Your Google business profile is fundamentally one of the most important marketing Assets in your entire business. Gateway For getting found by prospective customers online who are looking for a business just like yours a Realtor just like you in your local. Marketplace However, your Google business profile for as great as it is, comes with a lot of technical, frustrating challenges that are highly irksome. And so today's video is designed to help you overcome some of those situations like for example, you lost your verification status and you don't know what to do about it or your account suddenly got suspended you have no idea why, or you've got legitimate reviews that your customers are legit writing for your business that Google won't publish.

What do you do to overcome those challenging, irksome situations? That's the focus of today's video to help you move forward, overcome those issues and crush your local SEO to get found by more customers. Welcome to this week in marketing! My name is Jason Pantana I'm your instructor and I'm really glad you're here today and I'm excited to help you move forward with some of these challenging annoyances. If you're new to the Channel please make sure to tap that big red subscribe button and hit the little Bell right next to it to get no notified whenever we publish videos just like this one designed to help you Market scale and grow your business. So without further, Ado Let's dive into our topic today: overcoming the common technical challenges, irksome, annoying stuff that happens with the Google business profile.

Let's dive in. Issue Number One Your legitimate customer reviews aren't being published. so what happened is you send a customer the request to leave you the review. You had no idea, they actually did leave you the review and you reached out later on because you hadn't seen the review.

Come in, you're like, hey, could you leave me the review please and you asked again, they're like we did Jason We left you the review here. We can show it to you and that's the tricky part because they can actually show you screenshots of their review that they left you, but it's been unpublished so you can't see it. only they the creator of the review can see that content. You the business owner cannot see that content because for some unbeknownst reason to us Google thought it was spam or something like that and so it filtered it out.

Google has a pretty big Challenge on their hands. They're fighting back a lot of spam, illegitimate and authentic reviews all the time. and they do this by way of an automated review filter called their Googlebot that is constantly scanning reviews of all profiles everywhere looking for spam. And the trouble is, it's wound a little too tight right now, so it often misidentifies legitimate reviews as fake reviews and it unpublishes or filters them out.

And that's what's happening to your profile. It could be happening for any number of reasons. It could be that you sold somebody a house they moved halfway across the world, left you a review from an IP address that was halfway across the world and Google's like that's not a local review that's not a local customer. You're not a local business.

Filter it out. It could be something like that. Or it could be that you suddenly got a bunch of reviews one day and it was sort of a a different pattern than was expecting. The bot was like we think you bribed people, we think you paid them off to leave your reviews.

These can't be real or it could be something like they use a name like hey, Eric was awesome to work with and Eric might be a team member but not the name of the business and it starts seeing language that seems like it's inaccurate with what the business profile says about itself and so for whatever reason, it filters out the review. If you're dealing with reviews getting filtered out, there's a couple of things you can do and I'll tell you now. None of these are sure fire guarantees, but they can certainly help. The first is you're probably sending people your custom link to leave you the review.

It's a link that Google provides to you as your intake link for getting the review instead of sending customers to that link. What you can instead do is actually run a Google search for the name of your business and then copy that URL that's actually in the search query parameters in the URL and send them that as if they themselves Google the name of your business organically and they then scroll down on the Google business profile listing. It's called the knowledge panel and they tapped write a review. The idea here is that it's not you asking for the review, it's the customer voluntarily leading you the review on their own volition.

There was no prompting. So if Google suspects you're kind of pushing or coercing people into leaving the review, this sort of keeps you out of that mix so to speak. that's one possible solution. However, if you still have ongoing issues, you should submit a ticket through Google Business Profile Support: You can do that by going to Business.google.com Support: You can do that by going to Support.google.com business, fill out the ticket and then let Google get back to you and help them resolve the situation of your reviews getting filtered out.

Now, while I know this is super frustrating and you're working so hard to get those reviews, don't let it tempt you to stop trying to get reviews. There's going to be some kind of a churn whereby you ask for reviews and some of them may get filtered out. I Know it's frustrating I Know that it is, but keep going. It's a numbers game to some degree and we're playing the big picture.

so keep asking for reviews, make it a part of your transaction to close process. Issue number two is can I or should I use my brokerages my office's address as my physical address of my Google business profile. What's the best practice here? If you feel like perusing Google's bylaws, you'll discover a section within that talks about multiple individual practitioners operating out of a single shared office space. And it uses examples of law firms, doctors offices, and real estate firms, for instance.

So every agent, for instance, is presumably an independent contractor operating hanging their license at that particular brokerage address. So the question is, should you as an agent, for instance, use that address and the answer is yes, you should. It's intended that you would, because Google understands that there are individual practitioners doing business jointly and individually out of one common address. Now, I'm going to give you my two cents on something that's a little bit maybe controversial and I'm going to ask you to listen with a grain of salt in real estate.

In the US for instance, it's typically required in all forms of advertising to use the name of your Brokerage in the name of the advertisement, and I'm not going to give you any legal advice here that comes down to your real estate commission laws. There's rules that you have to follow. However, if you actually read Google's laws Google's rules and they're not the same kind of governing rules per se. But if you look what they say, they would tell you that the name of the actual office which would be you know ABC Realty for instance, should have its own Google business profile and if I'm Jason Pantana doing business as an agent affiliated with ABC Realty but my actual license with the state is Jason Pantana or something like that, then my business profile should be named Jason Pantana and should not use ABC Realty in the title.

Now again, you're going to have to talk to your broker about this because this comes down to a real estate commission advertising consideration and I'm not here to give you advice on that. I'm simply saying there is a bit of a disconnect. And here's the reason why: Because what Google doesn't want to happen is for someone to look up the name of ABC Realty and because every agent at the office is Jason Pantana comma ABC Realty Then our profiles start ranking instead of the actual profile of ABC Realty. It has to do with who has the most location Authority So think about it like this: When you set up a Google business profile, you feed Google a bunch of what I would call Main data.

This is the data by which Google verifies your profile. It includes the name of your business, the phone number, the website domain, and it also includes that physical mailing address that's main data about your business, That's the unique identifiers Google uses to recognize. oh, this is that agent and that agent and that agent. And that that agent.

They're all at the same office for instance, but they're all different agents. It's not based solely on that. Verification isn't based solely on just the physical address. that's one data point.

It's that, plus all the other data points. So if you start using the name of the actual office in the title, that's when it starts getting a bit murky. And really the disadvantage is to The Brokerage because they're the ones who are getting muddied down in the search results because all the agents and their firm are kind of squatting on their name and the SEO behind that name. Now one more thought for consideration: if you've ever gone to Google Maps and done a search in Google maps for best Realtor near me and you notice it drops a pen in a certain location and then you zoom in and maybe it's an office and more pens suddenly start to appear.

The pin that shows first is the one that Google deemed to be the most of authority the greatest location. Authority For that specific search term, Google evaluates the ranking of a Google business profile on three basic broad variables it looks at: Rel Events, prominence, and proximity. Those are the three big things it looks at. Relevance has to do with hey are the keywords and what the person search for on Google within this profile or the website that's attached to the profile is it relevant? In that sense, proximity has to do with that physical mailing address or the location of the search.

And then prominence has to do with Google's understanding of how well known a business is. Beyond just that Google search on their website, even offline sources as well how well known is it? And so when you think about getting your profile like a lot of folks would say hey, I'm concerned if I use the same address as all the other agents in my office, that I'm not going to stand out and I'm going to get lost in a sea of sameness so to speak because of that address And to some degree, that's kind of true. It is because it becomes more competitive. So what do you do about it? You've got to make a lot of content.

Build your website, build your SEO Gain prominence is the word that Google would use so that Google's like oh, Jane. So and so that agent right there has great location Authority for any thing around these terms in this area. So that's going to be the pen you would see first. So the next time you like, do a search on Google Maps Watch What Happens As you zoom in and zoom out, you'll see pens come and go.

and those pens are actually a pecking order of SEO and location Authority. But what do you do if you don't have a physical mailing address at all And your brokerage is perhaps a paperless brokerage that has no physical mailing address? What do you do? Well, you got a few options that have limitations, so be warned. The first is you could declare your business as a service area based business. When you set up your Google business profile, you were presented two options.

You have a storefront business with a physical address that's your better option. that's your typical option. and the other option was no, it's a virtual business with no storefront. It's a service area based business and you would then say I serve these areas counties, zip codes, cities, different Geographic markers like that.

Here's the challenge. If everybody, all your competitors were also service area based businesses, this would be moot. Who would care? It'd all be like a Level Playing Field. But the problem is, they're not.

most of your competitors. List the storefront. They have a physical mailing address and a service area based business up against storefront based businesses. In the world of Google Maps and location will lose every time because proximity is a massive Factor So that's probably not an advisable option if you have any intention of wanting to rank and get found by customers online.

So what could you do? Well, you could lease an office. That's an option. Maybe not what you want to hear, but it's an option. You could also do a co-working space.

There are some rules and language that Google talks about what is and isn't okay when it comes to co-working spaces in that you have to have certain signage and they might have. The verification process. Might be kind of a pain, but you could consider a co-working space or a third option that's often utilized that. I Don't really recommend for lots of reasons.

However, a lot of folks do. It is to use their home mailing address. Now Google is like no, no, that's not, that's not right. If you have to use a residential property address, then clearly you don't have a storefront so you should not have set up a storefront base to.

Google Business profile: You're a case study for a service area based business. however. I know lots of folks who have done it successfully that's not not condoning it. I'm not saying you should.

In fact, I think it's a massive privacy risk and I also think you should most certainly talk to your broker, talk to any legal counsel, maybe your board of realtors to determine what is permissible when it comes to getting found with your physical mailing address on your Google business profile. I'm just here to talk about what the issues are and what are some possible solutions for them to help you on your quest to getting found by more customers. on. Google Hey, if you're looking to get way more out of your Google business profile, then check out our brand new course.

Google Business Boss! It's a comprehensive A to Z approach to dialing in your Google business profile to generate more buyers, more sellers, more business for yourself. The course contains over three hours of pre-recorded video trainings that talk about how to troubleshoot issues even beyond what we've covered in this video here today. it's all things winning. a Google local search.

Just click the link in the description to learn more. Alright, next up, this one's kind of a doozy in Pandora's box. but let's do it anyways. your Google business profile.

either a it lost its verification status and now what do I do or B it got suspended and you have no idea why. So what do you do about a suspension or a loss of verification with your Google business profile? First, let's tackle the loss of verification. usually. and I mean usually a business profile loses its verification status when you change one of those main data points.

For example, we said earlier on the name of your profile. its physical mailing address, the phone number, the website domain. those are main identifiers. They're the identifiers by which Google verified your profile in the first place.

So if you change one of those, then it's very likely Google's going to say is this still verified We need to re-verify this and so you simply need to submit for re-verification You can Google search re-verify my Google business profile. It's the first link on Google and you submit for re-verification This typically occurs when you change your address or change brokerages or change the name or something like that. Now if Google says you should expect to receive a post car with a new code on it in the next four days or 14 days or whatever it is and you haven't gotten anything beyond that 14 day like it's been a minute. We've been waiting for a while window of time.

Then you're going to want to head back to Support.google.com business. Then you're going to want to head back to Support.google.com business. Fill out that little contact form again and ask Google directly. Pretty much.

um, you said you were sending a verification code. There's an opportunity to include images and screenshots. Go for it. The more information you give them so they can quickly turn around your issue, the better.

Now, losing verification and resubmitting is one thing. Getting suspended is another thing. So the broader question is, why do Google Business profiles get suspended? And the better question is probably why don't they be a shorter list? presumably. However, it usually does center around the same reasons a profile loses verification.

They changed some of their main data name, phone number, address, main data got changed. It's just that this this time Google didn't think it was okay this time. Google's like, um, we think you're up to something. We think you're trying to game your ranking results or something like that.

And so they usually want you to put it back. If this is the case, here's what you have to do. They're going to send you an email letting you know that you got suspended and they're going to tell you to basically put it back. That's what you have to do first.

put it back. whatever changes you most recently made, put it back. and then there's a reinstatement form you can fill out. Don't fill out that form before you put it back the way it was I Hope that's clear.

put it back the way it was first. However, if you feel like that's not a solution, hey, I can't put it back the way it was I have a different phone number now. Then once again, we're going to head back over to our favorite website link, which is Support.google.com business, fill out a ticket, put in as much information as humanly possible, to talk to somebody, and get your issue resolved in a timely manner. All right.

one more for good measure. This one's been coming up quite a bit lately. Are you getting emails from Google that your Google post violates its Community standards and you're like I Have no idea you know what? How did I violate their Community standards I Would bet you money that what you did is you included your phone number in the caption of that Google post. Now I Know that makes sense because you're like, hey, it's a Google post.

about my listing. Call me about my listing and you put that phone number in there. But Google's like I got you. You're divulging somebody's confidential private information I got you and so it thinks you're giving away somebody's phone number on the internet, which you're not, but it's causing it to trip the wire of that Community guideline violation.

So don't put a phone number in your Google post and that's likely going to solve the issue you're having if you're having that issue at all. That was fun. Lots of technical, challenging issues, but you know what? it goes with the territory when you look at the opportunities of Google SEO Social media. All of it.

They all have massive Rife technical challenges. But when you do the work to overcome those challenges, you do what your competitors are too lazy to do. They're not going to take the time to do that. so make the changes, make the corrections, get things in order, and start crushing it on.

Google I'm so glad you watched today. Now before you go, I have two favors. one I want you to let us know if we solved an issue for you in the comments below and I also want to hear from you if you have an issue we did not address. What is it? Let's put our minds together, let's solve the issues and help you move forward in your marketing.

until next week. This is this week. Laughs!.