Hey guys, this is Joe Burnich with bigwestmarketing.com. In this short video, we’re going to show you how to get your Google My Business account unsuspended. So let’s get started with that right now. Okay, so ever since Google’s update last November, you’re going to be seeing a lot more accounts going into suspension. This is bad. You don’t want to see this. So let’s take a look at what this looks like real quick. Okay. So you log into your Google account and you see this big red box that says, suspended. The location has been suspended due to quality issues. Very vague, Google, why don’t you give us some details on that? Well, they will not do that.
Now, if you call Google’s support number, they may give you clues, but they’re just guessing just like you. But I can tell you right now, from getting many, many of these unsuspended, probably 50 or more over the years, I can tell you right now there are two major things that will cause a Google suspension. 99% of Google suspensions are caused by either a business name issue, okay? Or an address issue. Most of the time it’s an address issue. Your physical address, where you registered your business. Home addresses are definitely more susceptible to getting suspensions than commercial addresses. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a legitimate commercial address get suspended.
I’ve seen UPS boxes, PO boxes, mailbox, etc. I’ve seen virtual offices, I’ve seen all of those get suspended because those violate Google’s guidelines when you use those as your business address. Okay? Let me give you an example here. We have a client currently who is in suspension and we’ve gotten him unsuspended twice. First time was because he was using a UPS mailbox. Okay? Second time, we weren’t exactly sure, but I’m going to show you exactly what we did to get him unsuspended. Because I’m telling you right now, Google’s really cracking down on the whole address thing. And I know I’ve been warning about this for a couple of years, but now it’s really ramping up in 2020. Okay.
So what do we do here? Well, number one, you want to fix the address issue. If you’re using any kind of fake address situation, you want to get that fixed, you want to use a real address, okay? And then you want to apply to Google, get the postcard sent to your address and verify it, go through all the steps necessary. Okay? If it’s a residential address, you want to hide that. So you’re going to click clear, after the address shows up and everything’s good to go, you want to click clear and it’ll actually hide that so people won’t know where your home is and you don’t have to about any of that.
So what you want to do first thing, step one, okay? After you get everything set up and you’ve verified the address, you’re still in suspension or it’s going in and out of suspension, depending on what’s going on, the number one thing you want to do, make sure you have a logo for your business, okay? Most people have a logo, but if you do not have a logo, get a logo. Okay? Number two, you want to get that logo put onto some shirts, okay? The bare minimum shirts, it’s even better if you have it on the side of your truck, okay? Or if you have signs, you can do it that way. Also have business cards with that same logo on there. Okay?
And then what you want to do is you want to take pictures with your smartphone. Okay. You get your smart phone here and you want to take pictures. You want to make sure that the location settings are turned on because if you’re saying that you’re located in Missoula, Montana, for example, then you want to be taking pictures with a smartphone in Missoula, Montana. And when you upload these pictures, which I’m going to talk about in a minute, Google is actually going to see that they’re actually taken in Missoula, Montana. They’ll actually get down to the little latitude and longitude. They can tell exactly where that picture was taken when your location settings are on your phone. So very important.
Now let’s talk about photos real quick. Let me pull up this slide I did for a webinar I did last month. Okay. So what you want in these photos, okay? Is people. You want a person, you or your employee, I don’t care who it is. And then you want branding in that photo, so you want it on the shirt. If you can get that logo printed on your shirt and make it clearly visible within the picture, then even better. And you want to make sure that the person is doing work that you claim to do on your Google My Business. So if you say that you’re a window cleaner, you want to have somebody doing window cleaning with the shirt on and the logo on that shirt, Google can tell exactly what’s going on in these photos.
That’s how smart the algorithm is. You hear about this AI, the artificial intelligence coming along? Google is leading that charge and here’s a perfect example of what they do. They can look at pictures and look at it like a human being does and be like, “Oh, that’s somebody cleaning. That’s somebody washing a window and they’ve got this specific logo that also matches the logo on their website. It matches the logo that’s uploaded in the Google My Business account. Everything’s coherent. This is a real business. We’re not going to suspend this business or we’re going to unsuspend this business because it’s a real deal.”
So we’re working with a client right now that has been in and out of suspension. He does not have a logo, he doesn’t have any photos uploaded to his account with the logo on there. So right now he’s working on getting that done and I can almost guarantee, because I’ve seen it many times before, once we get those pictures in there and we show proof that this is the real deal, Google’s going to unsuspend that account. It will stay on suspended. Now we can start working on getting him ranked to the top of the search engine and getting his phone ringing. Okay.
So that’s with photos. But you can take it a step further. You could also take a picture of your city license. So you go to your local city and you get a license, I don’t know, it’s like 40 bucks a year or something like that here. It’ll vary. Just Google how to get a city license in whatever it is. Wherever you live, Houston, Los Angeles, Kansas city, whatever it is, figure out where the office is, where you can register your business, get that business license. If you don’t have one, they’ll give you a little piece of paper and it’ll have all your business information on there. You take a snapshot of that with your phone once again and you upload it to your Google My Business account. Okay? That’s another one.
You can also do it with your business card. Okay? Take a picture of your business card, upload it to your Google My Business account. Now real quick, what I want to talk about is when you upload these pictures to Google My Business account, you want to use the Google My Business app. so what I’m going to do is take a screenshot of this. There, I’m going to show you exactly what that looks like. Now what I’m going to do is log into the app. Just use your normal Google login. Okay. And then what you’re going to see here is profile. Click on profile at the bottom. Okay? And then you’re going to see photos. Okay. Now there’s going to be a little button in the bottom right here where you can upload a photo. Okay?
This is where you want to take your pictures and then automatically upload them through the app. That’s where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck. That’s where Google is going to really be able to zero in on where the picture was taken and they’re going to be able to see that it came from a phone. It wasn’t just a photo that was snatched off the internet, stolen off the internet and uploaded to the Google My Business account. But you want to get these photos into the Google My Business account through the Google My Business app. It’s free. This is all free. Everything I’m telling you right now is free. All right?
Now, once you get that done, let me pull up my browser again here. Okay. So we’re back at Google. Now you got all that taken care of, but you’re still suspended. Still suspended on your account. Okay, no problem. What we’re going to do is we’re going to apply for reinstatement. Okay? So what we’re going to do is go to Google and we’re going to type in Google My Business reinstatement request. Okay. Now the one we were looking for here is probably this top one. Yeah, the top one right here. This is what you’re going to see when you click on that link. Okay? Google My Business local business reinstatement request. Okay? That’s what you want. That’s what you want to see.
And then you’re going to say, have you already contacted support about reinstating this listing? You want to click no. And note real quick here, we are receiving a high volume of questions about suspended listings. If you’ve appealed for reinstatement, our team is reviewing your appeal as quickly as we can. Thanks for your patience. It took about a week last time and by the way, we went back and forth with one of our clients two months getting all the stuff set up and going back and forth with Google until we got his account unsuspended. So it may take some grit. You may have to put in some time and some effort to do this even if everything is legit on your Google My Business account. Okay?
Are you the official representative of the company? Yes. Did you read the quality guidelines? Yes. And you may want to do that if you haven’t because that’s where it’s going to tell you, don’t use virtual addresses. Don’t use UPS boxes. Don’t use PO boxes. Stop doing that stuff guys. Stop playing those games. Okay. Is your organization permanently located at the address? Assuming you’ve already fixed the address and put the correct one in, you want to click yes. Have you entered an accurate street address for your service business? And it even says, addresses at PO boxes and mail receiving agencies are not acceptable. Mail receiving agencies. Okay? That’s very important.
No games guys, real legitimate home addresses or real legitimate commercial addresses. Okay? Didn’t click yes on that. Does your business operate in a service area? All of our clients are service area businesses meaning they are going out to people’s locations, either houses or their businesses and doing work. Okay? So if you’re watching this video, you probably have a service based business. That’s what this is referring to. Yes. Do you conduct face to face business at your location? This is where you want, if you’re doing a home address, unless you want people coming into your house, then you want to click no. Okay?
Did you set your address settings correctly? Okay? And we’re going to click yes. And that will also help hide that location too when you select these. Do you have multiple pages for the same location? Unless you have legitimate commercial addresses, legitimate commercial addresses in different locations, then click no. Okay. Now this is where you really need to pay attention and take notes on how you do this part. Okay. So you put in your name, put in your email address. Okay? If we’re working for you, if you hired us to do SEO, we’re going to do all this stuff for you. Okay? And we’re going to put in our email address and we will correspond with Google so you don’t have to. Otherwise, you’re going to have to be doing this email correspondence with Google back and forth, and you have to be very careful about how you do that. And I’m going to explain.
So what is the name of your business? Put the exact business name that you have on your Google My Business account. Okay? I mean exact. If something’s capitalized on your Google My Business account, put it over there. Okay? So I’m going to put Big West Marketing Inc. because I have Inc. on the end of my account name on my Google My Business account if I was to do this. Now this next part is tricky. What is the URL of your business’s listing on Google My Business? Okay? Now what most people do is they think they just put their website address in there. This is not for your website address. And it even shows a little screenshot here. You want to get this big long URL here.
I’m logged into my account or I should be, let’s see. Oh, I’m managing several locations here. Let’s go to my location. Okay. So when you get to this screen here, look, go back here. You want to click on info, it’s telling you what to do. You want to click on info, okay? Now when you see the info screen, you got all your info here. This up here at the top, this is the URL you want, not your website address. So we’re going to highlight that. We’re going to click copy. We’re going to come over here and this is where we’re going to put that there, that big, long Google My Business address. Okay? Very, very important that you do that and not put your website address. All right. So we got that.
Now you want to put the phone number here that matches your website and matches your Google My Business account. Okay? Very important to do that. Have you changed your page since it was suspended? Okay, this is where we need to be very specific. Okay? So if you did change your address from, let’s say you were suspended for using a UPS address or UPS mailbox, you explain that. “Hello. Yes, I have recently changed from a UPS mailbox to my home address,” and then list your address out. Okay? Even if you already… make it super brain dead simple for them to look at this, don’t make them guess. Don’t make them jump through hoops to figure out what you did. Okay?
And then second, I uploaded a picture of myself doing some work with the logo on my shirt and then I also added a picture of my business license and a picture of my business card. Explain all that in here guys. Very, very important. Now after you do all that and you’ve been very specific, reread it, make sure it sounds good, make sure that you’re being very specific. And then down here, this is what I like to do and this has worked very well. And this is a little secret. You want to be apologetic and you want to say, “Listen, I realized that I was violating Google’s guidelines. I’m sorry about that. I didn’t realize that we weren’t allowed to use UPS mailboxes until I watched this video by Joe Burnich.” No, I’m just kidding.
But you want to be very, very apologetic. Do not get mad at Google even though they’re doing something unfair, do not get mad at them and try to teach them a lesson. That will put you on the end of the list and maybe even ignored. Okay? These are human beings that are looking at this stuff and they want to work with the easy people, the people that are respectful and apologetic and owning the mistakes they’ve made. They’re saying, “I made a mistake and now I want to fix it.” That’s what you need to do in here. “I made a mistake. I’m sorry, and now I want to fix it. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.” That’ll go a long way. Okay?
Now you want to submit that form and then you want to have some patience. You will get an email, whatever email you put up in here, right here, this is the email they’re going to email you back at. So if you put in an email that you don’t check very often, then you better start checking that thing every day for the next week or two. It’s taking a week or two for Google to get back to you as of the making of this video anyway, it takes a little while. And you can actually respond and go back and forth with the rep from that email and that’s what we have had to do. For extra explanations, maybe they’ll have some questions, maybe not, or maybe [inaudible 00:16:07] send you an email that says, “Hey, you’ve been unsuspended, good job.”
If they send you an email that says, “Sorry, you’re still violating guidelines,” and they just shut it down, respond to them and ask, “Can you give me any pointers on what this is, exactly which guidelines I’ve violated? Sometimes they’ll go back and forth with you. What you don’t want to do is if you haven’t heard back for three or four days, go and refill this out. They don’t want you to do that. Actually, that will slow things down if you do that. You have to be patient. Wait a week or two. Okay? If you still haven’t, then you want to call Google support number. All right?
And that’s it guys. And like I said, there may be a month or two of going back and forth with Google and getting all the right stuff that you need. Getting that logo created, getting the tee shirts made, getting the phones taken, figuring out how to use the app, all that stuff. Okay? You need to do all that stuff and you need to take your time and get this done, or you can hire us to do it. We do this stuff all the time. If you’re an SEO client, then you can hire us to get your account unsuspended and then we can get it ranked up on Google. That’s what we do every day. All right?
So like I said, my name is Joe Burnich with bigwestmarketing.com. If you’d like to contact us and set up a free consultation to go through your specific situation, the phone number is 406-493-1881 or just click on the link below. Go to Big West Marketing schedule, book your appointment and let’s talk. Let’s talk for 30 minutes. It’s all free and if you want to work with us, fine. If you don’t, then you’re going to get a ton of free information. Okay. Like I said, I am Joe Burnich, and I will talk to you later.
