If you have a service-based business, you need to pay attention to this update alert for your Google My Business listing.
Mark Ambrose with Video4Traffic.com here. We’re going to show you how Google may be diverting traffic away from your Google My Business listing to one of their third-party partnerships and it may be costing you prospects and business.
Stick around, we’ll be right back.
okay if you go into Google, and we’re going to use plumber in san diego ca as an example. We’re talking about the Google My Business listing here so it’s in the map. Click on “more places” and if we got to a particular plumber, in this case Howe’s Plumbing, we see this listing right here under “products and services” to places.singleplatform.com.
And if we click on that link we get taken over to their site places.singleplatform.com, a generic listing for this plumber, and it’s unclaimed. Can you see the “claim this men” button down below?
and over on the right by the address on the right, is again a link to “claim this business.”
If we click on either one we get taken over to the places.singleplatform.com website with a form now to fit out. A lead generation form for them to contact you about selling you their service, which posts your product and services menu on Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Foursquare, and YP, which might be a great service for you but, you didn’t ask for that, or at least Bill Howe’s plumbing, heating, and air didn’t ask for it. I’ve already spoken with them about it.
And this is happening on many other service based business listings. Here’s another one for Core Plumbing, etc.
If I go for HVAC san diego as a search term I can see it’s happening in the air-conditioning trade also. Here’s another one, right here the Greater San Diego Air Conditioning. Same thing we see places.single.platform.com and if we click on it we go to the same generic listing on singleplatform.com’s website and again it’s unclaimed. We’re going to click on to claim it, and again we’re taken to the form tasking us for our contact information so they can contact us about their services for this listing.
So, this is an unwanted link in their GMB listing and if I’m a consumer and get taken to that page which is unclaimed, I’m probably going to get our of there and hit the back button a couple times and go look for another plumber right?
So you are losing, or potentially losing some customers because of this and perhaps more importantly you are not taking advantage of this link yourself. This should be your own link with product and service descriptions, which actually just shows up on mobile currently. I’m on a desktop but this singleplatform link shows on up desktop.
I called Google. If you go to Google.com/business that’s the home page for Google My Business and you can call them right here at this phone number 1-844-491-9665. I asked them what’s going on? I made a couple of calls in there to make sure I got the same story, and they gave me a method of getting rid of that link, which is a little bit of work.
But I really didn’t like that method. I will share it with you what they said. But first I then went over to singleplatform.com’s website itself. I searched and found this partnership page they have with Google My Business. They have a partnership and this page talks a little bit about that and again it’s about syndicating your menu across this platforms.
And they had a phone number down here, direct to themselves. I spoke with them and they told me they could remove the link from the listing on their end themselves without doing what Google told me to do. Or so they claim on the phone, which is what they gave me today.
So you can call this number if you have that link in menu, or your GMB listing rather. You can call this number to have them remove it. And based on the answers I got today, I would recommend you do that. The number is 1-929-254-0250. Tell them you have that link in your Google My Business listing and would like to removed.
Now Google instructed me to so something I don’t think I recommend, and three different calls to them confirmed their answer.
Go into your GMB listing, click on the Info menu item, then go to your categories in the blue area, and delete them all and add just “restaurant” as your only category and click “apply.” When you do, you’ll be able to scroll down and under services you will see that link to places.singleplatform.com link and be able to delete it and click apply again. Then go immediately go up to the categories again and delete restaurant and add your proper categories back and click apply.
Now that scares the heck out my because I’m getting rid of my categories. You would be getting rid of your categories and tentatively you’re a restaurant. I would fear… I asked Google if that would interfere with search rankings at all. Of course they said no, but I just don’t trust that at all.
So the simpler route seems to be to go the singleplatform.com and call them at 1-929-254-0250. They said they do NOT do that category change because they have the ability on their end to just delete it because of their relationship with Google (it takes 48 hours). And that would be my recommendation.
Okay, so if you find yourself with this link in your Google My Business listing, do some research, call both companies. Call Google and call single platform and make the decision for yourself. That’s recommendation #1 for today.
Part 2 recommendation is once you have that .link cleared out of your Google My Business listing go back into your GMB dashboard, click on “info” and scroll down and you should have a “services” tab and in there, if you click on that, is where you can put in keyword optimized descriptions to the products and services you offer. You can also add price. If I come down here and I click on “add a section” I can add a section name and a product or service under that with a keyword description and price.
Okay, so do that. Those help you with keyword searches on the Internet and help your Google My Business listing rank. You should coordinate those with your categories which should be coordinate with your products and services.
Okay so those are our two recommendations for today. We hope you found value in that.
Thank you and create a great day!
Original blog post found at: https://www.video4traffic.com/search-engine-optimization/gmb-singleplatform-link/
