Categories and Services

[Andrew Swan]

Question about categories and services....

Was considering cleaning up our categories a bit. We are currently utilizing 8 categories across all locations with a ton of services, some random and not related to our primary business category, listed under our primary business category so I was thinking about trimming down our categories to 3 or 4 and then organizing all of our services under the correct business categories. We are currently trying to improve our rankings for searches related to our secondary category and I saw a previous post where @JoyHawkins mentioned that services did not influence rankings but last year she ran the test again and found that services DID impact rankings so I wanted to see if anyone else had any experience with this?

Is the juice worth the squeeze? Could I possibly improve my ranking for searches related to my secondary and other business categories while maintaining my current rankings related to my primary business category? Will Google just go in and update and overwrite them afterwards?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Is the juice worth the squeeze? Could I possibly improve my ranking for searches related to my secondary and other business categories while maintaining my current rankings related to my primary business category? Will Google just go in and update and overwrite them afterwards?

Yes, 100%. Secondary categories are impactful and they don't dilute the power of the primary category.

 

[Claudia]

@Colan Nielsen every time I try to set a secondary category it ends up in position 5 out of the 6 categories I have. If I specially set my categories in order of relevance to the business why does Google keep sorting them differently after I save it?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

It's always been that way and I really don't know the answer as to why. If you discover the reasoning behind the ordering, please let us know!

 

[Claudia]

My client asked me to change his primary category from Sushi Restaurant to Japanese steakhouse. He dropped out of the local pack now sushi restaurant and its making me rethink adding all these categories. Previously I always stuck with 3 but now I have been adding up to 6 if they are relevant to the business of course. Has Sterling done any new case studies on multiple categories?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

We haven't done any recent official tests but we add as many categories as possible for our clients and we never see a negative impact, only positive impacts.

 

[JS Girard]

My client asked me to change his primary category from Sushi Restaurant to Japanese steakhouse. He dropped out of the local pack now sushi restaurant and its making me rethink adding all these categories. Previously I always stuck with 3 but now I have been adding up to 6 if they are relevant to the business of course. Has Sterling done any new case studies on multiple categories?

1) Obviously changing the primary is going to have a huge effect on ranking. I don't think anyone ever disputed that.
2) Sterling Sky has not done such a test but Darren Shaw (I dunno if he's on this forum) over at Whitespark did retest the category confusion hypothesis recently, and found it is no longer an issue.

 

[Claudia]

Thanks for sharing this! Yes I am aware primary category is most significant but but placing sushi as a secondary or in this case it keeps moving to position5. I wasn't sure if this was affecting my overall ranking. Still testing.

 

[JS Girard]

Thanks for sharing this! Yes I am aware primary category is most significant but but placing sushi as a secondary or in this case it keeps moving to position5. I wasn't sure if this was affecting my overall ranking. Still testing.

Oh. Sorry.
I think secondary categories have some sort of default sorting (some database ID, I'd assume), but I'll cop out to never having done systematic work to check for cases where the same categories are in a different order. Since secondary categories are not normally visible to gMaps visitors, I've never really given it a thought.

 

[WilliamGMBE]

@FLmanSEO @Claudia

This disussion is a little old, but wanted to share this discussion: Categories and Services can Improve Ranking? Check this idea.

This thread deals with services and categories and how you can find more. Thought you might like it.