Big Problems With Google’s Local Biz

Lisa Barone at Small Business Trends highlights two big problems with Google’s local business listings – including how competitors can hijack your listing.

Many small business owners and those that work with them began receiving emails about their local business results for the month of November. The emails contained information about where the business ranked in Google’s local index, how many users clicked on the listing, how many users clicked through to the Web site, how many clicked on ‘more info’, and how many went looking for driving directions.

This is all super important information for any small business owner to know and can be used to make sensitive decisions. Problem is, business owners were getting emails about businesses they had nothing to do with. Basically, they were getting other people’s site details. And if you’re getting someone else’s analytics data, well then, who’s getting yours?

When asked, Google responded that it was “a glitch” and that less than one percent of Local Business Center users had been sent the affected emails. Of course, we don’t really know how many people “one percent” really accounts for.

Search marketer Lisa Myers showed how easy it is for a competitor to hijack your listing in Google Local Business. And she knows how easy it is because she watched it happen to one of her clients.

In her post, Lisa breaks down the exact steps that a competitor would need in order to hijack your listing. Scary is that it doesn’t seem that difficult. Just create a new listing with someone else’s company name but your address, claim and merge the listings, and then verify it via the mail.

Once that’s done, any time someone searches for you, instead of seeing your real listing, they’ll see the one for your competitor and be directed there. And just like that, your search traffic is gone. It’s just that easy and so far Google doesn’t seem to have a solution.

Photo by Google.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *