#me making a jp post: there are dozens of us!! dozens!!!!!
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I posted 1,088 times in 2022
That's 601 more posts than 2021!
748 posts created (69%)
340 posts reblogged (31%)
Blogs I reblogged the most:
@dear-mrs-otome
@dark-frosted-heart
@atelieredux
@redheadkittys
@violettduchess
I tagged 1,011 of my posts in 2022
Only 7% of my posts had no tags
#mrs o talks - 399 posts
#spoiler - 314 posts
#spoilers - 314 posts
#ikepri spoilers - 237 posts
#ikemen prince spoilers - 236 posts
#ikemen prince - 150 posts
#ikepri - 147 posts
#ikepri silvio - 120 posts
#ikemen vampire - 107 posts
#ikevamp - 105 posts
Longest Tag: 134 characters
#i hope they don't entirely lean on the rio thing because i like him but nit enough to feel bad for wanting to bone his brother instead
My Top Posts in 2022:
#5
Silvio Ricci - PRETEND LOVER Event - Another Terrible Summary
(Yes, he is blushing. And yes, you'd better get used to his red-faced dumbstruck look because it's happening. Often.)
Here is my absolutely irreverent and chock full of hyperbole, only nominally-guaranteed-accurate rendition of Silvio's event story.
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Please always bear in mind that 1) I claim to be no expert in JP and there are and will be mistakes in this so show mercy on this amateur - and if you see any obvious mistakes, kindly let me know so I can improve 2) I didn't even TRY to make Silvio's dialogue as rude as it is. Always, at all times, assume this man is talking like a foul-mouthed sailor.
Aaaaaand 3) I made this so fucking long. Why did I feel compelled to be so detailed idk - this isn't even really a summary anymore it's just the whole damn event. FML
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So our story starts with Emma walking down the hall and being stopped by a very persistent aristocratic man she’s been dodging for days now - almost a dozen times now whenever she’s found herself alone he’s popped up, ‘coincidentally’, pestering her to have tea or spend time with him.
He tries again today, stating how beautiful it is outside and how she should join him for tea. She tries to make her excuses, apologizing and saying she has a prior engagement, but this stalker says no, he knows that’s not true - she doesn’t have anything on her schedule, he’s already checked with the servants in court.
She’s dismayed and also more than a bit wtf internally, when he presses her and says she doesn’t have any reason to hesitate so they should go. Takes her by the hand, making her skin sort of literally crawl, and tries to pull her off - only to be interrupted by a voice.
“Found you.”
Someone’s hand comes from behind and snags her, hauling her in…and she turns around to find, to her horror, that it’s Silvio there behind her. The tyrant himself, the last person she probably wants to see or have anything to do with because he is patently The Worst.
She can tell already that today is going to be rough.
He’s got his arms around her from behind, caught up too in his fancy schmancy exotic cologne, when he scolds her for making a hassle of herself. She’s one part relieved to be rescued from the creepy aristo guy…and one part full of dread because it’s Silvio that’s saved her and she knows he is far faaaar from a nice man.
He says with a smile how she’d already make a promise to him for the next while, and she’s blankly like….promise??? Prompting him to scowl at her before she’s all OH RIGHT RIIIIGHT THAT PROMISE RIGHT NOW YEP YEP. Realizing that maybe he’s trying to cover for her excuse to the aristocrat earlier.
Silvio’s grinning, but then he turns to the aristocrat and brushes him off, stating he doesn’t know who the guy is but he shouldn’t dare touch someone else’s woman - specifically, this woman is his.
See the full post
235 notes - Posted May 27, 2022
#4
Cute tsun cute tsun cute tsun alert
252 notes - Posted July 18, 2022
#3
Pace non trovo - IkePri (Silvio)
Fandom: Ikemen Prince
Pairing: Silvio Ricci/MC (Emma)
Warnings: None - not even spoilers really, just speculation
Summary: Silvio sets out to discover what it takes to buy Emma…but the true cost isn’t something either of them expects. (6.7k YES YOU READ THAT RIGHT WHY BRAIN words of snark and fluff, SFW)
Author’s Note: Frankly I’m just tired of looking at this. It’s long and I’ll never be happy with it but I want it out there before Cybird undermines all my ideas. And the gratuitous Italian is all my own headcanon.
See the full post
260 notes - Posted July 15, 2022
#2
Silvio Ricci - 1st Birthday (His POV) - Yet Another Terrible Summary
(Silvio: “Cut it out, back off!”)
Here is my irreverent, only nominally-guaranteed accurate rendition of Silvio’s 1st birthday story in his POV.
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Birthdays are the easiest occasion of the year to close a deal. No time to rest, as many merchants come looking for investments - Silvio’s never had any doubts on that matter. In fact, he’s always thought it was the best way to celebrate a birthday.
Until that cheeky woman prodded a sore spot.
~~~~~~~~
“You’re late,” he tells her, when he finally sees her amidst the hectic preparations for his birthday party. Pissy because she's dawdled when a few hours prior he’d summoned her with an invitation.
See the full post
281 notes - Posted July 21, 2022
My #1 post of 2022
Ahhh, he looks so happy they both do 🥺 - or at least he was until he realized Emma was faking sleep when she started giggling over him being mushy while she was 😘
310 notes - Posted August 22, 2022
Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →
#tumblr2022#year in review#my 2022 tumblr year in review#your tumblr year in review#omg just call it the Year of Silvio why don't we#klsdjfdls#i have problems and i will acknowledge them
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Animehouse at TCAF 2023
So for the uninitiated, TCAF is the Toronto Comics and Arts Festival, and it was held this weekend from Friday to Sunday. Sadly, I could only make the Sunday so I was unable to attend Mayuzuki's panel on the Saturday, but at the very least I made the signing on Sunday morning! All that said, this is just a little post sharing my thoughts and purchases from the festival as I had a great time and wanted to share that with people that were unable to make it there.
I'll get the boring stuff out of the way, my thoughts on it. It's a really cool and fun festival, I got there a half an hour before it opened since I had travelled from outside of the city, so I got myself a really nice spot in line. I was really surprised at how lax it was lining up, there were maybe a dozen people total in front of me, and the line only really started piling up in the last 15 or so minutes to get in.
Once I was in I got to take in the layout, which was rather cramped. I get it, they're operating it out of a library, there's not a whole lot of space. But I do still think it made for a bit of a suffocating experience when squeezing past people to walk in the narrow pathways between booths and bookshelves. Given the attendance, and the fact that it's free entry, I feel like they could really afford an upgrade if they required purchasing a pass for the festival. I'd 100% support it because it means the people that are behind it and participate in it as exhibitors could expand what they're doing and offer even cooler stuff.
Now, this is a comics and art festival, so I don't quite have a right to complain or voice my opinion, but I'll do it anyways. I love how they're integrating manga into the festival and using it to pull in people that might not otherwise experience comics in the more genuine sense outside of what's marketed by Marvel and DC. But I do also feel like they might try a little more to get a stronger response from that demographic. Both Denpa and Glacier Bay Books were there, and I feel like it's a bit of a missed opportunity to not have had them run a panel or anything for manga fans.
And last but not least, programming. I think it's really awesome that they're being proactive in getting younger audiences engaged in comics that exist outside of those big name ones like I said earlier. It's great to see them foster and encourage an interest that will help keep an industry going in the face of being overtaken in the public eye by superheroes.
Alright alright, manga stuff! Jun Mayuzuki was obviously the main attraction for me at the festival, so I made a B line for the signing table right when the festival opened. While I was there I bought this poster.
And I got this one for free with the signing.
And then of course there's the actual signature. I'm a bit (well really a massive) geek for this stuff so you know I had to get Mayuzuki to sign a JP copy of Kowloon Generic Romance volume 1 (real name omitted/edited out). It was a really great experience and Mayuzuki was incredibly nice, and seemed happy/surprised that I brought a JP volume to get signed.
Now, following that I've still got some cool stuff. Glacier Bay Books had a booth there and were selling some of the volumes they carry, so I picked up a pair I didn't have. Their quality really is incredible. Such a nice weight in the hands, the binding is tight without being rigid, and the paper quality when comparing to something like Viz is just stellar. Oh, and the color of the paper is dependent on the volume (Karman Line is blue/white while Mermaid Town is black with a red trim on the edge so the pages look red from the outside)
And Hollow Press came by and surprised me! These dudes are from Italy and are a horror publisher so I was super surprised to see them come all the way to Toronto for the festival, so I 100% had to pick up some stuff from them (not pictured are Grayworld & Crystal Bone Drive by Tetsunori Tawaraya because Tumblr is squishing the image horizontally for some reason). They've got really similar quality to Glacier Bay but put out a lot more smaller books than them. Still, great stuff (and for those in Canada, both Glacier Bay and Hollow Press titles are carried through The Beguiling!)
So yeah, a really awesome day where I got a lot of really awesome stuff. Being in Canada, there's not a lot of conventions or festivals that are easy or affordable to access, so a very grateful hats off to the team for bringing stuff to the general population that they can experience both in person and online!
#tcaf#tcaf 2023#toronto comic arts festival#jun mayuzuki#kowloon generic romance#after the rain#yen press#glacier bay books#hollow press#horror manga#anime and manga#manga#signed manga#manga collection
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songs that would have been really big while jack + kent were in juniors -- or at least in high school -- and that make me feel way too emo:
you and me by lifehouse (there’s a 100% chance that kent hardcore associated this song with jack)
beverly hills by weezer...... PLEASE.....
my humps. like. if you don’t think that kent dedicated this song to jack’s ass, idk what to tell u.
jack might pretend to be completely unaware of pop culture, but he also sang the entirety of jesse mccartney’s beautiful soul to kent one time. he just wanted to see kent blush, but he kind of meant every word.
one of the first times they kissed was after a party where they’d been looking at each other with gut-churning levels of sexual tension as rihanna’s sos blared around them
lips of an angel by hinder 😞 😞
when stickwitu by the pussycat dolls comes on the car radio, kent turns the volume WAY up but says nothing
speaking of car radios, jack will always hate the song jesus take the wheel bc every time it came on when kent was driving, kent would close his eyes, put his hands in the air, and dramatically sing along for 5 seconds or so while jack had to steer from the passenger seat. [kent: lmao u should have seen your face. jack: we could have died kenny. also jack: and your eyes were closed how could you even see my face..]
kent flirts so hard with jack at parties whenever beep by the pussycat dolls is playing. totally as a “””joke.””” jack really likes that song.
when kent remembers that he should probably flirt with girls once in a while (he’s gay as hell so sometimes he forgets) there’s something about the song buy u a drank that gives him that extra push. jack really hates that song.
GIRLFRIEND BY AVRIL LAVIGNE 🙌🙌
kent trying to teach jack the soulja boy dance.......
kent LOVES miley’s see you again; he’s always singing it with this dorky flirtatious energy that jack thinks is really cute. (after he beats jack at one-on-one, kent makes up his own lyrics, leading up to: “i can’t wait... to beat you again” and that actually really pisses jack off, oops)
don’t talk to me ever about how cheesy kent gets when he listens to avril’s keep holding on, esp. when he’s worried about jack’s anxiety/using but doesn’t really Get It
jack never told kent this, but the great escape by boys like girls always made him think about running away together, at least for the weekend
speaking of jack being cheesy, it’s 7 AM and they’re spooning in kent’s bed; kent’s phone starts playing music for his alarm but it’s actually the weekend, so kent falls back asleep and lets the music keep playing. when the song switches to love story, jack feels indescribably soft, and he stares at kent’s face, nuzzling his nose into kent’s shoulder and smelling him even though he knows it’s weird.
kent is ready to go (in BED) when shut up and drive is playing. jack doesn’t really understand why, but he’s not gonna complain or anything.
on that note..... justin timberlake’s lovestoned 🔥🔥🔥 (fire here representing jack when kent gets going)
jack will always feel an irritated fondness for bleeding love; kent would always purposely annoy him by singing it in a wispy high-pitched voice
kent knows all the words to no air by jordin sparks. (cries to it later, but that’s a different story)
jack really does fall in love when kent’s dancing to forever by chris br*wn at a party
OKAY so kent “seriously” (lol) promises jack that he’ll learn to play guitar just so he can play jason mraz’s i’m yours for him, and he borrows a teammate’s guitar and just starts strumming with the most ridiculously bad, random chords; jack joins in by supplying the vocals, except he only knows 1/5 of the words. they both remain completely straight-faced the whole time & their teammates die laughing
sometimes kent gets really mad at jack and is too angry to even say anything when jack acts like he doesn’t care, so he just blasts hot n cold to make a Point
jack really doesn’t get it.... “oh there’s that song kent likes. he sure likes that song”
once in awhile kent changes jack’s morning alarm to the numa numa song. kent wakes up early JUST so he can watch jack’s face when he’s woken to the sound of “my a-hee, my a-ha, my a-hoo, my a-ha-ha” and he CACKLES
i can’t even put into words how obnoxious they are when got money comes on
one time when kent falls down during practice and takes a little longer than usual to get up, jack skates over. kent looks up and says, “do - do - do you got a first aid kit handy?” and jack just gives him a Disgusted Look but damaged becomes a meme for sure
jack thinks in the ayer is the stupidest song in the world (kent loves it, obviously; he thinks flo rida is a “musical genius”) and sometimes when a completely different song comes on in the car, he taps kent on the shoulder, gets his attention, and says, “oh hot damn, this is my jam” in a conversational tone. little shit.
kent feels warm and soft when he hears one step at a time.
i will literally cry if i think too hard about crush by david archuleta and the Feelings it inspired in both kent AND jack before they got together (although lets be real, jack only knew this song in the first place bc of kent)
the first time kent hears teardrops on my guitar, before he and jack were together, he briefly considers feeling sad about jack, but decides that’s too pathetic. (unfortunately, this resolution doesn’t stay in place after the draft.)
kent thinks it’s funny to make the gasping/sexual sounds from britney’s piece of me when he’s alone with jack -- like, plopping down on his lap, leaning in, and just making those noises in his ear. jack thinks it’s funny until kent starts trying this during sex. (jack: ....oh hot damn, this is my jam. kent: ok truce)
sometimes when jack keeps talking to kent and asking him to hang out, kent starts singing “why you so obsessed with me??” to make their friends laugh, and it’s a joke, but it hurts jack’s feelings
jack unironically loves gavin degraw...... the 10th time kent walks in on him listening to in love with a girl, he needs to lie down and do some serious thinking about his taste in guys
poker face..... POKER FACE... i can’t even begin to describe how much kent loves this song, or how much jack loves the way it makes kent get a lil frisky
jack can never tell kent that he likes the song right round, because he’s already too committed to disliking flo rida
gives you hell........... ouch
jack always smiles when he hears down by jay sean, mostly because he’ll never be able to hear the lil wayne rap without remembering kent rapping along in the locker room
kent is always listening to britney’s circus. jack hates it unreasonably and glares at him until kent changes the song. (this only works half the time. the other half, kent just turns it up)
jack has probably heard kent yell “TELL YOUR BOYFRIEND, IF HE SAYS HE’S GOT BEEF, THAT I’M A VEGETARIAN AND I AIN’T FUCKING SCARED OF HIM” like 93 times
fire burning is playing at a party. the whole team is dancing & kent manages to get jack on the dance floor. his dancing is atrocious and he knows it, but he can see that kent is trying to hide how turned on he is, and that’s all that really matters.
jack actually knows every word to taylor swift’s you belong with me, just because kent was OBSESSED with it for 2 months straight. he will literally never be able to hear the song without seeing kent’s smiles and stupid fake drum solos in the car.
kent tries to get jack to have sex with him to the song lovegame, but jack can’t stop laughing every time he hears “disco stick” so that’s a no-go
(kent likes the song waking up in vegas even though it makes him feel kinda sad for no particular reason)
they have an ongoing “debate” about how kent hates country and jack likes it. when kent earnestly makes a case for tswift’s our song being THEIR song, jack makes fun of him for liking a country song instead of taking him seriously, and while kent might roll his eyes and play it off as no big deal, that hurts his feelings more than he will ever admit.
in their hotel room at 1:30 AM. one time by justin bieber is playing. kent is lying on his back, singing along and doing a stupid lil dance where he moves his arms and legs around in the air without sitting up. jack is staring at him and feels like he’ll just fall over, so he interrupts kent’s singing by kneeling over him and pressing their lips together. (this is actually their first kiss and it’s not like they’d be able to tell anyone about it in the first place, but they REALLY won’t tell anyone it was to a justin bieber song)
#this is so long god damn#check please#jackparse#pimms#me making a jp post: there are dozens of us!! dozens!!!!!
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Fragments of Forgotten Message Board Posts
Dragon Quest wasn’t always my favorite RPG series (I have three favorite RPG series right now). But here is a short story with a couple of twists and turns about how it became my favorite; also, this story is my personal retrospective review of Dragon Quest 7.
My first memory of Dragon Quest, before it became the series that makes my heart feel full, was a short preview of Dragon Quest 6 from the EGM import corner. I must have known about Dragon WARRIOR much earlier than that (even though we never had a Nintendo I was sufficiently FF-enthused to know about the Big Rival to Final Fantasy) but memories work in funny ways and that’s the one I have. I remember the caption on the screenshot pointed out how impressive it was that there were so many items on the bookshelves. I remember thinking this game looked so incredible, and how if it was anywhere as good as “Final Fantasy III” that it was going to be a must play.
But how was I going to play it? The answer, in 1995, was to have a best friend who went to Asia every summer and brought back dozens of carts and CDs each time. One of those carts was Dragon Quest 6, and once I scooped out my Super Nintendo’s innards to allow myself the ability to play, I was treated to an evocative campfire and SNES strings and a dream-like atmosphere that was everything I’d hoped for. I could only manage to get through a few hours of it without any JP language skills, but that was more than enough to leave a lasting impression.
I know that Dragon Quest 6 is a weird answer to the question of the first Dragon Quest you played. I’m not one of the NES kids who started with Dragon Warrior, or any who started later with the ports on Gameboy Color, or anyone who started even later with the ports on DS or 8 on PS2 or 11. I began my affair with Dragon Quest with expectations that this series had top of the line production values, and so this may begin to explain the mindset with which I approached Dragon Quest 7.
DRAGON WARRIOR VII is a game I bought at launch on my six year old Playstation after years of waiting, ready to experience this storied series in English for the first time. I don’t know why I didn’t know about any of the GBC ports, but despite some trepidation at the environmental visuals I was excited to start. And for the first 40 hours or so, I had a wonderful time. The structure was so intriguing to me, the battle scaling so modest but compelling. However, by Hour 100 (this is a period of time in my life in which every RPG I played got finished no matter what) my attitude about the game and Dragon Quest in general reached the point where 10 years later I was still sufficiently … passionate enough to make message board posts like this:
So the upshot here is that Dragon Quest 7 was a game that made me resent a series I was supposed to love, which in my mind made this game unforgivable. Months after making this post I would finally play Dragon Quest 5 on PS2 on my laptop and my love for the series would skyrocket further (one day I will write an essay about that perfect game and the lengths I went to more perfectly play it). And then one year after that they would announce a remake of DQ7 for Nintendo 3DS.
This announcement. Rather than do what everyone was expecting and churn out yet another DS-engine (which was based on the OG DQ7 engine!) “remake”, this was a full visual overhaul with 3D cutscene direction, maps for all dungeons, a fragment finder, and symphonic soundtrack. In other words, a remake that addressed virtually every complaint I had with my original DQ7 experience.
Time to briefly return to that original DQ7 experience. How to reflect on my memories of that playthrough? The memories I had when I made that angry post? The memories of making that angry post? The memories I have today? The truth about that experience is that I played DQ7 in the worst possible way you could play it. The game felt boring and repetitive to me in the back half because I marathoned it all at once over the course of a few weeks. The characters felt lifeless to me because I never actually used party chat (and party chat was more limited in the PSX version). The music began to grate on me because I wasn’t listening to dreamy Super Nintendo strings or more crucially, the full symphonic soundtrack I would later associate so strongly with so many of my personal Dragon Quest experiences.
And what about those vignettes I called charmless and dull? Well, even by 2014 I was hedging on that, wondering in message board posts if the visual and sonic revamp with actual cutscene direction would allow these stories to leave more of an impact for me. The ultimate answer to my hypothesis was unequivocally, yes, these stories left more of an impact for me.
I’m never the one you’ll hear arguing against a game giving you friction (my other favorite RPG series is SaGa), but in this case all of the QOL smoothing in the remake, the fragment finder, the previous event summary, the in-game mapping, the tablet consolidation, all of this allows you the space to refocus your attention on the game’s most potent strengths. Rather than leaving you with a sensation of oppressively aimless retreading and a feeling of being lost (and not feeling lost in the good way, like many of my favorites in my other other favorite RPG series, which is the one this tumblr was supposed to be exclusively about) the smoothness of play lets you see the slowly unspooling world (love a psx rpg with a slowly unspooling world!!) not as a constellation of chores but for what it truly is.
That true and modest spirit of Dragon Quest, these warmly human fables that are meant to linger with you, that one line buried in party chat that is meant to devastate you, a nested series of stories that build and connect over time until you’re left marvelling at the genius of the construction. When I made that post in the past, I didn’t have any memories of the story of the noble priest of Vogograd and the truth that is left to a future generation of children to build. Is it 20 years of age and experience and memories that allowed for me to find that story so moving? Or was it the space the smoothing in this remake left for me to better understand the meaning of this game?
I bought the DQ7 remake at launch five years after making that post, and I started and finished the DQ7 remake 5 years after buying it, which is, again, 20 years after I first finished it. How much time has to pass before you revisit the first Dragon Quest you ever finished, playing through the game you thought you hated, but maybe always suspected you could love? When do you allow yourself to return to old memories and then make new ones?
Time hasn’t erased every one of DQ7’s problems, there is still some dungeon padding and some repetition, and there are also new problems with occasional localization issues and symbol encounter issues. But as with any game, you form memories of flaws and memories of strengths, and if you watch the credits and listen to the symphonic credits theme and search your heart and the memories of the flaws already seem distant, then you know you’ve just played a game that is a great. Dragon Quest 7 is a great game and a great Dragon Quest. You know you truly a cherish a series when you are willing to wait until it is the perfect time to play, and time after time, whether for DQ3, or DQ5, or DQ11, DQ is the series I cherish enough to wait for. 20 years after finishing was the time I needed to revisit DQ7, and closing this loop is the perfect gift I could give to myself.
In conclusion, Square Enix please announce HD 2D DQ4 ASAP for me thank you.
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Genesis 2: “I shall call him Squishy”
One of the most pivotal and impactful moments of my life occurred in the summer of 2013 during my time in Guatemala. I had just passed my first semester of nursing school (by the grace of God), and I felt as if I had barely escaped from a burning building-stumbling out while covered in soot, unable to breathe, and moments from collapsing. Not only had the rigor of nursing school rocked me, but so did culture shock post my semester abroad in Zambia and significant faith struggles occurring at that time as well. For a myriad of reasons, I felt I could never be or do enough for God to truly love me, or rather, he used to love me but changed his mind because of my actions.
Somehow, I brought a copy of “One Thousand Gifts” by Ann Voskamp for some light reading to Guatemala, and the book truly changed my life and my view of Jesus. The author mentions how burdened she was by life, but then how she decided to challenge herself to list one thousand blessings or gifts God has given her. She began to list dozens and then hundreds of things, such as the reflection of light from the bubbles as she washed dishes, the sound of children laughing and playing, the smell of lavender. This shift towards gratitude completely changed her perspective, and showed her how God truly saw her, pursued her, and loved her deeply as displayed in the big moments (sending Jesus to die in our place) but also in the little moments of all the overlooked blessings she received, day in and day out. Seeing all that God had done for me, it was then that my false views of God’s indifference were redeemed, and I felt him holding me tight, carrying me through, healing my wounds and overcoming this burden of mine with gentleness, victory and love. He truly loved me!
In chapter two of Genesis, our gracious Father can be found providing for and blessing his creation time and time again as well. God is going WILD with detailed blessings! He breathes life into man, sets him in the paradise that is Eden, gives him bountiful and delicious food to eat, give him purpose in caring for the garden and naming the animals, and then, when he sees that it is not good for him to be alone, creates a ‘helper’ for the man (bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh) so that he would not be alone. God could not have been more thoughtful, loving, and kind to care for not only the physical, but all of the holistic needs man had by delivering time and time again.
Between the creation of man from dust to God’s provision in countless ways, the principle I deduced from this passage was as follows: (1) He will provide for our needs and we can trust him in that. (2) God’s commandments are purposeful for us even when they may not make sense to us. I don’t touch as much on the later principle in this post but I wanted to include it!
When I see how God provided for Adam and Eve in so many countless ways and when I am reminded of my realization of God’s intentionality after reading “One Thousand Gifts”, I am compelled to acknowledge that he loves us, he knows what we need, and he will provide what we need when we need it. How often do I instead cry out to the Lord like a child with floaties in a kiddie pool, flailing around as if God does not see me and have my best intentions at heart?
This makes me think of the wisdom of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?...Therefore do not be anxious, saying ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you (Matt 6:26-27, 31-33).”
That there is a PROMISE! Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you. One thing I always hung onto from my days at the Porch young adult ministry in Dallas, TX was Jonathan “JP” Pokluda sharing these words, “God’s not trying to rip you off.” Whether it is God withholding something from me, asking me to withhold from something, or asking me to do something that seems counterintuitive, he’s not trying to rip me off, he’s inviting me to a life of abundance. This applies to both of our principles listed above!
My application for myself this week is to pay attention to my thoughts. Whenever I have an anxious coveting thought, or what I want to happen in a situation but have little control over, I must remind myself of his faithfulness and love. One way to do this is to count blessings, just like I did eight years ago. For every anxious thought, think of three ways God provided during similar situations in the past, or three blessings God has given me that day already. Adam and Eve had no clue what they needed, but God went above and beyond for their needs. He will do the same for his children today as well.
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because of the jean-paul/bobby post lol like. If there aren't more fics, why not make them instead of complaining that people are making for another ship? Whenever i see people doing that, i think it is a weird hill to die on.
Also, i hafta admit, on one hand i know if kyle was a white twink there would be dozen more fics of them, bu on the other hand never gave much thought to jp's marriage because it was like... they introduced kyle and then a couple of issues later they were already getting married?? It always felt like marvel was just doing it so they could flaunt they had a "gay wedding", even though the wedding was between the one c-list gay x-man they always use whenever they need to do something gay-related and his flatscam boyfriend lol
So you agree? You agree that if Kyle was a white twink you, and everybody else, would have cared more about him even if he had even less writing than Kyle has? Care to mention that even with little time Marjorie Liu, legendary writer, did a good job with him and Northstar. Do you really think that on the lord's place of comic books they would make a gay wedding just because of clout? Much less coming from Marjorie Liu, writer that on her works was denied same sex romances being shown. We all know that she fully intended Johnny and Akihiro to be something more, same with all the subtext that Laura and Jubilee have and all that tension between Natasha and Elektra.
Also, that post pinpoints that those fanfics were made after Kyle and Northstar were already married. Curious enough that by that time Bobby and Northstar stopped having so many interactions and subtext between eachother.
As much as I have read X-Men stuff I am not a big Northstar fan, I do will say that his relationship with Kyle has been fleshed as years go by. Not much since like... he is not married with a white twink and Northstar is not an A-Lister.
Anyway, I love complaining. I literally do, my father once gave me a book so I could shut up because I complained for almost four hours straight about things I dislike and hate.
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Kale Yeah Market Bag
The Peabody Pop Up Market “Kids Day” was yesterday, July 10, 2018 at the Leather City Commons off of Lowell Street in Peabody.
It could have been the heat or something, but there were about half the vendors there. But–no harm!���more shoppers for the rest of us! Haha! It sort of worked out for me, because I got to set up at one of the park’s entrances, which allowed for more attention. I abutted two great new vendors.
It was hot, but there was a lot of shade and I got my NEW tent up with a little help from my neighbors. I was also able to give my “old” tent to a local artist named Lauren, whom I met through a GreenPeabody friend. She was so excited to have a tent and the old one wasn’t any worse for wear, so that was a real “win win”! My tent weights–which are compact, horseshoe style square weights–have been ordered, but didn’t come in time, but the tent stayed put.
One of my abutters was Reni (pronounced Ree-Knee) Wilson from Tumbled By Time. Reni has been collecting sea glass only from the beaches of Marblehead (birthplace of the American Navy and famous pirates, too!) for the last 28 years. Recently she decided to figure out how to make her found treasures into unique jewelry pieces. She doesn’t use clasps, but slip knots to make the necklaces and bracelets and she uses black fishing twine, so you know you can never wear her pieces out!
I got a little sea glass lesson from her, too, and told her all about my glass collecting friend from Canada. I chuckled when she told me the beaches in Canada aren’t good for sea glass! What beaches were she talking about, Deb Reid? Reni is able to tell exactly what type of bottle the glass originated from on most of her pieces and she was a font of knowledge about all thinks sea glass. She was originally from Ohio, but got lured here to our Atlantic Ocean beaches in her early years. They really DO lure you, don’t they?
To my right was a curious man named Adam who was wearing a fruit-adorned shrubbery on his head and handing out samples of “shrubs”. I was curious so I just had to ask what a shrub was…it’s flavored vinegars that have healthy/probiotic and culinary uses. Go figure!! Very keen hipster dude, who helped me out in the end when a certain someone whom I avoid IRL sauntered by.
I got back in touch with my friend, Michael Lucas from back in my days as CSM and VP of a local catalog company. Michael is retired from most of his other jobs, but he is still doing his Justice of the Peace gig, but also is selling the most unbelievably tasty flavored olive oils and vinegars–real authentic Greek oils! His son-in-law and he have a store at the North Shore Shopping Center (we old “locals” still call it that!) called The Branch Olive Oil Company. After trying his Fig Flavored Balsamic Vinegar yesterday, I can tell you he can keep his JP skills and just hand me over a bottle of that Fig Flavored Balsamic Vinegar for my salads!!
P.S. I guess there is life after working at a certain local catalog company! Go figure!
I also ran into several GreenPeabody members, including Sheila D’Ambrosio back from Maine, Pam Paine and, of course, Janette, who also runs the Tillie’s Community Herb Project over on Tillie’s Farm on Lynn Street.
Pam was headed to the Salem “No Place For Hate” Meeting…sure do wish we had one of those committees in Peabody, but she said she was turned down when she proposed it to the mayor. It may be something to revisit, Peabody? What do you think?
Not that many produce/farmers, which I think was the reason why the original farmers market outside of City Hall didn’t do well. Lisa from Bella & Harvey–the event coordinator–has done an outstanding job of getting and keeping interesting vendors and activities. For clarification, this is Peabody’s version of the traditional farmers market, which I think is great, because it allows people like me with natural and/or handmade products to have a booth. Anyone have any ideas? Are you a vendor and want to show your wares? I can point you in the direction of the woman with all the knowledge!
Because it was Kids Day at the market, I gave away some coloring sheets that I did using my Cricut, of course! Full sized pages were also for sale and in about a dozen FREE designs from Cricut’s Design Space.
FREE Coloring Pages
FREE Coloring Pages
FREE Coloring Pages
FREE Coloring Pages
FREE Coloring Pages
FREE Coloring Pages
Sample coloring page drawn and cut using my Cricut Maker
And because I use the creamiest, thickest white card stock, it elevates your coloring experience all the more.
This was the first market that I had some soaps for sale and I did sell a few bars. Lip Balms were the other purchases. I had a load of really fun market bags, but I think I have to display them better. Oh! And it didn’t help that the DJ was giving away free market bags around the corner.
Of course, I’d like to have sold more, but the benefits still far outweigh the difficulties! ❤
The NEXT Peabody Pop Up Market will be on Tuesday, July 24th from 3-7pm. I *think* the them is Crafty stuff…so I won’t need to make anything “special” for that….cuz everything I have is crafty! BOL!
Here are the vendor details from this post. If you visit any of them, be sure to tell them you heard about them from my blog! Thanks, loves!
The Branch Olive Oil Co.
North Shore Shopping Center, 210 Andover St., Peabody, MA
(978) 531-1920
The Branch Olive Oil Co.
New store coming to Pickering Wharf, Salem, MA in 2018
Also on Facebook at /thebrancholiveoil
Tumbled By Time:
Studio located at 28 South Street, Marblehead, MA
(617) 510-1846
Tumbled By Time
Also on Facebook at /TumbledbyTime, Instagram and Twitter
Peabody Main Streets:
Pictures are posted on Facebook.com/peabodymainstreets
E-mail newsletter at: Live Peabody
(978) 538-5704
La Diva Bella/Miss Rita to the Rescue! (that’s me):
Miss Rita to the Rescue! The Blog
On Facebook at /MissRitatotheRescue and /LaDivaBella
Also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Quora under my name: Ritamarie Cavicchio
Art with Lauren:
Sit and paint events, bachelor/ette parties and private art lessons
on Facebook at /ArtWithLaurenNoyes
Peabody Pop Up Market:
On Facebook at /Peabodyfarmermkt
Soap for Sale at the Peabody Pop Up Market
OMH
Rose Scented
Chamomile Soap
Lavender Soap
Peabody Pop Up Market: Kids Day The Peabody Pop Up Market "Kids Day" was yesterday, July 10, 2018 at the Leather City Commons off of Lowell Street in Peabody.
#All Natural#Boston North#Coloring#Cricut#Cricut crafting#Design Space#Farmers Market#Kids Day#lip balm#North of Boston#North Shore of Boston#Olive Oil#Peabody#Peabody Pop Up Market#Pop Up Market#Sea Glass#Shrubs#Skin Care#Soap#wicked local
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Local SEO Tips for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
Posted by MiriamEllis
Some business models exist in the ditches of Google’s information highways, belonging in local search results, but not well addressed by the official guidelines. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations exemplify this: They’re all over local packs, finders, and maps, but their models is a bit unusual, and Google has yet to update the guidelines to show exactly how to represent them in the Google My Business setting.
Today, we’ll pull together our own set of EV charging station best practices — based on Google’s rules for similar enterprises — and throw a few free local search marketing tips into the trunk as well.
How to handle your EV charging station Google My Business listings
Whether you’re an owner, in-house marketer, or agency staffer who’s been tasked with promoting a fleet of EV charging stations online, having a presence in Google’s local search results — including local packs, local finders, Google Business Profiles, and Google Maps — should be core to your digital strategy.
While Google’s helpful guidelines don’t specifically address EV charging stations, proof that they’re eligible for inclusion can be seen in the extra special features and categories Google has released for these models. For example, the above screenshot shows the charger icons, charger type designations, and wattage displays in the local results. In the US and UK, Google displays live charger availability data for some networks for consumer convenience. Even the map pins have special icons in them for EV charging stations.
Google definitely knows about them, and wants this industry to get listed.
If you’ve never set up a GMB listing before, Google’s own resources will walk you through the process of filling out and validating a profile for an individual location, but EV charging station marketers are most likely dealing with many locations at once. If you need to get 10 or more locations listed, you’ll be using Google’s bulk upload functionality, instead. You’ll also want to go for bulk verification of these large batches of listings.
But before you get started, here’s special guidance for handling some of the major fields you’ll be filling out for any EV charging station you’re marketing.
Business title
Google wants you to fill out this field with the exact name of the business as it appears in the real world. The majority of the listings I looked at in this sector were adding the words “charging station” to their brand name, which technically violates Google’s guidelines. Just as gas stations are supposed to list themselves as “Shell” or “Valero”, EV charging stations wanting to stick scrupulously to the guidelines should just be “EVgo” or “ChargePoint”.
According to the guidelines, Google wouldn’t want listings entitled “Shell Gas Station” or “EVgo Charging Station”, any more than they’d want “McDonald’s Fast Food Restaurant” or “Macy’s Department Store.”
But now for a home truth: Google says you’re only supposed to put your real-world brand in these titles, but they don’t take much action on enforcing this guideline, and having keywords in the business title that match search language is strongly believed to improve local rankings. So, if you adhere to the guidelines and remove “charging station” from your business titles, your rankings may decrease. This weighting of keywords in the business title is a longstanding issue Google needs to resolve.
Frankly, I think having the words “charging station” in the listing title might actually help users who are just now becoming accustomed to emergent EV technology and trying to understand where to get charged up, but my common sense and Google’s policies are often at odds.
Keep your business title free of other extraneous information like location information, or adjectives like “cheapest” or “best”.
Address
It’s a dominant trend for EV charging stations to be located in the parking lots of busy public spaces, like shopping centers, railroad stations, and business parks. Typically, to be eligible for a GMB listing, a business has to have its own address, but a look at Google’s local search engine results (including Google Maps) shows charging stations being permitted to use the address of the public space. For example, an EV charging station in a strip mall near me is using the same address as the Target that anchors the shopping center.
Additionally, businesses that host a charging station are allowed to have a link on their listings publicizing this feature.
Also related to address, many EV Charging stations will find details on their listings that describe them as “located in” a public space. If the “located in” descriptor is wrong, look up the business on google.com/maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and try to edit the information in this field:
If you see no correction within a couple of weeks of taking this action, contact Google My Business support and explain what’s going on.
Phone number
We’ll take our cue here from Google’s requirements of ATMs and kiosks. As I previously covered in my column on local product kiosks, the EV charging stations you’re marketing need a customer support phone number.
Again, this is one of those unusual grey areas. Normally, it’s standard advice for each location of a business to have a unique phone number. But, for EV charging stations, this obviously isn’t practical. Rather, be sure your listings have your help hotline number for customer service needs.
A word to the wise: Google has sometimes been prone to conflating listings with too-similar information. Having dozens, hundreds, or thousands of listings with the same brand AND phone number on them could potentially result in the accidental creation of duplicate listings. Large, multi-listing enterprises like EV charging brands might want to check out the automated duplicate detection and resolution services offered by Moz Local so that pesky duplicates aren’t interfering with listings management, visibility goals, and consumer direction.
Category
“Electric vehicle charging station” is the proper primary category for you, and my search through listings and GMB category databases is only finding one other related category, “electric vehicle charging station contractor” which may or may not be relevant to the business you’re marketing.
Hours of operation
Google’s guidelines state that gas stations should list the hours of operation that their pumps are available, and for most EV charging stations, this would presumably be 24 hours a day. As stated above, you’ll probably be uploading your data to Google via a bulk upload spreadsheet and the proper configuration for indicating 24-hours-a-day in the spreadsheet is 12:00AM-12:00AM.
URL
You’ll be allowed to include a website link on each listing you create. The best user experience I’m encountering on EV charger station listings is when the listing links to a landing page for the location I’m researching. On the flip side, you may get a ranking boost if you link to the brand’s homepage, instead, due to homepages typically having greater Page Authority than landing pages.
Photos/Videos
Make each listing stand out for customers by adding a few photos of the charger’s location. Given the fact that so many chargers are in vast parking lots, try to take some shots that illustrate the relationship of the station to the largest anchor business near it. This will help orient customers. And, given the newness of EV technology, uploading a video of how to use each type of charger would be extremely helpful to new electric vehicle owners.
Reviews
Looking around the SF Bay area, I couldn’t help noticing how few reviews these entities are receiving, meaning there are easy wins out there for any EV charger brand that makes a concerted review acquisition effort. If you’re building out landing pages on the brand’s website for each charging station locale, include a strong call to action and link to leave a review on Google on these pages. You can also use a free review link generator and then shorten the URL using a service like bitly for text or email-based review requests.
Just don’t ask for reviews in bulk; if you get too many at once, Google may filter them out as suspicious. And never incentivize reviews in any way — it can result in review loss, penalties, and legal actions.
Questions & Answers
Unsurprisingly, EV charging station listings show customers using Google’s Q&A feature to ask about costs and how to use the kiosks. These are leads for the brand and should be answered by the brand, rather than being left up to the public for responses of varying quality. If you’re using Moz Local to manage your listings, the dashboard will alert you each time a new question comes in on any of your listings.
Google Posts
Google Posts are a great way to make a brand stand out from less active competitors by microblogging persuasive content that appears on your listings, but for the typical EV charging brand, this feature is problematic. Google doesn’t allow large chains to post in bulk to their listings. There are some third-party services that facilitate hacks for this scenario.
Listings beyond Google
Google may be your dominant source of local business listings, but don’t hit the brakes there. Moz has mapped out the partners in our location data distribution network that currently support listings for EV charging stations. Talk to us about building your presence in key mapping applications like Apple Maps, search engines like Bing, aggregators like Infogroup, and mobile navigation providers like Navmii. Moz Local can help you get listed on multiple platforms so that potential customers can find your charging station locations via their preferred search methods.
Local search marketing tips for EV charging stations
JP Morgan predicts that EVs and HVs will make up 30% of total vehicle sales in the next five years and Statista estimates there are about 25,000 charging stations in the US. It’s big business, and while the convenience of charging at home can’t be beat, the presence of chargers and superchargers all over cities will do much to increase awareness of the rise of the EV, and to ease the transition away from fossil fuel transportation.
As a resident of California — the state with the most electric vehicles and also the state experiencing some of the worst devastation from Climate Change — every new charging station that pops up on Google Maps is a sign of hope to me. But I’ll be frank; I’m not a “car” person, and despite making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to understand how I could personally transition from a worried, gas-powered driver to a proud EV traveler has taught me that it’s a road paved with countless questions.
And that’s actually good news for EV charging station brands!
Whether you’re marketing EVgo, Blink, Tesla, ChargePoint, or the dozens of other charging solutions, your online marketing strategy is going to hinge on publishing content that solves consumers’ problems by answering their questions. Luckily for your industry, customers’ questions are so abundant that they are paving the way for you to develop absolutely fantastic website content that will support your organic and local rankings over time as you develop authority.
Here’s a simple six-step workflow for getting it right:
1. Survey customers
Making a minor investment in survey tech will let you directly ask the public what they want most from charging stations. Is it speed, location, more ports, better instructions, different payment options? Find out and document your learnings.
2. Analyze industry reviews and questions
Look at the common themes in your online reviews. For example, one thread I see running through the EV charging vertical is complaints about sitting in hot cars for 30+ minutes while charging up. When you think about it, gas stations provide shade at the pumps, though patrons are only there for ten minutes. If your customers are being inconvenienced in the summer heat, would properties permit you to build a canopy, or perhaps even better, plant some native trees to double down on your green goals?
Moz Local will surface the 100 most common words in your reviews for sentiment analysis purposes. Dig deeply into these for content inspiration and structural improvements.
And check out the positive and negative sentiment your competitors’ reviews contain. What is the competition getting wrong that you could get right? If you find opportunities like these, be sure you’re writing about them.
3. Fire up keyword research tools
How do electric car charging stations work?
Where can I charge my electric car?
What is the best EV charging station?
How to find free charging stations
How many miles does a Tesla get per charge?
Are EVgo stations free?
Can I use ChargePoint at EVgo?
What is a level 3 charging station?
Questions truly abound in the EV charging space. Moz Pro Keyword Explorer lets you type in keywords and phrases you feel could be important to the business you’re marketing, and then filter the results to see questions like the ones in my list, above. If you sign up for a free Moz community account, you can make 10 free queries a month or upgrade to a paid account for more robust keyword research.
Other free options include Google’s Ads Keyword Planner and the unpaid version of Answer the Public.
Document your findings so that you have created a list of questions around which you can base content publication.
4. Take a peek at Google Trends
Google Trends will show you interest in topics across time related to EV charging stations, and you can even see this broken out by regions of a country to help you localize your marketing. My glance at this data shows that interest in this subject took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged but is now steadily rising again. Glean further insights from this tool for topics you should be covering.
5. Analyze the competition
If you have a Moz Pro account, you can use Moz’s On-Page Grader feature not just to look at pages on your own website to see how to improve their optimization, but also to analyze what your competition is getting right and wrong. If you can find weaknesses in the strategy of a tough competitor, you can go one better with the actionable optimization tips On-Page Grader provides.
Look carefully at what your competitors are writing about on their websites and social accounts. If they’re covering a topic your keyword research hasn’t surfaced, note it down.
6. Get writing!
Now, take the list of questions and keyword phrases you’ve discovered, group them by topics, and begin creating pages for them on your website, or posts on the brand’s blog, providing answers. Some pages may be short, and others may be long — the rule of thumb is simply to cover each question thoroughly. You may find that some topics are best answered via other media, like short videos. That’s great, if you can produce them, but don’t forget to provide written transcripts.
Your findings can also fuel your social media posting, your Google posts, and provide the top FAQs you can ask and answer via Google Questions & Answers on your Google Business Profiles.
Finally, remember that marketing requires active promotion. Don’t just let your content sit on your website hoping someone will arrive to read it. Actively promote your best pieces via social media, to local print and online media journalists, and in local community hubs, like neighborhood websites and hyperlocal blogs. Work to build real relationships in the cities where you’re marketing your charging station locations so that you are always increasing awareness of your brand’s commitment to making towns and cities better places to live.
Have questions? Ask me in the comments. I’m personally rooting for the rapid spread of EV charging stations across the US and around the world, and if you’re marketing this model, I’d love to hear from you!
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Local SEO Tips for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
Posted by MiriamEllis
Some business models exist in the ditches of Google’s information highways, belonging in local search results, but not well addressed by the official guidelines. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations exemplify this: They’re all over local packs, finders, and maps, but their models is a bit unusual, and Google has yet to update the guidelines to show exactly how to represent them in the Google My Business setting.
Today, we’ll pull together our own set of EV charging station best practices — based on Google’s rules for similar enterprises — and throw a few free local search marketing tips into the trunk as well.
How to handle your EV charging station Google My Business listings
Whether you’re an owner, in-house marketer, or agency staffer who’s been tasked with promoting a fleet of EV charging stations online, having a presence in Google’s local search results — including local packs, local finders, Google Business Profiles, and Google Maps — should be core to your digital strategy.
While Google’s helpful guidelines don’t specifically address EV charging stations, proof that they’re eligible for inclusion can be seen in the extra special features and categories Google has released for these models. For example, the above screenshot shows the charger icons, charger type designations, and wattage displays in the local results. In the US and UK, Google displays live charger availability data for some networks for consumer convenience. Even the map pins have special icons in them for EV charging stations.
Google definitely knows about them, and wants this industry to get listed.
If you’ve never set up a GMB listing before, Google’s own resources will walk you through the process of filling out and validating a profile for an individual location, but EV charging station marketers are most likely dealing with many locations at once. If you need to get 10 or more locations listed, you’ll be using Google’s bulk upload functionality, instead. You’ll also want to go for bulk verification of these large batches of listings.
But before you get started, here’s special guidance for handling some of the major fields you’ll be filling out for any EV charging station you’re marketing.
Business title
Google wants you to fill out this field with the exact name of the business as it appears in the real world. The majority of the listings I looked at in this sector were adding the words “charging station” to their brand name, which technically violates Google’s guidelines. Just as gas stations are supposed to list themselves as “Shell” or “Valero”, EV charging stations wanting to stick scrupulously to the guidelines should just be “EVgo” or “ChargePoint”.
According to the guidelines, Google wouldn’t want listings entitled “Shell Gas Station” or “EVgo Charging Station”, any more than they’d want “McDonald’s Fast Food Restaurant” or “Macy’s Department Store.”
But now for a home truth: Google says you’re only supposed to put your real-world brand in these titles, but they don’t take much action on enforcing this guideline, and having keywords in the business title that match search language is strongly believed to improve local rankings. So, if you adhere to the guidelines and remove “charging station” from your business titles, your rankings may decrease. This weighting of keywords in the business title is a longstanding issue Google needs to resolve.
Frankly, I think having the words “charging station” in the listing title might actually help users who are just now becoming accustomed to emergent EV technology and trying to understand where to get charged up, but my common sense and Google’s policies are often at odds.
Keep your business title free of other extraneous information like location information, or adjectives like “cheapest” or “best”.
Address
It’s a dominant trend for EV charging stations to be located in the parking lots of busy public spaces, like shopping centers, railroad stations, and business parks. Typically, to be eligible for a GMB listing, a business has to have its own address, but a look at Google’s local search engine results (including Google Maps) shows charging stations being permitted to use the address of the public space. For example, an EV charging station in a strip mall near me is using the same address as the Target that anchors the shopping center.
Additionally, businesses that host a charging station are allowed to have a link on their listings publicizing this feature.
Also related to address, many EV Charging stations will find details on their listings that describe them as “located in” a public space. If the “located in” descriptor is wrong, look up the business on google.com/maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and try to edit the information in this field:
If you see no correction within a couple of weeks of taking this action, contact Google My Business support and explain what’s going on.
Phone number
We’ll take our cue here from Google’s requirements of ATMs and kiosks. As I previously covered in my column on local product kiosks, the EV charging stations you’re marketing need a customer support phone number.
Again, this is one of those unusual grey areas. Normally, it’s standard advice for each location of a business to have a unique phone number. But, for EV charging stations, this obviously isn’t practical. Rather, be sure your listings have your help hotline number for customer service needs.
A word to the wise: Google has sometimes been prone to conflating listings with too-similar information. Having dozens, hundreds, or thousands of listings with the same brand AND phone number on them could potentially result in the accidental creation of duplicate listings. Large, multi-listing enterprises like EV charging brands might want to check out the automated duplicate detection and resolution services offered by Moz Local so that pesky duplicates aren’t interfering with listings management, visibility goals, and consumer direction.
Category
“Electric vehicle charging station” is the proper primary category for you, and my search through listings and GMB category databases is only finding one other related category, “electric vehicle charging station contractor” which may or may not be relevant to the business you’re marketing.
Hours of operation
Google’s guidelines state that gas stations should list the hours of operation that their pumps are available, and for most EV charging stations, this would presumably be 24 hours a day. As stated above, you’ll probably be uploading your data to Google via a bulk upload spreadsheet and the proper configuration for indicating 24-hours-a-day in the spreadsheet is 12:00AM-12:00AM.
URL
You’ll be allowed to include a website link on each listing you create. The best user experience I’m encountering on EV charger station listings is when the listing links to a landing page for the location I’m researching. On the flip side, you may get a ranking boost if you link to the brand’s homepage, instead, due to homepages typically having greater Page Authority than landing pages.
Photos/Videos
Make each listing stand out for customers by adding a few photos of the charger’s location. Given the fact that so many chargers are in vast parking lots, try to take some shots that illustrate the relationship of the station to the largest anchor business near it. This will help orient customers. And, given the newness of EV technology, uploading a video of how to use each type of charger would be extremely helpful to new electric vehicle owners.
Reviews
Looking around the SF Bay area, I couldn’t help noticing how few reviews these entities are receiving, meaning there are easy wins out there for any EV charger brand that makes a concerted review acquisition effort. If you’re building out landing pages on the brand’s website for each charging station locale, include a strong call to action and link to leave a review on Google on these pages. You can also use a free review link generator and then shorten the URL using a service like bitly for text or email-based review requests.
Just don’t ask for reviews in bulk; if you get too many at once, Google may filter them out as suspicious. And never incentivize reviews in any way — it can result in review loss, penalties, and legal actions.
Questions & Answers
Unsurprisingly, EV charging station listings show customers using Google’s Q&A feature to ask about costs and how to use the kiosks. These are leads for the brand and should be answered by the brand, rather than being left up to the public for responses of varying quality. If you’re using Moz Local to manage your listings, the dashboard will alert you each time a new question comes in on any of your listings.
Google Posts
Google Posts are a great way to make a brand stand out from less active competitors by microblogging persuasive content that appears on your listings, but for the typical EV charging brand, this feature is problematic. Google doesn’t allow large chains to post in bulk to their listings. There are some third-party services that facilitate hacks for this scenario.
Listings beyond Google
Google may be your dominant source of local business listings, but don’t hit the brakes there. Moz has mapped out the partners in our location data distribution network that currently support listings for EV charging stations. Talk to us about building your presence in key mapping applications like Apple Maps, search engines like Bing, aggregators like Infogroup, and mobile navigation providers like Navmii. Moz Local can help you get listed on multiple platforms so that potential customers can find your charging station locations via their preferred search methods.
Local search marketing tips for EV charging stations
JP Morgan predicts that EVs and HVs will make up 30% of total vehicle sales in the next five years and Statista estimates there are about 25,000 charging stations in the US. It’s big business, and while the convenience of charging at home can’t be beat, the presence of chargers and superchargers all over cities will do much to increase awareness of the rise of the EV, and to ease the transition away from fossil fuel transportation.
As a resident of California — the state with the most electric vehicles and also the state experiencing some of the worst devastation from Climate Change — every new charging station that pops up on Google Maps is a sign of hope to me. But I’ll be frank; I’m not a “car” person, and despite making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to understand how I could personally transition from a worried, gas-powered driver to a proud EV traveler has taught me that it’s a road paved with countless questions.
And that’s actually good news for EV charging station brands!
Whether you’re marketing EVgo, Blink, Tesla, ChargePoint, or the dozens of other charging solutions, your online marketing strategy is going to hinge on publishing content that solves consumers’ problems by answering their questions. Luckily for your industry, customers’ questions are so abundant that they are paving the way for you to develop absolutely fantastic website content that will support your organic and local rankings over time as you develop authority.
Here’s a simple six-step workflow for getting it right:
1. Survey customers
Making a minor investment in survey tech will let you directly ask the public what they want most from charging stations. Is it speed, location, more ports, better instructions, different payment options? Find out and document your learnings.
2. Analyze industry reviews and questions
Look at the common themes in your online reviews. For example, one thread I see running through the EV charging vertical is complaints about sitting in hot cars for 30+ minutes while charging up. When you think about it, gas stations provide shade at the pumps, though patrons are only there for ten minutes. If your customers are being inconvenienced in the summer heat, would properties permit you to build a canopy, or perhaps even better, plant some native trees to double down on your green goals?
Moz Local will surface the 100 most common words in your reviews for sentiment analysis purposes. Dig deeply into these for content inspiration and structural improvements.
And check out the positive and negative sentiment your competitors’ reviews contain. What is the competition getting wrong that you could get right? If you find opportunities like these, be sure you’re writing about them.
3. Fire up keyword research tools
How do electric car charging stations work?
Where can I charge my electric car?
What is the best EV charging station?
How to find free charging stations
How many miles does a Tesla get per charge?
Are EVgo stations free?
Can I use ChargePoint at EVgo?
What is a level 3 charging station?
Questions truly abound in the EV charging space. Moz Pro Keyword Explorer lets you type in keywords and phrases you feel could be important to the business you’re marketing, and then filter the results to see questions like the ones in my list, above. If you sign up for a free Moz community account, you can make 10 free queries a month or upgrade to a paid account for more robust keyword research.
Other free options include Google’s Ads Keyword Planner and the unpaid version of Answer the Public.
Document your findings so that you have created a list of questions around which you can base content publication.
4. Take a peek at Google Trends
Google Trends will show you interest in topics across time related to EV charging stations, and you can even see this broken out by regions of a country to help you localize your marketing. My glance at this data shows that interest in this subject took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged but is now steadily rising again. Glean further insights from this tool for topics you should be covering.
5. Analyze the competition
If you have a Moz Pro account, you can use Moz’s On-Page Grader feature not just to look at pages on your own website to see how to improve their optimization, but also to analyze what your competition is getting right and wrong. If you can find weaknesses in the strategy of a tough competitor, you can go one better with the actionable optimization tips On-Page Grader provides.
Look carefully at what your competitors are writing about on their websites and social accounts. If they’re covering a topic your keyword research hasn’t surfaced, note it down.
6. Get writing!
Now, take the list of questions and keyword phrases you’ve discovered, group them by topics, and begin creating pages for them on your website, or posts on the brand’s blog, providing answers. Some pages may be short, and others may be long — the rule of thumb is simply to cover each question thoroughly. You may find that some topics are best answered via other media, like short videos. That’s great, if you can produce them, but don’t forget to provide written transcripts.
Your findings can also fuel your social media posting, your Google posts, and provide the top FAQs you can ask and answer via Google Questions & Answers on your Google Business Profiles.
Finally, remember that marketing requires active promotion. Don’t just let your content sit on your website hoping someone will arrive to read it. Actively promote your best pieces via social media, to local print and online media journalists, and in local community hubs, like neighborhood websites and hyperlocal blogs. Work to build real relationships in the cities where you’re marketing your charging station locations so that you are always increasing awareness of your brand’s commitment to making towns and cities better places to live.
Have questions? Ask me in the comments. I’m personally rooting for the rapid spread of EV charging stations across the US and around the world, and if you’re marketing this model, I’d love to hear from you!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Local SEO Tips for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
Posted by MiriamEllis
Some business models exist in the ditches of Google’s information highways, belonging in local search results, but not well addressed by the official guidelines. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations exemplify this: They’re all over local packs, finders, and maps, but their models is a bit unusual, and Google has yet to update the guidelines to show exactly how to represent them in the Google My Business setting.
Today, we’ll pull together our own set of EV charging station best practices — based on Google’s rules for similar enterprises — and throw a few free local search marketing tips into the trunk as well.
How to handle your EV charging station Google My Business listings
Whether you’re an owner, in-house marketer, or agency staffer who’s been tasked with promoting a fleet of EV charging stations online, having a presence in Google’s local search results — including local packs, local finders, Google Business Profiles, and Google Maps — should be core to your digital strategy.
While Google’s helpful guidelines don’t specifically address EV charging stations, proof that they’re eligible for inclusion can be seen in the extra special features and categories Google has released for these models. For example, the above screenshot shows the charger icons, charger type designations, and wattage displays in the local results. In the US and UK, Google displays live charger availability data for some networks for consumer convenience. Even the map pins have special icons in them for EV charging stations.
Google definitely knows about them, and wants this industry to get listed.
If you’ve never set up a GMB listing before, Google’s own resources will walk you through the process of filling out and validating a profile for an individual location, but EV charging station marketers are most likely dealing with many locations at once. If you need to get 10 or more locations listed, you’ll be using Google’s bulk upload functionality, instead. You’ll also want to go for bulk verification of these large batches of listings.
But before you get started, here’s special guidance for handling some of the major fields you’ll be filling out for any EV charging station you’re marketing.
Business title
Google wants you to fill out this field with the exact name of the business as it appears in the real world. The majority of the listings I looked at in this sector were adding the words “charging station” to their brand name, which technically violates Google’s guidelines. Just as gas stations are supposed to list themselves as “Shell” or “Valero”, EV charging stations wanting to stick scrupulously to the guidelines should just be “EVgo” or “ChargePoint”.
According to the guidelines, Google wouldn’t want listings entitled “Shell Gas Station” or “EVgo Charging Station”, any more than they’d want “McDonald’s Fast Food Restaurant” or “Macy’s Department Store.”
But now for a home truth: Google says you’re only supposed to put your real-world brand in these titles, but they don’t take much action on enforcing this guideline, and having keywords in the business title that match search language is strongly believed to improve local rankings. So, if you adhere to the guidelines and remove “charging station” from your business titles, your rankings may decrease. This weighting of keywords in the business title is a longstanding issue Google needs to resolve.
Frankly, I think having the words “charging station” in the listing title might actually help users who are just now becoming accustomed to emergent EV technology and trying to understand where to get charged up, but my common sense and Google’s policies are often at odds.
Keep your business title free of other extraneous information like location information, or adjectives like “cheapest” or “best”.
Address
It’s a dominant trend for EV charging stations to be located in the parking lots of busy public spaces, like shopping centers, railroad stations, and business parks. Typically, to be eligible for a GMB listing, a business has to have its own address, but a look at Google’s local search engine results (including Google Maps) shows charging stations being permitted to use the address of the public space. For example, an EV charging station in a strip mall near me is using the same address as the Target that anchors the shopping center.
Additionally, businesses that host a charging station are allowed to have a link on their listings publicizing this feature.
Also related to address, many EV Charging stations will find details on their listings that describe them as “located in” a public space. If the “located in” descriptor is wrong, look up the business on google.com/maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and try to edit the information in this field:
If you see no correction within a couple of weeks of taking this action, contact Google My Business support and explain what’s going on.
Phone number
We’ll take our cue here from Google’s requirements of ATMs and kiosks. As I previously covered in my column on local product kiosks, the EV charging stations you’re marketing need a customer support phone number.
Again, this is one of those unusual grey areas. Normally, it’s standard advice for each location of a business to have a unique phone number. But, for EV charging stations, this obviously isn’t practical. Rather, be sure your listings have your help hotline number for customer service needs.
A word to the wise: Google has sometimes been prone to conflating listings with too-similar information. Having dozens, hundreds, or thousands of listings with the same brand AND phone number on them could potentially result in the accidental creation of duplicate listings. Large, multi-listing enterprises like EV charging brands might want to check out the automated duplicate detection and resolution services offered by Moz Local so that pesky duplicates aren’t interfering with listings management, visibility goals, and consumer direction.
Category
“Electric vehicle charging station” is the proper primary category for you, and my search through listings and GMB category databases is only finding one other related category, “electric vehicle charging station contractor” which may or may not be relevant to the business you’re marketing.
Hours of operation
Google’s guidelines state that gas stations should list the hours of operation that their pumps are available, and for most EV charging stations, this would presumably be 24 hours a day. As stated above, you’ll probably be uploading your data to Google via a bulk upload spreadsheet and the proper configuration for indicating 24-hours-a-day in the spreadsheet is 12:00AM-12:00AM.
URL
You’ll be allowed to include a website link on each listing you create. The best user experience I’m encountering on EV charger station listings is when the listing links to a landing page for the location I’m researching. On the flip side, you may get a ranking boost if you link to the brand’s homepage, instead, due to homepages typically having greater Page Authority than landing pages.
Photos/Videos
Make each listing stand out for customers by adding a few photos of the charger’s location. Given the fact that so many chargers are in vast parking lots, try to take some shots that illustrate the relationship of the station to the largest anchor business near it. This will help orient customers. And, given the newness of EV technology, uploading a video of how to use each type of charger would be extremely helpful to new electric vehicle owners.
Reviews
Looking around the SF Bay area, I couldn’t help noticing how few reviews these entities are receiving, meaning there are easy wins out there for any EV charger brand that makes a concerted review acquisition effort. If you’re building out landing pages on the brand’s website for each charging station locale, include a strong call to action and link to leave a review on Google on these pages. You can also use a free review link generator and then shorten the URL using a service like bitly for text or email-based review requests.
Just don’t ask for reviews in bulk; if you get too many at once, Google may filter them out as suspicious. And never incentivize reviews in any way — it can result in review loss, penalties, and legal actions.
Questions & Answers
Unsurprisingly, EV charging station listings show customers using Google’s Q&A feature to ask about costs and how to use the kiosks. These are leads for the brand and should be answered by the brand, rather than being left up to the public for responses of varying quality. If you’re using Moz Local to manage your listings, the dashboard will alert you each time a new question comes in on any of your listings.
Google Posts
Google Posts are a great way to make a brand stand out from less active competitors by microblogging persuasive content that appears on your listings, but for the typical EV charging brand, this feature is problematic. Google doesn’t allow large chains to post in bulk to their listings. There are some third-party services that facilitate hacks for this scenario.
Listings beyond Google
Google may be your dominant source of local business listings, but don’t hit the brakes there. Moz has mapped out the partners in our location data distribution network that currently support listings for EV charging stations. Talk to us about building your presence in key mapping applications like Apple Maps, search engines like Bing, aggregators like Infogroup, and mobile navigation providers like Navmii. Moz Local can help you get listed on multiple platforms so that potential customers can find your charging station locations via their preferred search methods.
Local search marketing tips for EV charging stations
JP Morgan predicts that EVs and HVs will make up 30% of total vehicle sales in the next five years and Statista estimates there are about 25,000 charging stations in the US. It’s big business, and while the convenience of charging at home can’t be beat, the presence of chargers and superchargers all over cities will do much to increase awareness of the rise of the EV, and to ease the transition away from fossil fuel transportation.
As a resident of California — the state with the most electric vehicles and also the state experiencing some of the worst devastation from Climate Change — every new charging station that pops up on Google Maps is a sign of hope to me. But I’ll be frank; I’m not a “car” person, and despite making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to understand how I could personally transition from a worried, gas-powered driver to a proud EV traveler has taught me that it’s a road paved with countless questions.
And that’s actually good news for EV charging station brands!
Whether you’re marketing EVgo, Blink, Tesla, ChargePoint, or the dozens of other charging solutions, your online marketing strategy is going to hinge on publishing content that solves consumers’ problems by answering their questions. Luckily for your industry, customers’ questions are so abundant that they are paving the way for you to develop absolutely fantastic website content that will support your organic and local rankings over time as you develop authority.
Here’s a simple six-step workflow for getting it right:
1. Survey customers
Making a minor investment in survey tech will let you directly ask the public what they want most from charging stations. Is it speed, location, more ports, better instructions, different payment options? Find out and document your learnings.
2. Analyze industry reviews and questions
Look at the common themes in your online reviews. For example, one thread I see running through the EV charging vertical is complaints about sitting in hot cars for 30+ minutes while charging up. When you think about it, gas stations provide shade at the pumps, though patrons are only there for ten minutes. If your customers are being inconvenienced in the summer heat, would properties permit you to build a canopy, or perhaps even better, plant some native trees to double down on your green goals?
Moz Local will surface the 100 most common words in your reviews for sentiment analysis purposes. Dig deeply into these for content inspiration and structural improvements.
And check out the positive and negative sentiment your competitors’ reviews contain. What is the competition getting wrong that you could get right? If you find opportunities like these, be sure you’re writing about them.
3. Fire up keyword research tools
How do electric car charging stations work?
Where can I charge my electric car?
What is the best EV charging station?
How to find free charging stations
How many miles does a Tesla get per charge?
Are EVgo stations free?
Can I use ChargePoint at EVgo?
What is a level 3 charging station?
Questions truly abound in the EV charging space. Moz Pro Keyword Explorer lets you type in keywords and phrases you feel could be important to the business you’re marketing, and then filter the results to see questions like the ones in my list, above. If you sign up for a free Moz community account, you can make 10 free queries a month or upgrade to a paid account for more robust keyword research.
Other free options include Google’s Ads Keyword Planner and the unpaid version of Answer the Public.
Document your findings so that you have created a list of questions around which you can base content publication.
4. Take a peek at Google Trends
Google Trends will show you interest in topics across time related to EV charging stations, and you can even see this broken out by regions of a country to help you localize your marketing. My glance at this data shows that interest in this subject took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged but is now steadily rising again. Glean further insights from this tool for topics you should be covering.
5. Analyze the competition
If you have a Moz Pro account, you can use Moz’s On-Page Grader feature not just to look at pages on your own website to see how to improve their optimization, but also to analyze what your competition is getting right and wrong. If you can find weaknesses in the strategy of a tough competitor, you can go one better with the actionable optimization tips On-Page Grader provides.
Look carefully at what your competitors are writing about on their websites and social accounts. If they’re covering a topic your keyword research hasn’t surfaced, note it down.
6. Get writing!
Now, take the list of questions and keyword phrases you’ve discovered, group them by topics, and begin creating pages for them on your website, or posts on the brand’s blog, providing answers. Some pages may be short, and others may be long — the rule of thumb is simply to cover each question thoroughly. You may find that some topics are best answered via other media, like short videos. That’s great, if you can produce them, but don’t forget to provide written transcripts.
Your findings can also fuel your social media posting, your Google posts, and provide the top FAQs you can ask and answer via Google Questions & Answers on your Google Business Profiles.
Finally, remember that marketing requires active promotion. Don’t just let your content sit on your website hoping someone will arrive to read it. Actively promote your best pieces via social media, to local print and online media journalists, and in local community hubs, like neighborhood websites and hyperlocal blogs. Work to build real relationships in the cities where you’re marketing your charging station locations so that you are always increasing awareness of your brand’s commitment to making towns and cities better places to live.
Have questions? Ask me in the comments. I’m personally rooting for the rapid spread of EV charging stations across the US and around the world, and if you’re marketing this model, I’d love to hear from you!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Local SEO Tips for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
Posted by MiriamEllis
Some business models exist in the ditches of Google’s information highways, belonging in local search results, but not well addressed by the official guidelines. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations exemplify this: They’re all over local packs, finders, and maps, but their models is a bit unusual, and Google has yet to update the guidelines to show exactly how to represent them in the Google My Business setting.
Today, we’ll pull together our own set of EV charging station best practices — based on Google’s rules for similar enterprises — and throw a few free local search marketing tips into the trunk as well.
How to handle your EV charging station Google My Business listings
Whether you’re an owner, in-house marketer, or agency staffer who’s been tasked with promoting a fleet of EV charging stations online, having a presence in Google’s local search results — including local packs, local finders, Google Business Profiles, and Google Maps — should be core to your digital strategy.
While Google’s helpful guidelines don’t specifically address EV charging stations, proof that they’re eligible for inclusion can be seen in the extra special features and categories Google has released for these models. For example, the above screenshot shows the charger icons, charger type designations, and wattage displays in the local results. In the US and UK, Google displays live charger availability data for some networks for consumer convenience. Even the map pins have special icons in them for EV charging stations.
Google definitely knows about them, and wants this industry to get listed.
If you’ve never set up a GMB listing before, Google’s own resources will walk you through the process of filling out and validating a profile for an individual location, but EV charging station marketers are most likely dealing with many locations at once. If you need to get 10 or more locations listed, you’ll be using Google’s bulk upload functionality, instead. You’ll also want to go for bulk verification of these large batches of listings.
But before you get started, here’s special guidance for handling some of the major fields you’ll be filling out for any EV charging station you’re marketing.
Business title
Google wants you to fill out this field with the exact name of the business as it appears in the real world. The majority of the listings I looked at in this sector were adding the words “charging station” to their brand name, which technically violates Google’s guidelines. Just as gas stations are supposed to list themselves as “Shell” or “Valero”, EV charging stations wanting to stick scrupulously to the guidelines should just be “EVgo” or “ChargePoint”.
According to the guidelines, Google wouldn’t want listings entitled “Shell Gas Station” or “EVgo Charging Station”, any more than they’d want “McDonald’s Fast Food Restaurant” or “Macy’s Department Store.”
But now for a home truth: Google says you’re only supposed to put your real-world brand in these titles, but they don’t take much action on enforcing this guideline, and having keywords in the business title that match search language is strongly believed to improve local rankings. So, if you adhere to the guidelines and remove “charging station” from your business titles, your rankings may decrease. This weighting of keywords in the business title is a longstanding issue Google needs to resolve.
Frankly, I think having the words “charging station” in the listing title might actually help users who are just now becoming accustomed to emergent EV technology and trying to understand where to get charged up, but my common sense and Google’s policies are often at odds.
Keep your business title free of other extraneous information like location information, or adjectives like “cheapest” or “best”.
Address
It’s a dominant trend for EV charging stations to be located in the parking lots of busy public spaces, like shopping centers, railroad stations, and business parks. Typically, to be eligible for a GMB listing, a business has to have its own address, but a look at Google’s local search engine results (including Google Maps) shows charging stations being permitted to use the address of the public space. For example, an EV charging station in a strip mall near me is using the same address as the Target that anchors the shopping center.
Additionally, businesses that host a charging station are allowed to have a link on their listings publicizing this feature.
Also related to address, many EV Charging stations will find details on their listings that describe them as “located in” a public space. If the “located in” descriptor is wrong, look up the business on google.com/maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and try to edit the information in this field:
If you see no correction within a couple of weeks of taking this action, contact Google My Business support and explain what’s going on.
Phone number
We’ll take our cue here from Google’s requirements of ATMs and kiosks. As I previously covered in my column on local product kiosks, the EV charging stations you’re marketing need a customer support phone number.
Again, this is one of those unusual grey areas. Normally, it’s standard advice for each location of a business to have a unique phone number. But, for EV charging stations, this obviously isn’t practical. Rather, be sure your listings have your help hotline number for customer service needs.
A word to the wise: Google has sometimes been prone to conflating listings with too-similar information. Having dozens, hundreds, or thousands of listings with the same brand AND phone number on them could potentially result in the accidental creation of duplicate listings. Large, multi-listing enterprises like EV charging brands might want to check out the automated duplicate detection and resolution services offered by Moz Local so that pesky duplicates aren’t interfering with listings management, visibility goals, and consumer direction.
Category
“Electric vehicle charging station” is the proper primary category for you, and my search through listings and GMB category databases is only finding one other related category, “electric vehicle charging station contractor” which may or may not be relevant to the business you’re marketing.
Hours of operation
Google’s guidelines state that gas stations should list the hours of operation that their pumps are available, and for most EV charging stations, this would presumably be 24 hours a day. As stated above, you’ll probably be uploading your data to Google via a bulk upload spreadsheet and the proper configuration for indicating 24-hours-a-day in the spreadsheet is 12:00AM-12:00AM.
URL
You’ll be allowed to include a website link on each listing you create. The best user experience I’m encountering on EV charger station listings is when the listing links to a landing page for the location I’m researching. On the flip side, you may get a ranking boost if you link to the brand’s homepage, instead, due to homepages typically having greater Page Authority than landing pages.
Photos/Videos
Make each listing stand out for customers by adding a few photos of the charger’s location. Given the fact that so many chargers are in vast parking lots, try to take some shots that illustrate the relationship of the station to the largest anchor business near it. This will help orient customers. And, given the newness of EV technology, uploading a video of how to use each type of charger would be extremely helpful to new electric vehicle owners.
Reviews
Looking around the SF Bay area, I couldn’t help noticing how few reviews these entities are receiving, meaning there are easy wins out there for any EV charger brand that makes a concerted review acquisition effort. If you’re building out landing pages on the brand’s website for each charging station locale, include a strong call to action and link to leave a review on Google on these pages. You can also use a free review link generator and then shorten the URL using a service like bitly for text or email-based review requests.
Just don’t ask for reviews in bulk; if you get too many at once, Google may filter them out as suspicious. And never incentivize reviews in any way — it can result in review loss, penalties, and legal actions.
Questions & Answers
Unsurprisingly, EV charging station listings show customers using Google’s Q&A feature to ask about costs and how to use the kiosks. These are leads for the brand and should be answered by the brand, rather than being left up to the public for responses of varying quality. If you’re using Moz Local to manage your listings, the dashboard will alert you each time a new question comes in on any of your listings.
Google Posts
Google Posts are a great way to make a brand stand out from less active competitors by microblogging persuasive content that appears on your listings, but for the typical EV charging brand, this feature is problematic. Google doesn’t allow large chains to post in bulk to their listings. There are some third-party services that facilitate hacks for this scenario.
Listings beyond Google
Google may be your dominant source of local business listings, but don’t hit the brakes there. Moz has mapped out the partners in our location data distribution network that currently support listings for EV charging stations. Talk to us about building your presence in key mapping applications like Apple Maps, search engines like Bing, aggregators like Infogroup, and mobile navigation providers like Navmii. Moz Local can help you get listed on multiple platforms so that potential customers can find your charging station locations via their preferred search methods.
Local search marketing tips for EV charging stations
JP Morgan predicts that EVs and HVs will make up 30% of total vehicle sales in the next five years and Statista estimates there are about 25,000 charging stations in the US. It’s big business, and while the convenience of charging at home can’t be beat, the presence of chargers and superchargers all over cities will do much to increase awareness of the rise of the EV, and to ease the transition away from fossil fuel transportation.
As a resident of California — the state with the most electric vehicles and also the state experiencing some of the worst devastation from Climate Change — every new charging station that pops up on Google Maps is a sign of hope to me. But I’ll be frank; I’m not a “car” person, and despite making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to understand how I could personally transition from a worried, gas-powered driver to a proud EV traveler has taught me that it’s a road paved with countless questions.
And that’s actually good news for EV charging station brands!
Whether you’re marketing EVgo, Blink, Tesla, ChargePoint, or the dozens of other charging solutions, your online marketing strategy is going to hinge on publishing content that solves consumers’ problems by answering their questions. Luckily for your industry, customers’ questions are so abundant that they are paving the way for you to develop absolutely fantastic website content that will support your organic and local rankings over time as you develop authority.
Here’s a simple six-step workflow for getting it right:
1. Survey customers
Making a minor investment in survey tech will let you directly ask the public what they want most from charging stations. Is it speed, location, more ports, better instructions, different payment options? Find out and document your learnings.
2. Analyze industry reviews and questions
Look at the common themes in your online reviews. For example, one thread I see running through the EV charging vertical is complaints about sitting in hot cars for 30+ minutes while charging up. When you think about it, gas stations provide shade at the pumps, though patrons are only there for ten minutes. If your customers are being inconvenienced in the summer heat, would properties permit you to build a canopy, or perhaps even better, plant some native trees to double down on your green goals?
Moz Local will surface the 100 most common words in your reviews for sentiment analysis purposes. Dig deeply into these for content inspiration and structural improvements.
And check out the positive and negative sentiment your competitors’ reviews contain. What is the competition getting wrong that you could get right? If you find opportunities like these, be sure you’re writing about them.
3. Fire up keyword research tools
How do electric car charging stations work?
Where can I charge my electric car?
What is the best EV charging station?
How to find free charging stations
How many miles does a Tesla get per charge?
Are EVgo stations free?
Can I use ChargePoint at EVgo?
What is a level 3 charging station?
Questions truly abound in the EV charging space. Moz Pro Keyword Explorer lets you type in keywords and phrases you feel could be important to the business you’re marketing, and then filter the results to see questions like the ones in my list, above. If you sign up for a free Moz community account, you can make 10 free queries a month or upgrade to a paid account for more robust keyword research.
Other free options include Google’s Ads Keyword Planner and the unpaid version of Answer the Public.
Document your findings so that you have created a list of questions around which you can base content publication.
4. Take a peek at Google Trends
Google Trends will show you interest in topics across time related to EV charging stations, and you can even see this broken out by regions of a country to help you localize your marketing. My glance at this data shows that interest in this subject took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged but is now steadily rising again. Glean further insights from this tool for topics you should be covering.
5. Analyze the competition
If you have a Moz Pro account, you can use Moz’s On-Page Grader feature not just to look at pages on your own website to see how to improve their optimization, but also to analyze what your competition is getting right and wrong. If you can find weaknesses in the strategy of a tough competitor, you can go one better with the actionable optimization tips On-Page Grader provides.
Look carefully at what your competitors are writing about on their websites and social accounts. If they’re covering a topic your keyword research hasn’t surfaced, note it down.
6. Get writing!
Now, take the list of questions and keyword phrases you’ve discovered, group them by topics, and begin creating pages for them on your website, or posts on the brand’s blog, providing answers. Some pages may be short, and others may be long — the rule of thumb is simply to cover each question thoroughly. You may find that some topics are best answered via other media, like short videos. That’s great, if you can produce them, but don’t forget to provide written transcripts.
Your findings can also fuel your social media posting, your Google posts, and provide the top FAQs you can ask and answer via Google Questions & Answers on your Google Business Profiles.
Finally, remember that marketing requires active promotion. Don’t just let your content sit on your website hoping someone will arrive to read it. Actively promote your best pieces via social media, to local print and online media journalists, and in local community hubs, like neighborhood websites and hyperlocal blogs. Work to build real relationships in the cities where you’re marketing your charging station locations so that you are always increasing awareness of your brand’s commitment to making towns and cities better places to live.
Have questions? Ask me in the comments. I’m personally rooting for the rapid spread of EV charging stations across the US and around the world, and if you’re marketing this model, I’d love to hear from you!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Local SEO Tips for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
Posted by MiriamEllis
Some business models exist in the ditches of Google’s information highways, belonging in local search results, but not well addressed by the official guidelines. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations exemplify this: They’re all over local packs, finders, and maps, but their models is a bit unusual, and Google has yet to update the guidelines to show exactly how to represent them in the Google My Business setting.
Today, we’ll pull together our own set of EV charging station best practices — based on Google’s rules for similar enterprises — and throw a few free local search marketing tips into the trunk as well.
How to handle your EV charging station Google My Business listings
Whether you’re an owner, in-house marketer, or agency staffer who’s been tasked with promoting a fleet of EV charging stations online, having a presence in Google’s local search results — including local packs, local finders, Google Business Profiles, and Google Maps — should be core to your digital strategy.
While Google’s helpful guidelines don’t specifically address EV charging stations, proof that they’re eligible for inclusion can be seen in the extra special features and categories Google has released for these models. For example, the above screenshot shows the charger icons, charger type designations, and wattage displays in the local results. In the US and UK, Google displays live charger availability data for some networks for consumer convenience. Even the map pins have special icons in them for EV charging stations.
Google definitely knows about them, and wants this industry to get listed.
If you’ve never set up a GMB listing before, Google’s own resources will walk you through the process of filling out and validating a profile for an individual location, but EV charging station marketers are most likely dealing with many locations at once. If you need to get 10 or more locations listed, you’ll be using Google’s bulk upload functionality, instead. You’ll also want to go for bulk verification of these large batches of listings.
But before you get started, here’s special guidance for handling some of the major fields you’ll be filling out for any EV charging station you’re marketing.
Business title
Google wants you to fill out this field with the exact name of the business as it appears in the real world. The majority of the listings I looked at in this sector were adding the words “charging station” to their brand name, which technically violates Google’s guidelines. Just as gas stations are supposed to list themselves as “Shell” or “Valero”, EV charging stations wanting to stick scrupulously to the guidelines should just be “EVgo” or “ChargePoint”.
According to the guidelines, Google wouldn’t want listings entitled “Shell Gas Station” or “EVgo Charging Station”, any more than they’d want “McDonald’s Fast Food Restaurant” or “Macy’s Department Store.”
But now for a home truth: Google says you’re only supposed to put your real-world brand in these titles, but they don’t take much action on enforcing this guideline, and having keywords in the business title that match search language is strongly believed to improve local rankings. So, if you adhere to the guidelines and remove “charging station” from your business titles, your rankings may decrease. This weighting of keywords in the business title is a longstanding issue Google needs to resolve.
Frankly, I think having the words “charging station” in the listing title might actually help users who are just now becoming accustomed to emergent EV technology and trying to understand where to get charged up, but my common sense and Google’s policies are often at odds.
Keep your business title free of other extraneous information like location information, or adjectives like “cheapest” or “best”.
Address
It’s a dominant trend for EV charging stations to be located in the parking lots of busy public spaces, like shopping centers, railroad stations, and business parks. Typically, to be eligible for a GMB listing, a business has to have its own address, but a look at Google’s local search engine results (including Google Maps) shows charging stations being permitted to use the address of the public space. For example, an EV charging station in a strip mall near me is using the same address as the Target that anchors the shopping center.
Additionally, businesses that host a charging station are allowed to have a link on their listings publicizing this feature.
Also related to address, many EV Charging stations will find details on their listings that describe them as “located in” a public space. If the “located in” descriptor is wrong, look up the business on google.com/maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and try to edit the information in this field:
If you see no correction within a couple of weeks of taking this action, contact Google My Business support and explain what’s going on.
Phone number
We’ll take our cue here from Google’s requirements of ATMs and kiosks. As I previously covered in my column on local product kiosks, the EV charging stations you’re marketing need a customer support phone number.
Again, this is one of those unusual grey areas. Normally, it’s standard advice for each location of a business to have a unique phone number. But, for EV charging stations, this obviously isn’t practical. Rather, be sure your listings have your help hotline number for customer service needs.
A word to the wise: Google has sometimes been prone to conflating listings with too-similar information. Having dozens, hundreds, or thousands of listings with the same brand AND phone number on them could potentially result in the accidental creation of duplicate listings. Large, multi-listing enterprises like EV charging brands might want to check out the automated duplicate detection and resolution services offered by Moz Local so that pesky duplicates aren’t interfering with listings management, visibility goals, and consumer direction.
Category
“Electric vehicle charging station” is the proper primary category for you, and my search through listings and GMB category databases is only finding one other related category, “electric vehicle charging station contractor” which may or may not be relevant to the business you’re marketing.
Hours of operation
Google’s guidelines state that gas stations should list the hours of operation that their pumps are available, and for most EV charging stations, this would presumably be 24 hours a day. As stated above, you’ll probably be uploading your data to Google via a bulk upload spreadsheet and the proper configuration for indicating 24-hours-a-day in the spreadsheet is 12:00AM-12:00AM.
URL
You’ll be allowed to include a website link on each listing you create. The best user experience I’m encountering on EV charger station listings is when the listing links to a landing page for the location I’m researching. On the flip side, you may get a ranking boost if you link to the brand’s homepage, instead, due to homepages typically having greater Page Authority than landing pages.
Photos/Videos
Make each listing stand out for customers by adding a few photos of the charger’s location. Given the fact that so many chargers are in vast parking lots, try to take some shots that illustrate the relationship of the station to the largest anchor business near it. This will help orient customers. And, given the newness of EV technology, uploading a video of how to use each type of charger would be extremely helpful to new electric vehicle owners.
Reviews
Looking around the SF Bay area, I couldn’t help noticing how few reviews these entities are receiving, meaning there are easy wins out there for any EV charger brand that makes a concerted review acquisition effort. If you’re building out landing pages on the brand’s website for each charging station locale, include a strong call to action and link to leave a review on Google on these pages. You can also use a free review link generator and then shorten the URL using a service like bitly for text or email-based review requests.
Just don’t ask for reviews in bulk; if you get too many at once, Google may filter them out as suspicious. And never incentivize reviews in any way — it can result in review loss, penalties, and legal actions.
Questions & Answers
Unsurprisingly, EV charging station listings show customers using Google’s Q&A feature to ask about costs and how to use the kiosks. These are leads for the brand and should be answered by the brand, rather than being left up to the public for responses of varying quality. If you’re using Moz Local to manage your listings, the dashboard will alert you each time a new question comes in on any of your listings.
Google Posts
Google Posts are a great way to make a brand stand out from less active competitors by microblogging persuasive content that appears on your listings, but for the typical EV charging brand, this feature is problematic. Google doesn’t allow large chains to post in bulk to their listings. There are some third-party services that facilitate hacks for this scenario.
Listings beyond Google
Google may be your dominant source of local business listings, but don’t hit the brakes there. Moz has mapped out the partners in our location data distribution network that currently support listings for EV charging stations. Talk to us about building your presence in key mapping applications like Apple Maps, search engines like Bing, aggregators like Infogroup, and mobile navigation providers like Navmii. Moz Local can help you get listed on multiple platforms so that potential customers can find your charging station locations via their preferred search methods.
Local search marketing tips for EV charging stations
JP Morgan predicts that EVs and HVs will make up 30% of total vehicle sales in the next five years and Statista estimates there are about 25,000 charging stations in the US. It’s big business, and while the convenience of charging at home can’t be beat, the presence of chargers and superchargers all over cities will do much to increase awareness of the rise of the EV, and to ease the transition away from fossil fuel transportation.
As a resident of California — the state with the most electric vehicles and also the state experiencing some of the worst devastation from Climate Change — every new charging station that pops up on Google Maps is a sign of hope to me. But I’ll be frank; I’m not a “car” person, and despite making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to understand how I could personally transition from a worried, gas-powered driver to a proud EV traveler has taught me that it’s a road paved with countless questions.
And that’s actually good news for EV charging station brands!
Whether you’re marketing EVgo, Blink, Tesla, ChargePoint, or the dozens of other charging solutions, your online marketing strategy is going to hinge on publishing content that solves consumers’ problems by answering their questions. Luckily for your industry, customers’ questions are so abundant that they are paving the way for you to develop absolutely fantastic website content that will support your organic and local rankings over time as you develop authority.
Here’s a simple six-step workflow for getting it right:
1. Survey customers
Making a minor investment in survey tech will let you directly ask the public what they want most from charging stations. Is it speed, location, more ports, better instructions, different payment options? Find out and document your learnings.
2. Analyze industry reviews and questions
Look at the common themes in your online reviews. For example, one thread I see running through the EV charging vertical is complaints about sitting in hot cars for 30+ minutes while charging up. When you think about it, gas stations provide shade at the pumps, though patrons are only there for ten minutes. If your customers are being inconvenienced in the summer heat, would properties permit you to build a canopy, or perhaps even better, plant some native trees to double down on your green goals?
Moz Local will surface the 100 most common words in your reviews for sentiment analysis purposes. Dig deeply into these for content inspiration and structural improvements.
And check out the positive and negative sentiment your competitors’ reviews contain. What is the competition getting wrong that you could get right? If you find opportunities like these, be sure you’re writing about them.
3. Fire up keyword research tools
How do electric car charging stations work?
Where can I charge my electric car?
What is the best EV charging station?
How to find free charging stations
How many miles does a Tesla get per charge?
Are EVgo stations free?
Can I use ChargePoint at EVgo?
What is a level 3 charging station?
Questions truly abound in the EV charging space. Moz Pro Keyword Explorer lets you type in keywords and phrases you feel could be important to the business you’re marketing, and then filter the results to see questions like the ones in my list, above. If you sign up for a free Moz community account, you can make 10 free queries a month or upgrade to a paid account for more robust keyword research.
Other free options include Google’s Ads Keyword Planner and the unpaid version of Answer the Public.
Document your findings so that you have created a list of questions around which you can base content publication.
4. Take a peek at Google Trends
Google Trends will show you interest in topics across time related to EV charging stations, and you can even see this broken out by regions of a country to help you localize your marketing. My glance at this data shows that interest in this subject took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged but is now steadily rising again. Glean further insights from this tool for topics you should be covering.
5. Analyze the competition
If you have a Moz Pro account, you can use Moz’s On-Page Grader feature not just to look at pages on your own website to see how to improve their optimization, but also to analyze what your competition is getting right and wrong. If you can find weaknesses in the strategy of a tough competitor, you can go one better with the actionable optimization tips On-Page Grader provides.
Look carefully at what your competitors are writing about on their websites and social accounts. If they’re covering a topic your keyword research hasn’t surfaced, note it down.
6. Get writing!
Now, take the list of questions and keyword phrases you’ve discovered, group them by topics, and begin creating pages for them on your website, or posts on the brand’s blog, providing answers. Some pages may be short, and others may be long — the rule of thumb is simply to cover each question thoroughly. You may find that some topics are best answered via other media, like short videos. That’s great, if you can produce them, but don’t forget to provide written transcripts.
Your findings can also fuel your social media posting, your Google posts, and provide the top FAQs you can ask and answer via Google Questions & Answers on your Google Business Profiles.
Finally, remember that marketing requires active promotion. Don’t just let your content sit on your website hoping someone will arrive to read it. Actively promote your best pieces via social media, to local print and online media journalists, and in local community hubs, like neighborhood websites and hyperlocal blogs. Work to build real relationships in the cities where you’re marketing your charging station locations so that you are always increasing awareness of your brand’s commitment to making towns and cities better places to live.
Have questions? Ask me in the comments. I’m personally rooting for the rapid spread of EV charging stations across the US and around the world, and if you’re marketing this model, I’d love to hear from you!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Local SEO Tips for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
Posted by MiriamEllis
Some business models exist in the ditches of Google’s information highways, belonging in local search results, but not well addressed by the official guidelines. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations exemplify this: They’re all over local packs, finders, and maps, but their models is a bit unusual, and Google has yet to update the guidelines to show exactly how to represent them in the Google My Business setting.
Today, we’ll pull together our own set of EV charging station best practices — based on Google’s rules for similar enterprises — and throw a few free local search marketing tips into the trunk as well.
How to handle your EV charging station Google My Business listings
Whether you’re an owner, in-house marketer, or agency staffer who’s been tasked with promoting a fleet of EV charging stations online, having a presence in Google’s local search results — including local packs, local finders, Google Business Profiles, and Google Maps — should be core to your digital strategy.
While Google’s helpful guidelines don’t specifically address EV charging stations, proof that they’re eligible for inclusion can be seen in the extra special features and categories Google has released for these models. For example, the above screenshot shows the charger icons, charger type designations, and wattage displays in the local results. In the US and UK, Google displays live charger availability data for some networks for consumer convenience. Even the map pins have special icons in them for EV charging stations.
Google definitely knows about them, and wants this industry to get listed.
If you’ve never set up a GMB listing before, Google’s own resources will walk you through the process of filling out and validating a profile for an individual location, but EV charging station marketers are most likely dealing with many locations at once. If you need to get 10 or more locations listed, you’ll be using Google’s bulk upload functionality, instead. You’ll also want to go for bulk verification of these large batches of listings.
But before you get started, here’s special guidance for handling some of the major fields you’ll be filling out for any EV charging station you’re marketing.
Business title
Google wants you to fill out this field with the exact name of the business as it appears in the real world. The majority of the listings I looked at in this sector were adding the words “charging station” to their brand name, which technically violates Google’s guidelines. Just as gas stations are supposed to list themselves as “Shell” or “Valero”, EV charging stations wanting to stick scrupulously to the guidelines should just be “EVgo” or “ChargePoint”.
According to the guidelines, Google wouldn’t want listings entitled “Shell Gas Station” or “EVgo Charging Station”, any more than they’d want “McDonald’s Fast Food Restaurant” or “Macy’s Department Store.”
But now for a home truth: Google says you’re only supposed to put your real-world brand in these titles, but they don’t take much action on enforcing this guideline, and having keywords in the business title that match search language is strongly believed to improve local rankings. So, if you adhere to the guidelines and remove “charging station” from your business titles, your rankings may decrease. This weighting of keywords in the business title is a longstanding issue Google needs to resolve.
Frankly, I think having the words “charging station” in the listing title might actually help users who are just now becoming accustomed to emergent EV technology and trying to understand where to get charged up, but my common sense and Google’s policies are often at odds.
Keep your business title free of other extraneous information like location information, or adjectives like “cheapest” or “best”.
Address
It’s a dominant trend for EV charging stations to be located in the parking lots of busy public spaces, like shopping centers, railroad stations, and business parks. Typically, to be eligible for a GMB listing, a business has to have its own address, but a look at Google’s local search engine results (including Google Maps) shows charging stations being permitted to use the address of the public space. For example, an EV charging station in a strip mall near me is using the same address as the Target that anchors the shopping center.
Additionally, businesses that host a charging station are allowed to have a link on their listings publicizing this feature.
Also related to address, many EV Charging stations will find details on their listings that describe them as “located in” a public space. If the “located in” descriptor is wrong, look up the business on google.com/maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and try to edit the information in this field:
If you see no correction within a couple of weeks of taking this action, contact Google My Business support and explain what’s going on.
Phone number
We’ll take our cue here from Google’s requirements of ATMs and kiosks. As I previously covered in my column on local product kiosks, the EV charging stations you’re marketing need a customer support phone number.
Again, this is one of those unusual grey areas. Normally, it’s standard advice for each location of a business to have a unique phone number. But, for EV charging stations, this obviously isn’t practical. Rather, be sure your listings have your help hotline number for customer service needs.
A word to the wise: Google has sometimes been prone to conflating listings with too-similar information. Having dozens, hundreds, or thousands of listings with the same brand AND phone number on them could potentially result in the accidental creation of duplicate listings. Large, multi-listing enterprises like EV charging brands might want to check out the automated duplicate detection and resolution services offered by Moz Local so that pesky duplicates aren’t interfering with listings management, visibility goals, and consumer direction.
Category
“Electric vehicle charging station” is the proper primary category for you, and my search through listings and GMB category databases is only finding one other related category, “electric vehicle charging station contractor” which may or may not be relevant to the business you’re marketing.
Hours of operation
Google’s guidelines state that gas stations should list the hours of operation that their pumps are available, and for most EV charging stations, this would presumably be 24 hours a day. As stated above, you’ll probably be uploading your data to Google via a bulk upload spreadsheet and the proper configuration for indicating 24-hours-a-day in the spreadsheet is 12:00AM-12:00AM.
URL
You’ll be allowed to include a website link on each listing you create. The best user experience I’m encountering on EV charger station listings is when the listing links to a landing page for the location I’m researching. On the flip side, you may get a ranking boost if you link to the brand’s homepage, instead, due to homepages typically having greater Page Authority than landing pages.
Photos/Videos
Make each listing stand out for customers by adding a few photos of the charger’s location. Given the fact that so many chargers are in vast parking lots, try to take some shots that illustrate the relationship of the station to the largest anchor business near it. This will help orient customers. And, given the newness of EV technology, uploading a video of how to use each type of charger would be extremely helpful to new electric vehicle owners.
Reviews
Looking around the SF Bay area, I couldn’t help noticing how few reviews these entities are receiving, meaning there are easy wins out there for any EV charger brand that makes a concerted review acquisition effort. If you’re building out landing pages on the brand’s website for each charging station locale, include a strong call to action and link to leave a review on Google on these pages. You can also use a free review link generator and then shorten the URL using a service like bitly for text or email-based review requests.
Just don’t ask for reviews in bulk; if you get too many at once, Google may filter them out as suspicious. And never incentivize reviews in any way — it can result in review loss, penalties, and legal actions.
Questions & Answers
Unsurprisingly, EV charging station listings show customers using Google’s Q&A feature to ask about costs and how to use the kiosks. These are leads for the brand and should be answered by the brand, rather than being left up to the public for responses of varying quality. If you’re using Moz Local to manage your listings, the dashboard will alert you each time a new question comes in on any of your listings.
Google Posts
Google Posts are a great way to make a brand stand out from less active competitors by microblogging persuasive content that appears on your listings, but for the typical EV charging brand, this feature is problematic. Google doesn’t allow large chains to post in bulk to their listings. There are some third-party services that facilitate hacks for this scenario.
Listings beyond Google
Google may be your dominant source of local business listings, but don’t hit the brakes there. Moz has mapped out the partners in our location data distribution network that currently support listings for EV charging stations. Talk to us about building your presence in key mapping applications like Apple Maps, search engines like Bing, aggregators like Infogroup, and mobile navigation providers like Navmii. Moz Local can help you get listed on multiple platforms so that potential customers can find your charging station locations via their preferred search methods.
Local search marketing tips for EV charging stations
JP Morgan predicts that EVs and HVs will make up 30% of total vehicle sales in the next five years and Statista estimates there are about 25,000 charging stations in the US. It’s big business, and while the convenience of charging at home can’t be beat, the presence of chargers and superchargers all over cities will do much to increase awareness of the rise of the EV, and to ease the transition away from fossil fuel transportation.
As a resident of California — the state with the most electric vehicles and also the state experiencing some of the worst devastation from Climate Change — every new charging station that pops up on Google Maps is a sign of hope to me. But I’ll be frank; I’m not a “car” person, and despite making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to understand how I could personally transition from a worried, gas-powered driver to a proud EV traveler has taught me that it’s a road paved with countless questions.
And that’s actually good news for EV charging station brands!
Whether you’re marketing EVgo, Blink, Tesla, ChargePoint, or the dozens of other charging solutions, your online marketing strategy is going to hinge on publishing content that solves consumers’ problems by answering their questions. Luckily for your industry, customers’ questions are so abundant that they are paving the way for you to develop absolutely fantastic website content that will support your organic and local rankings over time as you develop authority.
Here’s a simple six-step workflow for getting it right:
1. Survey customers
Making a minor investment in survey tech will let you directly ask the public what they want most from charging stations. Is it speed, location, more ports, better instructions, different payment options? Find out and document your learnings.
2. Analyze industry reviews and questions
Look at the common themes in your online reviews. For example, one thread I see running through the EV charging vertical is complaints about sitting in hot cars for 30+ minutes while charging up. When you think about it, gas stations provide shade at the pumps, though patrons are only there for ten minutes. If your customers are being inconvenienced in the summer heat, would properties permit you to build a canopy, or perhaps even better, plant some native trees to double down on your green goals?
Moz Local will surface the 100 most common words in your reviews for sentiment analysis purposes. Dig deeply into these for content inspiration and structural improvements.
And check out the positive and negative sentiment your competitors’ reviews contain. What is the competition getting wrong that you could get right? If you find opportunities like these, be sure you’re writing about them.
3. Fire up keyword research tools
How do electric car charging stations work?
Where can I charge my electric car?
What is the best EV charging station?
How to find free charging stations
How many miles does a Tesla get per charge?
Are EVgo stations free?
Can I use ChargePoint at EVgo?
What is a level 3 charging station?
Questions truly abound in the EV charging space. Moz Pro Keyword Explorer lets you type in keywords and phrases you feel could be important to the business you’re marketing, and then filter the results to see questions like the ones in my list, above. If you sign up for a free Moz community account, you can make 10 free queries a month or upgrade to a paid account for more robust keyword research.
Other free options include Google’s Ads Keyword Planner and the unpaid version of Answer the Public.
Document your findings so that you have created a list of questions around which you can base content publication.
4. Take a peek at Google Trends
Google Trends will show you interest in topics across time related to EV charging stations, and you can even see this broken out by regions of a country to help you localize your marketing. My glance at this data shows that interest in this subject took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged but is now steadily rising again. Glean further insights from this tool for topics you should be covering.
5. Analyze the competition
If you have a Moz Pro account, you can use Moz’s On-Page Grader feature not just to look at pages on your own website to see how to improve their optimization, but also to analyze what your competition is getting right and wrong. If you can find weaknesses in the strategy of a tough competitor, you can go one better with the actionable optimization tips On-Page Grader provides.
Look carefully at what your competitors are writing about on their websites and social accounts. If they’re covering a topic your keyword research hasn’t surfaced, note it down.
6. Get writing!
Now, take the list of questions and keyword phrases you’ve discovered, group them by topics, and begin creating pages for them on your website, or posts on the brand’s blog, providing answers. Some pages may be short, and others may be long — the rule of thumb is simply to cover each question thoroughly. You may find that some topics are best answered via other media, like short videos. That’s great, if you can produce them, but don’t forget to provide written transcripts.
Your findings can also fuel your social media posting, your Google posts, and provide the top FAQs you can ask and answer via Google Questions & Answers on your Google Business Profiles.
Finally, remember that marketing requires active promotion. Don’t just let your content sit on your website hoping someone will arrive to read it. Actively promote your best pieces via social media, to local print and online media journalists, and in local community hubs, like neighborhood websites and hyperlocal blogs. Work to build real relationships in the cities where you’re marketing your charging station locations so that you are always increasing awareness of your brand’s commitment to making towns and cities better places to live.
Have questions? Ask me in the comments. I’m personally rooting for the rapid spread of EV charging stations across the US and around the world, and if you’re marketing this model, I’d love to hear from you!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Local SEO Tips for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
Posted by MiriamEllis
Some business models exist in the ditches of Google’s information highways, belonging in local search results, but not well addressed by the official guidelines. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations exemplify this: They’re all over local packs, finders, and maps, but their models is a bit unusual, and Google has yet to update the guidelines to show exactly how to represent them in the Google My Business setting.
Today, we’ll pull together our own set of EV charging station best practices — based on Google’s rules for similar enterprises — and throw a few free local search marketing tips into the trunk as well.
How to handle your EV charging station Google My Business listings
Whether you’re an owner, in-house marketer, or agency staffer who’s been tasked with promoting a fleet of EV charging stations online, having a presence in Google’s local search results — including local packs, local finders, Google Business Profiles, and Google Maps — should be core to your digital strategy.
While Google’s helpful guidelines don’t specifically address EV charging stations, proof that they’re eligible for inclusion can be seen in the extra special features and categories Google has released for these models. For example, the above screenshot shows the charger icons, charger type designations, and wattage displays in the local results. In the US and UK, Google displays live charger availability data for some networks for consumer convenience. Even the map pins have special icons in them for EV charging stations.
Google definitely knows about them, and wants this industry to get listed.
If you’ve never set up a GMB listing before, Google’s own resources will walk you through the process of filling out and validating a profile for an individual location, but EV charging station marketers are most likely dealing with many locations at once. If you need to get 10 or more locations listed, you’ll be using Google’s bulk upload functionality, instead. You’ll also want to go for bulk verification of these large batches of listings.
But before you get started, here’s special guidance for handling some of the major fields you’ll be filling out for any EV charging station you’re marketing.
Business title
Google wants you to fill out this field with the exact name of the business as it appears in the real world. The majority of the listings I looked at in this sector were adding the words “charging station” to their brand name, which technically violates Google’s guidelines. Just as gas stations are supposed to list themselves as “Shell” or “Valero”, EV charging stations wanting to stick scrupulously to the guidelines should just be “EVgo” or “ChargePoint”.
According to the guidelines, Google wouldn’t want listings entitled “Shell Gas Station” or “EVgo Charging Station”, any more than they’d want “McDonald’s Fast Food Restaurant” or “Macy’s Department Store.”
But now for a home truth: Google says you’re only supposed to put your real-world brand in these titles, but they don’t take much action on enforcing this guideline, and having keywords in the business title that match search language is strongly believed to improve local rankings. So, if you adhere to the guidelines and remove “charging station” from your business titles, your rankings may decrease. This weighting of keywords in the business title is a longstanding issue Google needs to resolve.
Frankly, I think having the words “charging station” in the listing title might actually help users who are just now becoming accustomed to emergent EV technology and trying to understand where to get charged up, but my common sense and Google’s policies are often at odds.
Keep your business title free of other extraneous information like location information, or adjectives like “cheapest” or “best”.
Address
It’s a dominant trend for EV charging stations to be located in the parking lots of busy public spaces, like shopping centers, railroad stations, and business parks. Typically, to be eligible for a GMB listing, a business has to have its own address, but a look at Google’s local search engine results (including Google Maps) shows charging stations being permitted to use the address of the public space. For example, an EV charging station in a strip mall near me is using the same address as the Target that anchors the shopping center.
Additionally, businesses that host a charging station are allowed to have a link on their listings publicizing this feature.
Also related to address, many EV Charging stations will find details on their listings that describe them as “located in” a public space. If the “located in” descriptor is wrong, look up the business on google.com/maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and try to edit the information in this field:
If you see no correction within a couple of weeks of taking this action, contact Google My Business support and explain what’s going on.
Phone number
We’ll take our cue here from Google’s requirements of ATMs and kiosks. As I previously covered in my column on local product kiosks, the EV charging stations you’re marketing need a customer support phone number.
Again, this is one of those unusual grey areas. Normally, it’s standard advice for each location of a business to have a unique phone number. But, for EV charging stations, this obviously isn’t practical. Rather, be sure your listings have your help hotline number for customer service needs.
A word to the wise: Google has sometimes been prone to conflating listings with too-similar information. Having dozens, hundreds, or thousands of listings with the same brand AND phone number on them could potentially result in the accidental creation of duplicate listings. Large, multi-listing enterprises like EV charging brands might want to check out the automated duplicate detection and resolution services offered by Moz Local so that pesky duplicates aren’t interfering with listings management, visibility goals, and consumer direction.
Category
“Electric vehicle charging station” is the proper primary category for you, and my search through listings and GMB category databases is only finding one other related category, “electric vehicle charging station contractor” which may or may not be relevant to the business you’re marketing.
Hours of operation
Google’s guidelines state that gas stations should list the hours of operation that their pumps are available, and for most EV charging stations, this would presumably be 24 hours a day. As stated above, you’ll probably be uploading your data to Google via a bulk upload spreadsheet and the proper configuration for indicating 24-hours-a-day in the spreadsheet is 12:00AM-12:00AM.
URL
You’ll be allowed to include a website link on each listing you create. The best user experience I’m encountering on EV charger station listings is when the listing links to a landing page for the location I’m researching. On the flip side, you may get a ranking boost if you link to the brand’s homepage, instead, due to homepages typically having greater Page Authority than landing pages.
Photos/Videos
Make each listing stand out for customers by adding a few photos of the charger’s location. Given the fact that so many chargers are in vast parking lots, try to take some shots that illustrate the relationship of the station to the largest anchor business near it. This will help orient customers. And, given the newness of EV technology, uploading a video of how to use each type of charger would be extremely helpful to new electric vehicle owners.
Reviews
Looking around the SF Bay area, I couldn’t help noticing how few reviews these entities are receiving, meaning there are easy wins out there for any EV charger brand that makes a concerted review acquisition effort. If you’re building out landing pages on the brand’s website for each charging station locale, include a strong call to action and link to leave a review on Google on these pages. You can also use a free review link generator and then shorten the URL using a service like bitly for text or email-based review requests.
Just don’t ask for reviews in bulk; if you get too many at once, Google may filter them out as suspicious. And never incentivize reviews in any way — it can result in review loss, penalties, and legal actions.
Questions & Answers
Unsurprisingly, EV charging station listings show customers using Google’s Q&A feature to ask about costs and how to use the kiosks. These are leads for the brand and should be answered by the brand, rather than being left up to the public for responses of varying quality. If you’re using Moz Local to manage your listings, the dashboard will alert you each time a new question comes in on any of your listings.
Google Posts
Google Posts are a great way to make a brand stand out from less active competitors by microblogging persuasive content that appears on your listings, but for the typical EV charging brand, this feature is problematic. Google doesn’t allow large chains to post in bulk to their listings. There are some third-party services that facilitate hacks for this scenario.
Listings beyond Google
Google may be your dominant source of local business listings, but don’t hit the brakes there. Moz has mapped out the partners in our location data distribution network that currently support listings for EV charging stations. Talk to us about building your presence in key mapping applications like Apple Maps, search engines like Bing, aggregators like Infogroup, and mobile navigation providers like Navmii. Moz Local can help you get listed on multiple platforms so that potential customers can find your charging station locations via their preferred search methods.
Local search marketing tips for EV charging stations
JP Morgan predicts that EVs and HVs will make up 30% of total vehicle sales in the next five years and Statista estimates there are about 25,000 charging stations in the US. It’s big business, and while the convenience of charging at home can’t be beat, the presence of chargers and superchargers all over cities will do much to increase awareness of the rise of the EV, and to ease the transition away from fossil fuel transportation.
As a resident of California — the state with the most electric vehicles and also the state experiencing some of the worst devastation from Climate Change — every new charging station that pops up on Google Maps is a sign of hope to me. But I’ll be frank; I’m not a “car” person, and despite making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to understand how I could personally transition from a worried, gas-powered driver to a proud EV traveler has taught me that it’s a road paved with countless questions.
And that’s actually good news for EV charging station brands!
Whether you’re marketing EVgo, Blink, Tesla, ChargePoint, or the dozens of other charging solutions, your online marketing strategy is going to hinge on publishing content that solves consumers’ problems by answering their questions. Luckily for your industry, customers’ questions are so abundant that they are paving the way for you to develop absolutely fantastic website content that will support your organic and local rankings over time as you develop authority.
Here’s a simple six-step workflow for getting it right:
1. Survey customers
Making a minor investment in survey tech will let you directly ask the public what they want most from charging stations. Is it speed, location, more ports, better instructions, different payment options? Find out and document your learnings.
2. Analyze industry reviews and questions
Look at the common themes in your online reviews. For example, one thread I see running through the EV charging vertical is complaints about sitting in hot cars for 30+ minutes while charging up. When you think about it, gas stations provide shade at the pumps, though patrons are only there for ten minutes. If your customers are being inconvenienced in the summer heat, would properties permit you to build a canopy, or perhaps even better, plant some native trees to double down on your green goals?
Moz Local will surface the 100 most common words in your reviews for sentiment analysis purposes. Dig deeply into these for content inspiration and structural improvements.
And check out the positive and negative sentiment your competitors’ reviews contain. What is the competition getting wrong that you could get right? If you find opportunities like these, be sure you’re writing about them.
3. Fire up keyword research tools
How do electric car charging stations work?
Where can I charge my electric car?
What is the best EV charging station?
How to find free charging stations
How many miles does a Tesla get per charge?
Are EVgo stations free?
Can I use ChargePoint at EVgo?
What is a level 3 charging station?
Questions truly abound in the EV charging space. Moz Pro Keyword Explorer lets you type in keywords and phrases you feel could be important to the business you’re marketing, and then filter the results to see questions like the ones in my list, above. If you sign up for a free Moz community account, you can make 10 free queries a month or upgrade to a paid account for more robust keyword research.
Other free options include Google’s Ads Keyword Planner and the unpaid version of Answer the Public.
Document your findings so that you have created a list of questions around which you can base content publication.
4. Take a peek at Google Trends
Google Trends will show you interest in topics across time related to EV charging stations, and you can even see this broken out by regions of a country to help you localize your marketing. My glance at this data shows that interest in this subject took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged but is now steadily rising again. Glean further insights from this tool for topics you should be covering.
5. Analyze the competition
If you have a Moz Pro account, you can use Moz’s On-Page Grader feature not just to look at pages on your own website to see how to improve their optimization, but also to analyze what your competition is getting right and wrong. If you can find weaknesses in the strategy of a tough competitor, you can go one better with the actionable optimization tips On-Page Grader provides.
Look carefully at what your competitors are writing about on their websites and social accounts. If they’re covering a topic your keyword research hasn’t surfaced, note it down.
6. Get writing!
Now, take the list of questions and keyword phrases you’ve discovered, group them by topics, and begin creating pages for them on your website, or posts on the brand’s blog, providing answers. Some pages may be short, and others may be long — the rule of thumb is simply to cover each question thoroughly. You may find that some topics are best answered via other media, like short videos. That’s great, if you can produce them, but don’t forget to provide written transcripts.
Your findings can also fuel your social media posting, your Google posts, and provide the top FAQs you can ask and answer via Google Questions & Answers on your Google Business Profiles.
Finally, remember that marketing requires active promotion. Don’t just let your content sit on your website hoping someone will arrive to read it. Actively promote your best pieces via social media, to local print and online media journalists, and in local community hubs, like neighborhood websites and hyperlocal blogs. Work to build real relationships in the cities where you’re marketing your charging station locations so that you are always increasing awareness of your brand’s commitment to making towns and cities better places to live.
Have questions? Ask me in the comments. I’m personally rooting for the rapid spread of EV charging stations across the US and around the world, and if you’re marketing this model, I’d love to hear from you!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
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Local SEO Tips for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
Posted by MiriamEllis
Some business models exist in the ditches of Google’s information highways, belonging in local search results, but not well addressed by the official guidelines. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations exemplify this: They’re all over local packs, finders, and maps, but their models is a bit unusual, and Google has yet to update the guidelines to show exactly how to represent them in the Google My Business setting.
Today, we’ll pull together our own set of EV charging station best practices — based on Google’s rules for similar enterprises — and throw a few free local search marketing tips into the trunk as well.
How to handle your EV charging station Google My Business listings
Whether you’re an owner, in-house marketer, or agency staffer who’s been tasked with promoting a fleet of EV charging stations online, having a presence in Google’s local search results — including local packs, local finders, Google Business Profiles, and Google Maps — should be core to your digital strategy.
While Google’s helpful guidelines don’t specifically address EV charging stations, proof that they’re eligible for inclusion can be seen in the extra special features and categories Google has released for these models. For example, the above screenshot shows the charger icons, charger type designations, and wattage displays in the local results. In the US and UK, Google displays live charger availability data for some networks for consumer convenience. Even the map pins have special icons in them for EV charging stations.
Google definitely knows about them, and wants this industry to get listed.
If you’ve never set up a GMB listing before, Google’s own resources will walk you through the process of filling out and validating a profile for an individual location, but EV charging station marketers are most likely dealing with many locations at once. If you need to get 10 or more locations listed, you’ll be using Google’s bulk upload functionality, instead. You’ll also want to go for bulk verification of these large batches of listings.
But before you get started, here’s special guidance for handling some of the major fields you’ll be filling out for any EV charging station you’re marketing.
Business title
Google wants you to fill out this field with the exact name of the business as it appears in the real world. The majority of the listings I looked at in this sector were adding the words “charging station” to their brand name, which technically violates Google’s guidelines. Just as gas stations are supposed to list themselves as “Shell” or “Valero”, EV charging stations wanting to stick scrupulously to the guidelines should just be “EVgo” or “ChargePoint”.
According to the guidelines, Google wouldn’t want listings entitled “Shell Gas Station” or “EVgo Charging Station”, any more than they’d want “McDonald’s Fast Food Restaurant” or “Macy’s Department Store.”
But now for a home truth: Google says you’re only supposed to put your real-world brand in these titles, but they don’t take much action on enforcing this guideline, and having keywords in the business title that match search language is strongly believed to improve local rankings. So, if you adhere to the guidelines and remove “charging station” from your business titles, your rankings may decrease. This weighting of keywords in the business title is a longstanding issue Google needs to resolve.
Frankly, I think having the words “charging station” in the listing title might actually help users who are just now becoming accustomed to emergent EV technology and trying to understand where to get charged up, but my common sense and Google’s policies are often at odds.
Keep your business title free of other extraneous information like location information, or adjectives like “cheapest” or “best”.
Address
It’s a dominant trend for EV charging stations to be located in the parking lots of busy public spaces, like shopping centers, railroad stations, and business parks. Typically, to be eligible for a GMB listing, a business has to have its own address, but a look at Google’s local search engine results (including Google Maps) shows charging stations being permitted to use the address of the public space. For example, an EV charging station in a strip mall near me is using the same address as the Target that anchors the shopping center.
Additionally, businesses that host a charging station are allowed to have a link on their listings publicizing this feature.
Also related to address, many EV Charging stations will find details on their listings that describe them as “located in” a public space. If the “located in” descriptor is wrong, look up the business on google.com/maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and try to edit the information in this field:
If you see no correction within a couple of weeks of taking this action, contact Google My Business support and explain what’s going on.
Phone number
We’ll take our cue here from Google’s requirements of ATMs and kiosks. As I previously covered in my column on local product kiosks, the EV charging stations you’re marketing need a customer support phone number.
Again, this is one of those unusual grey areas. Normally, it’s standard advice for each location of a business to have a unique phone number. But, for EV charging stations, this obviously isn’t practical. Rather, be sure your listings have your help hotline number for customer service needs.
A word to the wise: Google has sometimes been prone to conflating listings with too-similar information. Having dozens, hundreds, or thousands of listings with the same brand AND phone number on them could potentially result in the accidental creation of duplicate listings. Large, multi-listing enterprises like EV charging brands might want to check out the automated duplicate detection and resolution services offered by Moz Local so that pesky duplicates aren’t interfering with listings management, visibility goals, and consumer direction.
Category
“Electric vehicle charging station” is the proper primary category for you, and my search through listings and GMB category databases is only finding one other related category, “electric vehicle charging station contractor” which may or may not be relevant to the business you’re marketing.
Hours of operation
Google’s guidelines state that gas stations should list the hours of operation that their pumps are available, and for most EV charging stations, this would presumably be 24 hours a day. As stated above, you’ll probably be uploading your data to Google via a bulk upload spreadsheet and the proper configuration for indicating 24-hours-a-day in the spreadsheet is 12:00AM-12:00AM.
URL
You’ll be allowed to include a website link on each listing you create. The best user experience I’m encountering on EV charger station listings is when the listing links to a landing page for the location I’m researching. On the flip side, you may get a ranking boost if you link to the brand’s homepage, instead, due to homepages typically having greater Page Authority than landing pages.
Photos/Videos
Make each listing stand out for customers by adding a few photos of the charger’s location. Given the fact that so many chargers are in vast parking lots, try to take some shots that illustrate the relationship of the station to the largest anchor business near it. This will help orient customers. And, given the newness of EV technology, uploading a video of how to use each type of charger would be extremely helpful to new electric vehicle owners.
Reviews
Looking around the SF Bay area, I couldn’t help noticing how few reviews these entities are receiving, meaning there are easy wins out there for any EV charger brand that makes a concerted review acquisition effort. If you’re building out landing pages on the brand’s website for each charging station locale, include a strong call to action and link to leave a review on Google on these pages. You can also use a free review link generator and then shorten the URL using a service like bitly for text or email-based review requests.
Just don’t ask for reviews in bulk; if you get too many at once, Google may filter them out as suspicious. And never incentivize reviews in any way — it can result in review loss, penalties, and legal actions.
Questions & Answers
Unsurprisingly, EV charging station listings show customers using Google’s Q&A feature to ask about costs and how to use the kiosks. These are leads for the brand and should be answered by the brand, rather than being left up to the public for responses of varying quality. If you’re using Moz Local to manage your listings, the dashboard will alert you each time a new question comes in on any of your listings.
Google Posts
Google Posts are a great way to make a brand stand out from less active competitors by microblogging persuasive content that appears on your listings, but for the typical EV charging brand, this feature is problematic. Google doesn’t allow large chains to post in bulk to their listings. There are some third-party services that facilitate hacks for this scenario.
Listings beyond Google
Google may be your dominant source of local business listings, but don’t hit the brakes there. Moz has mapped out the partners in our location data distribution network that currently support listings for EV charging stations. Talk to us about building your presence in key mapping applications like Apple Maps, search engines like Bing, aggregators like Infogroup, and mobile navigation providers like Navmii. Moz Local can help you get listed on multiple platforms so that potential customers can find your charging station locations via their preferred search methods.
Local search marketing tips for EV charging stations
JP Morgan predicts that EVs and HVs will make up 30% of total vehicle sales in the next five years and Statista estimates there are about 25,000 charging stations in the US. It’s big business, and while the convenience of charging at home can’t be beat, the presence of chargers and superchargers all over cities will do much to increase awareness of the rise of the EV, and to ease the transition away from fossil fuel transportation.
As a resident of California — the state with the most electric vehicles and also the state experiencing some of the worst devastation from Climate Change — every new charging station that pops up on Google Maps is a sign of hope to me. But I’ll be frank; I’m not a “car” person, and despite making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to understand how I could personally transition from a worried, gas-powered driver to a proud EV traveler has taught me that it’s a road paved with countless questions.
And that’s actually good news for EV charging station brands!
Whether you’re marketing EVgo, Blink, Tesla, ChargePoint, or the dozens of other charging solutions, your online marketing strategy is going to hinge on publishing content that solves consumers’ problems by answering their questions. Luckily for your industry, customers’ questions are so abundant that they are paving the way for you to develop absolutely fantastic website content that will support your organic and local rankings over time as you develop authority.
Here’s a simple six-step workflow for getting it right:
1. Survey customers
Making a minor investment in survey tech will let you directly ask the public what they want most from charging stations. Is it speed, location, more ports, better instructions, different payment options? Find out and document your learnings.
2. Analyze industry reviews and questions
Look at the common themes in your online reviews. For example, one thread I see running through the EV charging vertical is complaints about sitting in hot cars for 30+ minutes while charging up. When you think about it, gas stations provide shade at the pumps, though patrons are only there for ten minutes. If your customers are being inconvenienced in the summer heat, would properties permit you to build a canopy, or perhaps even better, plant some native trees to double down on your green goals?
Moz Local will surface the 100 most common words in your reviews for sentiment analysis purposes. Dig deeply into these for content inspiration and structural improvements.
And check out the positive and negative sentiment your competitors’ reviews contain. What is the competition getting wrong that you could get right? If you find opportunities like these, be sure you’re writing about them.
3. Fire up keyword research tools
How do electric car charging stations work?
Where can I charge my electric car?
What is the best EV charging station?
How to find free charging stations
How many miles does a Tesla get per charge?
Are EVgo stations free?
Can I use ChargePoint at EVgo?
What is a level 3 charging station?
Questions truly abound in the EV charging space. Moz Pro Keyword Explorer lets you type in keywords and phrases you feel could be important to the business you’re marketing, and then filter the results to see questions like the ones in my list, above. If you sign up for a free Moz community account, you can make 10 free queries a month or upgrade to a paid account for more robust keyword research.
Other free options include Google’s Ads Keyword Planner and the unpaid version of Answer the Public.
Document your findings so that you have created a list of questions around which you can base content publication.
4. Take a peek at Google Trends
Google Trends will show you interest in topics across time related to EV charging stations, and you can even see this broken out by regions of a country to help you localize your marketing. My glance at this data shows that interest in this subject took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged but is now steadily rising again. Glean further insights from this tool for topics you should be covering.
5. Analyze the competition
If you have a Moz Pro account, you can use Moz’s On-Page Grader feature not just to look at pages on your own website to see how to improve their optimization, but also to analyze what your competition is getting right and wrong. If you can find weaknesses in the strategy of a tough competitor, you can go one better with the actionable optimization tips On-Page Grader provides.
Look carefully at what your competitors are writing about on their websites and social accounts. If they’re covering a topic your keyword research hasn’t surfaced, note it down.
6. Get writing!
Now, take the list of questions and keyword phrases you’ve discovered, group them by topics, and begin creating pages for them on your website, or posts on the brand’s blog, providing answers. Some pages may be short, and others may be long — the rule of thumb is simply to cover each question thoroughly. You may find that some topics are best answered via other media, like short videos. That’s great, if you can produce them, but don’t forget to provide written transcripts.
Your findings can also fuel your social media posting, your Google posts, and provide the top FAQs you can ask and answer via Google Questions & Answers on your Google Business Profiles.
Finally, remember that marketing requires active promotion. Don’t just let your content sit on your website hoping someone will arrive to read it. Actively promote your best pieces via social media, to local print and online media journalists, and in local community hubs, like neighborhood websites and hyperlocal blogs. Work to build real relationships in the cities where you’re marketing your charging station locations so that you are always increasing awareness of your brand’s commitment to making towns and cities better places to live.
Have questions? Ask me in the comments. I’m personally rooting for the rapid spread of EV charging stations across the US and around the world, and if you’re marketing this model, I’d love to hear from you!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Local SEO Tips for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
Posted by MiriamEllis
Some business models exist in the ditches of Google’s information highways, belonging in local search results, but not well addressed by the official guidelines. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations exemplify this: They’re all over local packs, finders, and maps, but their models is a bit unusual, and Google has yet to update the guidelines to show exactly how to represent them in the Google My Business setting.
Today, we’ll pull together our own set of EV charging station best practices — based on Google’s rules for similar enterprises — and throw a few free local search marketing tips into the trunk as well.
How to handle your EV charging station Google My Business listings
Whether you’re an owner, in-house marketer, or agency staffer who’s been tasked with promoting a fleet of EV charging stations online, having a presence in Google’s local search results — including local packs, local finders, Google Business Profiles, and Google Maps — should be core to your digital strategy.
While Google’s helpful guidelines don’t specifically address EV charging stations, proof that they’re eligible for inclusion can be seen in the extra special features and categories Google has released for these models. For example, the above screenshot shows the charger icons, charger type designations, and wattage displays in the local results. In the US and UK, Google displays live charger availability data for some networks for consumer convenience. Even the map pins have special icons in them for EV charging stations.
Google definitely knows about them, and wants this industry to get listed.
If you’ve never set up a GMB listing before, Google’s own resources will walk you through the process of filling out and validating a profile for an individual location, but EV charging station marketers are most likely dealing with many locations at once. If you need to get 10 or more locations listed, you’ll be using Google’s bulk upload functionality, instead. You’ll also want to go for bulk verification of these large batches of listings.
But before you get started, here’s special guidance for handling some of the major fields you’ll be filling out for any EV charging station you’re marketing.
Business title
Google wants you to fill out this field with the exact name of the business as it appears in the real world. The majority of the listings I looked at in this sector were adding the words “charging station” to their brand name, which technically violates Google’s guidelines. Just as gas stations are supposed to list themselves as “Shell” or “Valero”, EV charging stations wanting to stick scrupulously to the guidelines should just be “EVgo” or “ChargePoint”.
According to the guidelines, Google wouldn’t want listings entitled “Shell Gas Station” or “EVgo Charging Station”, any more than they’d want “McDonald’s Fast Food Restaurant” or “Macy’s Department Store.”
But now for a home truth: Google says you’re only supposed to put your real-world brand in these titles, but they don’t take much action on enforcing this guideline, and having keywords in the business title that match search language is strongly believed to improve local rankings. So, if you adhere to the guidelines and remove “charging station” from your business titles, your rankings may decrease. This weighting of keywords in the business title is a longstanding issue Google needs to resolve.
Frankly, I think having the words “charging station” in the listing title might actually help users who are just now becoming accustomed to emergent EV technology and trying to understand where to get charged up, but my common sense and Google’s policies are often at odds.
Keep your business title free of other extraneous information like location information, or adjectives like “cheapest” or “best”.
Address
It’s a dominant trend for EV charging stations to be located in the parking lots of busy public spaces, like shopping centers, railroad stations, and business parks. Typically, to be eligible for a GMB listing, a business has to have its own address, but a look at Google’s local search engine results (including Google Maps) shows charging stations being permitted to use the address of the public space. For example, an EV charging station in a strip mall near me is using the same address as the Target that anchors the shopping center.
Additionally, businesses that host a charging station are allowed to have a link on their listings publicizing this feature.
Also related to address, many EV Charging stations will find details on their listings that describe them as “located in” a public space. If the “located in” descriptor is wrong, look up the business on google.com/maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and try to edit the information in this field:
If you see no correction within a couple of weeks of taking this action, contact Google My Business support and explain what’s going on.
Phone number
We’ll take our cue here from Google’s requirements of ATMs and kiosks. As I previously covered in my column on local product kiosks, the EV charging stations you’re marketing need a customer support phone number.
Again, this is one of those unusual grey areas. Normally, it’s standard advice for each location of a business to have a unique phone number. But, for EV charging stations, this obviously isn’t practical. Rather, be sure your listings have your help hotline number for customer service needs.
A word to the wise: Google has sometimes been prone to conflating listings with too-similar information. Having dozens, hundreds, or thousands of listings with the same brand AND phone number on them could potentially result in the accidental creation of duplicate listings. Large, multi-listing enterprises like EV charging brands might want to check out the automated duplicate detection and resolution services offered by Moz Local so that pesky duplicates aren’t interfering with listings management, visibility goals, and consumer direction.
Category
“Electric vehicle charging station” is the proper primary category for you, and my search through listings and GMB category databases is only finding one other related category, “electric vehicle charging station contractor” which may or may not be relevant to the business you’re marketing.
Hours of operation
Google’s guidelines state that gas stations should list the hours of operation that their pumps are available, and for most EV charging stations, this would presumably be 24 hours a day. As stated above, you’ll probably be uploading your data to Google via a bulk upload spreadsheet and the proper configuration for indicating 24-hours-a-day in the spreadsheet is 12:00AM-12:00AM.
URL
You’ll be allowed to include a website link on each listing you create. The best user experience I’m encountering on EV charger station listings is when the listing links to a landing page for the location I’m researching. On the flip side, you may get a ranking boost if you link to the brand’s homepage, instead, due to homepages typically having greater Page Authority than landing pages.
Photos/Videos
Make each listing stand out for customers by adding a few photos of the charger’s location. Given the fact that so many chargers are in vast parking lots, try to take some shots that illustrate the relationship of the station to the largest anchor business near it. This will help orient customers. And, given the newness of EV technology, uploading a video of how to use each type of charger would be extremely helpful to new electric vehicle owners.
Reviews
Looking around the SF Bay area, I couldn’t help noticing how few reviews these entities are receiving, meaning there are easy wins out there for any EV charger brand that makes a concerted review acquisition effort. If you’re building out landing pages on the brand’s website for each charging station locale, include a strong call to action and link to leave a review on Google on these pages. You can also use a free review link generator and then shorten the URL using a service like bitly for text or email-based review requests.
Just don’t ask for reviews in bulk; if you get too many at once, Google may filter them out as suspicious. And never incentivize reviews in any way — it can result in review loss, penalties, and legal actions.
Questions & Answers
Unsurprisingly, EV charging station listings show customers using Google’s Q&A feature to ask about costs and how to use the kiosks. These are leads for the brand and should be answered by the brand, rather than being left up to the public for responses of varying quality. If you’re using Moz Local to manage your listings, the dashboard will alert you each time a new question comes in on any of your listings.
Google Posts
Google Posts are a great way to make a brand stand out from less active competitors by microblogging persuasive content that appears on your listings, but for the typical EV charging brand, this feature is problematic. Google doesn’t allow large chains to post in bulk to their listings. There are some third-party services that facilitate hacks for this scenario.
Listings beyond Google
Google may be your dominant source of local business listings, but don’t hit the brakes there. Moz has mapped out the partners in our location data distribution network that currently support listings for EV charging stations. Talk to us about building your presence in key mapping applications like Apple Maps, search engines like Bing, aggregators like Infogroup, and mobile navigation providers like Navmii. Moz Local can help you get listed on multiple platforms so that potential customers can find your charging station locations via their preferred search methods.
Local search marketing tips for EV charging stations
JP Morgan predicts that EVs and HVs will make up 30% of total vehicle sales in the next five years and Statista estimates there are about 25,000 charging stations in the US. It’s big business, and while the convenience of charging at home can’t be beat, the presence of chargers and superchargers all over cities will do much to increase awareness of the rise of the EV, and to ease the transition away from fossil fuel transportation.
As a resident of California — the state with the most electric vehicles and also the state experiencing some of the worst devastation from Climate Change — every new charging station that pops up on Google Maps is a sign of hope to me. But I’ll be frank; I’m not a “car” person, and despite making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to understand how I could personally transition from a worried, gas-powered driver to a proud EV traveler has taught me that it’s a road paved with countless questions.
And that’s actually good news for EV charging station brands!
Whether you’re marketing EVgo, Blink, Tesla, ChargePoint, or the dozens of other charging solutions, your online marketing strategy is going to hinge on publishing content that solves consumers’ problems by answering their questions. Luckily for your industry, customers’ questions are so abundant that they are paving the way for you to develop absolutely fantastic website content that will support your organic and local rankings over time as you develop authority.
Here’s a simple six-step workflow for getting it right:
1. Survey customers
Making a minor investment in survey tech will let you directly ask the public what they want most from charging stations. Is it speed, location, more ports, better instructions, different payment options? Find out and document your learnings.
2. Analyze industry reviews and questions
Look at the common themes in your online reviews. For example, one thread I see running through the EV charging vertical is complaints about sitting in hot cars for 30+ minutes while charging up. When you think about it, gas stations provide shade at the pumps, though patrons are only there for ten minutes. If your customers are being inconvenienced in the summer heat, would properties permit you to build a canopy, or perhaps even better, plant some native trees to double down on your green goals?
Moz Local will surface the 100 most common words in your reviews for sentiment analysis purposes. Dig deeply into these for content inspiration and structural improvements.
And check out the positive and negative sentiment your competitors’ reviews contain. What is the competition getting wrong that you could get right? If you find opportunities like these, be sure you’re writing about them.
3. Fire up keyword research tools
How do electric car charging stations work?
Where can I charge my electric car?
What is the best EV charging station?
How to find free charging stations
How many miles does a Tesla get per charge?
Are EVgo stations free?
Can I use ChargePoint at EVgo?
What is a level 3 charging station?
Questions truly abound in the EV charging space. Moz Pro Keyword Explorer lets you type in keywords and phrases you feel could be important to the business you’re marketing, and then filter the results to see questions like the ones in my list, above. If you sign up for a free Moz community account, you can make 10 free queries a month or upgrade to a paid account for more robust keyword research.
Other free options include Google’s Ads Keyword Planner and the unpaid version of Answer the Public.
Document your findings so that you have created a list of questions around which you can base content publication.
4. Take a peek at Google Trends
Google Trends will show you interest in topics across time related to EV charging stations, and you can even see this broken out by regions of a country to help you localize your marketing. My glance at this data shows that interest in this subject took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged but is now steadily rising again. Glean further insights from this tool for topics you should be covering.
5. Analyze the competition
If you have a Moz Pro account, you can use Moz’s On-Page Grader feature not just to look at pages on your own website to see how to improve their optimization, but also to analyze what your competition is getting right and wrong. If you can find weaknesses in the strategy of a tough competitor, you can go one better with the actionable optimization tips On-Page Grader provides.
Look carefully at what your competitors are writing about on their websites and social accounts. If they’re covering a topic your keyword research hasn’t surfaced, note it down.
6. Get writing!
Now, take the list of questions and keyword phrases you’ve discovered, group them by topics, and begin creating pages for them on your website, or posts on the brand’s blog, providing answers. Some pages may be short, and others may be long — the rule of thumb is simply to cover each question thoroughly. You may find that some topics are best answered via other media, like short videos. That’s great, if you can produce them, but don’t forget to provide written transcripts.
Your findings can also fuel your social media posting, your Google posts, and provide the top FAQs you can ask and answer via Google Questions & Answers on your Google Business Profiles.
Finally, remember that marketing requires active promotion. Don’t just let your content sit on your website hoping someone will arrive to read it. Actively promote your best pieces via social media, to local print and online media journalists, and in local community hubs, like neighborhood websites and hyperlocal blogs. Work to build real relationships in the cities where you’re marketing your charging station locations so that you are always increasing awareness of your brand’s commitment to making towns and cities better places to live.
Have questions? Ask me in the comments. I’m personally rooting for the rapid spread of EV charging stations across the US and around the world, and if you’re marketing this model, I’d love to hear from you!
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