Category: Google My Business

This morning we noticed Google My Business Locations starting to toss “error” messages whenever you are saving a location that has more then two categories. Here is a location with no errors when saved (and only two categories): And here is what it looks like when you add a third category:   Tested this across a couple of accounts (including ones where multiple categories make the most sense for the business e.g. multiple brand auto dealerships) and saw the same…

Because the listing isn’t closed… Okay, so that makes no sense right? Let me start from the beginning. We have a client that has a Ford dealership. When doing searches for Ford + geo, we were seeing the above “permanently closed” business showing up in the Knowledge Graph panel. So we had a team member investigate the issue by calling GMB support and asking why a closed listing was showing in the KG. Apparently the listing was showing up because…

Google recently rolled out their “primary category” requirement to Google My Business Locations bulk accounts. Instead of associating the first category per location in a bulk account as the “primary category”, the roll out is instead selecting nothing as a primary category for all locations in a bulk account.   This means that if you want to receive the benefit of having an associated “primary category” you need to go into your bulk accounts and chose the primary category for…

One of the benefits of working with local clients, both large and small, is that we see a lot stuff. Recently we have been conducting a rank tracking project for a large national brand with 1,300+ locations. This has has given us some interesting insights into the move from the local carousel to the local fanny pack. Most often SERP changes, either algorithmic or feature-based, get analyzed at the SMB level. This makes these changes seem monolithic and pervasive as you…

There has been lots of discussion about why big brands seem to be performing worse in pack results post-pigeon. Originally it looked like this was a byproduct of how Google was processing brand queries combined with an abundance of local spam. However after seeing what has happened to some large, multi-location brands after they transitioned to the GMB Locations dashboard it looks like another piece of the puzzle could be related to this slow & clunky upgrade process. Specifically, we…

Last week I posted some theories on why Google’s Pigeon update may have hurt the local rankings for some big local brands. While we have seen a lot of positive rankings improvements for our local clients, we have also heard of some large multi-location brands that got hit with 5-10% traffic losses. My take was that the combination of overweighting of Google’s brand algorithm and the narrowing of the radius for many local queries could have pushed some of these…

David Mihm released the results of the 2014 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey today and per tradition, we will summarize the big headlines and then send you over to David’s post for the data. “THE USER IS THE NEW CENTROID” I think this quote from David says it all, but if you want something to cut and paste into a “custom” audit for clients, try these: Top 10 Local Search Ranking Factors* City, State in Landing Page Title Hi I’m from…

There is apparently a new bug that is impacting the reporting of listing/profile views in the GMB Insights dash. According to GMB, this client’s views flatlined for 9/19 & 9/20: If I were a business owner this GMB Insights graph would freak me out. However, thanks to campaign tagging we can see that Google Analytics is telling a different story: What’s interesting is that this may not be a bug, but rather be a discrepancy in how GMB Insights reports page…

The other day I was doing the local SEO thing and called Google My Business support to get a client’s duplicate listing removed. After a pretty standard conversation about merging this dupe removed we hung up. A few minutes later I got a call, and it was the Google rep I just spoke with letting me know that their “Places Consult Team” had requested that we add hours of operation for the business to the My Business listing. Seemed like…