You know the drill, showing up in a google map pack, matters. Being competitive in the Google Map Pack, is gold. When you rank higher than the rest it can mean the difference between starving and being the most popular kid in high school. But, cheating at it will get you busted.
First off, if you’re a business owner in Minneapolis or Saint Paul and are riding the gravy train of virtual office locations, stop. Google is starting to crack down on virtual offices and fake listings, and it’s easy to figure out when google owns that data. After getting national news coverage for fake business listings, google started removing all virtual offices in Minneapolis and St. Paul, if the algorithm missed you, then a competitor may not, and it is easy to report if you know what you’re doing. So, if your shooting for a Regus style virtual office address and trying to hit volume numbers in Minneapolis or Saint Paul and you have some fancy address located at 100 S 5th St, Suite 1900 Minneapolis, MN 55402, your days are numbered. So, all those reviews you worked to get, maybe even invested in getting will be gone and non-transferable.
With that being said; if you have a physical location and a website. You can still target the SAB (Service Area Business) correctly and rank with local landing pages. Those are pages dedicated to local areas, such as your physical business is in Bloomington, but you want to be able to serve Minneapolis. This can be accomplished correctly with SAB + Local Landing page. We do this on many of the sites where a service serves a larger area than a single location. Moving Companies, Lawyers… you name the service and we can show you where expanding your area will help.
Want to get rid of the competitions virtual office locations? We also offer reporting services for companies who wish to those competitive virtual locations gone along with complete Google My Business (GMB) management. There is a right way to compete.