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If your a business owner or SEO guru then you most likely read somewhere about the importance of having correct citation consistency. It is even recommended that you use either Rd, Road, St. or Street depending what Google uses on their MAP service, but what do you do when Google is NOT displaying your full address on either Google Maps or Google My Business?

My business is located in Bournemouth, Dorset, UK. Dorset has a population of over 765,700 and has some of big companies such as ESET but for some reason Google does not display the county Dorset in either Google local results or Google Map information. Google Searching for my business (BYBE) does not display the county nor does it when searching for the street address on Google Maps, e.g:

Missing County name in Bournemouth

I've know about this for over 5 years but thought it was due to the fact that it was detecting my broadband connection in Bournemouth and therefore was tailoring the results because it felt it didn't need to tell me the county name, but I recently had a design project in London and decided to Google myself and noticed the results were exactly the same. So its got me wondering does this matter that its not displaying? Since many other companies across the UK do have their county mentioned e.g Cartoozo in Norfolk:

Cartoozo

It seems that Google does not list the county for any businesses within the Dorset region should it be Poole, Bournemouth or anywhere else for that matter.

So my question(s):

  • Is there any particular reason why Google decides not to display a county?
  • Can this have any impact to Local SEO?
  • Should I display the county on my website or can I keep it short? since Google is?
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  • i.sstatic.net/RIx8a.png
    – Goyllo
    Commented Apr 16, 2017 at 11:01
  • Hi Goyllo, it is my understanding that England means all parts of the country outside of London if you look at the Cartoozo screenshot example, Address line, you can see that both Norfolk and England is present, Norfork being the county, Thetford being the town. So, it has service in Bournemouth, England on the top line but on Address it does not display Dorset.
    – Simon Hayter
    Commented Apr 16, 2017 at 13:16

1 Answer 1

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Best practice is to use the full address of your company in all of your listings including your My Business listing, Google+ listing, etc.

If one of the Google services is not showing the county this could be due to the address that it has on file not having the county on record, the county not being relevant to the search query itself, or it could be a glitch within Google not considering Dorset as a county and discounting it from the address.

From an SEO point of view it would be better to have Dorset show in your address as if someone does a search for services you offer but anywhere within Dorset you want to come up, however Google is intelligent enough that if someone searches for xyz services in a given geographic region then it will include the results for any smaller geographic region in that area. Using Australia as an example (web don't have counties we have states) if someone searches for say "Computer repairs in Hornsby) it will show the computer repair companies in the town of Hornsby itself, but if someone does a search for "Computer repairs in Northern Sydney" it will show all the companies in Hornsby, and all the other north shore cities and suburbs.

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