After dealing with a frustrating day of local SEO and the insane amount of data corruption I felt it necessary to recap on some of the findings that I have had. For most of the great local SEO’s you will most likely already know quite a bit of this information because alike myself you have had the same frustration for months. The crazy gambit of Google’s Map Maker, Google Places and Google+Local is the cause of our headaches and sighs of frustration.
Overview
About 7 months ago now Google had made the announcement of the shift from Places to Pluses, which was a shift from the local SEO platform everyone was comfortable with to a new system. A merging process erupted and the pages that were once, were no more. Now Google has always used Map Maker to help create and maintain their local data, but with the switch and merging of all the places there is a very heavy focus on keeping all of your data accurate. Across the board you should have correct data for your business or the businesses you market. However Google has been throwing many of us curve balls. Google’s massive move from one platform to the other has been much less than smooth and seamless. To be honest I really feel for everyone working on this enormous feat.
Old Faithful Places
As many upon many SEO’s know Google Places was all about the citations and getting them accurate with your Google places. I’m sure many of you have already noticed that after merging your Google Places doesn’t just disappear. In fact, you may have merged listings from Google Places to Google+ and noticed some strange coincidences between the two. If you have see the “not what you expected to see?” notice from Google and it’s moderators on you Google+ then you might see a few things still being pulled from Google Places. Just today I noticed that I had a rejected description that was replaced with the character limited Google Places description. Often the categories displayed are pulled from Google Places as well.
Good Ole Places doesn’t always merge nicely though as I have seen a few merged businesses that have lost reviews in the merging process, just showing even more so how difficult this data is to maintain and aggregate. Speaking of aggregate, Google Map Maker is also playing a very crucial and pivotal roll in the Google+ merge.
Map Maker FTW!
This is definitely the most actionable and necessary information I can really give in doing local SEO right now and trying to keep your data all consistent. If you are getting ANY inconsistencies in you address or phone number this should be the first place you look. Google Map Maker is taking a lot of data and trying to properly crunch it all, sometimes what is crunched just doesn’t make much sense and creates some duplicates. Just today I needed to edit a Map Maker that was corrupted with data from a similar profession but different industry altogether. The data affected the categories, or “at a glance listings” the address was massively affected and worst of all there were two phone numbers listed. One number for my client, the other for the other business. This was all due to some data corruption somewhere with the Google bot that just crunched something wrong. In addition to the corrupted data there was also a duplicate listing in map maker. Obviously, the duplicate will cause some unwanted information and is a red flag to me to watch my map maker listings very very closely.
**If you happen to be getting any poor or incorrect data in your Google+Local listing look at Map Maker first and cross reference it with your Google Places information. **
This is very important, also make sure you have no duplicate or poor information on you listing that could cause data corruption. Take the preventative measure to “avoid any problems. Map Maker is controlling most of the hours of operation, phone numbers and address data for a verified merged listing on Google+. Though you may have control of pictures and the cover image, many of the other fields are heavily moderated.
Google+Local Creator of Confusion
Though I am unhappy right now with the local landscape I can see that Google+Local certainly has some benefits even with all of the headaches it causes. A few perks are the posting system and the building of followers to a local place, the benefit may be hard to see right now but going into the future the customer communication and marketing re-targeting potential is enormous. The updates to the page that do happen take very little time to take effect. You can have albums of photos as you are no longer limited to ten pictures and ten videos. The design and branding potential of the local pages is much greater with the customization of the cover photo. Lastly and likely the most overlooked benefit is having multiple pages for the consumer to view what they want about the local page. Much of these as a page owner you can control, but as far as the technical data and physical page information it is very heavily moderated and often pull from another place, no pun intended.
Final Thoughts
Though this is a headache as a marketer and a page owner, I can only imagine the frustration and migraines that are going on over at Google. The most important question to be asking right now is when will they be finished with the merge to switch from Google Places to Google+Plus? Only time will tell, until then I will just keep looking forward to my 5 o’clock beer while looking over all three of these platforms of local SEO.