Does Google Places reward unique icons for multi location businesses?
-
I work for a company that has over 100 physical locations. We are working to update our Google Place icon. My question is, do we get any seo benefit having a unique icon for each location, or no benefit and its better to focus on having a the best single icon possible. Note, we are going to add unique images in each place listing, this is specifically referring to the main icon shown on Google results.
-
It's important to have every physical location represented in Google Places. Ideally you should have a corresponding page on your site for each of those locations as well, that can be navigated to from your site home page through standard HTML links internal to the site (not through javascript or AJAX, etc).
You should submit a separate google place entry for each - use the bulk submission process. Each should have it's own local phone number and each should be given maximum Google Places optimization treatment. The title for each should all match your business name though - don't try and get a unique title in each individual location's places entry.
The more actual locations you do this with, the more likely you will come up in exponentially more local searches.
Don't forget to follow this up with submitting them all to YP.com, SuperPages.com, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, etc.
-
I have never tried to measure this. But following traditional SEO rules, you have to name your images properly if you want them to rank. Therefore, having keywords in the file name could potentially help. It certainly isn't going to hurt. But the benefit for you place rank, if any,is going to be miniscule.
Never measured it because I stick to the same patterns when something works. I name my images uniquely.
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
-
Location Links in Footer
Our business is in 10 cities. We offer identical services in each city, there's absolutely nothing different about the services we offer based on location. We have a contact page for each city with a bit of unique content (phone, address, photo of city, list of counties we service). It really would be a grey area to create subsites for each city and try to rewrite the service description content 10 times. However, we want to improve organic results. We of course have Google Places listings for each city. From an on-page SEO perspective, wouldn't it only have the possibility of benefiting, not hurting local SEO but add the city name linked to that city's contact page in the footer? I've seen arguments against it, and could see maybe if you were in like 50 cities instead of 10, but is there really any observed downside to doing that in the footer for every page? We can't title the difference service pages with the city name in the headings or page title, so at least we'd have anchor text in the footer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9640 -
Recovery after recent Google update
Hi guys. This is somewhat a continuation for this topic: https://moz.com/community/q/january-2016-massive-rankings-fluctuations After that update, several of our clients and our website as well have experienced high fluctuation rankings period, which ended up in huge drops - 10-20 spots. Which, obviously, made everyone unhappy. Anybody knows what exactly the change was about? What should we fix/take a look at, analyze again? We aren't using any shady techniques or black hat. Everything is honest. All metrics, number of backlinks etc are going up, no major changes have been recently made. Please, help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Google Indexing of Images
Our site is experiencing an issue with indexation of images. The site is real estate oriented. It has 238 listings with about 1190 images. The site submits two version (different sizes) of each image to Google, so there are about 2,400 images. Only several hundred are indexed. Can adding Microdata improve the indexation of the images? Our site map is submitting images that are on no-index listing pages to Google. As a result more than 2000 images have been submitted but only a few hundred have been indexed. How should the site map deal with images that reside on no-index pages? Do images that are part of pages that are set up as "no-index" need a special "no-index" label or special treatment? My concern is that so many images that not indexed could be a red flag showing poor quality content to Google. Is it worth investing in correcting this issue, or will correcting it result in little to no improvement in SEO? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Did Reviews still have the same value in Google places ranking?
I have two questions relating to Reviews. 1. Reviews still add value to Google places ranking. 2. I have a page and two clients posted reviews for me.They all get removed after 3,4 days.What is wrong with Google?Did they consider them fake?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csfarnsworth0 -
Quantity or quality in Google+ authorship?
Hi folks, here goes a (hopefully) easy one for the local authorship gurus. For our blog content strategy we currently have two inhouse contributors. Both have decent Google+ profiles and one is in the process of really establishing authorship/influence by submitting guest posts to several industry sites, sharing content in Google+, engaging in conversations in twitter, etc. Posts by this latter contributor already rank page 1 for the main keywords. We now have a new content contributor who is a retired employee from the company and a good friend. He has written excellent content that will be published in our blog in the coming few months. He does not have a Google+ profile but he can have one if we ask him to, but he is not going to use it for anything other than writting on our blog. He does not mind having his content published under any of our current Google+ profiles. Question: should we include this new content under our current profiles or should we create a new Google+ profile for this new contributor knowing that it will be an 'empty' profile? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TIBA0 -
Will changing Google Places address hurt rankings?
I have a client transferring ownership of their service business (photo booth rental). The current listed address will change, so my main concern is preserving the rankings during the transition. Should I change the Google Local listing to a new physical address, or change it to "serve a surrounding area"? It seems best to set as "serving a surrounding area", but I know Google is really weird about making local listing changes. I've seen and heard about countless listings falling completely off the map after being updated. Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Old and New Google Places Address Update or Create?
Working on SEO for client who is at a new address. Luckily? there are no google reviews attached to the old addresses (there 2). Should I try to update one of the old ones? Or should I just go ahead and create a new listing? What are the pros and cons of each decision.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Removing a Page From Google index
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0