A baffling situation with google misranking due to town name confusion?

[JS Girard]

Okay, this is easily the most baffling thing I've ever seen.

• Client is a SaB
• Client was validated with our help via live call
  • Translation: we know the address was validated in the correct physical location.
• Client is in the Quebec town of L'Ange-Gardien, in Outaouais
• Problem: Client has been complaining of receiving many calls from Venise-en-Québec, a town located about 200kms away:
  
  
  
• I have been able to reproduce results with teh client showing for keywords both with explicit and implicit geolocation in multiple town of the area from Pike River to Farnham and Saint-Césaire
• This client only has 14 or so reviews. This does not justify ranking so far in any way.
• We are well-aware (because it has caused problems in the past with the sales department) that there is a town called Ange-Gardien not very far from Venise-en-Québec (note the slight spelling difference):
  
  
  
  
• While we routinely do use keywords in names, The town name is not used in this particular case and does not appear anywhere in the GBP name.
• If you'd asked me a week ago whether google can misplace a business because of nearly-homonymous town names, I would have thought you have never done local SEO. However, there is seemingly no other explanation for this behavior, that I can think of.

Does anyone have any idea what else could be going on?

I am utterly baffled. All I could suggest was adding "Outaouais" to the GBP to try and curb the undesired calls.

 

[keyserholiday]

Are you sure it’s SEO and not PPC? Are you sure the calls are coming from GBP? I nice had too many clients blame Google when it was Apple Maps or another platform. I also work with a horrible SEO who did too many board match search terms so if you did a search for Joe’s Dentist our clients ad would show up and they caller thought they were connecting to Joe’s and not Mike’s Dental.

 

[JS Girard]

Are you sure it’s SEO and not PPC? Are you sure the calls are coming from GBP? I nice had too many clients blame Google when it was Apple Maps or another platform. I also work with a horrible SEO who did too many board match search terms so if you did a search for Joe’s Dentist our clients ad would show up and they caller thought they were connecting to Joe’s and not Mike’s Dental.

We are literally the only owner of the GBP at the moment, so I can confidently say no PPC is going on with the GBP. I'm aware google doesn't like, but I'm not responsible for validating GBPs and I don't know why my coworkers keep doing it.

Organic PPC might fire off, but unless there's incredibly bad geographical settings (I do not do PPC myself), only "ange-gardien/L'ange-gardien" is a potential trigger and it wasn't in any of the combinations I have tested.

Believe me, I am in just as much disbelief as you are, but the callers are VERY insistent about having found our clients' business on Google, which I have confirmed is easily done with several highly relevant keywords for this vertical. It's even showing for English keywords which appear nowhere on the GBP other than the vertical name!

This GBP is provably being returned in organic top-3s which is completely abnormal and unexpected regardless of where the calls are actually coming from.

 

[keyserholiday]

You don’t need access to a GBP to run PPC. Are you using call tracking numbers? If you are you can listen to the calls to see if it’s the GBP or website trigger the calls.

 

[JS Girard]

You don’t need access to a GBP to run PPC. Are you using call tracking numbers? If you are you can listen to the calls to see if it’s the GBP or website trigger the calls.

This client literally didn't know what a GBP before the rep called them the first. They have no idea that call tracking is even a thing. While it's technically possible (though I find it incredibly unlikely) that there's organic PPC for the website going on, I have not seen it come up any of the various queries I've been doing. and that's when there even is ads at all: most keywords did not return any ads at all in Venise-en-québec, making it doubly unlikely that is the problem, since that is (for some reason!) the nexus of calls that our client is complaining about

 

[keyserholiday]

I am at a loss. I don't have the business's name, so I can't investigate the issue further, and I don't have enough information to go off on. I have had too many clients blame Google when it wasn't Google at all.

 

[JS Girard]

Trust me I would love to be able to just, share links freely, but the basic process at this agency involves direct violations of Google's guidelines (keyword stuffing + use of custom listing pages instead of the client's website), which is why I'm always extremely careful about sharing GBP links.

It's not my decision (they've been doing this since like 2007), but since it's literally the only way their business model actually works (a fact they are very reluctant to acknowledge), it's impossible to effect change.

 

[keyserholiday]

I am of no help. I don't do anything grey or blackhat.

 

[Stefan Somborac]

@JS Girard - For a keyword without much competition, I've seen a profile rank over a long distance. 200km seems a bit far, but I think it's worth exploring. Compare low vs. high competition keywords.

Use a grid tool like LocalFalcon and set up a grid that covers the whole area. Not only will this his will help you figure out how far the profile ranks, but you should also see where Google thinks the business is located.

I agree with you: can Google misplace a business because of nearly homonymous town names? I doubt it! But maybe, for some other reason, they got it wrong. It would be helpful to know where the SAB is "located". (I use LocalFalcon for this whenever it comes up.)

 

[JS Girard]

@JS Girard - For a keyword without much competition, I've seen a profile rank over a long distance. 200km seems a bit far, but I think it's worth exploring. Compare low vs. high competition keywords.

Use a grid tool like LocalFalcon and set up a grid that covers the whole area. Not only will this his will help you figure out how far the profile ranks, but you should also see where Google thinks the business is located.

I agree with you: can Google misplace a business because of nearly homonymous town names? I doubt it! But maybe, for some other reason, they got it wrong. It would be helpful to know where the SAB is "located". (I use LocalFalcon for this whenever it comes up.)

Luckily, this is a vertical where I can test english keywords without invalidating the whole process. Local Falcon doesn't reflect what the Valentin app spot checks (which I mentioned above) gave, nor does it reflect the reality of phone calls from Venise-en-Qu.bec, but it mostly confirm the base hypothesis.

L'ange-gardien (correct town) is in the bottom left quadrant. Same keyword without and with town name:

Ange-gardien area, same keyword, no town name:

this map does not reflect calls from venise-en-québec, but I'm testing in English, so not necessarily surprising. note that the areas are so far away that the maps don,t overlap at all. In fact, they're so far away I can't even get a LocalFalcon test that covers both areas!

Like, this is complete madness, and I certainly don't expect google engineering to be any damn help. Looking at our internal logs there were three different love call validations for this client, which probably explains how this could have happened, since by the time of validations #2 and #3 the full address was no longer on the GBP. There is no possible confusion at address level (I have seen it happen before, but the street name is unique and the street is correctly traced on Maps).

aaauuuggh. I can't even talk to the people

 

[JS Girard]

UPDATE!

Some internal Sleuthing has revealed that the GBP was in fact validated in the wrong town (I had misread the notes and thought there was a sequence of multiple revalidation, but it was just the one). The person who was on the Live Call is from Morocco and even though the homonymy is warned about in our internal documents, they were completely unaware and the validation ended up going up as a SAB in the wrong town.

Argh

Well, guess it's off to try and get an address to display now...

 

[Stefan Somborac]

Interesting! Thanks for sharing that discovery.