Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Can You Spell Restuarant?
One of the struggles of researching local marketing is the fact that I frequently misspell the word Restaurant. I am obviously not the only one. I searched today for Pittsburgh Pa Restuarants to find this Authoritative OneBox:
The record has not been claimed by the business owner as of yet but it made me curious how widely the error had penetrated the Internet. On the search “Arby’s Roast Beef Restuarants” it cropped up 33 times including Yelp and Allpages.com amongst others.
This search result put several issues in sharp relief for me:
1-Google’s Authoritative Onebox is far less than perfect and predicates its results too heavily on business title.
2- Once an error like this crops into one electronic directory, it crops into many. It will be an annoying problem for the business owner to solve.
3- Now more than ever, it is critical to double check your marketing message before you hit the return key!
© Copyright 2024 - MIKE BLUMENTHAL, ALL RIGHT RESERVED.
Comments
10 Comments
Mike,
Interesting post. In this case, I’m sure Arby’s, the franchise owner of Arby’s, or someone else just made a mistake. But, perhaps, it’s a good mistake. If enough people are searching for restaurants misspelled, a little known restaurant could end up getting a share of that traffic (though at the cost of having posts like yours brought to the consumer’s attention).
Vinicius
http://www.yipit.com
One of the things that I observed in doing the research on ranking factors for Google Maps, was that franchise restaurants were clueless about the opportunities in local and how to go about striving for them. They very rarely have in a place a local strategy and that appears to be the case here as well.
This mistake might have even propagated from an error in their phone book listing, I am not really sure. That would be interesting to ferret out.
While a misspelling like this might lead to some positive traffic, in this case at least, the price seems too high to me. Its one thing to have a deep page in a website optimized for a common spelling error, its another to have your business function as highlighted in your title misspelled. It speaks of carelessness and a certain too fast food mentality.
BTW Good luck with the rollout of Yipit.com, I hope that it goes well.
Mike
One of the things that I observed in doing the research on ranking factors was that franchise restaurants were clueless about the opportunities in local and how to go about striving for them. They very rarely have in a place a local strategy and that appears to be the case here as well.
This mistake might have even propagated from an error in their phone book listing, I am not really sure. That would be interesting to ferret out.
While a misspelling like this might lead to some positive traffic, in this case at least, the price seems too high to me. Its one thing to have a deep page in a website optimized for a common spelling error, its another to have your business function as highlighted in your title misspelled. It speaks of carelessness and a certain too fast food mentality.
BTW Good luck with the rollout of Yipit.com, I hope that it goes well.
Mike
“It speaks of carelessness and a certain too fast food mentality.”
Hahaha. That made me laugh.
Mike, have you lost your stylesheet?
Miriam
Hi Miriam…
I have lost my styesheet. Am waiting on the sysadmin to restore…we were restoring from a drive array issue and the template and some of the images were creamed.
Mike
I’m sure it was a mistake. Meanwhile I couldn’t think of a more valuable mistake, from a marketing perspective.
1. There are a reasonable number of misspellings in searches (gawd knows I make enough of them).
2. Authoritative onebox sites are amazing traffic generators.
I could “live” with that mistake. I have several authoritative one boxes that apply to a couple of business phrases. One is a relatively high traffic long tail phrase…..ever since the authoritative onebox has kicked in traffic for that phrase compared to similar phrases that had similar traffic over years has simply exploded. I have some authoritative oneboxes for dramatically less popular phrases, yet those two have shown marked increases in traffic since the onebox kicked in.
I’m not telling people to make mistakes, or spam for oneboxes….but if you can get them they are very worthwhile.
Well they would be worthwhile if it was something other than fast food 🙂
I am not sure that a person searching on “restuarant pittsburgh pa” is looking for an Arby’s. 🙂
Mike
😀 yeah….I have to agree with you, Mike. I don’t believe in spamming the engines. If a mistake of that type pops up…wow, though: Its lucky. Authoritative one boxes dominate the real estate of a search page and definitely drive traffic to a site. The traffic might not stick. If you were looking for an elegant restaurant or restuarant in Pittsburgh, you probably wouldn’t end up at Arby’s.
Google’s algo results probably are too many for Google itself to monitor without complex automated reviews. I imagine its difficult to pick through the various onebox results that really shouldn’t be there and eliminate those that seem inappropriate for search.
Dave
Hi,
“I am not sure that a person searching on “restuarant pittsburgh pa” is looking for an Arby’s.”
–> thats not the point for the seo’s…. if theres a keyword like “Detektei Hamburg” and that keywords is worth 70 Dollar you can be sure all the seos will use that keyword to drive traffic to their websites just 2 eran the money. No matter if the searcher has to visit non-interesting pages 😉
Hi Stefan
You are right about that although in this case it appears to have happened out of owner carelessness somewhere along the line….
Mike
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