Solid Stratagems

Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing, Local Business Results, Local Inbound Marketing

Why Your Business Has Poor Rankings on Google Maps

Google Business Profile Suspension Image

A lot of business can come to your local business through your Google Business Profile. That business mostly comes from popping up on Google Search or Google Maps.  I’ve seen business owners unknowingly break Google’s guidelines for local businesses and get hit with a penalty.

It’s not fun.

There are five basic penalties:

  1. Poor rankings (an algorithmic penalty)
  2. Unverified
  3. Suspended
  4. Permanently Removed
  5. Reviews Removed

Sometimes the penalty can be fixed quickly. Other times, the penalty can stick around for 12 months, or even worse, permanently.

Here’s 10 things you can do that will get your Google Business Profile poor rankings, unverified, suspended, permanently removed, or worse.

#1 Changes to the APUNCH

You likely already know the importance of having the NAP (name, address and phone number) correct in your Google Business Profile. I’ve changed the NAP acronym to APUNCH. This is due to the importance of the Google Business Profile destination URL (U), categories (C), and hours (H). Changing these items can result in a drop in rankings.

It’s not really a penalty.

It’s part of the algorithm.

Google knows people don’t want to be sent to an unestablished business, the wrong address, or during the wrong hours etc. So the algorithm favors established businesses with consistent APUNCH.

Likely Penalty: Drop in rankings for as much as 12 months.

#2 Creating a New Profile When Moving

When your business moves you should keep your Google Business Profile! Just change the address. You might be thinking, “But, you said not to change my business address”. True, I don’t want you to. I want you to avoid moving at all costs! But changing your business address is not as bad as starting over, your rankings will bounce back stronger after the 12-month suppression, and you get to keep your reviews.

Likely Penalty: Start in the back of the line and depressed rankings for 12 months.

#3 Ignoring Unresolved Updates

Google is now adding alerts in Google My Business of unresolved updates that need the business administrators review. They are also sending emails to the owner of the page to review the pending updates. I haven’t seen the penalty of ignoring such the emails, but based on watch the algorithm for years I’m going to guess Google won’t favor businesses that aren’t keeping their profiles up to date or responding to requests from Google

Possible Penalty: Algorithm penalty until needed updates are reviewed and resolved.

#4 Keyword Stuffing Your Business Name

It’s against Google’s guidelines to include business locations, taglines or anything other than the business name in the business name field of your business profile.

This gives businesses with an optimized business name an advantage over unoptimized business names. For example, if you’re in the pest control industry, the name “Orkin Pest Control” would be better than “Orkin Exterminators”, “Orkin Exterminating” or just plain old’ “Orkin”.

Of course, you have probably already chosen a business name. So be smart and be sure the name you enter in your Google profile matches the name that is displayed on your website and other online profiles.

Possible Penalty: First, your profile can become temporarily suspended. Second, upon changing the business name to the correct name, your profile can have suppressed rankings for 12 months.

#5 Creating Multiple Pages For The Same Address or Business

In the past, creating multiple profiles for the same business or address caused all kinds of havoc. Sometimes profiles even became combined and then neither profile would rank. Pretty messy.

It’s not quite as bad as it used to be (your profiles probably won’t be combined automatically), but having multiple profiles (especially multiple verified profiles) still causes trouble.

Likely Penalty: Profile becomes unverified.

Possible Penalty: Temporarily suspended or suppressed rankings.

#6 Using A Broken or Redirected URL

I analyzed a company that had multiple locations. Each location had it’s own landing page on the website. These landing pages were used in the URL fields of the Google profiles of each location. Then the company changed the URLs of some of the locations webpages. Without updating the URLs in the business profiles!?!

Not good.

Google doesn’t want to rank broken links.

The profiles weren’t suspended but they were buried in the local rankings.

Be sure to use a working and active URL. Not URLs that are broken or redirect.

Possible Penalties: Possible suspension and ranking suppression for up to 12 months after fixed.

#7 Revealing An Address That Customers Don’t Do Business At

Google considers sending a potential customer to an address where they can’t do business worse than sending them to a missing page.

Possible Penalty: Suspension or permanently deleted.

#8 Fake or Virtual Business Locations

Many local businesses know how valuable it is to rank at the top of search engines for a city in which they do business. This has caused some local businesses to get carried away and set up virtual addresses in all the cities or suburbs they do business in. This goes against Google’s guidelines. If you want to rank on Google Maps for a given city you should have actual legit office space. This can be home or commercial office space, but it can’t be P.O. Boxes, UPS Boxes, or even virtual office space.

Likely Penalty: Suppressed rankings.

Possible Penalty: Profile suspended or even deleted.

#9 Guilty By Association

There are three basic ways you can be guilty by association:

  1. Your address is associated with fake/virtual addresses:  For example, you make have actual physical office space at a local Regus that sells a lot of virtual office space. Your address may get penalized along with the virtual addresses. If this happens to you contact me. I’d love a good reason to contact Google and see if this can be resolved.
  2. Your industry is associated with a spammy industry: Have you ever used Google to hire a locksmith? Talk about a shady industry. I’ve heard of, but haven’t seen, business profiles getting suspended along with others in their market just because the industry was so spammy. Just like above – If this happens to you contact me. I’d love a good reason to contact Google and see if this can be resolved.
  3. The owner/managers of your Google profile have a bunch of spammy profiles in their account: This is just another good reason to be careful about who you make an owner or manager of your business profile.

Possible Penalties: Anywhere from suppressed rankings to having your profile deleted.

#10 Manipulating Your Reviews and Ratings

In addition to displaying genuine businesses, Google wants to display genuine reviews. In no way should businesses manipulate their reviews. Here are the four common ways you can get penalized for manipulating reviews:

  • Getting reviews from friends, family or employees, rather than consumers.
  • Paying a person or company to leave reviews.
  • Offering discounts to customers/clients for giving a review.
  • Getting reviews from customers/clients in person (at their home with a company device) or on-site (at your place of business).

Possible Penalties: Reviews not displaying on Google search or on your business profile.

Questions and Solutions

Have a question about your Google Business Profile? Or have are you looking for the best solution to one of the above penalties? Feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to take a look at your profile.

Inbound Marketing, Local Inbound Marketing, Uncategorized

3 Reasons www URLs Are Better Than Non www URLs For SEO …But Don’t Go Switching Just Yet

www vs non www url for SEO

When I started my first website I had no idea that a www URL was better than a non www URL (sometimes called a root or naked URL). In fact, I had no idea that both options even existed. Unfortunately, my first website’s URL by default was a naked URL. Most “experts” will tell you that there is no difference, it’s just a matter of preference. It does make a difference! www URLs are better for SEO! …but don’t go switching just yet.

Links

Each and every website with a naked URL I’ve analyzed has had backlinks (links to the website) that include the non-canonical www URL. In other words, when people link to a website they often include the www whether or not the canonical URL includes the www. Links play a big part in a website’s capacity to rank and direct links add more PageRank (ranking capacity) than links to permanant redirects (a 301 redirect). Here’s a short clip about it from Google’s Matt Cutts:

Performance and Speed

Website performance and speed is playing a growing role in SEO. www URLs have at least two advantages over naked URL’s.

CNAME Records: Some hosting providers strongly recommend against naked domains. One reason for this is that www URLs allow the hosting provider the extra flexibility of redirecting traffic from a failing server using DNS CNAME records. You can learn more about this over at Heroku.

Cookies: Among the best practices for website developers is serving static content from a cookieless domain (often a subdomain of the website, e.g. static.domain.com). If you are using a www URL you are actually using a subdomain as your canonical domain (www.domain.com is a subdomain of domain.com) and cookies will not get sent to other subdomains (e.g. static.domain.com). If you are using a naked domain (non-www) as your canonical domain, the cookies may get sent to all your subdomains, including the subdomain used for static content). In short, a naked canonical domain can prevent one from creating a cookieless subdomain.

Google Uses The www

If you listen to a hundred “SEO” experts you’ll get a hundred different opinions. If you’re smart you’ll stop trying to learn from the “experts” and start learning from the brands that are at the top of search engines for the most valuable keywords and phrases. In the case of www vs. non-www, you can take note from the biggest and best search engines. Google, Yahoo and Bing all use the www. That should say enough by itself.

A Note About Branding

Admittedly there is no direct SEO difference in branding your site as www.domain.com or just domain.com. That said, when people see a www they immediately think website. I’m just assuming that branding your website with a www is much more effective than without it. Of course, you could always brand your website with a www even if the canonical URL is naked (I did this with my first website), but doing so may lead to more www links. Not good.

Have A Naked URL? …Don’t Go Switching Just Yet

If you’re starting a website from scratch I highly recommend starting with a www canonical domain. But what if you’re not starting from scratch? Based on the above reasons websites with a naked URL should switch to a www right?

Wrong.

Perhaps much worse than wrong.

If your website has already begun to gain natural links to you naked canonical URL the last thing you want to do is change your canonical URL. All those links would pass through the redirect and you would lose a portion of that precious PageRank you’ve spent so much time and effort earning. You already made the decision (whether intentional or not), and it’s time to move forward. Like me, you can always make the better choice on your next website.

The Solution That Is Better Than Switching

So you’re bummed because you or your client chose a naked URL.

And you know switching to a www URL is a no go.

But, you want the full benefit of all links pointing to your site. Including the ones with your pointing to your non-canonical www URL.

There’s good news. Here’s what Google has to say:

“If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to http://example.com, we’ll consider both links the same.”

So after you have specified your preferred domain Google will consider the non-canonical version the same as the canonical. I think this means that there is a good chance that links with or without the www will point directly to your “preferred” (aka canonical) domain and there is a good chance the PageRank passes directly to the “preferred” domain as well. This is the best solution I’ve found (other than choosing a www to begin with).

How To Specify Your Preferred Domain:

Here’s instructions on specifying your preferred domain from Google’s page on setting a preferred domain.

  1. On the Search Console Home page, click the site you want.
  2. Click the gear icon , and then click Site Settings.
  3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.

Why Is My Website Still Showing Up In Search Results Without the https://?

In Google’s search console page on how to Use Canonical URLs, they include a section about how they prefer https over HTTP for canonical URLs. In this section they help developers troubleshoot why Google may choose to make the http rather than the https the canonical URL for a website.

Growth, Inbound Marketing, Local Inbound Marketing

The 7 Prerequisites For Strong Sustainable Growth

Strong Sustainable Growth

Ignore any of these seven rules and strong sustainable growth is no guarantee. Follow each of them and you’ll be protected against the most common reasons businesses fail to thrive.

Rule #1 Become Driven By Data

Learning to make decisions the right way is invaluble. When faced with decisions, especially big ones, most companies will brainstorm, talk it over and make a decision and go forward. Being decisive is good, what isn’t good is going forward with a decision that wasn’t the best possible decision (not to mention most big companies have a very difficult time reversing bad decisions, often throwing good money after bad). The goal isn’t to make the best decision the first time, the goal is to never stop working towards arriving closer and closer to the best decision. In optimization speak, it’s called – iteritive testing. It’s a five step process that never ends.

  1. Brainstorm for possible solutions.
  2. Choose at least two solutions to test.
  3. Test and gather data.
  4. Implement the better solution.
  5. Start the process over again by brainstorming for an even better solution, perform another A/B test, etc.

By following these steps you will leverage the power of better data and arrive closer and closer to the best slogans, click through rates, landing pages, sales pitches, pricing structures, sign up process, customer satisfaction etc. Don’t be a company that is complacent with the same results every quarter. Be anxiously engaged in gathering data that will allow you to have 10% increase in click through rates to your site, 10% increased engagement with you site, 10% increase in order form completion, 10% increase lifetime value of customer etc.

Rule #2 Build A Scalable Model

Businesses that grow without having a scalable business model eventually pop. If you want strong sustainable growth make sure you have a scalable model and systems in place that do not put a ceiling on your growth.

Rule #3 Be and Remain Committed to Being The Very Best

There are a lot of variables that make up the minds of buyers. Some are looking for the lowest price, some want the most bang for their buck, others simply just want the very best (and often buyers are looking for convenience – but we’ll talk about this in a bit). Who you market to will determine who your customers are. Who your customers are will have a tremendous impact on your long term growth and success (not to mention how much you enjoy interacting with clients). Consider the following table which compares outcomes of business models that focus on winning customers through “Best Price”, “Best Value”, and “Absolute Best”.

Best Price Best Value Best Product
Profit Margins < Average < Average > Average
Profit/Time Ratio < Average < Average > Average
Customer Satisfaction < Average < Average > Average
Customer Reviews < Average Average > Average
Customer Loyalty < Average Average > Average
Default Ratio High Average Low
Long Term Success < Average Average > Average
Personal Sanity Very Low Average Very High

Rule #4 Create an Optimized Pricing Structure

Offering nothing short of the industry’s very best means limiting yourself only to clients who are willing and able to pay the highest price right? Not at all! By creating an optimized and scalable pricing structure you can help those with the tightest budgets afford the very best (although in smaller or limited portions). When creating an optimized pricing structure consider the following:

  • Transparent and Defined: Buyers love transparent and well defined pricing. They want to be able to see the pricing and know exactly what they are getting. Do not be afraid to put your pricing right on your website. This helps assure buyers that their will not be hidden fees or surprises.
  • Super Simple: Pricing must be simple. If your pricing structure is transparent and defined but complex it will lead to confusion, indecision and frustration. It’s tempting to pack too many features into your packages or pricing. KEEP IT SIMPLE, LESS IS MORE. DO NOT CREATE INDECISION.
  • Options/Levels: Let’s imagine you own a pest control company and price your premium service at $450/year ($75 every other month). If you put that package on your website, you may, for example, have a conversion/close rate of 10%. Without changing any other part of your sales funnel you can increase your conversion rate by creating multiple pricing levels. In this case, let’s say you add a smaller package of $380/year ($95 every three months) and a bigger package of $780/year ($65 every month). At first thought you may think your conversion/closing rate will go up because you are appealing to customers with a variety of budgets, but it’s much better than that. By placing your premium package (your bread and butter package that you want everyone to buy) between a smaller and larger package you actually help convert and close customers who don’t usually pay for premium products and services
  • Incentive to Be a Recurring/Subscribing Customer: If your business model aims to create subscribing or recurring customers your pricing structure better give buyers an incentive to do so. For example, a pressure washing company could offer 10% the one time price if the buyer signs up to have their home pressure washed annually or 20% off to have the service semi-anually.
  • How high should your pricing be? Use these guidelines to help determine the price level of each package:
    1. High enough to be able to provide the best products and/ or service.
    2. High enough to be able to hire and retain the best employees (this is HUGE! HUGE! HUGE! If you can’t retain your best employees you are going to be fighting an uphill battle).
    3. High enough to have a 10% budget for inbound marketing.
    4. High enough to have at least the industry’s average profit margin.
    5. You must have the highest quality products and/or service, but not necessarily the highest prices. That said, if you are truly following guidelines 1-4 your pricing is probably in the industry’s top 20%.

Rule #5 Always Reinvest 10% of Revenue in Future Growth (Wisely)

Not all marketing is created equal. Some methods have a much better ROI than others. The following five marketing methods are listed in order of ROI for most local and small businesses.

#1 Organic Inbound Marketing

  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Local Search Engine Optimization
  • Review Site Optimization
  • Conversion Rate Optimization

#3 Paid Inbound Marketing

  • PPC e.g. Google Adwords
  • Local Directories e.g. Angies List, BBB, Yelp
  • Remarketing

#2 Customer Marketing

  • Blogging/Content Marketing
  • Social Media
  • Email Marketing

#4 Targeted Outbound Internet Marketing

  • Social Media Marketing

#5 Targeted Outbound Marketing

  • Trade Magazines
  • Trade Websites
  • Targeted Direct Mail

#6 Less-Targeted Outbound Marketing

  • Radio
  • Television
  • Newspaper

Rule #6 Value Your Reputation Above All Else

The internet has made it much easier to build a strong or terrible reputation quickly. It is a huge game changer when your reputation is clearly the best and the strongest. As stated before you better be and remain committed to being the very best. If you allow your reputation to go south… well good luck.

Rule #7 Be Disruptive

Companies that experience strong growth aren’t followers (remember that part about being data-driven?). They don’t wait until someone else is doing it! They are the market leaders! They assume the whole industry has it wrong. They test ideas they get from consumer feedback. They test those ideas, and when the data says the idea is great, they implement the ideas. The rest of the industry tries to keep up and copy what disruptive companies do.