Tom Tom Map Locations – Optimizing for Apple Maps Part 3

As you all know by now (hopefully), the announcement of an Apple Maps release for iOS 6 caused quite the stir in the SEO community – and for good reason. With the number of iPhone users who will potentially be using Apple Maps as their primary source for looking up and selecting businesses to frequent, it’s definitely something the SEO community, as well as your small business, should be concerned with optimizing for.

In our last two blogs about Apple Maps Optimization, we discussed what should be your overall tactics for optimization as well as exactly how to verify and update your business information with Acxiom – a data company that is expected to be one of the main business listing providers for Apple Maps.

In this latest installment, you’ll learn how to make sure your physical business location shows up correctly in Tom Tom’s database and is therefore (hopefully) easily navigated to once Apple Maps is actually released, assuming they are using Tom Tom’s data how we think they will. We will also be showing you the best way to correct your listing if there is a problem.

Keep in mind that much of this advice is speculation – nobody is exactly sure how each data source is being utilized with Apple Maps or how much weight each company’s data is given, and we can’t guarantee that if you follow these steps you will be totally optimized for Apple Maps. All of these things are still good things to know, though. So let’s get started!

Checking Your Business Address

First you’ll want to check to see that your business address shows up correctly. This is really quite easy. You can do this here, at Tom Tom’s Route Planner.

Just click on the “find a location tab” and enter the address you would like to verify. If your location shows up correctly, you are all done! Ta da! If not, move on to the next step.

Correcting an Incorrect Business Address

If your business address showed up in the wrong location on Tom Tom’s maps, you’ll need to update it in their system.

In a sense, there are two ways to do this. The solution that Tom Tom supplied via twitter was to submit a change to their community map-update program “Map Share.”

This doesn’t necessarily update their official map, though it is taken into account in the community maps and can eventually be adopted as an official change.

This is why I would suggest going a step further and reporting your issue directly with Map Insight by Tele Atlas (the company that Tom Tom gets its maps from.)

This way, you have all of your bases covered and can feel confident that you’ve done what you can in regards to your incorrect business address listing.

There you have it! It seems that making changes to TeleAtlas and Tom Tom data for the sake of Apple Maps optimization is definitely a time-worthy task, though not as daunting as correcting information with Acxiom. Just take the time to follow these steps and you should be on the right track for showing up correctly when iOS 6 is released this fall.

Let us know in the comments if you’ve had any experience with updating data among these companies and how it went for you – and as usual, check back soon for more updates and advice!