google my business

Don't Believe Us About the Importance of Accurate Listings?

Last Updated: June 23, 2016

We tell our clients over and over again that the accuracy of their online listings can make or break their advertising efforts. If your listings don’t have accurate, consistent information across the board, then you’re fighting a losing battle.
Our lectures are often met with skepticism. How important could all these little listings really be?
In Moz’s latest “Whiteboard Friday” video, George Freitag explains why listing accuracy is vital. Here’s an industry leader repeating exactly what we’ve been saying for years:

Google takes trust very seriously. So how does Google determine trust? That is where listing accuracy comes into play. Listing accuracy is Google’s method for determining whether or not it can trust a local business search result.

How Does Google Use Listings?

When we talk about “listings,” we’re referring to any webpages mentioning your business name, address, and/or phone number. These could include review sites like Yelp, directories like Whitepages.com, and even local news sites. Google uses these to figure out how credible your business’s information is. If the information in these listings all match what’s in your Google My Business profile, then Google will be more inclined to present your business as a local search result because the information seems trustworthy. However, on the flip side, if there are several online listings with information that clashes with your Google profile, then Google will be less likely to display your business. It won’t feel confident it can trust your information.
At the end of the day, it comes down to the reliability of information. Google wants to keep its users happy. The only way to do that is to provide them with information that’s consistently correct.
Therefore, keeping accurate listings across the web is a vital element of local search optimization. You have to keep your existing listings updated with all the right information. You also have to fix any other incorrect data floating around on the web. You may not know about this incorrect data, but Google will.

What If I Can’t Find Every One of My Listings?

Because it’s so difficult to find incorrect data in obscure places on the Internet, many small business owners have trouble asserting their presence in local searches. But this is how you can benefit from working with a local SEO company like Prospect Genius. An SEO specialist can do a deep audit of your existing web presence, find the errors you can’t, and fix them. This will give you the highest level of accuracy possible and boost your presence in local searches.
For all the details about listing accuracy, we strongly recommend you watch the full video over on Moz.
And, of course, reach out to us if you have any questions!

Has Google's Security Gone Too Far?

Last Updated: September 17, 2015

Surprise, surprise: Google is making life more difficult for local business owners and online advertisers. This time, the problems have to do with Google’s new security measures, which have become markedly stricter in the last year. While tightening security is a good idea in theory, it’s been extremely problematic in execution, as it has created quite a mess for the many business owners who share access to their Google My Business accounts with their advertisers.
Here’s what you need to know about Google’s security pain points so you can avoid being locked out of your account and keep your advertising on track.

Claiming Your Listing Is a Pain

If you are the owner of your Google My Business listing, then you don’t have to worry about trying to claim it. You can easily make your online advertiser the manager of your listing. However, many Google My Business accounts are created by a hired SEO company or online advertiser; when you stop working with that company, they abandon your listing without giving you back ownership. That company still technically owns your listing, but now you don’t have access to it because you don’t know the log-in information.
Trying to claim these types of listings has always been challenging, but Google has made it even more difficult recently. When you (or a new advertiser) try to claim your listing, Google will first contact the current owner of that page. However, since the current owner is your former SEO company that no longer cares about your business, it’s unlikely to respond to Google’s request. Your listing will be stuck in limbo for at least 1-2 weeks while Google waits for a response from the owner. If there’s no response after a few weeks, Google will give you the option to claim your listing yourself by phone or e-mail—but this will only work if you have a corporate e-mail domain. If this doesn’t work, you may have to create an entirely new listing from scratch and start over.

Solution

You can avoid these delays by requesting your Google My Business account information as soon as you stop working with an online advertising provider. You may also want to consider creating an e-mail address on your company’s website domain.

Good Luck Logging In to Your Own Account

“But if I know my username and password, shouldn’t I be in the clear?” Technically, yes. However, you may still run into problems logging in if you don’t regularly visit your account. Google takes any significant absence (we haven’t pinpointed the exact time period yet, but it seems to be at least several months) as a sign that your account has been compromised. As a result, Google will grill you with hyper-specific security questions to make sure it’s really you signing in. This may also happen if you forget your password or try logging in from a new device or physical location.
Some of these questions include:

On what date did you create this account?
What other Google apps and products do you use?
What is the date when you first started using these products?

In many cases, Google may also ask you for your mobile phone number so it can text a PIN to you, which you will then have to verify manually. Of course, because the vast majority of users won’t be able to recall the exact day and month that they created their accounts, the authentication process can get complicated and frustrating very quickly.

Solution

Be sure to log in to your Google My Business account on a regular basis (at least once per month). Not only will this prevent Google from thinking your account’s been compromised, but it will also help you remember your username and password. You can also turn off your two-step authentication process (which is an optional user setting) so that you aren’t prompted to verify your account every time you sign in from a new device or location.

Your Advertising Could Take a Hit

When Google’s security measures present these kinds of problems, your advertising efforts will suffer greatly. If you’ve hired an online advertiser, they won’t be able to claim your listing and, therefore, won’t be able to optimize your local search performance. Not only will they not be able to do their job, but they could potentially get blocked from your listing altogether if they try accessing it without the proper credentials. Even if you’re performing your own advertising, you won’t be able to do much if you can’t log in to your own account.
Here’s the bottom line: If you can’t log in to Google, you can’t manage your listing. If you can’t manage your listing, you can’t keep it updated to ensure it matches all of your other online content. If your Google listing doesn’t match your online content, your local search performance will take a serious hit.

Take a Behind-the-Scenes Look at Prospect Genius

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

When you hear us talk about SEO and lead generation, do you feel like Charlie Brown listening to his teacher go, “Wah wah-wah wah wah”? If you’re not someone who specializes in online advertising, it’s perfectly understandable to feel confused—and, frankly, a little bored—about what it is we do. However, it’s important to know a little bit about what goes on behind the scenes so you can appreciate exactly how our services are benefiting your web presence.
Here’s what you need to know.

We Amplify Your Existing Presence

There’s a good chance that you had already set up a Google My Business or Facebook account before joining our program. If that’s the case, you may be misled into thinking that any leads coming from Google or Facebook are a result of your existing presence instead of our work. It’s a logical assumption, but it’s incorrect.
Instead, local search optimization functions as a multifaceted machine, with a series of gears, levers, and wheels all working together to create the final output. The phone call or e-mail inquiry that came from your Google listing is actually a product of the search optimization machine. Your company information ranked well in Google’s local search results, thus leading the customer to contact you thanks to all of the behind-the-scenes work we did.
For proof, take a look at two examples of clients whose Google traffic skyrocketed after signing up with Prospect Genius.
Company A:

Company B:

As you can see, after signing up with us, these two clients saw huge increases in their views and clicks. That’s due to all the work we’re doing for your campaign. But what does that work entail, exactly?

We Build the Machine

Prospect Genius’s job is to design and build the local search optimization machine that powers your campaign. That means making sure each individual part works perfectly in addition to fitting all of those parts together seamlessly.

Here are the four main parts:

Google listing
On-page SEO
Citations
Inbound links and social signals

Google Listing

Local search rankings improve when your Google listing is thoroughly optimized and populated with lots of customer reviews. That’s why Prospect Genius optimizes every client’s listing and provides a handful of tools to help you increase your number of reviews.

On-Page SEO

To appeal to Google’s search algorithms, all of your website’s pages must be optimized. You must have valuable content that’s targeted at specific search terms and is generally informative. All of our LeadTrax™ sites are written and designed for on-page SEO to further boost your company’s rankings.

Citations

Citations refer to all of the instances in which your business name appears alongside your contact information (e.g. address and phone number), and they must be consistently accurate. Citations most often come from online directories and Internet yellow pages, but they may also occur in newspapers, magazines, local blogs, and social media posts. Many of Prospect Genius’s packages add your business info to numerous directories, ensuring accuracy across the board and driving up your citation score.

Inbound Links and Social Signals

Inbound links are links that exist on another website and link to a page on your website. They indicate that your page contains valuable information. Along the same lines, social signals are data points that tell Google how appealing your website is on a human level. If lots of people are sharing links to your website on social media, and your company’s social media account has lots of “Likes” or followers, then those valuable social signals will boost your local search ranking. That’s why Prospect Genius sets you up with Facebook and Twitter accounts (if you don’t already have them) and promotes you on social media.

It’s All About Synergy

Did you make it to the end of this post without your eyes glazing over? Good! Hopefully, you now have a much deeper understanding of what drives your campaign and keeps it successful.
With your cooperation, we’re able to create a uniform front to fortify your company’s online presence. We achieve substantial, organic results by creating a well-oiled machine that runs flawlessly. While your Google listing is significant, you can’t give all of the credit to a single cog.
As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions you may have.
Photo credit: Linda Buquet, localsearchforum.com

Is Your Google My Business Listing Being Sabotaged by… Google?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

If you have a Google My Business account, the greatest force working against you may be Google itself. Here’s what you need to watch out for.

Google Makes Updates Without Your Knowledge

Many local business owners and advertising providers alike have noticed that, every so often, little details on their Google listings are suddenly changed without their consent. For users who have been affected, it’s incredibly frustrating. You spent a lot of time and energy setting up your listing and making sure all the information was filled out accurately, but now it looks like someone else updated your account with a totally different street address or phone number. As it turns out, that “someone else” was probably Google.
Around 10 years ago, your local competitors were your biggest threat online. It didn’t require much technical savvy to sabotage each other’s listings. They could go into Google, claim your listing as their own, and alter all of the information in it without much difficulty. As Google’s interface and security features became more sophisticated, the frequency of these sabotage incidents dropped significantly. Now, however, Google is the one you have to watch out for.
While Google’s intentions aren’t bad, the outcome is the same: your listings are being altered without your consent. Why is this happening? Ironically, as Google pushes for accuracy above all else, it’s chasing its own tail. It automatically scans the web for citations of your company—i.e. mentions of your company name, address, phone number, or URL—to make sure everything matches. If there’s a citation out there that doesn’t match what’s on your listing, Google might decide to update your listing for you so it does match. Unfortunately, this conflicting information is usually from an outdated listing on an old directory site, so the update is incorrect.
Google might also update your listing in response to a user who reported that the information in your listing was incorrect. Little does Google know, its effort to maintain accuracy on all of its listings often backfires.

Google Un-Verifies Listings at Will

While the automatic updating is certainly frustrating, it’s nothing compared to Google’s automatic un-verifying of your listing. It may do this for multiple reasons, but it most often happens when Google deems an account “inactive.” In the Google and Your Business Help Forum, Google’s Jade Wang explains:

In some cases, we may contact Google My Business users via email to confirm that they are still actively managing a business page. If a user is unresponsive to our attempts to contact him or her and has not logged into Google My Business for a significant length of time, then we may unverify pages in the account. We’re doing this in order to continue to provide users with the best experience when they’re looking for local businesses like yours.

Matt McGee of Search Engine Land confirms that this “significant length of time” of inactivity is at least six months. Although Wang claims that Google will notify a business owner before un-verifying, this doesn’t always happen, as we’ve seen firsthand with many of our own clients.
While inactivity is the most prominent reason for Google to un-verify a listing, other reasons include multiple listings and multiple advertisers. Sometimes, if a business has a listing for each of its multiple locations, Google sees the various addresses and phone numbers as “conflicting” with one another and randomly chooses one listing to un-verify.
Other times, Google will un-verify a business’s listing if it is being accessed and updated by more than one advertiser. That’s because it thinks something fishy is going on if account managers are logging in from disparate locations. (This is just one of the many reasons we advise against working with more than one advertiser at a time.)

Constant Vigilance Is Crucial

To avoid trouble, Jade Wang advises, “It’s a good idea to keep an eye on the inbox associated with your Google My Business (Locations) account. It’s also a good idea to regularly log into Google My Business (Locations) to confirm that your business information is current and accurate.”
We’ve always said that business owners have to be more proactive about their advertising, and this is just another reason why. You must track your listing(s) frequently to make sure it’s always accurate and in good standing.
However, we also understand that most business owners don’t have the resources to constantly track their listings. Frankly, after you been out on the job all day, it’s hard to find the time or energy to scan your Google My Business account for any red flags—and that’s if you can even remember to do it at all.

MapTrax™ to the Rescue

Thankfully, there are services out there like MapTrax that will do all the tracking for you. MapTrax monitors your listing daily and automatically alerts you of any changes to your company’s address, phone number, or URL, and if the listing has been suspended or un-verified. This way, you can immediately address any problems that may arise.
For only a few dollars per month, MapTrax provides insurance and peace of mind without requiring you to lift a finger. Our system does all the work for you! It will protect you from spammers and other wild cards, as well as Google itself, that could do harm to your company’s listing.
If you sign up in July, you can get MapTrax for just $5/mo. That’s 50% off! It’s very reasonably priced insurance that will save you time, money, and future business.

7 Signs That Call From Google Is a Scam

Last Updated: May 14, 2015

Cons and scams certainly aren’t unique to the Internet Age, but it definitely seems like they’re lurking around every corner lately. At one time or another, we’ve all received spam e-mails, Facebook messages, and phone calls from individuals who are posing as other people to trick us into giving up our money or personal information. That “Nigerian prince” e-mail chain from 15 years ago may not be circulating anymore, but plenty of other, more convincing scams have taken its place. Scams that involve shady companies pretending to be Google are a prime example.

7 Ways to Spot the Scam

In these Google scams, regular business owners are bombarded with unsolicited phone calls from individuals pretending to be from Google. You should be very wary of any phone call “from Google” if the caller does any of the following:

Tells you that you’re not ranking
Tells you that your site is not mobile friendly
Tells you that your listing is not verified
Offers you a certain placement or position on Google
Discusses your performance on Google
Even mentions SEO or optimization
Asks for money or payment (unless it’s an AdWords pitch)

Google will never, ever call you out of the blue to discuss any of the above topics. Google would not be concerned about improving your rankings or optimizing your business’s listing in any way.
Moreover, if your site is not mobile friendly, you would receive an e-mail or pop-up notification on your Google My Business page directly from Google saying as much. Google wouldn’t go out of its way to call you just to tell you that.
Finally, Google typically doesn’t even call businesses unless they’ve already been verified by PIN, so you can ignore any phony caller who’s posing as a Google representative and telling you that your listing is not verified.

What Do Legitimate Google Calls Look Like?

First of all, the only two numbers that we know to be associated with Google for unsolicited calls are (650) 253-0000 and (650) 253-2000. These are the only two legitimate Google phone numbers we’ve seen in our seven years of operation. However, if there are any other authentic Google phone numbers out there, they will always have a (650) area code (for Mountain View, CA).
If Google does call you unsolicited, it will be an extremely rare occasion, and it will only be for one of two reasons:

Google might call about your Google My Business listing for quality control purposes. The caller will just ask you about the information on your listing in order to confirm your service offerings, physical address, and other pertinent info. This is standard procedure as Google wants to ensure the accuracy of the information it’s publishing (after all, its credibility is on the line). These calls typically come from one of Google’s outsourced call centers overseas; the caller will most likely have a foreign accent.
Google might also call you to sell AdWords or AdWords Express. These calls will be obvious sales pitches for AdWords, and they will not discuss rankings or positioning on search results pages. Furthermore, these calls will be from one of Google’s domestic headquarters; the caller will most likely have an American accent.

Again, it bears repeating that Google will never try to optimize your website or Google My Business listing. It’s okay if the caller asks you about information on your listing as a way of verifying what’s already in the system, but your guard should go up as soon as they start asking you for your credit card number or other sensitive information.

What If It Feels Like a Scam?

If any red flags appear to you during the phone call, simply ask the caller directly if they are from Google. If they answer you by saying that they “work with” or are “partners with” Google, then they’re clearly trying to skirt around the question.
It’s important to note that many second-rate advertising companies will claim to be partners with Google. This terminology is misleading because it makes it sound like the company has a special deal or affiliation with Google—but that’s not the truth at all. When an advertising company brags about being a Google Partner, it really just means someone from that company passed Google’s AdWords and Analytics exams online. Any advertiser can become a Google Partner. If an advertiser tries to use this certification as a way to trick people into believing that they have a special relationship with Google, that should tell you they represent a dishonest company, and you should act accordingly.
However, if you’ve received a phone call from a true scam artist—not just a desperate advertising company—then there’s a chance they will lie and claim that they are indeed from Google. In these cases, it’s critical for you to trust your instincts. If you’ve gotten a bad vibe during the conversation and the caller has raised any of the red flags explained above, then you should not trust them. Instead, you should terminate the phone call and report it to one of the many online scam alert websites.

Prospect Genius

Don't Believe Us About the Importance of Accurate Listings?

How Does Google Use Listings?

What If I Can’t Find Every One of My Listings?

Has Google's Security Gone Too Far?

Claiming Your Listing Is a Pain

Solution

Good Luck Logging In to Your Own Account

Solution

Your Advertising Could Take a Hit

7 Signs That Call From Google Is a Scam

7 Ways to Spot the Scam

What Do Legitimate Google Calls Look Like?

What If It Feels Like a Scam?

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