Home-Based Business
-
Can a single business list multiple locations that are home-based? Will Google find this acceptable?
More details. The business is a service based business that operates in two states. The owner has one approved Google My Business listing for her main location - her home in DE. She also has employees and stores supplies at her in-law's home in PA. Separate phone numbers are used for each business location.
We have tried to create a Google My Business listing for the PA location and it has been rejected for quality reasons. We've asked clarification and received none. Is this worth pursing further or does it violate Google guidelines?
-
So happy to have you in the community, Donna
-
As always Miriam, SO helpful! Thanks.
-
Hi Donna,
Thanks for taking the time to answer. You have checked off all of the obvious reasons that I can think of for rejection. It sounds like the business is doing everything as one would advise and the fact that these locations are in 2 different states cannot lead us to suspect that Google is sensing a spamming of the SAME service area. My best suggestion here would be to phone Google and see if they can offer you any further explanation. If that doesn't work, you might want to hire somebody like Joy Hawkins at Imprezzio as she is a real detective when it comes to odd problems like this, and she is also either a TC or an RER and might have access to more information about this than the average Local SEO. I think this thread has helped clear away common problems, leaving us with the conclusion that there might be something about this scenario that is uncommon.
BTW, thanks for the kind mention, Robert!
-
Let me answer your questions.
- It's a pet waste removal business.
- There are separate addresses, phone numbers, and service areas spanning two different geographies.
- Google My Business and + profiles are customized to each location and point to separate, locally-optimized pages on the website. They're tagged as service area businesses with real addresses (not PO Boxes) hidden.
- Phone calls are answered professionally. "Thanks for calling Business Name".
- Customers are served at their location. They do not come to the business.
- Citations exist for each location - between 60 and 85. We're about to initiate an effort to acquire more.
Thank you all for taking the time to contribute to this discussion. It's appreciated. I wish there was an obvious answer but, as Robert rightly points out, Local is complicated. I guess the quality issue isn't obvious.
-
Agree. And it's not just Google.
-
Very interesting - not applicable in this case but I think your point was more about the complexity of local SEO and unwritten rules in general. Thanks Miriam.
-
Couldn't agree more!
-
Donna,
Miriam is truly an expert in Local SEO. Listen and learn from her and you will be given the best advice. She really helps a ton of people through Moz and one or two other forums.
Best
-
Donna - the reason I'm asking so many questions is because of things like this:
Thought I would add
Hope it helps! -
Google should look very favorably on home-based businesses. Didn't they start in a friend's garage? They didn't even own it.
Some home-based businesses bring in millions of visitors per month to their websites and make buckets and buckets of money.
These propeller heads need to dump that big brand attitude. It isn't your location that's important, it's more about your velocity and trajectory.
-
Hi Donna,
This is a very good question. Google does not have an official guideline on this, but I would make a best guess that a string of homes being promoted as business locations could be something they would look for as a red flag. Now, given that this is just one other location, I'm not 100% confident that this is the cause of the rejection of the PA listing, but it might be. Some thoughts surrounding this:
-Are customers coming to the home in PA to do business?
-Are employees going from the home in PA to customers locations to serve them? If so, are they serving a completely different service area than the DE business? And, when trying to create the GMB listing, did they hide the address and set a service area or did they try to have a visible address?
-Who answers the phone at the PA location? Do they say, "Good Morning! Company Name. How can I help you?" or do they say, "Hello?" like a resident rather than a business? Could Google have called the business and gotten the latter greeting rather than the former?
-Does the PA location list a distinct phone number from the DE one, or did the owner try to list the DE phone for the PA business?
End of the day, there isn't a guideline on this, but there might be some details to the case that could lead to possibly being able to convince Google that the PA location deserves a listing. Might be. A rejection can be hard to overcome.
-
Unfortunately most likely you won't get an official response from Google on this. It may come down to the type of business it is, and maybe even the website that you link to. If you were to have a website and list both locations (or both areas that you serve), such as domain.accountant/city1 and domain.accountant/city2 and each local listing links to the appropriate page, you may have a better chance of getting your business listed.
Also, rather than focus specifically on Google, you may want to focus on getting more local citations and listings for both locations. That may help you in the future, you may want to hold off on the Google listing until you have more links and listings elsewhere.
-
Example:
Cleaning business in Delaware and employees in PA as well. One of employees operates out of home and has business phone there and keeps the supplies there.From this I don't see a problem, but to diagnose the "quality" issue we need more info. If you do not make contact with customers during stated hours, if you are an ecommerce operation in the minds of Google, etc. would all be issues and there are more. If you are using just the phone number but trying to use a PO box or the main address it is problematic. Are you a service area business and you are trying to set things up where address shows when you should not be, etc.
Local is not as simple as it could be so more info would help.
Hopefully, this gives you at least a starting place.
Robert
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
-
Local Listing - Service Business with Three Areas Served
A client of mine owns a business that is a service (i.e. they do not have a storefront). They service three major markets - Atlanta, GA; Charlotte, NC; Nashville, TN. When talking to the Google My Business team, they said we needed to set up only one listing based on where we were headquartered (which is Atlanta) and then list that we service the other markets so that it shows in the listing. So we have one business listing set up as a service but headquartered in Atlanta and show the service area as Atlanta, Nashville and Charlotte. Does this seem correct? There is a lot of competition for them so looking to boost local search as much as possible. Thanks!
Local Listings | | maghanlinchpinsales0 -
How Do I Remove Address from Google Business Page?
Not very up to date in handling local listings, so here's my situation. I have an office that is not going out of business, but instead going virtual. So that physical address will no longer exist but the team is intact. So I am dealing with the Google Business Listing page for this office at https://business.google.com/ In the "Published on" section, it has Google Search, Google Maps, and Google+. I want to remove it from Maps and the address from this account. There's an address for this store, but editing it only seems to allow changing, but not removal. There is also the option of "Mark as Permanently Closed", but surely that isn't the best option since that will leave a nasty red "PERMANENTLY CLOSED" in the results when searching. What's the best course of action here?
Local Listings | | nbyloff0 -
Can I use the same interior photos for multiple stores in Google My Business?
Hi, The company I work for has many store locations across the country. Getting good/quality interior pictures has become very difficult for us. We recently good a Virtual Tour from Google for one of the locations, and they took some really pictures. According to Google, the "Photos should represent the actual business" and "Represent the real-world business location". My question is: since our stores are VERY similar in the interior, can we use the same pictures for them while we get more pictures? Would Google penalize this? Thanks!
Local Listings | | StantonOptical0 -
Using Hashtag for Google My Business
I was told by a Google My Business representative to include #{keywords} in my description. I was told this would boost my rankings. Has anyone else heard of this?
Local Listings | | Smart_Start0 -
Connecting multiple locations under one Google business listing ?
I am working for a client with multiple locations across U.S. and trying to add multiple locations under one Google business listing ? Is there a any way to add multiple locations in one listing, or every location needs to have its own business listing ?
Local Listings | | singhk0 -
Duplicate Google Plus and Google My Business Listings
My business has duplicate listings for both Google + and Google Places or Maps or My Business or whatever it's called today. Of course the listings that I want to show are marked as duplicates, and the only option is to remove the duplicates. Is there any way to merge these listings or switch which one Google recognizes?
Local Listings | | lmsybiatb0 -
Google + / Local for Business. How to SEO ?... Done the basic but no real change.
Hi All, We have set up all of our Google local for business pages which are verified and these link to the relevant branch pages on our website. The branch pages also link back to the relevant google local page. We only appear for one category on the google local pages and we have also done a large number of citations (NAP) across all locations and the text used in each of the google pages is keyword rich and we mention the city in there as well to localise it. We have a few google + likes and we have used hootsuite to publish the same content across some of the google local pages which links back to our website blog , we are not appearing in local search whereas our competitors seem to be appear for all their branches. Is there any fundamental tips or things we need to do to def. get up on the rankings.. Or any good articles worth reading ?.. I've had a look but can't seem to see anything relating a google local business bible.. thanks Pete
Local Listings | | PeteC121 -
Questions about On-site Location Content for Service Area Businesses
Hello all, I've got a couple tough questions about how to go about creating locations pages for my business, and I'm wondering if you can give me some much needed direction. I'm about to launch a professional house cleaning business which will serve Philadelphia and a couple surrounding counties. I plan on aggressively expanding to other large cities, and while I plan on building a Philly locations page, I'm unsure of how to rank organically for all the individual towns/municipalities in the surrounding counties in the middle without having a physical business location there. Should I even hope to rank for these smaller towns? Would a page where the county is in the h1 tag, and say the top 10 largest towns in that county listed underneath in h2 tags help me reach searchers in those top 10 largest towns? How about paying ~$100 for a physical street address in each county and submitting that NAP to local directories of the larger towns, as well as getting a Google My Business page and using the service radius option? Is there some other strategy that I'm missing? I'm just at a loss for how to compete without AdWords for the people searching in the smaller towns when my competition is businesses with NAP/citations and their main page dedicated solely to that smaller town. Google seems to have made it even harder with Pigeon coming out recently. I serve those areas just as readily as my competition, yet the customer will predominantly see them SOLELY due to the fact that most of my competition are incapable of serving or choose not to serve wide areas. I understand that these businesses are dedicating a lot of resources to those small towns, but it does seem a sad fact that it doesn't mean they're any higher quality of a company than mine, yet they get a leg up. ANY advice or direction would be greatly appreciated, and would come with a huge internet bear hug.
Local Listings | | PTHerrington0