Google’s New Local Business Center Guidelines

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

This morning we discussed Google’s new page previews feature in the SERPs. Well, Google also introduced new guidelines for Local Business Center listings. These guidelines could affect you.

Among the new guidelines for the Google Local Business Listing are as follows:

• Your Google Local Business Listing must match your full legal business name. This is significant because you can’t keyword base your Google Local Business Listing listing. If your business name is Al’s Italian Restaurant and your primary menu item is pizza, you can’t include the word “pizza” in your title. It has to be “Al’s Italian Restaurant.”
• P.O. Box are no longer allowed for business addresses. This might actually be a good guideline for controlling spam, but it will also shut some legitimate businesses who operate through a P.O. Box. It will put a damper on some home-based businesses for sure.
• If you rent office space, you can’t use your office address. You must use the office address of your landlord, the “central office.”
• If you have more than one person updating your Local Business Center listing then you must use one shared e-mail account. This is obviously to cut down on the practice of multiple accounts for the same business.
• If possible, use an e-mail address from a domain that matches your website URL. That means no hotmail, Yahoo!, or even Gmail accounts. If your business website is giraffetoys.com then you can use an e-mail address like you@giraffetoys.com.

You can get more information on these guideline changes at Blumenthals. The full list of guidelines for Google Local Business Center can be found at Google Maps.