Many clients have a hard time understanding the requirements of Google My Business in conjunction with their home based business. More often than not I get calls from small business owners who have just had one or more of them GMB profiles deactivated by Google and they don’t understand why.
I speak from experience quite a few years ago after Google discontinued the Google+ profile pages and switched over permanently to the current Google My Business profile listing format.
My own listings consisted of my website design and SEO business, and a second listing for my online retail shop.
Well, when Google got the dust settled as far as moving from Google+ to GMB, guess what? To my extreme dismay and dislike, they took my reviews from the gift shop and merged them with the reviews from my website design and SEO business!!! I felt lots of different emotions, most notably that now it was an extremely unprofessional looking profile.
What’s the point of getting angry about it? Serves no constructive purpose other than to blow off steam but at the end of the day it doesn’t fix the problem.
So. I let it sit for several years, which was kind of dumb on my part because I was not promoting the gift shop end of my business on GMB. However, life gets in the way and in it’s own way it gave me time to think about this.
Only recently, after having helped literally hundreds of small business owners with their Google My Business profiles being shut down or suspended, I thought once again about what can I do to remedy my own situation. As many of us do, we tend to sweep out own issues under the carpet in favor of taking care of client issues first. No surprise there!
After reading and re-reading this thread in the Google Business Profile Support area, it suddenly dawned on me what I could do to promote BOTH of my “enterprises” through the one GMB listing.
Bottom line, Google doesn’t want residential addresses showing up on Google Maps. They don’t want home based businesses showing up that all use the same address and the same phone number. Ok. Fine.
Since my “enterprises” are all registered under my company name, Maureen McCullough LLC, all use the same address, and all use the same phone number, it became apparent that I could actually list all activities under the one GMB profile that I have because it’s all one company. The gift website, Vintage and Bling, has a disclaimer on it that it is a division of Maureen McCullough LLC, which it actually is.
So I updated the categories that my business functions under, adding gift shop and party supply shop. And now, I am creating posts and adding pictures to my GMB profile that show both of my enterprises.