Business shows in Maps for "unrelated" search

[Conor Treacy]

We were reviewing a site with a client that is a business broker. One of their key phrases is "buying a business" or "selling a business" and they mentioned the various competitors in the results showing everything from marketing companies, jewelry companies, and car sales are showing in the localpack and/or full map display.

They show up in the maps for the "selling a business" in position 5 on the maps, but above them is a company that is "Sell Your Car".

Everything on the "Sell Your Car" site is related to selling a car, but for them to show for "selling a business" leaves a bad user experience in search.

Is there any mechanism to report this to Google?

It's not a GMB Violation. No abuse. It's not spam (except for the spammy ones). It could be classed as misleading, but it's misleading that it's in the result, not the business itself.

 

[Justin Mosebach]

2 ideas that might work?

1. You could try posting about it on the official GBP Forum.
2. Try clicking on the "Send feedback" button at the bottom of the SERP (and get others to do the same).

 

[keyserholiday]

2 ideas that might work?

1. You could try posting about it on the official GBP Forum.
2. Try clicking on the "Send feedback" button at the bottom of the SERP (and get others to do the same).

This isn't something we can assist with on the forum. We have had a few of these issues and we couldn't get them resolved as it's outside of GBP and is related to ranking.

 

[Conor Treacy]

Check the anchor text used in their backlink profile

Checked and verified, nothing about selling a business, but since they have the words "sell a car", "selling a car" and they have the word "business" - just not as a "selling a business" type phrase.

I ran a backlink check via ahrefs, scanned for both anchor and "surrounding text". Nothing in the anchor, but some had "business for over 30 years" - but the anchor being "like this site" (which is really poor SEO anyway!)

I'll run a post over on the GBP forum and see if anyone has any ideas. I submitted "feedback" for the "Your opinions on Maps" as that seemed the most appropriate option in the list.

If I make any progress, I'll post here also.

 

[Brian Barwig]

Youre probably going to have to try and overtake them as reporting them won't work. Try adjusting your Title, Meta and Headers on the home page to something along the lines of "sell your business" and see if it pushes the client site up.