Video Transcript
Hey, everyone. Joe Burnich with bigwestmarketing.com. In this video, what we’re going to do is talk about the dangers of opening multiple Google Business Profile account. Let’s get started right now. Okay. So, here we are at Google. I’m looking at my own business, my own Google Business Profile, Big West Marketing here. And this is what we’re talking about. It used to be called Google My Business or GMB. Now, it’s called the Google Business Profile. Google changed it a few months ago. Now, since we work with a lot of service businesses, like home service businesses, a lot of times people will go ahead and create additional accounts in an effort to rank their business in multiple cities. They don’t want to only get work from their geographic location, the specific city that they have an address in, they want to get work from all over the metro or multiple cities around their home city.
Now, unfortunately, Google will not let you do this. Google will not let you open multiple Google Business accounts, unless you are using commercial addresses. And I’m talking about legitimate commercial addresses. So, I want to show you something. Somebody actually reached out to me this morning, which prompted me to make this video. They’ve created all these Google Business Profiles and Google let the them do that. And they use residential addresses, this is all the same business. I blurred it out to protect this person’s privacy. Now they’re all suspended. All of them are suspended, even his original legit address is suspended.
The only way to truly make this work is to use legitimate commercial addresses, and I’m talking about offices with signage and people working in there. So, clients can actually come and meet you at those different addresses. It’s not realistic for most small business owners to go and spend a bunch of money on legitimate commercial addresses. You don’t want to use PO boxes. You don’t want to use multiple residential addresses. You can use one residential address if you’re a home based business, which a lot of you guys are, I know, but if you start using multiple residential addresses, this is what’s going to happen, you can get all of them suspended. Huge danger, huge mistake.
So, let’s say that you do have a bunch of residential addresses approved and some of them are ranking and things are good. All of a sudden you get all of them suspended, like this guy. Well, the problem is you can’t go and permanently delete those. You can’t just delete those and expect Google to be like, “Okay, we’re good to go.” What happens is, Google… The only thing you can really do is mark that as permanently closed. There’s a setting inside the Google My Business account where you can go in there and put a little check mark that says this business is permanently closed. That does not delete it from the internet. So, now, if people go out and search this business name and they see this profile here at the bottom, it can say permanently closed. Big red letters, permanently closed.
So, now, people are going to think that if they see that specific profile, they’re going to think your business is actually closed down and is no longer in existence. And if you do get your original legit address, location verified and up and running, which sometimes can take months, I’ve even seen it take a year, two years sometimes, to get out of Google’s black box, to get off their black list, to get back in Google’s good graces. The chances of that thing ever ranking, especially at the top, are slim to none. It does happen in special cases, but it’s very, very rare and I don’t want you to put yourself in that position.
Now, whenever I tell people this over the phone, when we’re having a free consultation or something like that, one of the things that typically comes up is the person will say, “Well, my competition does this and I see that they’re ranking all over the place. So, I’m going to do it.” Now, that may be true. You may have a competitor that is playing all kinds of games, getting all kinds of rankings, and they’re just cleaning up all around your service area, and it’s just not fair. That competitor is taking a big risk. And they may be getting away with it right now, most likely they’re going to end up like this and they’re going to have them all suspended eventually. I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but most likely it will happen.
Now, just because they’re getting away with it doesn’t mean that you will be able to get away with it. It’s kind of like if there’s a bank in your or town and somebody robs that bank and they get a bunch of money and they get away with it, they don’t get arrested for it, does that mean that you should go in there and rob that bank as well? No, chances are you’re probably going to get busted and you’re probably going to spend some time in prison, and you don’t want to be in what I call Google prison. You don’t want to be on Google’s blacklist, you want to be in Google’s good graces.
So, moral of the story is do it right, do it legit, follow Google’s guidelines and you can rank high. Now, there are other ways to get some rankings in multiple cities, but it’s going to be in the organic section, the section below the little local three pack or the map section. You can get rankings down below there. That’s something we do for clients all the time. If you’d like to discuss this more, you can always give our office a call at (406) 493-1881, or visit our website at bigwestmarketing.com, set up a free consultation, and we can have a little chat and we can see what you got going on. And we can give you some really solid, free advice, so I highly recommend you do that. Click on the link below. Once again, my name is Joe Burnich with bigwestmarketing.com and I’ll see you in the next video.
