Lachlan_Wells
Member
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2019
- Messages
- 49
- Reaction score
- 43
After Google confirmed last week that they won't manually review submissions to change names, and several years offering spam cleanup as a service, I'm starting to think it might be time to evolve my definition of keyword stuffing. Have I succumbed to joining a team I can't beat? Well maybe, but hear me out first.
The vast majority of listings breaking the business name guideline aren't alphabet soup like the canadian loan agency below, they're borderline cases like this Hertz listing. If you're Hertz's competitor, you're reliant on Google to fix this of course.
However, Google's mission is not to provide the best search results, it's to provide the best user experience.
In a way, the guidelines are a prototype of this UX ideal, where every business name contains only a brand and all descriptors are elsewhere. By delegating all name decisions to AI though, Google has decided that name standards are ultimately set by the user. If hardly any local guides are submitting name edits and the ML algo doesn't receive enough conflicting data, then the name the business owner has chosen must be OK.
The question is, what do you do if you operate in a market full of competitors like Hertz, where the most visible profiles all follow the same name conventions and repeated edits haven't worked? Do you start a network of fake accounts and submit edits from different IPs, or do you ask your customers to help after they've already rated, reviewed and uploaded photos? This doesn't seem realistic.
Perhaps we should treat business names the way we've always treated page titles? If we don't think our users will mind a few extra keywords, we add them to the title so they can potentially increase rank. Or if we want to stand out, we might try a super short title and see if that improves CTR. With both page titles and GMB, there's no penalty if Google decides they have to change your name, so we're free to experiment. Until we have a local algo that doesn't rely massively on keywords in business names, maybe the best way to serve our clients is to balance the needs of the business with the needs of the user instead of attempting to enforce a standard we can't control.
The vast majority of listings breaking the business name guideline aren't alphabet soup like the canadian loan agency below, they're borderline cases like this Hertz listing. If you're Hertz's competitor, you're reliant on Google to fix this of course.
However, Google's mission is not to provide the best search results, it's to provide the best user experience.
In a way, the guidelines are a prototype of this UX ideal, where every business name contains only a brand and all descriptors are elsewhere. By delegating all name decisions to AI though, Google has decided that name standards are ultimately set by the user. If hardly any local guides are submitting name edits and the ML algo doesn't receive enough conflicting data, then the name the business owner has chosen must be OK.
The question is, what do you do if you operate in a market full of competitors like Hertz, where the most visible profiles all follow the same name conventions and repeated edits haven't worked? Do you start a network of fake accounts and submit edits from different IPs, or do you ask your customers to help after they've already rated, reviewed and uploaded photos? This doesn't seem realistic.
Perhaps we should treat business names the way we've always treated page titles? If we don't think our users will mind a few extra keywords, we add them to the title so they can potentially increase rank. Or if we want to stand out, we might try a super short title and see if that improves CTR. With both page titles and GMB, there's no penalty if Google decides they have to change your name, so we're free to experiment. Until we have a local algo that doesn't rely massively on keywords in business names, maybe the best way to serve our clients is to balance the needs of the business with the needs of the user instead of attempting to enforce a standard we can't control.
