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Your Google Business Profile can make or break a customer’s first impression. In this episode, Greg Gifford shares why the right primary category and complete, accurate details matter more than most people realize—and how small tweaks can help you land in the coveted map pack.
Google Business Profile Optimization: The Local SEO Secrets Most Businesses Get Wrong
Your Google Business Profile isn’t just another directory listing you set up once and forget about. It’s one of the driving factors on whether potential customers find you or your competitors when they’re ready to buy.
Yet most business owners treat it like an afterthought—filling out the bare minimum and wondering why they’re invisible in local search results.
The reality is more nuanced (and more important) than you might think. After talking with local SEO expert Greg Gifford from SearchLab, who’s been optimizing local search strategies for over two decades, it’s clear that the businesses winning in local search understand something fundamental: your Google Business Profile is often a customer’s first impression of your business, and it’s the cornerstone of your entire local SEO strategy.
Why Your Google Business Profile Actually Matters
Your Google Business Profile serves a dual purpose that can make or break your local marketing efforts.
First, it’s your ticket to appearing in the map pack—those three coveted spots that appear at the top of local search results. Get in there, and you’ve dramatically increased your visibility. Miss out, and you’re relegated to the regular search results below, where far fewer people will find you.
Second, it’s typically the first impression customers have of your business. Whether someone searches for you by name and sees your business panel or discovers you through a generic search and clicks on your map listing, they’re seeing your Google Business Profile before they ever reach your website.
“If they search for you by name, they see your Google business panel over on the side, and they see all that information,” Gifford explains. “If they find you in the map pack on a generic search, that’s still their first impression because they’re going to click on your little listing and then see the panel and see all the information before they get to your website.”
This means your profile needs to accomplish two things simultaneously: help you rank higher in local search results and convert browsers into customers once they find you.
Why Your Category is Critical
Most business owners approach category selection the wrong way. They pick what seems most obvious—a Ford dealership selects “Ford Dealer,” a restaurant picks “Restaurant,” and so on.
But Gifford shared a counterintuitive insight that could transform your local search visibility: you should choose your primary category based on what you’re competing against, not just what you are.
Take that Ford dealership example. In Dallas, Texas (which happens to be the densest Ford market in the country), every Ford dealer is fighting for the same searches. Choosing “Ford Dealer” as your primary category puts you in direct competition with dozens of other dealers.
But what about a Ford dealership in a smaller market like Portland, Maine, where there might only be one Ford dealer in town? “He probably doesn’t need to and shouldn’t select Ford dealer as his primary category because Google knows he’s a Ford dealer,” Gifford notes. “He’s automatically going to rank number one.”
Instead, that dealer should choose “Used Car Dealer” as their primary category, because that’s where the real competition lies—against Chevy, Toyota, Kia, and all the other used car dealerships in town.
This strategic thinking applies across industries. If you already dominate searches for your specific brand or niche, choose a primary category that helps you compete in the broader market where you have room to grow.
The Essential Fields You Can’t Ignore
If you’re short on time (and who isn’t?), Gifford has good news: optimizing your Google Business Profile doesn’t require hours of work. “You probably fill out everything in there in 10 minutes,” he says.
But those 10 minutes need to be strategic. Beyond selecting the right primary category, focus on these essential elements:
Business name accuracy: Use your actual business name without adding extra keywords. Keyword stuffing here can get you in trouble with Google.
Correct hours of operation: This seems basic, but incorrect hours create customer frustration and can trigger suspension flags if you’re constantly changing them.
High-quality photos: Show what your location looks like. These photos influence both rankings and customer decisions.
Complete business description: While this doesn’t impact rankings, it’s crucial for conversions. “You want to write something amazing that’s going to let people know how great you are,” Gifford emphasizes. Skip the keyword stuffing and focus on compelling copy that makes customers want to choose you.
One detail many businesses overlook: if you’ve been in business for years, make sure to include your opening date. “The length of time that you’ve been open is a good trust signal,” Gifford explains. A 20-year-old business has an inherent advantage over a six-month-old startup when all other factors are equal.
How to Avoid The Suspension Minefield
Here’s where things get tricky: Google Business Profile suspensions have become increasingly common, and they can happen for reasons that seem completely innocent.
Gifford and his colleague Ben Fisher have a running joke: “If you breathe on your keyboard, you could get suspended.”
Simple actions can trigger automatic reviews:
- Changing your hours twice in a few days (even for legitimate reasons)
- Adding photos that Google’s algorithm flags
- Having a manager account that’s connected to suspicious activity elsewhere
- Making any updates when your business wasn’t eligible for a profile in the first place
That last point is crucial. Many e-commerce businesses created profiles years ago when verification was easier, even though they don’t meet face-to-face with customers (a requirement for Google Business Profile eligibility). These businesses might operate fine for years until they make an update that triggers an automated review.
The frustrating part? Google’s suspension emails are intentionally vague. They’ll cite reasons like “deceptive content” without explaining what that means. As Gifford points out, “Google doesn’t want to be helpful because if Google would tell you exactly what you did wrong, then that helps all the spammers know how to skirt the system.”
Single Location vs. Multi-Location Strategy
Your approach to Google Business Profile optimization should depend on your business structure, particularly when it comes to where you link from your profile.
For single-location businesses, always link to your homepage. It’s the most valuable page on your site, and it makes sense from a user experience perspective regardless of what search brought them to your profile.
But multi-location businesses need a different approach. “If you’re a multi-location business with even two locations, you want to land people on the page on the website for that particular location, because that matches the intent of what they clicked on,” Gifford explains.
This becomes even more important for businesses with many locations. If someone finds your Starbucks location near their hotel, they don’t want to land on the corporate Starbucks homepage—they want information specific to that location.
Beyond Google: The Platforms You’re Probably Ignoring
While Google dominates local search, ignoring other platforms can hurt you in unexpected ways.
Take Yelp, for example. Most business owners outside the West Coast don’t think about Yelp much. But here’s what they’re missing: Apple Maps sources its star ratings from Yelp, not Google.
“Anyone looking up directions on Apple Maps, the stars that show for your business listing on Apple Maps are sourced from Yelp, not from Google,” Gifford notes. If you have 1,000 five-star Google reviews but only a handful of poor Yelp reviews, Apple Maps users will see that poor rating when looking up directions to your business.
Apple is also developing its own review system through Apple Business Connect. While it’s limited now, Gifford predicts Apple will eventually switch to native reviews and abandon Yelp integration. Setting up your Apple Business Connect profile takes just a few minutes and positions you for future changes.
Don’t forget about Bing either. While it represents a small percentage of searches, setting up your Bing business profile takes about five minutes. Why leave that potential traffic on the table?
What AI Means for Local Search
Despite all the panic about AI disrupting search, Gifford hasn’t seen significant impact on local businesses. While e-commerce and informational sites report losing 50-70% of their traffic to AI overviews, location-based businesses remain largely unaffected.
“For a local business, a car dealership, a plastic surgeon, a personal injury attorney, we’re just not really seeing that much of an impact,” he explains.
The reason makes sense: AI tools still struggle with location-based accuracy. Gifford shared a perfect example of ChatGPT completely hallucinating a Dunkin’ Donuts location in Boston, sending his team to an address where no Dunkin’ had ever existed.
Until AI models become more reliable for location-specific queries, traditional local search optimization remains your best bet for attracting nearby customers.
The Contrarian Take on “Ranking Factors”
One area where Gifford diverges from other local SEO experts is his skepticism about declaring new “ranking factors” based on limited testing.
He specifically challenges the idea that business hours are a ranking factor, despite some high-profile SEO experts claiming otherwise. While Google does prioritize open businesses during off-hours searches (showing the 24-hour emergency dentist when you search at 1 AM), Gifford argues this isn’t a ranking factor—it’s the algorithm matching user intent.
“It’s a feature of the algorithm that works to match user intent,” he explains. “It’s not a ranking factor.”
This distinction matters because businesses have started claiming 24-hour operations just to rank better, often without proper answering services. The result? Bad reviews from customers who call at midnight and get voicemail.
The broader lesson: be skeptical of quick fixes and “secret” ranking factors. Focus on fundamentals that consistently work rather than chasing the latest theory.
Your Next Steps for Local SEO Success
Local search optimization doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need to be strategic. Start with these actions:
- Audit your primary category selection: Are you choosing based on what you are, or what you’re competing against? Consider whether a different category might give you better visibility.
- Complete every field in your profile: It takes 10 minutes and ensures you’re putting your best foot forward for potential customers.
- Set up profiles on other platforms: Claim your Yelp, Apple Business Connect, and Bing listings. They take minimal time but protect you from rating discrepancies across platforms.
- Focus on customer experience: Your Google Business Profile should make it easy for customers to find your hours, contact information, and understand what makes you different from competitors.
- Monitor for issues: Keep an eye on your profile for any suspension warnings or review management needs.
Remember, your Google Business Profile isn’t just about rankings—it’s about creating the best possible first impression for potential customers. Get that right, and the rankings often follow naturally.
The businesses that understand this dual purpose—visibility and conversion—are the ones dominating local search while their competitors wonder why their phone isn’t ringing.
Local SEO Secrets: Google Business Profile Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is the Chief Operating Officer at Search Lab, a boutique marketing agency specializing in local SEO and PPC. He’s one of the most in-demand speakers at digital marketing and automotive conferences all over the world with dynamic movie themed presentations packed full of actionable tactics and information. I have firsthand experience with this as he spoke at the 2023 Agents of Change Conference.
He’s got over 20 years of online marketing and web design experience, and his expertise in local SEO has helped countless businesses gain more visibility in local searches. He graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BA in cinema – starts to make sense -and communications, and he has an obscure movie quote for just about any situation.
Today we’re going to be taking a look at improving your Google Business profile to help you show up in more local searches, with Greg Gifford. Greg, welcome back to the podcast.
Greg: Nice to be back my friend.
Rich: Alright, so seeing how you presented at Agents of Change that every slide you had was a different movie from the MCU Marvel Cinematic Universe, what in your opinion, is the best and the worst movie in the MCU to date?
Greg: Wow, you are just starting off with the hard ones, aren’t you? Man…
Rich: I will allow the Spider-Man movies with Tom Holland to be part of the MCU, just in case there’s any purists out there.
Greg: I think that it’s really hard to ask a movie guy a question like this, let alone a superhero and movie guy.
I think the magic of the first Avengers movie, I don’t think I’ve ever felt the same way with any other Marvel film. Like it was so cool to finally see somebody pull it off on screen and be like, this is exactly how it should be. So like that first Avengers film, I don’t think it’s the best quality-wise of all of them, but it has such a special place in my heart because it was the first one where they all came together. And even rewatching it now, while it’s kind of not aged as well because the effects aren’t as good, just the quality and the pace of the story is so well done, I thought it was great.
Worst, geez. Everybody else would say, Thor: Love and Thunder. I kind of enjoyed Thor: Love and Thunder. I don’t, okay, I enjoyed the movie in general. I don’t like how, again, back to the original Avengers. In the original Avengers, Thor is this God-like guy that comes down and he is very serious and stiff. And by Love and Thunder he is like a goofball comic relief guy. I don’t like that direction that they took him in. Honestly, I would say Thor:Dark World is probably my least favorite of all of them.
Rich: Alright, I’ll just weigh in here and say mine. My favorite is Guardians of the Galaxy. Maybe two, but I’ll just throw one in there because I was just asked for somebody who hates superhero movies, where should they start? I said Guardians. Because it just, it fills me with feels.
And then the worst one I would have to say is Marvels. Like the one with the Marvel girl and Captain Marvel.
Greg: Oh God, I forgot. You’re right. That’s it. I forgot about that one. That’s for sure the worst.
Rich: I don’t want to hate it. I like Brie Larson. It’s just a terrible movie. It’s just not interesting and it was only there to move the story of the MCU forward, not to enjoy two hours of the theater.
Greg: And the Miss Marvel TV show was actually a really good series.
Rich: Was good. I really liked it.
Greg: So how did you go from this really awesome series to just tank a movie so badly?
Rich: All right, let’s shift gears. People are not tuning in for our comic book podcast. I want to talk about Google Business Profile. But before we get to that, in your opinion, what’s been the impact of AI on local search, both in terms of using AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity as well as AI overviews from Google?
Greg: Honestly, we have not seen that much of an effect yet. Now sure, there’s lots of people out there that are like, we’ve lost 50%, 70% of our traffic to AI overviews. Yeah. Those are like the e-commerce sites and the informational focus sites. But for a local business, a car dealership, a plastic surgeon, a personal injury attorney, we’re just not really seeing that much of an impact.
Sure, on certain high-level queries maybe there’s an AI overview, but those aren’t typically purchase intent queries anyway, so we don’t really care. Just with the clients that we work with, we haven’t seen that much of an impact. Now a lot of the clients we work with are using a lot of AI tools and ChatGPT and things to streamline their processes, and obviously we’re doing the same. But from a search perspective, I haven’t seen that much of an effect within local. And I’ve talked to a lot of other people that strictly do local and they all say the same thing. We all know it’s coming, like Google’s going to figure it out, ChatGPT, Perplexity, whoever, they’re going to figure it out.
But until they can get the models to be more accurate, you still… perfect example, we were in I think April, we were in Boston for a company quarterly meeting and we wanted to meet up in the morning and do a thing. And so our owner was like, oh, let’s meet at this Dunkin Donuts, because then we were going to go to the Boston Aquarium. And I was the first person there. There was no Dunkin Donuts there or anywhere close.
And so I am texting him going, “Dude, I’m at the address that you sent us to you. There’s no Dunkin.” He’s like, “Hold on, let me check out.” What had happened was he asked ChatGPT, “Hey, I need the closest Dunkin Donuts to the Boston Aquarium”, and ChatGPT was like, oh, there’s one right here. There has never been a Dunkin Donuts at that location. It just completely hallucinated, and he didn’t think to fact check.
And that happens a lot, you get these hallucinated results. Which most people understand that happens, but it’s a little different when you’re asking it to write a blog post or you’re asking it for some information and a couple of things are hallucinated versus I need to go here, and it completely hallucinates the whole thing.
So I think a lot of people mistrust it in local as well. Which is why it hasn’t really taken off yet because it’s just not that great.
Rich: And it’s really, in ChatGPT’s defense, in Boston there is a Dunkin Donuts on every single corner. Like, how do you get that wrong? So the idea that they chose one address that didn’t have a Dunkin Donuts, it’s almost mathematically impossible.
Greg: I know, right? It’s like the one place in Boston that you couldn’t walk within a half a block and run into a Dunkin Donuts. And that’s where it sent us.
Rich: We will have to include a link from this podcast to the Saturday Night Live Dunkin Donuts commercials, because they’re brilliant.
But anyway, back to marketing. What does a well optimized Google business profile matter for those of us who run or market for a small to medium sized business today?
Greg: So it’s really the cornerstone of your local strategy. It’s what allows you to show up in that map pack, the highly coveted spot that’s at the top of the search results with the three possible businesses. It’s a kind of a two-fold issue.
Part number one, your Google business profile is basically the homepage of your website. It is the first impression that a customer will have of your business. If they search for you by name, they see your Google Business panel over on the side, and they see all that information before they even get to your website. If they find you in the map pack on a generic search, that’s still their first impression because they’re going to click on your little listing and then see the panel and see all the information before they get to your website. So it’s typically someone’s first impression. You want to put your best foot forward and. Create the impression that you’re amazing so that they will click through to your website and hopefully convert.
And a lot of times now there are different features. With hotels you can book a room right from the business panel. You don’t even have to go to the website with car dealers, you can look at the inventory without even going to the website. So there’s a lot of things that Google has rolled out over the years to provide more information to people, which of course, all the marketers are like, you’re stealing clicks.
But if you think about the user experience, do I really need to go to the website to look at the hours? No, I can see it on the business profile and just show up. But then the other side of the coin is if you properly optimize your profile, you’re more likely to show up higher in the map pack. And if you can get in those top three spots, then you get more visibility and you get more leads and more business. So it’s best foot forward, best impressions so that you get more conversions. But it’s also best foot forward so you show up to more people.
Rich: Greg, I don’t know if there’s an answer to this. I’m in Maine, and there’s just so many not just local businesses, but local businesses that are tourist-based businesses. Is there a different approach that a business should take if they’re are local business, but the business is mostly locals, versus a local business where most of their business comes from away when they come to a touristy area like Maine?
Greg: Yeah, the only difference would really be the focus of some of your content. Because realistically, if I’m coming to Maine, I am going to specify, “Hey, I want a list of lobster restaurants in Portland, Maine”, right? So I’m going to explicitly tell Google I want results based in this particular geographic area, versus a local probably isn’t going to specify their location, so it’s an implicit query.
So explicit, you’re telling Google specifically, I want this city. Implicit, you’re not saying a city and Google’s just going to base it around your current location. But content wise, optimization wise, there’s not a whole lot different you have to do between those situations.
The only difference would really be, let’s say if you’re at a tourist spot in Maine and you get a ton of people from Boston, then you would want to write some content around, “Hey, if you’re looking for some cool trips to take from Boston, these are some great locations in Maine”. Or if maybe you get, for whatever reason, a ton of people from Atlanta, you do your research, then maybe you might shift your content strategy a little bit and try to target more specifically searches of people going, “I’m from Texas, I’ve never been to Maine. What do I do the first time I’m there?”
But other than that, there’s really no difference. It’s optimize your business profile, get awesome reviews, and have amazing content that answers customer’s questions.
Rich: Awesome. So if we haven’t yet optimized our Google business profile and we’re short on time, what are the most essential fields that we should complete?
Greg: So all of the fields that are there are the fields that you should complete. And even though you might be short on time, there’s really not that much there. It’s not like it takes that much time, assuming that you’re verified. Because the verification side takes some time and you have to do a video now and all these other things. But let’s say you’ve already got it verified, it already exists, you already have access to it. You could probably fill out everything in there in 10 minutes. So it’s not like it’s a big-time crunch thing.
But most importantly, make sure your business name is the actual business name and you’re not adding additional keywords, because that can get you in trouble. The most important thing you can do is select the correct primary category because there are 10 slots where you can enter categories. You can only use the preselected categories that Google has. You can’t make them up. And the primary one, the one that you select in the first slot is probably the most influential thing in all of local search that will determine your visibility and search results. So it’s not always the thing that you think it should be. So you’ve got to think strategically.
If you are a Ford dealership in Dallas, Texas, you’re really fighting. That’s the densest Ford market in the country, for anyone that doesn’t know. You’re really fighting against all of the other Ford dealers. So you should have Ford dealer as your primary category. But a Ford dealer in, if there’s one in, I keep saying Portland, I don’t know why, but let’s say Portland, Maine, and there’s one Ford dealership in town. He probably doesn’t need to and shouldn’t select Ford dealer as his primary category. Because Google knows he is a Ford dealer, he’s automatically going to rank number one.
And anyone doing a search for whatever business it could be, an underwater basket weaving studio, whatever it might be. If you are the only business in that vertical in a town, Google doesn’t even display a map pack. It just shows the Google business profile. So in that situation, that Ford dealership should choose used car dealer because that’s what he fights against with Chevy and Toyota and Kia and all of the used car dealerships in town.
So that’s where you sometimes have to pick something that seems counterintuitive, but it’s figuring out the thing that’s going to be the most impactful for your business. And then you want to make sure your hours of operation are correct. You want to make sure you’ve got amazing photos that really show what your location looks like. And that’s honestly about it. All the stuff in there is not hard to do, but those are the ones that really have the most influence.
Rich: Interesting that I might not choose what I would consider to be my primary category if I already more or less own it and maybe look at some secondary categories where it’s a little bit more competitive.
Greg: Yeah. And then the other thing with categories is your categories are what your business is, not what your business does. So we see a lot of times in pretty much every vertical where business owners are marketers will try to put a square peg in a round hole.
Like the example that I always use in presentations is car dealers will typically put appraiser as a category in their business profile because they appraise the value of your trade-in when you trade in a vehicle. But that’s not what that means. That’s something you do not something you are. A car dealership is not an appraiser. That’s a very specific business type. That’s something that they do. It’s not something that they are. So you want to make sure that you’re only picking things that exactly match.
A hospital might put restaurant because they have a restaurant at the hospital, but that’s not what a hospital is. And there’s been a lot of research through the years that shows that if you choose a category that is completely unrelated to your primary category, and also to all your other categories, it actually causes a bit of confusion in Google, and you’ll be demoted in search results. You remove that category, you pop back up, and you’re visible again because Google’s that pattern detection engine. And if it sees something odd that doesn’t make sense, that’s probably not good for you.
Rich: Interesting. You’ve noted that there’s a couple of things that don’t impact your rankings, but they’re still good to have. One is your business description, and the other is the date that your business opened. As somebody who’s been in business for 28 years like me, I see our longevity as a benefit, but why do you recommend these two things in general?
Greg: The length of time that you’ve been open is a good trust signal. If I’m trying to decide which business I want to go do business with and there are multiple options and they all look about the same, they all have the same review score, they all have the same number of reviews. One of them has only been open for six months and another one’s been open for 20 years. I’m probably going to go to the guy that’s been open 20 years. And so that’s why that one’s important.
And the business description, it’s important because again, this is a customer’s first impression of your business. So you want to write something amazing that’s going to let people know how great you are. The problem is most business owners, and even a lot of marketers, think that if you keyword stuff that it’s going to help the profile rank better. But the business description is not used in the ranking algorithm. It has zero influence whatsoever. So you can keyword stuff the hell out of it, it’s not going to do anything for you. It’s probably actually going to hurt you on conversions because a human that reads it is going to be like, what the heck is wrong with these guys?
And also it depends on the vertical. Because for some verticals there’s extra features in the business profile. Like a hotel, you’re going to have the whole room booking widget that’s in there, that’s going to push that description way further down, much less likely people are going to read that description.
With car dealerships, you’ve got that inventory widget that displays all of the inventory, pushes everything further down. But for most businesses that don’t have any additional widgets, that description might be at least partially above the fold. So it’s more likely people are going to read it. So you want to be compelling, you want to give people a reason to come see you. You want to stand out from the competition, so that’s what you need to write there instead of just leaving it blank.
A lot of businesses will put five words there, like “best pizza in Maine” or whatever, and that’s not great. Write something compelling that says that you’re awesome or shows your personality.
Rich: All right. Should businesses always link to their homepage in their Google business profile, or are there instances where linking to a location specific page would be more advantageous?
Greg: So if you are a single location business, you should always link to the homepage from your business profile, because that is the most weighted, most valuable page on your site.
And again, first impressions, regardless of what search caused your business profile to display. When they click that website button on the business profile, it makes sense to go to the homepage. But if you’re a multi-location business, you don’t want to link to the homepage. Because if you’re a multi-location business with even two locations, you want to lay in people on the page, on the website, for that particular location because that matches the intent of what they clicked on. Especially if you’ve got thousands of locations.
If you’re a restaurant chain and there’s a location in every city, or you’re Starbucks and you’ve got or Dunkin in Boston and you’ve got a million of them, it wouldn’t make sense to land on the homepage of Dunkin Donuts. If I’m looking for a Dunkin location near the hotel where I’m staying, it should take me to the location page for that location.
Rich: When it comes to having those businesses that have multiple locations, does it matter? Like for Dunkin, I’m assuming that’s some sort of franchise business like McDonald’s would be. Am I creating that for myself? Or if I have a small chain, am I making sure that each one of those chain stores has its own Google business profile? Like where do the lines get drawn in when it’s a little bit murky like that?
Greg: Yeah. With the franchises it’s six to one, half dozen of the other. Sometimes it’s controlled by the corporate brand and you’re just given manager access to it. Sometimes they let the individual locations be the owners and set those up. And when a new location opens, then the person that’s going to be running that location opens it up and sets up the business profile. But most of the time, I’ve even seen businesses with up to a hundred locations where each location is up to each location. Sometimes it’s all corporate.
We work with a lot of car dealership groups. There may be 10 in the group, there might be five, there might be 50. Again, about half the time, corporate owns them all, and the other half of the time each location owns them all. There’s really no preferred direction. It’s just based on how that business wants to run things.
Rich: Okay. One of the many subreddits that I’m addicted to covers local SEO. And it seems like every other post is either somebody complaining about being banned from Google Business Profile or the request for review got rejected. What are some of the common causes of this?
Greg: So I have a twice a month podcast that I do with Ben Fisher, who’s another local SEO, and our running joke for the past year has been, if you breathe on your keyboard, you could get suspended. And it really could be that there are a multitude of reasons that could cause it.
You could be doing something nefarious, you could be trying to cheat, you could just be doing something that’s questionable and they’ll just suspend you. And then you have to apply for a reassessment and they’re just checking to make sure that you’re legit.
Sometimes it’s one of the accounts. So you’ve got the owner of the account and then you’ve got managers that are able to do Google posts, or respond to reviews, or change categories, or whatever. Maybe one of your managers is doing something nefarious on the side, completely unrelated. They didn’t even touch your business profile, but your business profile got suspended because every business profile that user account has access to gets suspended because they were doing something spammy.
It could be that I helped somebody on the Google Business Profile forum last week that, you’ve got your hours, list of hours of operation, and this particular business had to close early on a Saturday. So instead of using the holiday hours feature, which is what you should do, where you say in holiday hours on this particular date, these are our hours of operation. And on that date, Google will temporarily override it. Instead they went and changed their permanent hours, just like, oh, we closed early today, we’re changing it to 1:00 PM. And then the very next day they changed it back to 6:00 PM. And since they’re changing their permanent hours two days in a row like that, Google was like, ah, wait. And they got suspended.
Sometimes it’s you posted an image, you’re putting images in your gallery and there’s something about the image that Google doesn’t like. Sometimes it’s just changing anything. It’s just a random check that Google is running. So there’s really not a way to know don’t do these five things, because they’ll cause it. Because literally, you don’t even have to do anything to get suspended nowadays. And most of the time, people get confused because they think, I went into my business profile and I responded to a review, and then they get suspended and they think, oh, the last thing I did was respond to a review. I must have written something in that response that was against Google’s guidelines, so I’m just going to go delete that response and I’m going to go apply for reinstatement. And it’s not necessarily the last action that you performed that caused the suspension.
One of the big things out there that a lot of people don’t understand is to be eligible for a business profile, you have to do face-to-face business with customers either at a physical storefront or at the customer’s location as a service business, like a plumber or an electrician. There’s a lot of people out there that are straight up e-commerce businesses. They are a hundred percent online. They do not meet face-to-face with customers. But back in the day, to get approved for a business profile, all you had to do was go in and claim it or set it up and to claim it. Google would mail you a postcard with the pin number, you put the pin in, and you’re verified. So people would set up these businesses out of their home address for an e-commerce business just so that they can collect reviews and be found online.
And it’s been there for years. And people on the forum will be like, “I’ve had this for 15 years, and all of a sudden Google suspended me.” And it’s because they went and made some change or did something. And it doesn’t matter what they did. And it’s not that what they did was wrong. It’s that from the get-go, they weren’t eligible for a profile, but they were able to skirt the system. And now the automated checks that run whenever you make an update go, wait a minute, this guy’s an e-commerce business. He’s not eligible for a profile. So it could be any of those things. It’s really hard to diagnose.
And when you get suspended, Google sends you an email. It says, “Hey, your business profile has been suspended for this reason”, and there’s only a handful of reasons that it’ll even list, and they’re all incredibly vague. The only one that’s helpful at all is Google will tell you’re suspended because there’s a bad user account. Okay, if it’s a bad user account, you go get rid of everybody except the owner. You apply for reinstatement and if they let you back in, it was one of those. If you apply for reinstatement and it wasn’t that transfer ownership to somebody else, get rid of that owner account and you’ll get it back.
But all the other ones are like deceptive content. Okay, what does that mean? It means nothing, and people complain that it’s not helpful. But Google doesn’t want to be helpful. Because if Google would tell you exactly what you did wrong, then that helps all the spammers know how to skirt the system and set up fake profiles. So you have this catch 22 of Google wants to fight the fake profiles, but legitimate businesses get stuck in the cross hairs. And they want to help the legitimate businesses, so they give you a reason, but they can’t help you too much because then that helps the spammers and defeats the purpose of the whole thing. So it’s this just never ending cycle.
Rich: You can’t show them the teacher’s edition, so to speak. So we’ve talked a lot about Google business profile, but are there other competing services that you are paying attention to or that we should pay attention to? Microsoft or Apple?
Greg: Yeah. One of the big things that I always talk about is business owners really need to pay attention to Yelp. And Yelp is really only a big deal on the West Coast, and everywhere else nobody pays attention to it. I couldn’t tell you the last time I logged into Yelp. Like I look at Yelp for work, but I haven’t logged into a Yelp account in probably 15 years.
But Apple and Google don’t play nice together. So anyone looking up directions on Apple Maps, the stars that show for your business listing on Apple Maps are sourced from Yelp, not from Google. So you need to pay attention to your Yelp profile, even though most businesses don’t.
Because let’s say I am looking for a blue widget retailer, and they’ve got a thousand reviews and a 4.9 rating on Google. And then I go look up directions to that blue widget store. And on Apple Maps, they have a 1.5 rating with 20 reviews. I might decide that’s not the store I want to go buy from at that point. And it has nothing to do with anything the business is paying attention to. It has to do with their review stars on Apple Maps.
Apple also has Apple Business Connect, “ABC”, a new feature that lets you set up your Apple profile. It is much less intensive than the Google profile. There’s not much to it other than name, address, and hours, but Apple is trying to start to collect reviews from businesses. And at some tipping point in the future, which none of us can predict what that point is going to be, but at some point Apple is going to switch to native Apple Maps reviews and get rid of Yelp. So you should pay attention to Apple Maps and you should definitely set up your Bing business profile as well, because there are actually people out there that do use Bing. It’s a small percentage of people, but for the five minutes it takes to go set it up, why would you not?
Rich: I always like to wrap up with a contrarian take. So Greg, is there anything that other local SEOs say that you just don’t agree with, or something that you put out there that they’re just like, you’re crazy?
Greg: How much time do we have to talk about this? So I feel like there are, it doesn’t happen as often post-COVID as it did pre-COVID, but it still happens periodically where someone will come out and say, here’s this new factor, this new ranking factor, or we have discovered this secret, or this thing works if you want to rank. And they’ve done it like one time, maybe two times, and they make the blanket claim that it works for every business. That’s not scientific at all. Maybe in your market. Again, you’re the only business in that market, so of course it’s going to work like gangbusters. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s great. So I don’t like that.
I don’t like when people release studies and don’t tell you what the methodology was. So you don’t know, is this something that they were able to repeat multiple times or is this something they did once and they’re now claiming as gospel?
Another thing is, I love Joy Hawkins. Joy is great. She’s really smart. Probably the best person in local SEO out there. Google made an update about a year ago probably, to how the algorithm works when you’re searching in off hours. So if I am searching for an emergency dentist and it’s during the day, things rank as they rank. But if I’m searching for emergency dentist at 1:00 AM, the guy that ranks number one is likely the guy that’s actually open at 1:00 AM versus my normal dentist who closes at 5:00 PM. That makes sense for the user intent of, I’m looking for a business that’s open right now at 3:00 AM or 1:00 AM, that all the businesses that are closed get bumped down, and the businesses that are open are bumped up.
Joy calls it a ranking factor. She even called it an update, called it the openness update, and called it a ranking factor, and says the hours are a ranking factor. They’re not. It’s a feature of the algorithm that works to match user intent. Now, I complain to Danny’s not in the role that he was in before as the liaison, but at the time he was a search liaison. And I said what about if it’s nine o’clock at night? I am heading to the East coast this weekend for a trip, and I’m looking for a restaurant, and I want a place to go eat seafood when I go to your conference in Maine. Everything’s closed at that point. Maybe one restaurant is still open because they’ve got a bar and they’re open until midnight.
Rich: Denny’s. Yeah.
Greg: Should Denny’s rank number one just because it’s the only restaurant in town that’s open? No. Because I’m searching from out of town looking for something I’m doing this weekend that doesn’t match my intent. So it’s awesome that she discovered that this change happened and that this would influence search results. The problem is people interpreted it as hours are a ranking factor. Let me just say I’m open 24 hours and now I’ll rank better. And the reality of that is doing that only potentially helps you to rank better at night if all of your competitors are also closed.
But we’re doing this massive Google Business profile study, and I’m crunching the numbers right now, and we ran it in three different verticals. And for auto dealers, we don’t really see anybody saying they’re open 24 hours because that’s not realistic. For the personal injury attorneys, like 90% of them, or actually 95% of them say that they’re open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And we all know there’s no lawyers at the office on Saturday and Sunday, but they have a call service so they can say they’re open.
If you want to make that argument, go ahead and I can get it. For a personal injury attorney, you want to be able to have people call you at 3:00 AM when they’re at the hospital and they need an attorney because they just got in a wreck. So it makes sense. But at the point that now every personal injury attorney in the market says that they’re open 24 hours a day, it doesn’t help anybody rank any differently. Everybody’s going to rank the thing that they would’ve ranked before when they all had their hours listed as nine to five, Monday through Friday.
And it’s not that I’m mad about what Joy found, it’s that I think sometimes we get really excited when we find something like this and we want to share it with the world and let people know that this thing is happening. But I feel like sometimes it’s a little irresponsible to say this is a new ranking factor, and now everyone goes out and makes this change.
And we’ve actually seen problems where businesses will say they’re open 24 hours and then they get a lot of bad reviews because people will call them, and lawyers are at least smart enough to have an answering service. But other businesses, they don’t read the whole blog post of all the people that have written about it, saying if you’re going to say you’re open 24 hours, you do need an answering service with a real person, not just a place you can leave a message, but someone that you could talk to 24/7. Otherwise, that leads to problems.
Businesses are just like, oh, if I say I’m open 24 hours, I rank better. And they go do that, and then they get a bunch of bad reviews because customers show up at 10:00 at night and they’re closed, or they’re calling them at 9:00 at night and there’s nobody there. So I feel like sometimes things like that happen and it’s not even the fault of the other SEO.
Because your original question was, are there things that other SEOs say that I disagree with? I don’t disagree that’s how the hours things work. I disagree that it’s a ranking factor. It’s not a ranking factor. It’s a function of the algorithm working as intended, But I disagree with not being careful about how people are going to interpret what you say. Because I think it can cause more harm than good, certain things like that.
Another big one is if we want to get into the whole AI can of worms, I absolutely hate how everyone out there is saying that they’ve got AI rank trackers. Because it’s absolutely impossible to track rankings, and rank trackers in general suck. It gives you a 10,000 foot overview, but it is absolutely not realistic, especially in local where location and proximity come into play.
But with AI systems, everyone’s searching with different prompts. It’s not like everyone is searching for “blue widgets Dallas”. They’re like, I need this and this and this, and then they get a result. There’s no way to track that. You don’t know what people are typing. Google has even said multiple times over the years that 20% of the queries that happen every day have never been entered into Google before. And it’s got to be a much higher percentage when we’re talking about ChatGPT and Perplexity and everything else.
So I really disagree with a lot of the people out there that are like, we’ve cracked the code on how to show up in searches. And people are like, there was a whole thread on Twitter yesterday or the day before where Lily Ray was like, look, I keep seeing people talking about how if you want to show up better in AI search results, you got to use schema. And I’ve never seen anybody that’s actually proven. People are saying it, but nobody can provide proof. Nobody has run a scientifically sound study that shows that using schema helps you show up better, yet everyone’s parroting that information and saying it. And it became this huge chain of comments where people were like it makes sense that it would work, but everybody agreed that nobody’s really proven it.
So I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there about what can and can’t be done as far as tracking AI visibility and doing things to show up better in AI. And even if you did reverse engineer things and figure out that if I do a couple of things over here, it’ll help me show up for this one query that I’m trying to put into ChatGPT. ChatGPT rolls out 6.0 in two months, and now it doesn’t work the same way. And now you got to figure it all out over again. And I think once things calm down, when the AI systems actually become AI and they’re not just LLMs like they are now, I think at that point we’ll be able to figure out more things.
But right now everything’s changing so quickly. I really disagree with all the people out there saying that they’ve cracked the code. I get it. People want to try to jump in and I know you play with it a lot. We play with it a lot. It’s an exciting time. And people want to take advantage of that and try to make some extra money off of it. But I think it’s irresponsible to go out there and say that you’ve cracked the code and you’re doing all this stuff that actually works, which might kind of work sometimes, but is not the same as going, “Yeah, I can, I know how SEO works and I can get you ranked better.”
That was a very long and rambling answer. I’m sorry.
Rich: It was excellent, though. So if somebody wants to learn more about you Greg, if they want to learn more about this survey that’s coming out soon, if they want to learn more about Search Lab, where can we send them?
Greg: Best place to go is Search Lab’s website, just searchlabdigital.com. You want to follow me on socials? I don’t really use social media all that much anymore. I used to be really big into Twitter, but since I quit going to as many conferences and Twitter kind of went downhill after it got bought, I switched to Blue Sky for a bit. Now when I am at conferences, I do get on Blue Sky. I’m just Blue.Sky/Greg Gifford, whatever the URL is, it’s easy to find me. And then LinkedIn. I’m fairly active on LinkedIn, I’m just Greg Gifford on LinkedIn. Those are the best places to find me.
And then follow the Search Lab stuff and the socials because we’re doing this massive Google business profile study, and we’ll release all of that probably next month. So there’s a lot to it. There’s some really cool stuff there. Even if you’re not in one of the three verticals that we included in the study, there’s still a lot of really insightful data there and it really backs up a lot of the best practice assumptions that people have been making over the years.
Rich: Awesome. We’ll have all that in the show notes. Greg, as always, it’s a pleasure to see you. I love chatting with you. Thanks so much for your time today.
Greg: Thanks for having me back on the show.
Show Notes:
Greg Gifford and his team at Search Lab are focused on local SEO and PPC, having helped thousands of businesses earn more local visibility. Check out the website for tips to help your business gain visibility in local search. And be sure to follow him on Blue Sky and LinkedIn for updates.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.