Listing Not Ranking After Recovering from "We Currently Do Not Support" Error

[Katherine]

Listing Not Ranking After Recovering from "We Currently Do Not Support" Error

Hi,

Our client's listing started getting the 'We currently do not support this location' a few months ago. They are a service area business, but we hid their address about a week after the Google Places Policy update. We filled out a support ticket to resolve the issue and now their listing is live.

However, now they are ranking terribly and their analytics show very few impressions. They used to be in the top 20 in local (not great, but not too bad), and now they are somewhere on the 7th or 8th page for their major categories + location. Any thoughts as to why this is happening?

Company Details:

https://plus.google.com/117711472001336851252/about?gl=us&hl=en

Rineair Heating & Air Conditioning​

485 Ohio Pike
Cincinnati OH 45255
United States

Categories: Air Conditioning Contractor, Heating Contractor, Furnace Repair Service, Air Conditioning Repair Service, HVAC Contractor

 

[Linda Buquet]

Re: Listing Not Ranking After Recovering from "We Currently Do Not Support" Error

Katherine,

No time to investigate in detail right now but a couple quick thoughts.

1st of all best practice is NOT to repeat name, city, state in description and I and others believe she sometimes gives a ranking penalty as keyword repetition is what spammers do. This listing has name repeated once and city and state both repeated twice. In my Advanced Places training I go into more details on this and give suggestions for writing a good description. I'll try to go dig up and post some more tips later.

The other thing I OFTEN wonder, is whether when a listing is deleted then re-instated, whether it starts over in the cycle and can take about 6 weeks to start ranking again and show analytics. (Not sure it's true but seems like it to me.)

The other thing I wonder about - is I've seen listings that once penalized seem to carry the penalty for awhile. For instance I've had consulting clients that were suspended, then after suspension could not rank. Seems it took about 8 month for many of them, then suddenly they would be back up to their previous high ranking.

Again, no time to really analyze this one right this sec, just some quick thoughts.

Anyone else have any feedback?

 

[Katherine]

Re: Listing Not Ranking After Recovering from "We Currently Do Not Support" Error

Hi Linda,

Thanks for your speedy response!

I had removed one mention of service area from the description when reviewing the listing since I was worried about it, I agree it looks a bit spammy. However, most of our listings have one mention of the service area, do your recommend against that? I always thought it was helpful from a user perspective since the service area of a business is hard to access on Maps. We haven't had any penalties before for it that I am aware of, but I guess the listing was manually reviewed when it was re-instated so that might have caused a problem for this listing.

I was wondering if you had heard about anyone else having this problem? Do you think some sort of penalty is carrying over from the listing being removed?

Thanks for your help,
Katherine

 

[Linda Buquet]

Re: Listing Not Ranking After Recovering from "We Currently Do Not Support" Error

However, most of our listings have one mention of the service area, do your recommend against that? I always thought it was helpful from a user perspective since the service area of a business is hard to access on Maps. We haven't had any penalties before for it that I am aware of, but I guess the listing was manually reviewed when it was re-instated so that might have caused a problem for this listing.

Sorry, just found time to circle back around on this one.

Well the problem is not repeating "service area" per se it's repeating the city the address is in.

If the service area is Cincinnati and that's the city they are located in, then the customer searched for Cincinnati and your client came up because they are located in Cincinnati, so it's redundant to mention it again.

Different story if they were in Irvine Ca and you wanted to mention they serve all of "Orange County".

Curious why you hid address. It looks like they are in a commercial location?

 

[Katherine]

Re: Listing Not Ranking After Recovering from "We Currently Do Not Support" Error

Hi Linda,

We hid the address because of the change to Google's guidelines: "If you don't conduct face-to-face business at your location, you must select "Yes, this business serves customers at their locations" under the "Service Areas and Location Settings" section of your dashboard, and then select the "Do not show my business address on my Maps listing" option."

Since this is a contractor who primarily serves people at their homes, we thought it was best to hide their address although they do have an office.

We did this for all our clients, but this is the only one whose rankings have dropped. I think it must have something to do with that "we currently do not support error."

Thanks for your input, greatly appreciated!
Katherine