Lessons from messing up your Google Places Settings

I took up a job to find out why these paralegals in Riverside were suddenly no longer ranking for local oriented searches. After a little poking around, I found that they had changed their Google Places setting:

They had changed this setting to be “Yes, this business serves customers at their locations”, instead of serving at their location. If you have a brick and mortar, your site/business and citations are treated differently! If you DO have a location, then make sure you play that card for all it’s worth. Otherwise, you need to make sure you’ve got enough area specific keyword references backing up your listed service areas if you don’t have a brick and mortar address.