From Computer Repair to Building the First Online Credit Reports

I asked Ben to tell me what it was like 30 years ago and how he got into SEO.

Officially, he started in 1996, but actually he started in 1994 technically. It's a very long story. Cut it short, he was actually in computer repair and networking at that point. Long story short, he ended up leaving the job he was at in Flagstaff, Arizona. Basically, he told the owner he was going to put him out of business. So he went out and got a bunch of customers.

Then he had one of his clients, Triple A Credit or something like that. They wanted to do mortgage and personal reports online. This is in 1994. There was no such thing. This didn't exist. You couldn't do it even technically, and even legally you couldn't do it because of the credit bureaus.

They had to wrangle with the credit bureaus and get them to do it. They had to set up a BBS, which Ben had experience building when he was a kid. They built a BBS, built some Windows servers, and told the credit bureaus, here's our technology, this is our tech stack, this is how secure it is, here's how we're encrypting the data from the internet down to the BBS over to the Windows servers back to the BBS down to the internet back up to the internet.

The credit bureaus were like, that's even more secure than what we have. Excellent. They gave them the green light. The client made over $60,000 in the first three months, which was amazing for that time.

Then they opened their mouth and told everybody about what Ben did. Then everybody wanted websites, which got him into local SEO inadvertently. He started working with newspapers and radio stations and the government and Chamber of Commerce all over Arizona.

But it was really interesting trying to express to the small business owner how important the internet was. Back in that day, even in Flagstaff, you only had a population of 250,000. 100,000 of those were students because you had Northern Arizona University.

When you're talking to a guy who's selling gold coins and saying you should put your website address on your business card and you should put your website address on your storefront so people know how to reach you, they kind of go, why? What are you talking about? Why would I do this?

Now today, Ben doesn't think there's any business that's not doing something like that. It's imperative. You put it everywhere. Back in the day, it was the Wild Wild West.

He remembers in Y2K he was working with KZGL, and they had to come up with a promo called the Y2P bug where they actually wrapped a VW bug just to get people from NAU to visit their website, which was doing radio streaming and advertising. Nobody was really doing that.

It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of pioneering.

The Philosophy That's Worked for 30 Years

I asked Ben how he made the transition into local. That was maybe a few years later, in 1996.

He said it was local actually, but not local in the traditional sense of what you think about today. Today you think about, well, how can I build service pages? How can I get links? How can I manipulate meta tags?

Finding clients in the 90s, it was how do I get visitors to get to my client's website? That was what it was.

In 1996, you had search engines, but you had everything from Ask Jeeves to WebCrawler to Go.com. They were very primitive search engines really. Even Yahoo. The Yahoo directory was out then. Google hadn't come along. Google didn't come along until 1998 actually.

"The the same tenants that you used um that you used back in the 90s work today and that is is like and when I speak I tell I say this a lot I say make sure when you're SEO you're doing SEO for your customer for the user don't do it for Google if you're doing it for Google you're going to lose at the end of the day because they're going to win," Ben explained.

Just do it for your customer. Write content for your customer. Get a link that is going to bring you somebody. Don't do it for SEO purposes. If you do that, you're always going to be ahead of the algorithm. You're always going to be ahead of the spammers and the scammers that are trying to game the system.

Because they game the system, then Google figures out a way around it. Ben's just seen that so many times over the decades.

Back in those days, that's what it was. You were doing things to get customers. They would build little widgets and fun things to do just so they knew that all of the students at NAU were going to link to it because it was cool.

They'd build little widgets for their customer websites. They'd build mortgage calculators. Why would they build a mortgage calculator? Because people needed to know what their mortgage rates were going to be. People would of course link to it, but it would happen naturally. There wasn't a lot of gaming of the system.

If you wanted to game Yahoo, it was really easy. It was title tags. He had like 30 bed and breakfast clients. Literally, you put the keywords into the title tags, and all of a sudden, the entire first page of Yahoo is all his clients.

It was really simple back then.

The 8 to 11 Real Google Business Profile Ranking Factors

Ben mentioned that when it comes to Google Business Profile and ranking factors, there are a whopping maybe between 8 and 11. Why does he say 8 and 11? Because he thinks those ones between the 8 and the 11 number are not ranking factors. He thinks they're more filters.

Here are the real ranking factors:

Number 1: Your Address

The first one, the most important one, is actually going to be your address. Believe it or not. Your address.

Even though you are a service-based industry like pest control, most work out of your home actually. The address that you use for your verification is still known by Google. When you enter it, you still have to put in your address when you create a new profile even though you're hiding it.

They know what the ZIP code is. They know what the city is. They're going to use that as a ranking factor. That is where you're going to rank as a service area-based business.

You're going to rank usually on average around 2 miles in a radius from where you are. You can actually see this by the way if you look inside of something like Local Falcon, any of the grid tracking tools.

If you have a storefront, which Ben encourages you if you can get a storefront, get a storefront. Why? Because it's going to rank you anywhere from 5 to 10 miles.

All of this of course has some big old "it depends" on it. If there's a lot of competition or if there's a lot of population, that shrinks. It just makes sense that it would shrink.

Also in pest control, just to put it bluntly, nobody's going to look for a pest control service near me and really care where you are as long as you can get to my house. Two to five miles is good enough for me.

Again, think what the user wants. The user wants you to come to them. I don't care if you're in Scottsdale and I'm in Glendale. It doesn't matter to me that you're 45 minutes away.

That's going to be number one: your address.

Number 2: The Business Name Itself

Does the name have keywords in it? Do you have pest control in your keywords? If you specialize in a certain type of pest, is that pest name in your business title?

The thing is though, you just don't want to stick keywords into your business title willy-nilly because it must match all of your actual government documentation. Your utility bills, business license, insurance, things of that nature.

It has to match your logo and your website, Secretary of State entry, BBB, Chamber of Commerce, all of these places, all of these areas. Why? It's because when you get suspended, which Ben's sure we'll talk about later, but when you get suspended, you're going to have to give these types of information and these types of documents.

Google's going to look at their own internal databases to see if your name actually matches and your address with everything that's considered public facing.

Ninety-six percent of the time, you're not going to have this data. You're not going to be prepared.

Ben asked this question: how many of you today have a utility bill that is in your business name?

He just heard 10,000 pest control companies scream. They all screamed. Why? Because Google needs a utility bill or a business license that shows the address and the business name as it is on your Google Business Profile.

Ninety-six percent of people guaranteed are going to have their personal name. They're not going to have it in their business name because it's a home-based business. They don't think they need to, and usually they're right, they don't need to. But for Google, you do. Period.

Number 3: Your Category

Your primary category is going to be the most important category that you have. Remember, when you're choosing categories, categories is who you are, not what you do. That is the most important aspect that you need to understand when you're picking a category.

The example Ben likes to give for this is when you go to a McDonald's, they have a soft serve machine. Now is McDonald's going to be a primary category of a restaurant? Maybe. Or fast food restaurant actually technically. And a subcategory, would you put in ice cream shop?

I said no, I don't think so. I think that's way too far.

Ben said well, the average small business owner would because they think I offer ice cream, so therefore I'm an ice cream shop. No.

But people do this. He sees it all the time whenever they're looking at Google Business Profiles. He'll see everybody has nine subcategories picked out. He's like, really? You think you are that? You're not. They're like, well, I'm getting phone calls about this type of service we don't do that.

Ben looks at their categories. He's like, well, you have a category that specifically calls that service out. So that's why you're getting those phone calls.

Pick out the right categories. Primary category is the most important. Your subcategories are important as well, and they will get you business.

There's a tool that you can use from Pleper (P-L-E-P-P-E-R). With that tool, you can actually have an overlay on Google Maps that shows you all of your competitors and what categories they are using.

Doesn't necessarily mean you need to copy them, but at least it gives you a good indicator as to what is potentially usable. Again, just put the litmus test: who are you, not what you do.

And there is no such thing as category dilution. If somebody tells you there's category dilution and they're an SEO person, run away. You can have as many categories as you want as long as they pass that litmus test.

Number 4: The Website URL You're Linking To

The link, the website URL that you are linking to, indirectly can impact your rankings. It's very, very, very tiny.

The general rule of thumb is if a page is ranking well in Google search for your key term, that should be the page that you link to. That's either going to be usually your homepage.

If you have more than three locations, Ben says you should have local landing pages at that point, not just your homepage for every single link.

Not Ranking Factors:

Phone number is not a going to be a ranking factor.

Your description is not going to help you with ranking.

Number 5: Reviews

They already talked about reviews. When it comes to reviews, that's a very simple algorithm actually. Ben believes Mike was the first one to discover this.

Your first 10 reviews actually gives you a ranking bump. Then your next 100 reviews actually gives you a ranking bump. Anything in between there and anything above that kind of doesn't really matter. There's no evidence that anything above 100 is going to do anything for you or even 90 is going to do anything for you.

Again, we go back to the whole customer experience. Does having a thousand reviews with a 4.9 rating matter? Well, guess what? The 4.9 rating matters because Google does look at the ratings, but they don't use it as a ranking factor per se.

But as a consumer, if I'm going to look for somebody and I see somebody with a 3.5 or I see somebody with a 4.9, who am I calling? I'm calling the 4.9. Just period. There's a better customer experience for some reason, and I'm not going to waste my time with the 3.5 because I already know there's a bunch of bad reviews.

Number 6: Services

The services area of your GBP, you can either add services that Google suggests or you can go ahead and make custom services. Both of these actually work and will give you a ranking bump for the keywords that you put in there within usually about 72 hours, and they stay.

Ben has a year-long test that he's been doing on these, and they just continue to stay. It amazes him every time he takes a look at the report.

The thing here is though, you have to be careful with services because services come up as basically what's called a justification where it says, you know, this company provides pest control service or ant control.

But you have to always predicate with "provides: whatever the keyword is."

The example he likes to give about this is what like personal injury lawyers do. They usually put in a service and they'll just call it "sexual assault." Great, fantastic. You provide sexual assault. That's funny. You provide sexual assault.

Think of it that way. So "provides: [service]."

You can actually write an AI prompt that will do this for you. It's really simple actually. That prompt is basically saying: come up with the most important keywords for my business, which is pest control. I want you to give them in two to three different words maximum and say must match this type of pattern and must sound natural when saying "provides: [word]."

When you do that, it'll actually come up with a whole list for you.

Filters (Not Really Ranking Factors):

Hours filter: Joy came up with this thing that basically showed that if your hours are set to 9 to 5, then at 6:00 PM, you're not going to show up in a ranking grid. Well, that just makes sense because you've got your hours listed 9 to 5. So why would Google show somebody in search if they're closed?

This is more for storefronts. The way Ben looks at it, it's a more of a filter than a ranking factor. It's a ranking in the sense that you won't rank if you don't have your hours set to open.

This has made a lot of companies that are showing their address put on 24/7. You're not allowed to do that. It puts a target on your back so somebody can report you for showing 24/7 when you're a storefront.

Service area-based businesses, as long as you actually do pick up the phone at 3:00 in the morning, fine. If you have an answering service, if you don't, use something like CallRail. Figure out when people do call you and set your hours to that.

Other Things:

Attributes are a ranking factor. Black-owned, Latino-owned, veteran-owned, things like that. Wheelchair accessible. Anything that basically you think that can show up in Google Trends is going to be an attribute, and it can help because people actually search for those things.

Google Posts are not a ranking factor. Skip the hashtags, useless. Don't put keywords in your description. It doesn't matter.

As a matter of fact, just hit generate description and let the AI just make a description for you. It pulls information from your website and other places and it'll write a nice description for you.

You're not a writer. You're a pest control company.

The Terrifying Suspension Statistics

I asked Ben what people most often get suspended for and how can they avoid it.

First, he put this in perspective. In the seven years that he's been working with GBP, he's probably handled north of 6,000 reinstatements from suspensions. So it's kind of like Allstate: been there, done that, seen it.

With this, they've captured a lot of data as far as how businesses are prepared for suspensions, what types of suspensions, why people get suspended.

The whys of getting suspended are not always apparent as you would think. Whenever he gets an email from somebody who's been suspended, it's always the same story. I haven't done anything wrong. There is no deceptive content.

Google looks at things way different than we do, and they put things into these organized little buckets. These buckets are inaccurate at best.

Causes of suspensions: there's so many causes of suspensions. He has an article he's written for Search Engine Land and BrightLocal. BrightLocal probably has the best article he's written on this, which is a huge article with the reasons for why you might get suspended.

The high-level ones are going to be you've stuffed your business name with keywords. That's not necessarily the problem, by the way. It's not necessarily the problem. He can't get any more depth than that. It might be, but it is a factor that can get you reported.

When you're reported, Google looks at a myriad of details, some of them which you can't even see because it's in their internal databases. So it's a leading cause for the suspension but not the actual reason.

Same thing goes with your address. Having an address is a cause actually. For instance, you operate out of your home, but you're showing your address in your Google Business Profile because you want the pin on the map. That's what everybody does. Well, guess what? It's also not allowed.

Same thing goes for FedEx or UPS or any other mailing company that gives you a physical address with a suite number. Doesn't matter. Are your clients 2 inches tall? He highly doubts it. If they are, excellent, fantastic, you've got trolls for customers or Smurfs. But realistically, you don't.

They also have a database of all of these locations. So guess what? You're going to get suspended.

People also like to go on the cheap. They'll think, okay, well, I'm going to go get a co-working space or I'm going to go get a virtual office over at Regus or whatever. I'm going to do a shared desk for $30 a month. I'm going to be on Google Maps.

Yes, until you're not.

Then there are things that are a little bit more hidden. Making edits way too fast to your profile. Service-based businesses are notorious for this because they're busy. They're doing stuff. They're out in the field. They're hunting down mice, whatever the case may be.

They just go in and go, okay, I'm going to edit my hours, I'm going to add my description, I'm going to edit my phone number, I'm going to edit my, and I'm going to hit save, save, save, save, save, and I'm going to go off and do what I do.

Guess what? You're suspended.

I didn't know about that actually.

Or, hey, I'm going to go hire somebody on Fiverr to manage my Google Business Profile from India and Pakistan and Russia. Fantastic idea, till you're suspended.

Or I'm going to hire this shady PPC company that said they're going to charge me $5 a month to run my AdWords campaign till they get suspended. Guess what? Their AdWords account gets suspended, which gets you suspended, and all of their clients.

These are real things. These happen. These things just do happen.

Then there's the little things that you just don't know about. These are kind of more invisible type of things. Ben's seen things as silly as a ZIP code being off by one digit on a Secretary of State entry cause a suspension. He's seen an expired business license cause a suspension. It was valid last week, not this week. Google has access to that business license database.

There's just so many things that can cause the suspension.

Only 4% of Businesses Are Prepared

What they found out from their data is that only 4 out of 100, 4% of businesses, are prepared to be reinstated.

"Let me put a little bit of fear into you really quick and what this actually means I want you to think about your business okay your Pest Control business you're doing great you got all this business coming in from your Google business profile you've signed up for local service ads it's working fantastic right you've hired 30 guys or three let's say you've hired three guys to help you help you you now have two Vans right going out doing your service fantastic all of a sudden your phone stops ringing," Ben explained.

Your local service ads is no longer really producing anything. Your Google Business Profile is not producing anything. Your phones just stop.

He wants you to ask yourself one question: How long can you stay in business at this rate? How long can you stay in business without your phone ringing?

The answer that everybody in the audience right now is saying is, oh yeah, I've got a week.

There's a segment that's saying that. The other segment's going, oh, I can go 3 weeks. I can go 30 days, but then I'm letting people go.

I can go 31 days, and I'm selling trucks.

I've got three months, and I'm going back and working at Home Depot.

These are real conversations that Ben's had with people.

The problem is you don't know what you're missing documentation-wise or even what the problem is when you're suspended. When you go to Google and you go for an appeal of your suspension, the other thing is you only have one swing, one shot, 60 minutes to provide the evidence that you need to get reinstated.

He'll say that again: you have one good shot to try and get reinstated.

What that usually means to somebody is I've also got that one shot to get all of my reviews back. Because when you're a service area-based business, even getting your reviews moved to a new profile is an "act of God."

That was so good. Ben said, "Put that sound bite in there."

But seriously, it's very difficult actually to move reviews between service area business listings profiles even though they're mine, they're my reviews. No, wrong. They're Google's reviews actually. Technically, they actually belong to Google Maps, not Google My Business or Google Business Profile.

That 4%, those people most likely will get reinstated unless there's something really bad going on, which usually has to do with another user they've added to their account.

But it goes back to what they were talking about earlier with the utility bill. Same thing goes for business licenses, certificates of insurance. Pest control, you'll have like maybe a little pest control card that you get. Never has the business name and the address on it. Hardly ever. It's usually in your name. So you can't use that either.

Most of the stuff is just not going to be ready to go.

The 46% Annual Suspension Rate

I asked Ben what people most usually get suspended for. Is it the business name or the address or something else?

It's usually copying what other people are doing. So in other words, adding keywords to their business name, getting an address at one of their employees' homes or one of their contractors' homes. Things like that.

They're like, well, my competitor does it, so why can't I? So they just go ahead and do it. They don't think about the implications, and they don't even know.

To be very fair, the average business owner doesn't even know that this is a problem. They just see it and they just do it. They don't think it through because why would you? In all fairness, why would you even think of it through?

But yeah, so that's why he likes to bring the awareness to it. It's like, hey, defend your business. If you don't even hire somebody like him, hire somebody. He doesn't care. Just hire somebody. Have them look at all your stuff and make sure you are in compliance.

An expert. It's a very, very, very small price to pay for being online.

It gets worse. Not me per se, but agencies in general. If an agency gets hit with a suspension, their entire account can get hit with a suspension, which means all of their clients can get suspended.

Hunting down what the actual issue was at the beginning is extremely difficult.

Ben's had customers or agencies that have come to them and be like, I have 100 accounts, 100 profiles, and they've all been suspended. What do I do to get them back?

First thing you do is you communicate with your customers because they're going to be down for about 30 to 60 days.

"In service-based business is that 46% of the I'm sorry 46% of service based businesses will be suspended once per year what it's a fact it's a number," Ben said.

He knows this from analyzing over 6,000 reinstatements. Every year. Every year, yes.

So just because you have not been suspended, you need to put the word "yet" at the end of it.

My Main Takeaway

The biggest thing I learned from Ben is that 46% of service-based businesses will be suspended once per year, and only 4% are prepared to get reinstated. This is absolutely terrifying. Most business owners have no idea this is even a risk. They're busy hunting down mice and taking care of customers, and then boom, their phone stops ringing. They don't know what they're missing documentation-wise. They don't have a utility bill in their business name. They don't have the right business license showing the address. And they only have one shot, one swing, 60 minutes to provide the evidence they need to get reinstated. After that, their reviews are gone, their rankings are gone, and they're back to working at Home Depot. The cheapest insurance you'll ever buy for your business is having someone make sure you're in compliance before disaster strikes.

The second takeaway is that there are only 8 to 11 real Google Business Profile ranking factors, and 70% of the fields have zero effect on ranking. Stop wasting your time stuffing keywords into everything. The real factors are: address (2-mile radius for service area businesses), business name (must match all government docs), primary category (who you are, not what you do), the website URL you're linking to, reviews (first 10 get a bump, then 100, then nothing above matters), and services (use the "provides:" format). Everything else? Description, phone number, posts, hashtags? Zero effect on ranking. They're for the consumer to understand what the merchant does, not for SEO. Stop wasting your life on things that don't matter and focus on the 8 to 11 that actually move the needle.

The third insight is the philosophy that's worked for 30 years: do SEO for your customer, not for Google. Ben's been doing this since 1994, and the same tenets work today. Write content for your customer. Get a link that is going to bring you somebody, not for SEO purposes. If you do that, you're always going to be ahead of the algorithm. You're always going to be ahead of the spammers and scammers trying to game the system. Because they game the system, then Google figures out a way around it. Ben's seen it so many times over the decades. The businesses that focus on customer experience, that treat their Google Business Profile like it's for humans not robots, those are the ones that survive updates and suspensions and all the chaos that comes with local SEO.

The fourth thing that struck me is that making edits too fast to your profile can get you suspended. Service-based businesses are notorious for this because they're busy. They're out in the field. They just go in and edit hours, add description, edit phone number, edit, edit, edit, hit save, save, save, save, save, and go off and do what they do. Boom, suspended. Or they hire somebody on Fiverr to manage their Google Business Profile from India or Pakistan or Russia. Suspended. Or they hire a shady PPC company, and when that company's AdWords account gets suspended, they get suspended too along with all their clients. These are real things that happen every single day. Slow down. Be intentional. Don't make rapid-fire changes. Treat your profile with care, or you'll be the next statistic.

The fifth lesson is about the power of being a Google Business Profile Diamond Product Expert. There are only 10 Diamond experts in the entire world, and only six in the United States. Ben gets to see features 6 months to a year before they come out. He gets to give input when they're in mock phase with only 10% of the product thought out. He acts like a canary in a coal mine, seeing issues before they become widespread. He speaks in front of the trust and safety team at their annual summit and vents in front of really smart people who actually listen. That's the power of volunteering your time, genuinely helping people, and building relationships with Google and other experts like Joy Hawkins and Mike Blumenthal. You can't do this for business growth or status. Ninety-nine percent of people who try drop off after a week. You have to genuinely love helping people solve their Google Business Profile problems. That's what separates the Diamonds from everyone else.

If you want to learn more from Ben, check out SteadyDemand.com for local SEO services and My Business Assurance for suspension protection. You can find him most active on Twitter at @TheSocialDude where he shares tips and anything intriguing in the GBP world or local SEO world. Don't ask him where he came up with that name. It was a long time ago when Twitter first started. Ben's journey from building the first online credit report system in 1994 to becoming one of only six Diamond Product Experts in the United States is proof that doing things for your customer instead of for Google, volunteering your time to help others, and genuinely caring about solving problems will always win in the long run.