Have you ever checked the accuracy of your location marker compared to where it appears on the widely used google maps application?  If you do,  you may notice that the latitude and longitude and position of your marker is not exactly the same as where it appears in the Google Map.

The exact location marker on your map may be slightly off by a few feet or meters from the actual location shown in the Google Maps App. Both are using Geocoding  (the process of converting addresses into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude), which you can use to place markers on a map, or position the map, so why the difference?

Zooming in on the Google Map site will reflect changes to the lat/long slightly  I found this to be so when I noticed those automatic Google icons populating my map.  Premier  or MySLP/Enterprise subscribers can check off the setting to render those Google icons”non-clickable” but what if you have a business listed at the same exact address or  possibly the same exact business as a Google icon?  I discovered when I clicked on the Google Map  icon and opened it in the browser independently  from  my site, it returned a different latitude and longitude.   I  then tried  to match their coordinates by updating my location address with the same lat/long that appeared in the browser.  To my surprise it moved my location further away then the initial coordinates.

As I  resolved to have my location marker override the Google icon , I decided to use a different map service to see if it would return a different geocoded coordinate.  Using “Bing Maps” I could see yet another latitude/longitude, granted they were all very close to each other , but this one was closer to the commercial Google Maps result.  I found it  zoomed in  closer on the marker then the commercial Google Maps did. Apparently they do not have the ad and marketing presence that Google has built into their maps. They want to show you as many ads and icons on their map as possible, so perhaps they cast a wider net and just get you close enough. Makes sense.

Back to Google Maps. Having surmised this may be a built in quirk for marketing,  I zoomed in on the location.  Sure enough,  a new set of coordinates appeared.   Once I had zoomed in as much as I could on the Google Maps icon I copied the new set of latitude/longitude coordinates and pasted those into my  location field in Store Locator Plus.    Viewing the map on the front end of my site proved my theory was  correct.  I achieved my goal.  With the exact same coordinates , my icon now appears instead of the google centric, auto icon that they had imposed.

Although this may not be an undertaking  you wish to venture  on if  you have a hundred locations sparsely located in a large region, I found this to be an effective way to force my icon to appear instead of one imposed on me by Google. I also came to the realization that even having an exact address in a third party app would not return the exact coordinates.

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