Primary Category vs. Secondary Category

[SabrinaB]

I'm looking for opinions and personal experience-based recommendations here. (I am pretty sure I'm overthinking this but every time I think I have a handle on GBP best practices and optimization, something changes.)

Do you think you should be more or less specific with your primary category? For example, for a doctor, do you think it's better to choose the more general 'doctor' as a primary and then add something more specific (like 'pediatrician' or 'family practice physician') as a secondary? Or should you be more specific in the primary and leave the more generic to the secondary?

I have also encountered a similar conundrum with hotels that offer longer stays. Is it better to advise they choose the general 'hotel' category as the primary? Or will they perform better by going with the more specific 'extended stay hotel' category?

I know Google advises being specific, but in the latter example, I worry that by choosing the more specific category it will exclude them from more general hotel searches, for which they would still be an option.

How do you guys approach these situations?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Sabrina, in my experience you want to select the primary category that aligns with the main service/procedure etc that you want to rank best for. In your example, I would use "pediatrician" if my main practice was focused around kids. But if I was a general physician who happens to see kids I might choose 'family practice physician' as the primary and "pediatrician" as a secondary.

 

[SabrinaB]

Hi Sabrina, in my experience you want to select the primary category that aligns with the main service/procedure etc that you want to rank best for. In your example, I would use "pediatrician" if my main practice was focused around kids. But if I was a general physician who happens to see kids I might choose 'family practice physician' as the primary and "pediatrician" as a secondary.

Thanks, Colan. I also have a client in the hotel space that specializes in extended travel but also wants to appear as an option for traditional hotel stays. My instinct says to use 'extended stay hotel' as the primary (with 'hotel' as secondary) but the client is pushing back as they feel like that would exclude them from normal 'hotel' searches. In my experience, the primary being more specific should exclude them from more general searches but I would be curious to hear your thoughts.

 

[Jannell Howell]

Sabrina, have you done relevant searches for your client's area to compare the results for 'hotel' vs 'extended stay hotel'? Did it affect their ranking in Maps?

 

[WilliamGMBE]

@SabrinaB

You should consider relevance and traffic availability here. What you select as a primary category has a big influence on ranking, so best to have the most relevant and specific ones. On the other hand, you dont want to select a primary category which does not has a lot of search traffic, like if you are in a small town.

There are couple of data driven ways you can come to a conclusion here:
- Competitor analysis: You can use free version of GMBEverywhere tool to find what your competitors are doing at your location. Are there too many people with one category over the other.
- Traffic and other info:
The Category Finder tool in GMBEverywhere to dig deeper into the data to make an informed choice. Screenshot below shows the data for you specific example. In screenshot below, please note the following
Marked 1: It shows the global search for that term. Using this you can find the relative popularity of that search term.
Marked 2: It shows the related category which you can also choose from. Would suggest consider others from here too for your secondary category in case you dont select it as your primary.
Marked 3: Once you select the category you find interesting, you can click on the 'Compare on Google Trends' which will show how these terms compare relatively. You can select your specific location on Google Trends and it will show the relative popularity of the search term at your location. Google Trends is part of Google. This can give you an idea about the traffic in your location.

Hope this helps. Full disclosure, we are part of GMBEverywhere.