Page 49 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

always zoomed out to include your actual listing location, even though you are a SAB and do not
have a pin on the maps. This is why having the cities showing listings from the other city prior to
running the test is a good control. The result confirms it is the service area listed on the GMB
listing giving you the opportunity to show in the maps pages while in that location.

The Effectiveness of GMB App Edits

Test Setup:

There are multiple ways to make edits to your GMB listing. Depending on how you submit GMB
listing edits, you can get a different outcome. To test the effectiveness of GMB app edits we
made a total of 15 GMB edits to 9 different listings through the GMB mobile app.

Test Results: November 13, 2020

The ONLY edit giving us problems was moving the address, which caused a soft suspension that
required re-verification to make edits (that was expected). There were ZERO hard suspensions.

Now, we don't want to say using the app is 100% safe, but we are continuing to push the limits.
We have even taken a fake listing that we have reported on in the past (My Marketer) and
attempted to change the category and name to one of the "spammier" categories we could think
of - pest control. Within 3 hours both changes were approved even though we didn't update the
website, my marketer.com, or remove/change the marketing posts we previously published.

We did notice that although the change occurred, there were some weird filtering issues in the
local SERPs. We showed up in maps when searching "pest control guys Chicago", but did not
show for "pest control guys in Chicago", "pest control service Chicago", and other similar terms.
We then did a "search from location" using Bright Local’s local search tool, and confirmed that we
could not find our listing on any of the pages in maps. We also checked "plumbers near
Gettysburg" while in Hanover and Gettysburg and found the same results, no listing...

This result makes us believe that the switch in a category is the main reason our Chicago listing
isn't showing immediately. Changing the category may have triggered a spam score that caused
a temporary filter. If changing categories can cause this then the question is, does adding
categories to an established listing cause the same effect? More importantly, could it impact the
other category rankings and how? These are questions for our category/subcategory tests, but
based on the category changing, we can confirm the mobile app edits can be effective to update
listing details.

49