Does it make a difference which google category a custom service is entered under?

[JS Girard]

This came to me recently. A good example is roof snow removal, a seasonal service commonly offered by roofing companies in Canada. These business can have "Snow Removal Service" as a secondary category, makes sense. Now, the big question is, do you think there's any difference whether the service(s) for Roof snow removal are placed under the "roofing contractor" category instead of "Snow Removal Service"

For the purpose of this, assumes there will not be any manual category switch made during the winter season.

Non seasonal examples abound too, for example, paving, excavation and demolition are very commonly part of the range of services for companies with this sort of heavy equipment.

 

[klharris08]

This is a really good question. I do not know, never tested it.

 

[dale-jepto]

When Google suggests custom services for your profile, they do so in both the primary and additional categories. This would lead me to conclude that it should be what is the most relevant category, not what is the primary.

Having said that, services can be repeated across different categories so it might be best to put it on more than one.

 

[JS Girard]

When Google suggests custom services for your profile, they do so in both the primary and additional categories. This would lead me to conclude that it should be what is the most relevant category, not what is the primary.

Having said that, services can be repeated across different categories so it might be best to put it on more than one.

Can they? I've never checked that, but I know usually if I enter a service twice by accident it won't let me save it, so I always assumed you couldn't.

Not talking about suggested services here (those are auto selected across all the relevant categories where they are present). Talking specifically about manually entered ones.

 

[dale-jepto]

Yeah im referring to custom services too. In our platform we highlight custom services in purple, so Im trying to find an example of one where they are duplicated or where a service might be added to an unrelated category.

I tried adding one through the GBP dashboard this morning, and I'm seeing a bunch of errors. I'll do some more investigating through the API to see if there are more informative error messages as I couldn't decode the response, it just gave me two error IDs.

 

[JS Girard]

disclaimer: I only know what happens when the edits are manually done, I am not a programmer. However, that sounds a lot like your dashboard is hitting a roadblock/error message that it wasn't programmed to handle.

For the record, when trying to add such a dupe service by typing in the name, the edit box vanishes (i.e. it resets to the default state before clicking on "add custom service") and you get an error message "you already have this service":

In other words, it's not that the edit is submitted and rejected. The edit is not even submitted at all. With teh API, though, it obviously has to handle it differently!

 

[JS Girard]

Along the same line: When google translates the name of a category that previous didn't have a name in the language you're using, it's now detected as a modification. and I know for a fact it was not in the past!