What To Do When Moving Business Addresses
A common question we get asked at Meaningful Marketing is whether or not moving can hurt your Google My Business or organic search rankings. I’ve already written an article on whether or not changing your business name affects your search engine rankings, and the same answer applies here if your business is moving, and in the instance of moving, you want to make sure you follow steps I’m about to lay out in this blog post.
You could see a loss in Google My Business rankings if you don’t follow the steps laid out in this post.
Update Your Website
The first thing you want to do is you want to update your website with your new address and contact details. So obviously go through your contact page, your “about us” page, check and make sure your contact details are updated. You also want to go through your website header and footer. The footer is at the very bottom which might have an old mention of a name or an address. Same thing with the header. You might have your old address up there.
Now, depending on if you’re prolific in web development or WordPress, whatever your website’s on, this might be easy for you. If not just search whatever platform you’re on. Whether it’s let’s say WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or Weebly, search to find out how you can change things and if you’ve obviously worked with Wix, Squarespace and Weebly, you probably set that up yourself so it shouldn’t be too difficult to change. Contact your web development company if you are struggling to change the address on your website.
If you are on WordPress and you just want to make sure this gets done across the board, what you can do is you can use the WordPress plugin called Search and Replace. This works pretty much just like a word doc where you would find text and replace it with new text. What it does is it searches your entire database, so everywhere on your website it will search and find and replace the text. So it would be easy for you to change 1324 street name to 1325 street name. This would ensure it’s done wherever the old address is listed.
Update Google My Business Listings
Now that you’ve updated your website, what you want to do is you want to work on the Google My Business listing. What you want to do is if you’ve moved into a location, whether it was a previous business, you want to find their Google My Business listing and mark it as closed. Now, if you’re in good contact with the previous business that was in there, you can contact their owner and whoever was managing theirGoogle My Business page and have that done. If not, you’ll have to search and find that and mark it as closed.
When that is done, the next step is to update your ownGoogle My Business listing. You want to obviously go in, change your business address and phone number (if it’s changing) and that’s hopefully going to be done quite easily if you have access to your Google My Business page. If you don’t, you’ll have to go through and get it and claimed then verified. Now, verifying and claiming it can be pretty straightforward, as long as you can do the phone verification. So what you would do is if nobody has claimed that listing before, you can go in and claim it and what Google can do is verify you are the owner by doing either a phone verification, or a post card verification with a pin code. Sometimes a mail verification takes two weeks, or more, and sometimes they get lost. If you can have the option, do the phone verification as it will get done as soon as possible.
Change All Business Listings On The Web
Once you’ve updated or claimed and then updated your listing, or if you haven’t claimed it, you’ve updated the listing, you can move onto the next step, which is then to find your business listings. What you want to do is you want to search the web for all of your business listings. I’ve written an article on how to do that and the importance of your business listings. Read that post which has a spreadsheet that you can keep track of all of your listings.
But you want to track down all of your listings then update those listings or claim them so you can change those listings. Every business directory on the web is different so claiming might be allowed. If so, claiming the listing method might be different. Regardless, claiming will update the listings faster. The other method is to send update requests for each listing. This is know and NAP (name, address, phone number) clean up and is included in our Google My Business package.
Whether it’s Yelp, Foursquare, Yellow Pages, Better Business Bureau, whatever it is, you want to change your business address and phone number if that’s changing as well. Having the business name, address and phone number consistent across the web is important for your businesses Google My Business rankings.
Our NAP cleanup offers four rounds of that and we have pretty good success with this. The goal is to focus on the bigger directories first like Yelp, Yellow Pages and Foursquare as they’ll have the changes done quite easily.
So, that’s the big part of the task of when you move and change addresses is getting those business listings updated, and you want to make sure you jump on that as soon as possible so that you don’t have any decrease inGoogle My Business or organic search rankings.
Find Niche Directories
The next step is to go through any niche directories where you’re listed. If for example you’re a health clinic, you want to go through and find in any of those directories and make sure those get updated as well. The same thing with local directories that you’re in, you want to update those as well.
But those should be covered when you do a search for your business name and address within google, and if you follow with tips laid out in my importance of your business listings blog post. You’ll be able to find all of your listings there, and again, this is something we can do as we have software called Bright Local which tracks down a lot of obscure directories and listings and mentions of your business so that we can update them as well.
While you are doing this you’ll want to do is then keep track of your updates. So you want to follow along and make sure those business directories are being updated and again within the blog post on the importance of your business listings, you can keep track on a spreadsheet, or you can have someone like us here at Meaningful Marketing do this for you. With our Google My Business package.
You want to make sure you get this done as soon as possible so that you don’t see a decrease in rankings, whether it’s Google My Business or organic search, because Google has stated in theirGoogle My Business support section that a business must be listed properly on third-party websites like Yellow pages, Foursquare and all these directories. Make sure you’re on top of it and keeping track if those changes. The steps laid out in this blog post will help you when you are about to, or if you already have, moved your business location.
If you have any questions, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help.