Greetings from inside the SEOigloo!
For the past couple weeks, Mike has been documenting the very real angst small local business owners have been suffering as a result of finding themselves incorrectly categorized in Google Maps. Imagine if you were a carpet cleaner, but the closest thing you could find in Google’s Local Business Center’s Categories was House Cleaning Service. So, you put yourself in that category, not able to find a better one. Then, when you go to see how you’re doing in Maps, you discover that all of your local competition is somehow appearing in Maps in a Category called Carpet Cleaners. You know no such category is available in Google’s Local Business Center. How on earth are your competitors pulling this off, leaving you in a state of local anonymity?
As Mike has figured out, Google is pulling these more diverse and often more accurate categories from Superpages. Not only has he discovered this, but he has formulated a plan for getting yourself out of the undesired Maps category into the right Superpages one so that your business will be correctly listed for the phrase that truly describes what you do.
Read Mike’s step-by-step guide, complete with a helpful diagram, to get your business out of Category Limbo and into Local Heaven again.
Mike did an awesome job on this and his findings are going to come as a tremendous boon to any small business owner who has found themselves in this puzzling predicament.