So one day you go into your Google My Business account to perhaps make a post or make an adjustment to your hours and what do you see? Your Google My Business listing has been suspended!! End of the world, right? Not so much. Keep reading.
Google My Business gives you a free listing for your business complete with a spot on the map, categories for your business, the ability to post pictures and to actually post posts about your business. It’s a free service. Sounds great!
Enter today’s spammers and scammers who make fake addresses, fake listings, hand out fake damaging reviews to legitimate businesses, and take down legitimate business listings by reporting them as duplicates, or out of business when they are not. Not sounding so great now………..
Google encourages “edits” to listings in the effort to make them hopefully more relevant and accurate. Which opens a door to the scammer, spammer and competition to use this editing power for harm instead of good.
If your business does NOT see customers at your location, such as a consultant who goes out to meet with clients, or an at home internet business who sells and ships from the home but does not have a physical brick and mortar retail store, you are generally encouraged to clear your address on your Google My Business listing so that your home address isn’t out there for all to see.
If you operate more than one business from your location, say your home, such as a husband operating one business and the wife operating another, you cannot have both businesses listed on Google My Business. So what’s the point of even listing your businesses on Google My Business?
These two types of scenarios, the one where you clear your address and the operating of more than one business from your home location is what Google has been targeting and suspending lately.
You’re not dishonest, you’re running a legitimate business, but you are getting your listing suspended. Yes, you can contact Google and ask for it to be reinstated. There is no guarantee they will do so, and there is no guarantee they will constructively interact with you.
So what’s a small business owner to do? The listing is suspended, you don’t know when or if it’s ever going to be brought back to life. And meanwhile like a fairly normal person you are kind of freaking out.
It all boils down to doing things the old fashioned way, boys and girls. Good old fashioned search engine optimization done the way we did it quite a few years ago, before Google My Business was ever even a thought or a conception. Google My Business started in 2014. We’ve been doing search engine optimization long before that, since 2000.
And how did we get our clients all over the Internet like splat back then? Good old honest search engine optimization with geo targeting and precisely constructed landing pages. All white hat, all transparent and all targeted at your desired target audience. No black hat seo BS.
Honest, creative search engine optimization with geo targeting and carefully constructed landing pages has survived the test of time. It has survived innumerable Google algorithm changes, it has survived all of the trendy techniques of times past, and it survives today alive and well.
So, if your Google My Business page has been suspended never fear. There is life after suspension. Plenty of life. And plenty of business that you can acquire just by making the move towards geo targeted SEO and carefully crafted landing pages.
