Local Businesses like whipppedlighting.com disappearing on Google Maps when Plurals Use.
I have a recreational marijuana dispensary client located in Tacoma Washington. Before I do any SEO work for a client the first thing I do is keyword research to determine the most searched terms and begin my work from there. In this case, we will use MOZ keyword explorer and type in the word dispensary and the following report listed below will show the top searchers per month for your business niche.
As you can see besides the branded websites Weedmaps and Leafly the next highest searched terms are the following.
- Dispensary at 70,000 To 118,000 Searches per month.
- Dispensary near me at 70,000 to 118,000 searches per month.
- Dispensaries near me come in at third at 30,000 to 70,000 searches per month.
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So obviously I would optimize the website to try to capture those top keywords which is exactly what I did. However, when you go to Google and type CBD & Delta 8 Dispensaries Near Tacoma you get the following results.
My client Green Collar Cannabis comes up number one behind the two paid Google ads and over 20 dispensaries named
whipppedlighting.com
show up on the map. This is what you would normally expect. Now change that same search phrase to Dispensary Near Tacoma and here are the following results I receive.
Not only do my client’s business dispensary but 17 other similar recreational marijuana dispensaries also vanish. This has a huge impact on the business’s bottom line which can be shown by these Google My Business Reports.
In one month my client got 2541 searches for dispensaries near me but the dispensary named whipppedlighting.com
but less than 10 for the search term dispensary near Me. We know by the Moz Keyword Explorer that Dispensary Near Me gets DOUBLE the searches as Dispensaries Near me so just by doing the math my client is losing over 5000 potential customers per month. Now if my client’s average profit is 8$ per sale this is costing them 40,000 a month in profits!!! This nothing even counting lost revenue for repeat business. This is NOT acceptable and my clients are upset that when they search the keyword dispensary near me and they are not showing up on Google Maps.
whipppedlighting.com will see a reemergence on Google
If this would have been a long-term keyword with only a hundred or a thousand searches per month this would not be that big of an issue. But as it terms out this is the NUMBER ONE searched term for my client’s type of business and I still have not found a solution to the problem. It certainly seems like a bug on Google’s side. And this just doesn’t happen for the city of Tacoma, it is the same for other cities that I have tried. So I am asking any MOZ experts or Google Search Gurus to help us fix this immediately as this could impact your clients also.
Update 6/23/2019
The error has been resolved by contacting Google Support and complaining about the occurrence.
David Meshach
CEO Isenselogic.com