Google Business Profile Suspensions – What You Must Know About Them

Getting a suspension notification from Google can be a problem for many businesses since it limits their ability to reach clients. Here’s what you can do in a similar situation. Most of us lawyers are aware that many of our competitors hire local SEO experts to use their position in the MapsGuide Program to edit out, move, or delete our law firms and law offices after these lowlifes get mail service where we actually maintain physical offices. We have seen this time and time again with larger firms from places like New York, setting up shop in California, for example.

What Is a Google My Business Suspension?

A suspension occurs when your Google My Business is not visible on Google Maps or Google. You can also lose control of your business listing (it’s unverified, and you’re unable to manage it).

When your business listing is suspended, you’ll get a notification in your dashboard that says “this location has been suspended due to quality issues.”

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t tell the business owner exactly why their account has a suspension. A suspension can happen due to a myriad of reasons, and many of them are related to spammy tactics. It can also occur if you break some of the Google My Business guidelines.

Local businesses often get numerous clients from their GMB (Google My Business) profile. Therefore, receiving the suspension notification may be one of the owner’s worst nightmares.

If you’re running your business online, having a suspension can be catastrophic as well. When you’re suspended, your potential clients can’t find you, so your whole revenue stream will suffer consequences.

Some Accounts Suffer Consequences from Changing Business Hours

It doesn’t happen to everyone, but some owners say their Google Business profile doesn’t appear on listings after making changes to their business hours. Sometimes, it has happened to people who’ve changed their main categories.

Although Google doesn’t explain the reasons for suspending an account, if you’ve done certain things, it may have been what’s behind your suspension.

Other Actions that Can Cause Suspensions

Having multiple listings for the same business is forbidden. Additionally, if you have different companies, you can’t list them with the same address.

Suspensions also happen when a Google Business profile has a misleading website URL or contact number.

Having an illegitimate business address, not listing a residential address if you’re running an online-only business, and adding the address of an establishment or office building you don’t own are common reasons for Google to suspend accounts.

Google My Business suspensions can also occur if there are name issues. Forget about unnecessary keywords and catchy phrases since they can cause problems.

You can use your SEO knowledge, but it’s best if you do so in your metadata, website posts, and other appropriate fields.

Types of Suspension

Your business profile can get two types of suspension: a hard or a soft one. Fortunately, if you try to understand why it happened and do what you need to correct it, you may get your listings (and reviews!) back.

Hard Suspension

This is the worst thing that can happen because it completely removes your business information from the public eye.

With this suspension type, your clients can’t find your business name. If they try to specifically Google your business, they won’t see it either.

It Removes Your Business Listing From Search Results

People who get this type of suspension often go through this because they violated Google’s guidelines. Consequently, Google removes all ways for clients to find you.

However, this type of suspension usually occurs after a severe violation of Google’s guidelines. It happens to scammers, people who promote illegal activities, or owners who don’t qualify to have a GMB listing in the first place.

Your listing won’t appear in anyone’s search results if you have a hard suspension. This can immensely impact your business if you rely on customers finding you through the search panel.

Your Business Won’t Appear on Google Maps

If you have a hard suspension, your business won’t appear on Google Maps either. When people try to look for it in the app, it’ll be as though it doesn’t exist.

Google Business Profile suspensions are often difficult to manage because they affect the owner in many ways. If clients can’t even see your business on the map, they won’t know it exists.

Soft Suspension

A soft suspension happens when you’re unable to edit your listing and it suddenly has an ‘unverified’ status.

If this occurs, you may have to send information to Google to confirm that you’re running a legitimate business.

Soft suspensions can happen for reasons as small as a typo or emoji in your business name. Therefore, you should act quickly if you want to get your listing back.

Google may ask for your business license to sort things out. Sending the information fast is crucial since you need to avoid competitors or spammers suggesting edits to your listings (which can be published).

Service Area Business Consequences

Suspensions often occur to Service Area Businesses (SAB), especially when trying to set an address.

SABs are businesses that don’t have a physical location. Instead, the professionals go to the clients’ residences, so these services are also known as home-based ones.

SEO experts and Google professionals have been trying to crack down on spammy Google My Business listings, so it’s likely that if you’ve ever done anything that violates the guidelines, you’ll receive a suspension notification message. This problem often occurs to SABs, such as plumbers, lawyers, pet control services, workers, etc.

Getting your Google My Business account suspended is way more common than you think. Most businesses face suspension at some point, due to one reason or the other. Therefore, you must make the right choices to get the suspension lifted.

How the Circle of Legal Trust Can Help You

Many businesses serve customers, but their owners sometimes make small mistakes when managing their online presence. This is very common when it comes to Google listings.

Some people receive a suspension notification and they know it’s probably due to a problem with their business name, physical address, or business description. However, there are ways out of this, especially if you’re relying on capable experts.

The Circle of Legal Trust, our business, serves customers who need guidance with certain legal matters. We have lawyers and collaborators who are social media, AI, website, SEO, and research experts, so we can assess your problem and provide suggestions. Contact us today if you need help!