The Power and Impact of Google Maps

[earlpearl]

As a business operator I was blown away by the following post in google groups for business owners/maps.

As maps or one box results are dropped into organic searches they have an incredible impact on businesses. I sporadically follow posts on this google groups. I have asked for and gotten help there. I have provided help.

Mike Blumenthal and his blog follow these issues far more closely than I.

After seeing the post I did an organic search for Denver florists and the results were different than reported.

Sometimes raising bloody hell w/ at this group produces very fast results.

here is the post by a business owner that blew me away:

We own Denver Flowers, Inc. in Denver, Colorado. We have 2 retail
locations in Denver, Colorado. Our url is www.denverflowers.com. We
have been listed on Google for approx. 3 years. We have the #1
natural position in Denver Flowers. We have the #2 natural position
in Denver Florist. We have spent $118,000 in adwords advertising for
the past 3 years.

When performing a natural search for Denver Flowers you solely get a
local map for Lehrer's Flowers: Denver, not Denver Flowers. When
searching for Denver Flowers Denver, you get a map of one of our
locations. When you search Lehrer's Flowers, you get no map at all.


When searching any metropolitan area in the US, this type of mapping
result NEVER occurs outside of Seattle, Washington. When performing
the natural search for Seattle Flowers, the search result is a map for
Seattle Flowers in Seattle. Every other metropolitan area returns
multiple results for "flowers in xxxxx city".


Lehrer's is our largest competitor in Denver and this has basically
shutdown our business overnight. This update was done to the maps 36
hours ago and there was an immediate, massive reduction in our
volume. Approx. 95% of our business is internet based volume.


As you are aware, it is impossible to actually speak to a person on
the Maps team. I have contacted Google 7 times in the past 2 days and
was solely able to speak with representatives from the adwords team
and one main receptionist. The first 5 people on the adwords team I
spoke to all agreed this was a major and transparent problem for my
organization. The 6th person, Derek, said "the system works as
designed". Google tapes all these conversations and they will verify
my account.


I called Navteq in in a desperate attempt to reach anyone to assist in
helping me keep my company alive. I talked to 3 reps at Navteq. The
first 2 representatives, including a supervisor said "I totally agree
you have a major problem", the third representative was extremely
helpful but her screen was showing different search results than the
other 8 people I had already talked to. I have all of these names and
times if you want verification of these discussions.


I have sent probably 8 e-mails to various accounts in trying to reach
someone at Google to assist with this problem over the past 2 days.
These include e-mails to local-help@google, click-to-call@google and
some account reached through the press link on Google's website.


We are now less than 1 week from Christmas, our busiest time of year,
and critical weakness in the "algorithm" for maps has bankrupted my
company. This issue is not gray, it is very glaring and 100% of
reasonable people - as well as Google's internal statistics of website
traffic to our site - would back-up our account of the circumstances.


We are simply desperate. We have invested $100,000s in our
organization and have relied on Google as a honest partner in building
our business. We have paid you over $118,000 and your stock price is
a $675, all we want is someone to help us in getting our competition's
map off the Denver Flowers page.


PLEASE HELP us. I realize we are nothing to you, but my family is
losing everything.


Tim Johnson
President
Denver Flowers, Inc.
720.273.2783

There were some follow up posts, including one by a business person sympathyzing w/the business owner and another with a different outlook. This other person referenced that the business owner shouldn't put all his marketing reliance on Google.

But frankly, what is an operator to do when the buying public is dramatically using search all the time and ignoring other marketing media.

It really speaks to the power of Google Maps.

Of similar vein, but seemingly not as critical I interacted with someone else who has suffered from G maps not having updated address information for about a year. Frankly the business operator didn't even realize there was an option to get google customer service reps to respond and help them to correct Google Maps information till months and months had passed.

Of interest, this business operator referenced that there had been continuous problems with potential customers going to a wrong address over the year. After a while they started responding to the calls with a question asking where the misdirected customer got the wrong address. In every single case, according to the business operator the source of the information was google (google maps --because the website had accurate address information)

In any case this is a system that has potential for amazing impact, can have serious impact on businesses, is essentially moving into a monopolistic position due to command of market share, and needs to see, IMHO serious improvement.

(glad that business wasn't mine)

Dave