More threads by JoshuaMackens

JoshuaMackens

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CPA. We dropped on 8/7/19 and then again on 9/10/19 in Google Maps.

8/7/19 was a 3.5 spot drop

9/10/19 was an absolute brutal drop of 15 spots.

On 8/7/19 I got a notification about an update to our GMB page. The category was changed from "Certified Public Accountant" to "Financial Planner". Suite was tweaked slightly, and then tried to update our website to a different website (we use our own website for ranking purposes and there are two other websites 1) corporate 2) file sharing site which also has business information, basically an old website, this was the website updated to). I believe this is also when the "Manage this listing" tag popped up which is used for franchise listings (which this client is a franchise). It's also possibly when the corporate website started outranking us for brand queries. When you Google our brand in our location, the corporate website location page ranks #1, we rank #2. I changed it all back but there was no ranking recovery.

On 9/10/19, this was the devastating drop. No idea what could have caused this.

1) I mean, we're kind of ranking like a "Financial Planner" at this point, meaning that we don't rank well at all in Maps for any of our keywords while we're outranking all local competitors organically. I wonder if Google took my main category edit back to "Certified Public Accountant" but kept "Financial Planner" in its memory somehow? I mean the franchise is known as a CPA franchise, so I don't know how Google bungled that change so poorly. But the suite change is something that's out there on the internet as well. And we're ranking dastardly in Maps. I wonder if someone at corporate uploaded information to GMB somehow and got everything confused? Where did these changes come from? They don't seem like a user edit, no one has access to this listing besides myself, no 3rd party apps I'm aware of (I didn't install any certainly and I'm the only user period), so it had to be a Google edit, right?

2) On the 9/10/19 drop, no idea what could have caused this. Does anyone know of a Google update at that point?

Any insight is appreciated!
 
Something went down on Sept 10 for sure. Lot's of swings that day. What I noticed most was phrases that included a location: "keyword + town".
 
So I went back and checked my other clients for both of those days and there's significant movement for many of my clients on both of those days.

Did anyone else see anything similar to Yan and I?
 
Yes, a client I was working on saw significant gains on that day.
 
What's weird is we've only increased organically because of backlinks. Since we're a CPA we're a little volatile since the whole industry uses "CPA" in their name on GMB. They are not allowed to do that since the CPA is using a DBA, so it puts us way behind the curve. But other than that, I can't explain the drop quite honestly.
 

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