The Local SEO Industry lost a good friend today. Rest in peace disclosed categories in Google Maps.
For those that don’t know about local search engine optimization, how to get higher ranking in Google Maps, a major criteria of ranking is understanding which categories to be listed under and in what order.
Before June 22, 2009, one could spend a day and analyze which businesses come up 1st – 5th in Google Maps and create a fairly reasonable assumption for which categories to list their own business in to be ranked near or above the competition. To find the categories, one only needed to click the map itself in the business profile, which produced a call out with the business address and a few additional fields and clickable options. Among them was a link to “Edit”, which invoked a window that anyone could see and populate (provided the business didn’t claim their listing already). If the business had been categorized, up to 5 categories would be exposed and the researching marketer could make note of the categories and sequence.
Today those fields are hidden from users and from bots (yes, at Local Splash we figured out a way around the legacy system). This change is ironclad and no scrape, bot or hack can see categories.
Let’s hope there’s enough feedback going out to Google about this awful change in Google Maps so that we can have access to fair competitive data and not have to guess which categories will provide us with the best results. Call your Congressman people!
