That means using a fake address is not only risky, but it’s also unnecessary.

3. Hiding Information

Some business owners have a tendency to hold their cards close to their chests. They’ve learned from years of competition that they don’t want people having access to sensitive information about their businesses. Fair enough—but this behavior does not mesh well with Prospect Genius’s online advertising services.
When you hire us and don’t give us a full history of your web presence or you lock us out of key resources like your Google My Business listing, you’re stunting your own advertising efforts. We not only need to make sure your Google listing is working in harmony with the other work you’re paying us to do, but we also need to know where else your business is listed and what types of behaviors you’ve engaged in previously. For example, if you have a history of bending, breaking, or ignoring Google’s policies, or you worked with a different advertiser before hiring us, we need to know. If there’s something in your history that you don’t tell us, then we might end up making matters worse by spreading conflicting information about your business. (And as you know, Google despises conflicting information.)
When you hide this kind of crucial information from us, it’s like hiding the level from your kitchen renovation contractor. Sure, they’ll be able to get the job done without it, but all of your cabinets are going to be wonky and crooked, and your kitchen might end up being unusable. You’re essentially hiring someone to do a job for you and then taking away their ability to do that job effectively. Simply put, you’re wasting your own money.

Conclusion: Don’t Lie

That’s the general rule when you want to stay out of trouble online. Don’t lie to Google. Don’t lie to your advertiser. Don’t lie to your customers. Just don’t do it. It may seem like a simple white lie, but Google’s punishments don’t always fit the crime. You have no way of predicting or controlling the consequences. Google might delete all of your reviews, penalize your rankings, suspend your listing, or even mark your business as “closed.” The potential consequences simply aren’t worth the gamble. Help yourself and your web presence by remaining honest at all times.

The Do's and Don'ts of Expanding Your Campaign

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Thinking about expanding your Prospect Genius campaign in 2015? It’s not uncommon for clients to want to take their campaigns to the next level after being with us for a certain amount of time and achieving a certain level of success. You want to see how far you can take your online advertising campaign, and we can’t blame you!
You should feel free to make upgrades and additions to your Prospect Genius campaign, but be careful: more does not always mean better. Here’s what to do and what not to do.
Good vs. Bad

Goal: Expand Service Offerings

If your goal is to expand your service offerings…

DO NOT just add any old service to your site.

It may be tempting to stack up your services as a way of offering the widest selection possible, but that strategy could actually backfire. Google likes specificity. The more laser-targeted your offering is, the more credible you’ll be in Google’s eyes. Love it or hate it, it’s just the reality of dealing with Google and their expectations. Google likes to put things in tidy boxes, so even if you do offer an eclectic range of services, your Internet marketing strategy should focus only on advertising what’s relevant to your main category. 

DO add specialized service pages to your LeadTrax™ site.

Instead of just tacking on extra services, a more effective way to generate leads from your service offerings is to offer specialty services. Think depth over breadth. By offering a specialized service like Samsung or LG appliance repair, you’ll be able to capture attention from prospects who have highly specific needs and corner that niche market. Google likes this approach, too, so the hyper-specific search terms targeted by these pages rank really well. We’ve had many clients see fantastic success by adding specific brand pages and specialty pages to their LeadTrax sites. 

Goal: Expand Your Market

If your goal is to expand your market or service area…

DO NOT create a fake Google listing.

If you want to reach a different geographic area, do not under any circumstances create a new Google My Places listing with a fake address. It may seem like a shortcut to getting listed in a different area, but this trick would only work if you actually had another physical location at that address. Google uses Google Earth technology, their own cars, and even local volunteers to check out new listings and determine whether they’re valid. If you try to pull the wool over Google’s eyes, you’ll pay the price with a suspended or penalized listing (which can take up to 12 months to rectify). So while faking an address may give you a temporary improvement in rankings, it’s not worth the risk of what could be a year or more of penalties and other problems.

DO use a pay-per-click campaign.

This is the smarter alternative to creating a fake listing. Did you know that pay-per-click (PPC) isn’t as geographically limited as organic SEO is? That means adding our PPC package to the mix will help you to expand your geographic market, regardless of whether you’re already a Prospect Genius Core member or you’re using one of our à-la-carte services. While local search is dictated by the address on your Google listing, PPC is much more flexible. You get to decide on how broad or narrow your targeted geographic area is. For example, you could choose to target ads specifically at Schenectady, NY, or you could choose to widen your ads’ reach to all of Albany County. It’s totally up to you. In other words, PPC will allow you to reach a wider audience without hurting your organic local search rankings.

Goal: Maximize Results From Online Advertising

If your goal is to get even more out of your online advertising efforts…

DO NOT use two SEO companies.

You might think, “My campaign is doing well. I’ll add another one to get even better results!” That couldn’t be farther from the truth when it comes to SEO. While combining organic search optimization and paid search optimization typically generates great success, combining two organic search campaigns from two different providers will do the opposite. Working with two separate SEO companies at the same time will essentially sabotage both your campaigns. Read more about this in our blog post, “For SEO Companies, Two’s a Crowd.”
This principle applies to all forms of online advertising: You don’t want to hire two different companies that provide the exact same services. Whether it’s two SEO providers or two social media specialists, they’ll counteract each other’s work, get in each other’s way, and create a disaster for your web presence.

DO leverage social media.

If you want to get more out of your online advertising without sabotaging your own campaign or paying for PPC, then optimize your social media presence. By leveraging all the social media tools available to you for free, or even taking advantage of our specialists who can do the work for you, you’ll be able to reach customers in a whole new way. Not only will you be able to spread the word about your business more efficiently, but you’ll also create a terrific showcase for your business’s unique personality. When prospects get a glimpse of what your company is about and see that there are real people behind it, they’ll be much more likely to connect with you. Plus, the more “Likes” you have on Facebook and followers you have on Twitter, the more credible your business will seem to prospective customers.
To that end, consider taking advantage of Prospect Genius’s SocialStart or SocialStream packages. If you’re looking for an even greater push, we also perform Facebook ad campaigns that will boost your posts and get more “Likes” for your page.

Always Ask Questions

If you want to expand your campaign but you’re having trouble setting goals or deciding where to start, give us a call! We’re always happy to discuss your company’s needs and work on a solution that fits perfectly.

Avoid These Online Advertising Pitfalls

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

While the world of online advertising is rapidly advancing, most experts still look at it as the Wild West. There aren’t too many standardized methods set in stone, and there sure are a lot of entrepreneurs trying to carve out a niche for themselves. In the spirit of independence and getting rich quick inherent to the American frontier, some dubious online advertisers have developed and perpetuated ways to cut corners in hopes of seeing faster results. Spoiler alert: They usually don’t work.
The problem is, most of these are pitfalls that well-intentioned business owners fall into when handling their own marketing campaigns. That’s why we’re focusing this post on some of the major traps that all business owners like you should avoid when traversing the unfamiliar territory of online advertising.

Don’t fall for the temptation to falsify addresses or reviews.

It may seem like an easy way to get ahead on Google+ and Google+ Local, but that’s a lot of risk for no reward. Google will always uncover the truth. For instance, if you try to place your company in a better location by using a fake address, Google’s street-view images will immediately tell them whether or not your business is actually located there (they have an image for virtually every address in the U.S.). Additionally, Google will mail a postcard to that physical address as a means of verifying that you actually work or reside there.
Similarly, business owners often fabricate customer reviews on their Google+ Local listings to pad their reputations, but Google can easily detect when multiple reviews are being posted from the same IP address, or if reviews are posted from IP addresses outside the expected geographical area.
When—not if—Google catches you perpetuating inaccurate information, they’ll likely suspend your listing and penalize your rankings. They have a zero-tolerance policy for black-hat tactics like this. Simply put, getting a quick boost for your company’s website is not worth the highly probability that you’ll get caught and cripple your campaign for months.

Don’t fall for assurances that two SEO companies can work together.

If you’re already working with one SEO company, you might still find yourself in a position where other SEO companies are trying to get your business. In their attempts, they might assure you that you can work with them and your current SEO company at the same time. They might even tell you it will double your success. None of that is true.
We wrote extensively about this in a previous post, so here’s the gist: Two companies will inevitably sabotage each other. It won’t be intentional, but it will be inevitable. Why? Because an SEO company must have exclusive access to all directory listings, social media accounts, and other listings in order to make updates whenever necessary. If two companies have this level of access to all the same accounts, they’re going to put out conflicting messaging, redundant information, and even duplicate content. Plus, Google will certainly notice if regular changes are coming from multiple IP addresses and will flag your listing for suspension.
Working with more than one SEO company at a time will unavoidably result in a suspended listing or plummeting rankings.

Don’t fall for free trials from SEO companies.

SEO must be customized in order to be effective, and the amount of work required upfront cannot be provided for free.
SEO is not conducive to free trials because it requires several weeks’ worth of detailed, back-end production that cannot be reused, resold, or repurposed for another company. SEO’s custom nature means it’s tailored for you and you alone, but it also means that the company providing the SEO work would be left holding the bill for all of the time and resources consumed if they were to offer a free trial.
For that reason, free trial offers are almost exclusively for directory-style services that only require listing your basic company information. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using directories, but it’s simply not the same as SEO. Directories list you and your direct competitors on the same page, and there’s almost no way to help you stand out from the crowd. Instead, every listing gets the same exact treatment.
Think of directory services as a hotel and an SEO company as a custom home builder. If you wanted a free trial for a hotel room, it would cost the hotel very little, as the system is built on high turnover and uniform services anyway. If you wanted a free trial for a house, however, the home builder would lose a staggering sum of money if you didn’t pay them. They would have constructed a house from scratch that they can’t resell because it was based on your specific design preferences.
The bottom line? There’s nothing in this world that is both custom and free. 

Don’t fall for the hype surrounding Google Partners and AdWords certification.

Many upstanding, reputable companies may be certified affiliates, but this title does little to distinguish between effective and ineffective companies.
To receive AdWords certification, an individual must join Google Partners and pass at least two separate AdWords exams. AdWords certification is a stepping stone toward becoming a Google Partner, a title that’s offered to companies with at least one certified individual on staff and a few other qualifications—namely, a demonstration of best practices, a fulfilled AdWords spending minimum, and a complete company profile.
These are objective rubrics that most companies with sufficient resources can achieve. That means there can be vast differences in effectiveness between companies that are AdWords certified and/or Google Partners. Furthermore, a company only needs to be loosely affiliated with a certified individual in order to be considered a Google Partner, so prospective customers need to ask whether the certified individual is going to be the actual person working on their account.
In other words, a Google partnership or certification offers no way for a prospective customer to know if the company they’re dealing with is actually going to get them the results they need. Rather, these titles only serve to create the appearance that Company A is somehow affiliated with Google or has influence on things like rankings and algorithms.
In reality, a Google partnership or certification only proves that Company A is real, knows the basics of AdWords, and pays Google a substantial amount of money for AdWords.

Don’t fall prey to deceptive advertising schemes. If you have questions about a certain practice or company that seems suspicious, don’t hesitate to direct those questions to Prospect Genius. Our campaign coordinators and account managers are always eager to answer your questions and provide expert guidance whenever possible.

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Our passion is helping small businesses thrive. It’s why we get out of bed every day. Too many business owners are cheated and lied to every day so we see it as our duty to be a beacon of truth, a safe harbor, in an often unscrupulous industry.

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