Phil Rozek has just published a great piece at his blog: Top Local SEO Myths. Phil asked me and 9 others for 3 myths about local marketing. Never one to be shy, lack for things to say or follow instructions I sent along four. Here is a sampling of my responses:

Myth One–

When you verify your listing data in Google (Places, Places for Business Dashboard, Google Plus) you are claiming your page.

Fact: Google views local as a syndicated service that uses local data stored in and retrieved from a canonical record in their Knowledge Graph. The data that you provide to them is stored in that record along with data that they get fromMapMaker, Community Edits, third party sources, web scrapes of your website etc etc etc.

The data that your provided them may or may not be considered the authoritative data in this scenario and the page that you thought you owned may show data that they think more trustworthy than what you provided.

Google will take any of the authoritative data that they have in this canonical record and show it where they think it makes the most sense. Some will show on the front page of Google search results, some will show on the Google Plus Page for your business, some will show in Maps, some will show Glass. What shows is determined by them.

Moral: Your local data is seen in Google’s main search results seen many orders of magnitude more often than your data shows on any other Google local output. In fact it might be more than the total of all of the other views in their other products and services. Thus you should focus on what your data looks like there.

You own nothing in this environment, least of all “your page” at Google.

But I was just one amongst many. There were also some incredible contributions from
Darren Shaw – Whitespark
Mary Bowling – MaryBowling.com
David Mihm – Moz
Don Campbell – Expand2Web
Greg Gifford – AutoRevo
Andrew Shotland – LocalSEOGuide
Mike Ramsey – NiftyMarketing
Linda Buquet – Local Search Forum
Adam Steele – LeanMarketing

And of course Phil. Regardless of Phil’s incredible command of the grandmother guilt tactic (But it will only take 5 minutes), the article makes for great reading.