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Are Coworking Offices Eligible for Google My Business Listings?

Posted by MiriamEllis

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

Coworking office spaces have existed for more than a decade around the globe, and I consider it a testament to their growing popularity for start-ups and agencies that I’ve been seeing an increasing number of questions about them in recent times at places like the Moz Q&A forum and elsewhere. The burning question on everybody’s mind is: do coworking locations meet or fall afoul of the official Guidelines for Representing Your Business On Google? This article attempts to provide the most thorough possible answer to this important question.

Image courtesy of Manuel Schmalstieg on Flickr

Google isn’t always completely transparent in their guidelines, so I went for the next best thing. In researching this topic, I communicated with Google My Business Community forum Top Contributor, Colan Nielsen, and want to thank him for conferring about best practices with me.

Virtual vs. coworking offices

Let’s sync up with a couple of quick definitions.

A virtual office offers a mailing address that is not physically occupied by the purchaser. This address is generally not a P.O. box. It typically offers some means of communication via a receptionist, call center and/or voicemail. A virtual office may sometimes offer rental of conference rooms. Virtual offices fail to meet Google guidelines, including:

• Make sure that your page is created at your actual, real-world location.
• Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible.
• Provide your regular customer-facing hours of operation.
• If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at a different address from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours.

A coworking office is a space physically occupied by practitioners during stated business hours. In addition to providing desks, rooms, suites, phone booths, and other amenities, coworking spaces often promote collaboration between tenants and offer educational and social events. Many do feature a central reception desk, but participants should carefully weigh whether using such phone numbers is a wise decision.

• Properly utilized coworking spaces can be eligible for Google My Business inclusion.

10 tips for coworking local SEO success

Image courtesy of IsaacMao on Flickr

Over the past ten years, coworking spaces have popped up in cities around the world. They can be a good solution for:

• Startups with limited funding
• Sole proprietors who don’t like the quiet of working in isolation
• Home-based business owners who do not want to list their home addresses on the web
• Workers in rural areas in need of stable WiFi
• Professionals who consistently require office space but who can’t yet pay rent for a full, dedicated building
• Individuals looking for particular amenities, such as an address in a desirable location, a green environment (offered by some coworking spaces), or networking opportunities with other coworkers

If your business or your agency’s clients are researching whether a coworking space will help or hinder your local search marketing efforts, be sure any space you consider meets these requirements:

1.) You must physically occupy the space. Any other scenario revokes eligibility.

2.) You must be able to receive postal mail at the coworking space or you won’t be able to receive your Google My Business verification postcard.

3.) Many coworking spaces have a central receptionist who takes calls and messages. You will be better off listing your own phone number on your website and citations, instead — a number that connects directly to you. It’s fine if it’s a cell phone. Invest in a dedicated line for your business and always answer that phone with your business name in greeting. Your clients (and Google) want to know they’ve reached your business if/when they call.

4.) Your Google My Business listing hours of operation must accurately reflect the hours that you are actually at the office.

5.) If you rarely or never meet with clients at the office, but mainly go from the coworking space to meet them at their locations, your business model is a service area business (SAB) and should hide its address in the Google My Business dashboard to be Google guideline-compliant.

6.) If you do not accept walk-in traffic but meet clients by appointment only, again, you should hide your Google My Business address.

7.) Do not generate fake suite numbers. Unless you have been assigned a permanent, dedicated suite number in the office, simply list the main office address on your website and all citations. Concerned about citation consistency? Do a quick lookup with a tool like Check Listing to be sure you aren’t publishing variants of the address around the web.

8.) Even if you occupy different rooms at different times in the coworking space, do not be tempted to create a Google My Business listing for each of them. Create just one listing.

9.) Do not create multiple Google My Business listings for the difference services or goods you offer. You are just one business and are eligible for just one listing.

10.) Local SEO agencies serving clients who use coworking spaces must advise them of the risks and be prepared to act if there's an accidental GMB listing takedown.

The risks

A business that is staffed during stated business hours, has a dedicated phone number, and, where appropriate, is adhering to Google’s SAB guidelines, should pass Google muster. That being said, a small amount of risk exists in the coworking situation for these two reasons:

Accidental merging

In the past, Google experienced major issues with merging listings with similar details that were at the same or similar addresses. Google appears to have become increasingly sophisticated in parsing out one business from another at a shared location, but merges do still occur.

Should your business or clients experience a merge, first check for shared details apart from the address. A shared phone number appears to be the biggest risk factor, but shared Google categories between one business at a coworking space and a completely different business in the same building would be something to investigate as well. Make the details as you unique as you can and then get on the phone with Google to ask them to help you separate the listings.

Industry history

Coworking spaces are popular with tech start-ups. Unfortunately, SEO and design firms in particular have not always had an easy relationship with Google. In fact, for many years, Google excluded these industries from their local results. It’s believed that this may have been partly owing to Google’s determination that most businesses in these industries operate virtually rather than face-to-face with clients, but Google’s decision may also have been influenced by a high level of spam. Like the locksmith and auto dealership industries, tech industry companies may experience extra Google scrutiny, and a large cluster of business listings associated with a single address could potentially raise a red flag. Google could wrongly determine that a listing pertains to a virtual office rather than a staffed coworking space. If you suspect that a listing takedown has resulted from a mistake like this, your best bet is to fully explain your case on the Google My Business Community forum and ask the Top Contributors there to help.

Given these two provisos, owners and marketers promoting coworking locations should be vigilant in regularly checking up on their Google My Business listings to be sure that nothing has been merged or removed and that no strange ranking drops have suddenly occurred.

Google, the real world, and your business

Image courtesy of Jodimichelle on Flickr

Google’s rate of innovation has been breathtaking over the past two decades, and in local SEO, the pace of change has sometimes been particularly dizzying. One of the challenges I’ve encountered most in the midst of this continual technological commotion relates to Google not always accurately reflecting real-world business scenarios.

One example of this would be the many years it took them to offer a support phone number to the millions of business owners whose bottom lines and very existences were being directly impacted by Google’s local pack results. Another would be Google’s historic treatment of service-area businesses as something of an afterthought rather than a core component of local commerce.

Right now in the real world, economists say that the real rate of unemployment/underemployment in the United States is about 10%, while commercial real estate costs and rental pricing continue to skyrocket, driving would-be entrepreneurs to seek out affordable solutions to jump starting new businesses. Fortunately, this is a case in which Google appears to be keeping up with the times, allowing guideline-compliant coworking companies to be included in the local packs. To these bright new innovators who are working hard to contribute to their local communities, I’m wishing the best of success!

Coworking spaces are a good fit for many local business owners on the way up, and if you’re coworking, our community would love to hear about your experiences and tips in the comments.

Header image courtesy of Manuel Schmalstieg on Flickr.

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Posted by tylermurray

It’s been a busy quarter for the Moz Content team, and we’re excited to share the results of our hard work!

During the first few months after launch, we focused most of our energy on improving the Content Audit workflow with a few stability- and speed-related updates sprinkled in. This quarter we’ve had the opportunity to explore exciting ideas that create unique insights for you, our awesome users! These are the first (but definitely not the last) round of innovative additions for the year.

I want to see these updates in action!

One of the more challenging aspects of building and executing on a content strategy is the ideation phase. The proverbial question of “what should I write next?” is a constant theme in our customer and industry feedback. That’s why we've focused a majority of our efforts on taking the pain out of content ideation.

With that, here are the goods from Q2:

Tracked Audit redesign

Fully interactive historical data

Last quarter we received a fair amount of feedback referencing confusion with the timeframe selection in Tracked Audits. We also weren't happy with the level of interaction users had with the visualizations. With that feedback, we overhauled the entire experience to allow you the ability to drill down into specific time segments.

This becomes powerful when comparing performance of a site over, say, the previous quarter or month. You also now have the flexibility to toggle visibility of the data you care about. Don’t care about Pinterest shares of your content? Great — go ahead and toggle that off with a single click in the graph legend.

Related topics

Important topics that exist in my content domain

Ideation can be a huge challenge when consistently working to produce relevant and timely content for your audience. The new related topics feature in Content Search shows you topics your competitors are writing about that you may have missed or ignored. When ideating, this can provide a set of unique, relevant, and potentially high-performing topics to seed new ideas.

Here’s how it works

Each article has topics we’ve extracted from the page content. When you perform a Content Search, we run an aggregation over said extracted topics that takes into account publication date and Reach score to generate a list of the most relevant Related Topics for your query.

Example: Our team loves pizza, so we’re often interested in the latest pizza news. Performing a search for “pizza” articles in the last month produces what we believed to be an erroneous related keyword seen below (mount kilimanjaro). Mount Kilimanjaro?! All it took was one click to realize that no, this was no mistake: Pizza Hut delivered a pizza to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The team has to know about this! And that, my friends, is why you should all be using the Related Topics feature.

Content performance scale

Performance relative to similar content

When you’re comparing content performance against the competition, it’s not always as simple as looking at one brand or website versus your own. It’s often the case that you’re competing for viewership with many websites that bleed in and out of your primary industry or vertical. That’s why we’ve introduced a new comparison tool in our search results. We now show you how a piece of content performs relative to similar results in our search index.

This helps tease out interesting answers to questions, like "Is a goal of 25 shares on Facebook a good number for this piece of content?" Or similarly, "What’s realistic engagement on LinkedIn for content about this topic?"

Oh, and how about those Roger emoticons?! We even use them in our Slack channels!

(High-five to Derric Wise for these!)

Digest emails

A weekly snapshot of performance

With an active Tracked Audit, we crawl your site and discover, measure, and track your content on a weekly basis. Our recently released digest emails take this a step further by providing an indication of when we've completed your weekly audit, in addition to some unique highlights (or, in some cases, lowlights) from the past week.

We’ve just enabled weekly digests for all existing Tracked Audits and digests are turned on by default going forward. It’s easy to update your email settings on the Dashboard by selecting the cog icon at the top of an audit tile, or by adjusting your account-level settings at moz.com/email.

Faster searches, more results (Seriously, a lot faster!)

We know there’s no time to waste when producing awesome content for your audience! That’s why we’ve worked hard to leverage the power of ElasticSearch, an extremely powerful storage utility, which allows us to index and serve many millions of documents in a matter of milliseconds. When we started storing all of this data, we weren’t entirely sure how we'd be using it in the future. As the index grew, we were forced to cap the number of results for a query at around 13k documents due to network limitations. These latest updates to our index now allow access to millions of results and begin to open up interesting new questions.

Ready to check out the new-and-improved Moz Content?

We hope you’re as excited about these new features as we are. As always, feel free to leave questions, concerns, or ideas in the comments below! We love feedback, and we love incorporating it into the product even more.

Huge ups to the team: Greg Burton, Ben Robbins, Chris Whitten, Jay Leary, David O’Hara, and David Him.

PS: We’ll all be at a MozCon booth this year, so feel free to drop by and say hello!

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