7 myths that affect local SEO | Weboptim
#1. If Google Places doesn't include your suite number, you should skip everything you're doing and fix it immediately
The truth: Google does not recognise the suite number for the vast majority of businesses listed on Google. Even though you enter the suite number in your Google My Business profile, it doesn't transfer it to the "suite" field. Google is paying more and more attention to the location designator when determining the actual location of a business and less attention to the actual words we type in the address field, as there are multiple ways to name a street.
A Google Possum update introduced a filter based on the location of the search query. Regardless of whether or not a suite number is specified, Google My Company will do nothing with it. If the link is good but the suite number is missing, move on. There are more important things to spend time on that will affect your ranking.
#2 A small difference in company name is a big deal
The truth: Say the name of the company "Bob Farm: Bob Smith", and once listed as "Bob Smith Insurance" and other times "Bob Smith state farm". Let's trust the algorithm a little. If Google can't recognize that these 3 names are actually the same business (especially if the addresses and phone numbers are the same), then you have a big problem. There would be countless duplicate listings in Google, it wouldn't be able to keep up. In general, you can only find duplicates if there are big differences in address and phone number.
#3 DAILY maintenance involves recording hundreds of listings
The truth: SEO companies often use this scare tactic and it works very well. There is a small business who gets paid for maintenance. They then do an investigation on the bad data and send you a list of hundreds of directories with bad data. This causes a panic and we immediately think we need to hire someone to maintain all this immediately so that it doesn't cause damage to the rankings.
Let's look at an example: local.com is a site that contains hundreds of small newspaper listings. If we have one bad listing here, it might appear that our listing on hundreds of aggregator sites is wrong. E.g. 3 listings for different domains, but when you look at it, the pages are identical.
Can this cause panic? No. If we fix the listing on Local.com itself, all domains will be fixed. If not, you should know that Google doesn't even index such sites.
If it doesn't index, it's a good sign that the content is not too significant and you don't need to worry about it. It would be inefficient for Google to index all these different URLs because their content is exactly the same. Also, no one is linking to them.
#4 No risk of service termination
People often wonder what happens to their NAP data when they terminate the account. While these companies do nothing to intentionally bring back old data, there are some interesting facts about what happens when someone deletes an account.
The truth: The good news is that usually keeping is the right decision, after giving up some important things will no longer be visible. Yext claims they are not doing anything to restore old data that was bad. When you delete someone's profile, the lock that was put in place to protect them is no longer in place.
Overall, there is clearly a risk in opting for termination.
#5 Link building is just one type of link building strategy required for local SEO
Many local SEO companies feel that link-building is just one type of link-building strategy that small businesses need in order to rank in the top 3 results on the map. According to one survey, 72% use local SEO for link building.
The truthA: Local SEO guides describe how important mentions are, but if that were the only link building strategy they used, they would probably not rank well in the marketplace. They have found that links provide the most important competitive advantage when it comes to Google Company Profile strength.
# 6 References that give the same telephone number but are in an unrelated industry should be ignored
This question has been asked countless times by everyone. If we have a restaurant that had a phone number, but then the place closed and a new company opened there and got the same phone number, should the new company be concerned that there is already a restaurant there on the list?
The truth: If users call a number that they think another company is calling, this will of course have a negative impact on the user experience. The phone number is the most unique and standardized piece of information for a business, and therefore the most important and significant identifier for Google when determining how trustworthy a business is.
Users finding the restaurant number and calling it would be a consistently negative experience for both customers and the new business, so it makes sense to either mark the restaurant as closed or remove it from Google Maps altogether.
# My Google Company is a mention/reference
One is more of a mislabeling than myth, but Google's listing isn't really a mention. "Mention" came from the concept of "citation" in scientific papers. Using this conceptual framework, we can think of Google listing as scientific, and all data on the internet as a source of citing business mentions. In fact, to use a metaphor, Google listing is the queen bee, and the mentions are the workers who keep the queen alive and healthy.
Source: moz.com