Custom Attributes in Google Places
-
Hi Guys
I'm looking for some clarity of what I can and can't add to the custom attribute fields in a Google Places listing. From my understanding, you can add additional information about your services, but not what those services are.
The issue I'm trying to resolve is that a client of mine offers far more than the 5 services/ category options Places allow. They are a home services company, covering all sorts from plumbing, painting and decorating, through to extensions etc. They have about 25 different services.
At the moment I'm restricted to just getting rankings for 5 services (correlated to the categories in Places), when I'd like to rank locally for them all.
As Google is showing local results for most search queries related to their services whether those searches are geographically modified or not, I'm in a position where even if I am ranking top 5 organically for the terms, I'm still on bottom of page 1, or top of page 2.
Would it be wise to add these additional services to the custom attributes section of the Places listing, or would this set off the potential for a listing suspension?
Any ideas how to combat this problem would be very welcome.
-
Hi Miriam
Thanks for your thoughts, its much appreciated.
Unfortunately Places does limit me in this instance, so you're right that other avenues of traffic generation would be a good route to head down.
All the best
-
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
-
thanks for the feedback guys. Any suggestions about how I may be able to overcome the issue though?
-
I agree with Alan. Best to play it safe on this one and may not work anyway.
-
I would say not, they gave you only 5 categories, any more would be trying to manipulate results.
I also doubt it will work, i believe those extra fields are display only
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Google image search
How does google decide which image show up in the image search section ? Is is based on the alt tag of the image or is google able to detect what is image is about using neural nets ? If it is using neural nets are the images you put on your website taken into account to rank a page ? Let's say I do walking tours in Italy and put a picture of the leaning tower of pisa as a top image while I be penalised because even though the picture is in italy, you don't see anyone walking ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
x-default hreflang attribute value
Hi When is it best to use the x-default hreflang attribute value tags? Screaming frog is flagging lots as missing, but is it necessary? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Brand on Google Knowledge Panel
Hi, I have a question that maybe someone can give me some insight, as I haven't been able to get any kind of solution by Google My Business support so far for several months. Our brand "neakriti" is a news organization located in Greece. If you search the brand "neakriti", you get all the results as normal, but the "Knowledge Panel" on the right of the search appears empty. However, if you search the brand as "neakriti.gr" on google search, it appears on the Knowledge Panel. I have been talking about this on the phone support of Google My Business for months now (more than a year), and I get responses like, "give it some more time and it will appear on neakriti results too". We are authority for the keyword "neakriti", and it is our site that appears first. Our website is linked to the business profile too. I have claimed the business, I have filled all its information, with daily posts specifically for the knowledge panel and so on. Is there any suggestion as to why we are unable to show up with just the brand name on the knowledge panel, or suggestions for actions we can possibly take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisanif0 -
Google Webmaster Tools Parameters
We have several large ecommerce websites, and we've added some tracking parameters to GWT for google to ignore. All pages are correctly canonicaled. Google has been ignoring the parameters and the canonicals, and still ranks many parametered pages for us. Has anyone run into this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Dropped from Google?
My website www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk appears to have been penalised by Google. I ranked fairly well for a number of venue related searches from my blog posts. Generally I'd find myself somewhere on page one or towards the top of page two. However recently I found I am nowhere to be seen for these venue searches. I still appear if I search for my name, business name and keywords in my domain name. A quick check of Yahoo and I found I am ranking very well, it is only Google who seem to have dropped me. I looked at Google webmaster tools and there are no messages or clues as to what has happened. However it does show my traffic dropping off a cliff edge on the 19th July from 850 impressions to around 60 to 70 per day. I haven't made any changes to my website recently and hadn't added any new content in July. I haven't added any new inbound links either, a search for inbound links does not show anything suspicious. Can anyone shed any light on why this might happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Google News sitemap keywords
My company is a Theater news and reviews site. We're building a google news sitemap and Google suggests some recommended keywords we can use with their <keywords>tag: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/116037</keywords> Our writers also tag their stories with relevant keywords. What should we populate the <keywords>tag with?</keywords> We were thinking we'd automatically populate it with author-added tags, in addition to one or more of the recommended ones suggested by Google, such as Theater, Arts, and Culture (all of our articles are related to these topics). Finally, many of our articles are about say, celebrities. An author may tag an article with 'Bryan Cranston,' and when this is the case we're considering also tagging it with the 'Celebrities' tag. Are all or any of these worthwhile?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Significant Google crawl errors
We've got a site that continuously like clockwork encounters server errors with when Google crawls it. Since the end of last year it will go a week fine, then it will have two straight weeks of 70%-100% error rate when Google tries to crawl it. During this time you can still put the URL in and go to the site, but spider simulators return a 404 error. Just this morning we had another error message, I did a fetch and resubmit, and magically now it's back. We changed servers on it in Jan to Go Daddy because the previous server (Tronics) kept getting hacked. IIt's built in html so I'm wondering if it's something in the code maybe? http://www.campteam.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregWalt1 -
Why will google not index my pages?
About 6 weeks ago we moved a subcategory out to becomne a main category using all the same content. We also removed 100's of old products and replaced these with new variation listings to remove duplicate content issues. The problem is google will not index 12 critcal pages and our ranking have slumped for the keywords in the categories. What can i do to entice google to index these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0