Why Your Google Business Profile Needs a Watchdog

Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com.

By the time you’ve gotten your first Google Business Profile verified and it has gone live, you’ve already accomplished so many steps that you may feel like you never want to look at it again… or at least not for a while. I understand, especially now with video verification being such a tiring song and dance, but take heed: an unwatched profile will turn into your local business’ worst liability instead of one of its best assets. 

As a local business owner, you’ve got a thousand other tasks calling to you, like taking care of your staff, serving your customers, and working away forever on your marketing strategy. This is why you need to put a trusty watchdog on duty on your Google Business Profile (GBP) so that you can turn your attention elsewhere most of the time.

In today’s column, we’ll look at what can go wrong with unguarded Google Profiles and how to protect your business from troublesome spam attacks.

How you, Google, the general public, and spammers see your GBP

This is an image of just one Google Business Profile, but four different groups of people see it in four wildly different ways:

1. You

You see your GBP as one of your brand’s key digital assets. It’s the main seat of your online reputation and, hopefully, a core source of leads, conversions, and sales.

It’s your publishing vehicle for writing Updates, review responses, and answers to questions, as well as uploading impactful image and video content. You may also have it hooked up to Google Merchant Center for an e-commerce layer of your marketing.

You’re proud of this listing, and the work you put into it can make it feel like it belongs to you. Be wary of that feeling, though, because your listing actually belongs to…

2. Google

Yes, all GBPs belong to Google and they can edit, suspend, or remove them at any time. Google sees your listing as their asset, useful to them as content in their search engine and mapping products (in which their revenue-generating ads are based).

It’s quite true that they couldn’t have this local business content to fill up their products if brands like yours didn’t exist, but it’s essential to be aware that your GBP doesn’t belong to you. It’s Google’s property, and they consider it to be an open source interface for…

3. The General Public

Even though your listing has your name, address, phone number, images, videos, and reviews talking about your business on it, Google views it as open-source media. Like an old school community message board, anyone can walk by and thumbtack a suggestion to your listing that leads to it being edited by Google.

These public edits can be useful, as in the case where the owner of a defunct business has not reported the location as closed and people in the community are being inconvenienced by arriving at shuttered premises. The public can let Google know the business should be marked as closed. 

On the flip side, though, the public can also make a mistake, as in the case of someone giving wrong answers to people’s questions in Google’s Q&A feature on your Google Business Profile. Without malicious intent, a random person can tell a neighbor that you do/don’t offer specific products and services, do/don’t have features like ADA access or gender neutral restrooms, or are/aren’t open on particular holidays. A passerby can erroneously determine that your name, address, or phone number are inaccurate on your GBP and report it to Google, because the public has been trained by Google to view your listing as belonging to everyone who uses the internet.

But even this somewhat awkward scenario pales in comparison to how your listing is viewed by…

4. Spammers

These bad actors view your GBP as a vehicle for scamming the public and punishing your company. Google’s open source approach to real-world business representation means that your unprincipled competitors can either mess up your listing themselves or hire spurious marketing firms to do so in hopes of gaming their way to the top of the local packs, local finders and Maps.

It also means that anyone with a grudge against you, a staff member, or your business – be that a former employee, an angry customer, or a personal adversary – can attack your GBP out of hostility.

This is why it’s vital to be aware of the following information.

What spammers can do to your Google Business Profile

Unlike members of the general public who might make an honest mistake about your business, spammers intentionally manipulate GBPs in all of the following ways:

• Hijacking your Profile to edit its name, address, phone number, website address, or other fields to drive people away from your business and to whatever brand they are marketing.
  
  Mike Blumenthal recently demonstrated how a scammer can edit a GBP phone number in about 20 minutes, and how these scams hurt not only the targeted business, but the public who may then be tricked into putting their health, safety, or money into the hands of scammers.

• Reporting your business as closed.

• Moving your map pin so that your business no longer appears at the appropriate location. We have done quite a bit of reporting on this terrible tactic which is designed to make you invisible to the public.

• Leaving 1-star reviews to destroy your reputation and local pack rankings. Reviews are only supposed to be left by legitimate customers who have had a first-hand experience with your business, but dramatic review spam attacks have become common in the age of extremist politics and rage-bait, with non-customers piling on to shame brands they dislike. 

• Leaving subtler review spam to more gradually erode your reputation and rankings. Unlike the better-known and very obvious review spam attacks in which a business suddenly receives hundreds of 1-star reviews, stealthier spammers will steadily leave reviews with a slightly lower rating than your average star rating.
  
  For example, if your 5-star GBP begins to receive a slow drip of mysterious 4 or 3-star reviews, your overall rating will erode and this will undermine the listing’s ability to rank well in Google’s local interfaces.

• Leaving fake negative reviews to either punish your business or make it look bad in comparison to a competitor. Scammers can simply make up nonsense about non-existent transactions, and even use your review section to tell the public to go to a competitor instead.

• Uploading photos that have been edited to make your business look bad.

• Creating fake business identities at your address, resulting in chaos.

The list goes on and on, and spammers are continuously seeking new ways to exploit weaknesses in Google’s local products. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes weeks or months for business owners to realize that a drop in foot traffic or phone calls is the result of a spam attack, with enormous profits having drained away in the interval.

Likewise, a secondary scenario of damage can emerge when legitimate customers start leaving negative reviews after encountering fake information about a real business. In a future column, I may even discuss the psychological damage that is being done to real-world local communities whose transformation from trustfullness to suspicion has been exacerbated by the internet turning towns and cities into digital spam targets. But for now, the overriding takeaway is that your Google Business Profile can’t be left unguarded.

How to station a watchdog on your Google Business Profile

You’ve got countless other things to do besides sitting glued to your screen watching to see if someone is maliciously or erroneously editing your GBPs. On that latter note, today’s column wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that sometimes troublesome edits accidentally get made to your listings by your own staff!

If access to your GBP has been given to several people at your company or to marketers you’ve hired, weird changes can be made because someone misunderstood something. These can go undetected for weeks or months until you suddenly realize that an in-house blunder has caused your primary category to be changed, your hours to be incorrect, or that some other troublesome error has occurred. 

In short, what you need is a set of alerts that ensure that you know when changes are happening to your GBP, and I have listed here some useful tools:

• Whitespark will alert you via email any time your name, address, phone number, categories, website address, or description are edited either by the public or by anyone at your company. It also gives you a simple button for accepting or rejecting suggested edits. This $1/month system also tracks all the changes that get made to your GBP across time, which can be really insightful in terms of tying fluctuations in your visibility and conversions to edits to your listing.

• Visualping can be used to alert you any time the cover photo of your Google Business Profile changes if you set it as a tracker of your branded searches.

• Whitespark’s Reputation Builder will immediately alert you to all incoming reviews so that you know right away if the review section of your GBP is being spammed. 

• Google offers its own email alert system that you can customize, and I recommend setting it to alert you to incoming photos in particular, but be advised that it may not be foolproof.

You’ll still want to regularly look at your listings, but tools lighten the load. They can make the difference between staying awake at night worrying about prowlers and knowing that Fido will start barking if anything is amiss. Just a small set of useful resources like the one I’ve shared gives you the peace of mind that you’ll know as quickly as possible when major changes occur, so that you can actively respond to minimize damage.

This active approach to GBP management is critical for two reasons:

1. It ensures that you’re taking maximum control of your business in Google’s system; Google may own your GBP, and the public may be able to influence it, but you can harness the powers of awareness and action to keep the listing accurate and influential.
   
2. It ensures that you are doing your part to protect your local community from spammers who are trying to exploit it. Sadly, Google’s system is filled with listings that violate their guidelines, but at least you can do your best to monitor your own profiles so that they can be trusted by the public as much as possible.

More trustworthy local results are good for everybody (except spammers!). Keep checking back with Whitespark as we continue to roll out new features for listings management that help you make the most of your online local business marketing opportunities.

And if you want a watchdog for your or your clients’ GBPs, Local Platform might be the tool for you!