Google has a lot of advice — best practices, policies, guidelines… things that are supposed to help marketers get better results.
Take this one — if you have a home-based business, Google recommends you do not put your address in your Google Business Profile. Here's what their site says:
If you don’t serve customers at your business address, do not enter an address under the ‘Info’ tab in Business Profile Manager. Leave the ‘business location’ field blank.
But what effect does leaving your address off your Google Business Profile have on your position in the search results?
Joy Hawkins from the Sterling Sky local SEO agency in Toronto published some new research about this today. I spoke with her this afternoon.
So Joy, how did you test this?
We have a multi-location client and I convinced them to let me take their address off of one of their listings that was set up as a storefront for a month. We hid the address — literally checked the box that says “Remove the address.” Then we waited a month and we looked to see what happened.
And what happened?
The rankings dropped quite a bit for some terms. Not all, I should say… some terms are completely fine. Some of the main keywords that get the highest search volume in this space were the ones that we saw the impact on. The rank tool that we used was Placescout and they take a screenshot for every single pin that they checked.
And for some of them, they actually removed the local pack altogether. It was gone the moment we hid the address. When we added the address back a month later, the local pack came back. It was just nuts.
Then it came back when we added their address back. I thought maybe it was an anomaly.
We've also tested this on two other locations for the same client, where we again went in and added the address to a listing that was hidden, saw the same decrease in ranking.
Those were the search results, but did the drop result in more downstream metrics, like a drop in call volume?
Yes.. It's pretty steady, and then just like [the other results, the call volume went down]. Then when we add it back, the calls start to go up again.
I've heard this from other businesses over the years, like, “Oh, I hid the address on my listing and my calls dropped.”
Joy Hawkins leads the Sterling Sky local SEO agency, which you can learn more about at sterlingsky.ca
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