The reason I’m posting this here rather than on a marketing or SEO subreddit is that recently, I’ve both read and received many stories about people who run small businesses losing their Google Business Profiles due to suspensions from Google which often times take forever to actually fix and it ends up leading to a lack of calls, business, and just overall visibilty of their business. It sucks to hear because in my opinion the map pack section of Google has been sort of the last fighting ground for small businesses to get their business seen organically without spending thousands of dollars on ads as Google continues to push regular SEO further down and in some cases off the first page entirely. If you don’t think that’s important, ask yourself when’s the last time you ever went to the 2nd or 3rd page, and the answer is probably not very often. So with that being said I wanted to highlight some of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen from managing these profiles and maybe help you guys avoid some common suspensions (I will not be covering the obvious things like using fake reviews or botting).

Using a P.O. box or a Virtual Office

You get ads about them all the time for your business, saying Hey, just rent our virtual office and use your location anywhere and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Google has tightened down a huge amount on addresses, and they now require video verification, which must have permanent signage in the video. If you do see any businesses using this, the chances are they got in prior to this rule during the old text to verify phase, but the moment they are found out or reported, they’ll be right back in the same boat with the rest of us. I mean, you can’t even use a home address anymore like you could when they did the mailing verification; however, you can still be a service area GBP if you don’t have your address, they just tend not to rank as well.

Multiple listings

I see this all the time, too, where a business owner gets suspended and they think to themselves, well, this is taking too long, I’ll just create a new profile with the same business name and info, but then BAM, Google gets you. It’s not okay to have two or more business profiles for the same business, and it will get both suspended. I will say I’ve seen this happen to businesses with multiple locations, and if that’s the case, there’s a specific process you must follow, which can be found in the Google guidelines

Editing the Name, Phone Number, Or Address

This one is my favorite to see because it’s so common and it’s the stupidest thing Google did, but it’s really to prevent spam changes, so I kind of understand, but it’s still awful. So if you change one of those main categories, you may trigger a reverification, which will require a new video to be sent in. Even if you do have a legitimate address, this is still a pain as Google will suspend your profile in the meantime, and even if it does get approved, it can take a while. You may get away with changing these maybe once, twice, or if you’re a lottery winner, 3 or more times; however, you have to be careful with this, especially for all your GBP’s slipping under the radar with offices you no longer use. I hope this was helpful for whoever needed it, I know there will probably be 10 people saying thanks captain obvious but you would be surprised how often these three things specifically happen and it leaves business owners technologically savvy or not in the dust waith a profile that once generated a third or more of their calls now useless.

TLDR: Don’t have multiple listings for the same profile, don’t use a P.O. box or virtual office, and don’t edit the N.A.P. of your business too often.