Don’t lose your Google MyBusiness Map Entry Again!
Claim, update, and curate your Google Map entries.
The Issue
Texas A&M University had encountered issues in the past of losing map entry locations on Google Maps. After troubleshooting the second incident in 2016, the Web Development unit from the Division of Marketing & Communications decided to make a long-term effort initiative in claiming, securing, updating, and curating all of Texas A&M’s locations and landmarks on Google Maps.
The Impact
Google Maps works in a way that anybody can create a map entry. Sometimes Google creates the entry itself by crawling web pages, pulling locations from those web pages, and then creating entries. Google also considers account activity on entries as evidence of it being maintained, such as leaving a comment, posting a review, or uploading a photograph. The location information then changes over time with inconsistent sources of ownership and without accountability for updating these entries. A serious problem can compound over time. For example, within a two-month span, Texas A&M lost ownership of the university entry twice. At that point, it was very difficult to reclaim the location.
The Working Solution
A verified Google MyBusiness account can help you recognize and organize your business listings on Google Maps. You can connect your current Gmail account with a Google MyBusiness account. If you do not have a Gmail account, you can create an account.
Go to business.google.com to get started with a new account. The Google MyBusiness account makes it easier to directly validate and claim ownership of new locations. Request “bulk verification for 10+ locations” to make the account more useful. Google has a customer service page at https://support.google.com/business/answer/4490296?hl=en explaining how to do this. Without this extra step, account owners will have to use the postcard validation method for every location they are trying to claim. Since Google doesn’t support the concept of mailstop and postal delivery to street addresses, the postcard method isn’t always reliable on campus, and it can take quite a bit of time.
For universities or agencies with less than 10 locations, claiming your location entries is a smaller, but still tedious, process. For those with more than 10 locations, the bulk verification ability makes the process much easier. In order to understand which path to take, consider how your university or agency may define a location.
Defining A Location
A location can be a specific department, a lab, facility, or other business units. Physical locations such as buildings, monuments, or historical markers may be added, but Google now prefers business units. You may consider a location open to the public or private, such as a lab that requires card access.
Within one building you may have a handful of major offices and services that your general public may need to access. Therefore, you may have several different map entry locations in the same physical building.
More Than 10 locations | Texas A&M University’s Route
After consultation and research, Texas A&M dedicated time to create and validate their own Google MyBusiness account. Texas A&M started this project in July of 2016, and projected the project to take two years.
Professionals within the Division of Marketing & Communications jumped through many hoops to get to where they are at now with their Google MyBusiness account. Since Texas A&M had several locations already claimed by others, they had to divide and conquer in order to get past the first step: verifying their Google MyBusiness account.
Unlike other business with three to five locations, Texas A&M estimated to have 1,100 – 1,200 locations with about half of them being open to the public. This means roughly 600 Texas A&M locations are available for the public to search, call, visit, and review throughout the year.
Texas A&M’s method to achieve such a feat was to collaborate across campus. In order to get the Google MyBusiness account, you have to own at least ten locations that have been already validated through the postcard method. You have to show that you own all of those by making the information on the Google location entry exactly match what’s on the website that it links to. The Division of Marketing & Communications didn’t have ten locations on their own, so they reached out to others on campus – the libraries, Health Science Center, Athletics, and Engineering – so collectively they could validate 10 entries.
This took a great deal of cooperation. Those areas were willing to make updates to their website so the process could get completed. Once that hurdle was overcome, the Division of Marketing & Communications was able to claim all of the college and departmental entries.
Within the account entry, Google allows the concept of co-owners. In order to keep this a cooperative project as it had started, the Division of Marketing & Communications then shared back ownership of every entry. This way it’s not MarComm controlling everything, but each department is able to make able to make their own updates.
Obtaining ownership of the 10 entries took a month and a half to two months. Most of the time went to submit to Google, having Google evaluate the submissions, and the Texas A&M team going back to make changes.
What To Look Out For
REJECTIONS: Google rejected several of our location submissions. Sometimes it was a matter of having the submitted photo being different from what was in the map entry. Google insisted that it match exactly. I tried to submit something for the visitor center, for example. The on-location photo showed “Appelt Aggieland Visitor Center,” which is what is on the wall in the physical location – but the website and printed literature simply said “Visitor Center.” Google rejected that one because the wording on the building didn’t exactly match the wording on the website.
Also, Google is interested in providing directions rather than delivering mail. So it wants addresses in a format of a street address rather than mailstops. Websites, though, tend to post their mailing addresses on the site and not their street address. Google would reject the entry if the street address wasn’t there.
PHOTO DISCREPANCIES: The group who had agreed to let us use their locations were a great help here. We were able to edit or add information to websites so that it would match Google’s needs. Athletics was particularly helpful in this. I consider this a great success in the overall level of cooperation and collaboration that we’re starting to develop across campus.
ONLINE RESOURCES: When submitting validation requests, keep in mind that Google is a very large organization. As such they are very rigid in enforcing their guidelines. There is little room for exceptions. Even when Google’s guidelines do not make sense for your organization, they are inflexible in interpreting and enforcing them. Even if you have a validated account, they will still not make exceptions. So for greatest success, you should carefully read Google’s requirements and adhere to them exactly.
Make A Plan. Get Started Today
Having a concerted effort to claim your locations on Google brings many benefits. You will always have people looking for directions. Claiming locations and keeping the information updated makes it easy for people to actually know where they’re going and wind up in the proper location.
The second big benefit is the search optimization benefits that it produces. Google, Bing, and other search engines place greater importance on data sources that they see as being important, primary, and up-to-date. So, as you’re making updates to the map’s entries, and making the entries more complete (web links, photos, office hours, etc.), each component that is added makes the search engine see that is incrementally being a more and more valuable resource. Your location then starts progressing in the search rankings, not just on the maps, but also on the general searches related to these locations as well.
Third, through collaborative efforts, you can build a strong community of contacts across your university or agency who you can rely on. These partnerships are important and will strengthen the success of this large project.