Best Solution/Strategy for this scenario

[Nick.SEOSpark]

In a single city, a local yoga teacher teaches at multiple (let's say 5) locations. So, these are locations that are hired out (like gyms etc).

Is it still best to have the home address (of the yoga teacher) as the singular business address on Places (as long as it's in the same city), and then choose "serve customers at their locations"/hide address on maps?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Nick,

Great question and one of those real world examples that's hard to fit into the Google maps/local world.

Since guidelines say: "You also can't create a Places listing for an ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don't own or have the authority to represent."
She can't really list the other locations.

So yes I think service area, hide address is best bet. Then in description say something like: We offer classes all over the city, see our site for locations. Or something like that.

 

[Nick.SEOSpark]

Thanks Linda. Yes, it seems like the kind of (common) situation that makes the solution less useful to users. They no doubt want to see the addresses where they will take the class rather than the teachers home/formal address.

 

[Nick Rink]

I think this is where the merged Google+ Local / Google+ Biz Pages could come in handy. It's possible to add quite a bit of additional information + links, so the client would be able to hide their address as required but then add links to the G+ Local listings of where they actually conduct their classes.

We've only gone ahead with the merge for one client so far and it looks great, even though not all the info from the dashboard shows up in the live listing. Not as "buggy" as I thought it would be, but just enough to be rather irritating