Google Places Marketing The Wrong Way

In a com­pet­i­tive mar­ket, some com­pa­nies will do any­thing to get ahead. Even for­get­ting about the moral con­sid­er­a­tions, how­ev­er, many under­hand­ed prac­tices will back­fire, even if they seem to work in the short run. Here is an exam­ple that stood out to me recent­ly (but for legal rea­sons I’ll avoid the com­pa­ny names for now): I have a large paint­ing client in the Chica­go area who has a com­peti­tor with a name near­ly iden­ti­cal to theirs. They have had sev­er­al legal bat­tles over the name issue; the guy dis­ap­pears for a while, and then keeps show­ing up again! Today I was doing some research for this client and dis­cov­ered this com­peti­tor on Google Places. He had 4 reviews, so I took a clos­er look. After look­ing at the reviews, I’m 99% sure that they are most­ly or com­plete­ly bogus. Here´s why I think so: 

1. The date stamp: all 4 reviews were writ­ten on the same day. This can be a coin­ci­dence, but it’s not very like­ly that four real clients would hap­pen to write reviews on the same day, and none on any oth­er day. What is more like­ly is that one per­son signed in under four dif­fer­ent names.
2. All four reviews have key­words in them, which I have nev­er seen a cus­tomer do. A cus­tomer of any com­pa­ny will not use key­words like, ​“They were the best house painter Green Bay WI in town. Peo­ple don’t talk or write that way! That was the clinch­er for me. I knew then that all were made up.

Why did the com­peti­tor do this? Prob­a­bly he sat in on a webi­nar or read an arti­cle that said that more reviews on Google Places you have, the bet­ter place­ment you will receive on Google search­es. So, will this trick work? Prob­a­bly not. Google might be the largest search engine in the world, but there are real peo­ple (and very, very smart ones) behind the scenes mak­ing sure that they keep it the best. They are con­stant­ly mon­i­tor­ing how com­pa­nies pro­mote them­selves online. If they dis­cov­er that a web­site or rank­ing is using ​“black hat” tech­niques, they will quick­ly remove the com­pa­ny and/​or URL from the web for quite some time. Four dif­fer­ent review from a sin­gle IP address would alert Google that some­one is resort­ing to ​“naughty” pro­mo­tion­al prac­tices. What can a com­pa­ny do then to increase their rank­ings on Google Places? The way it is cur­rent­ly set up, the best prac­tice is to take your time and build qual­i­ty reviews from mul­ti­ple sites — not just Google. Google wants to see a vari­ety of qual­i­ty reviews done on dif­fer­ent days and at dif­fer­ent times. There is noth­ing wrong with call­ing up a cus­tomer and ask­ing him or her to write a review. Spread it out a lit­tle bit so they´re not doing it on the same day. Maybe set a goal of 2 – 3 per week. Ask them to use Google, Yelp, City­Search, Mojo Pages and more. Mar­ket­ing takes time! It’s always been that way. Peo­ple think that because we live in such a fast-paced soci­ety, we can acheive #1 results on the web overnight. Some­times being tricky you will get lucky and get good place­ment. But like most oth­er parts of life and busi­ness, dis­hon­esty doesn’t pay off in the long-run. It might suc­ceed in the present, but it will usu­al­ly fall apart in time.