It’s tempting to tweak various settings on your Google Business Profile page, or to add “content” to it in any way you can, or to try out and maybe max out new features on it. Your hope is that that will help your visibility in the Google Maps 3-pack, and a lot of local SEO advice seems to encourage it, so why not?
Lots of reasons not to. My basic advice is simple: touch your GBP page as little as possible. Sure, fill out your basic info, and fix glaring issues (or, better yet, avoid them). But you probably don’t need to or should not “manage” it, or pay someone else to. The busywork I’m referring to includes things like tweaking your categories repeatedly, changing your “service area,” publishing GBP “posts,” posting tons of photos, and responding to all or most reviews, and so on. The cons of those sorts of activities outweigh the pros. Here are the cons of GBP “management,” as it’s commonly understood:
1. Doesn’t help rankings, in my experience. You need to have a Google Business Profile (at least for Maps visibility), you can’t set it up bass-ackwards, and you should probably log in every few months to make sure the basement hasn’t flooded. But that’s about the size of it. Fiddling with your GBP page and posting on it doesn’t add value to the customer and doesn’t distinguish your business. Google looks at the bigger picture to determine which businesses should rank where and for what.
2. Most of the features are not very visible in the search results. “Posts” are way below the fold, most photos are several clicks away, videos are still buried, most of your review responses will be buried, and few people will know exactly what your service area is – to name a few points. Google puts ADS front and center. Not the non-essential GBP features.
3. Increased risk of suspensions – both hard and soft suspensions. If you make too many edits in rapid succession, there’s a good chance you’ll be soft-suspended: you’ll be locked out of your GBP page and made to re-verify your ownership, likely by video. In the meantime, your un-verified page will be more susceptible to competitors’ attempts to remove you from the map. If you’re not careful in making weightier edits, particularly to your address, there’s a good chance Google will pull your page from Maps altogether, in a “hard” suspension.
If you need to make a big change, like to the address or name, at least update your website and some of your citations first, so it looks more deliberate to Google. When in doubt, avoid making other changes to your page. If you need to make them, at least spread out those changes over a few days or weeks.
4. Higher likelihood of accidents, especially if you’re using new GBP features that may still be buggy. The more time you spend in GBP, tweaking this and posting that, the more likely it is that sooner or later you edit the wrong field, make serious typos, or are in the wrong place at the wrong time and learn of the latest GBP bug the hard way.
5. Missed-opportunity costs. It can take a lot of time to keep your GBP page tweaked to your liking and topped-off with whatever you feel compelled to post on it. You may even feel you’re never “done.” That’s time you can’t spend on other things – tasks that have clearer payoff and higher payoff.
6. Hard to scale, if you have many GBP pages. If you’ve got many locations, departments, or practitioners, keeping all of their GBP pages perfectly coiffed will take much longer.
7. Invites extra scrutiny if you need to contact GBP support. Let’s say you had a hermit-crab GBP page that uses an old address. Maybe technically you should have closed or merged that GBP page, but it’s ranked well for many years, and it hasn’t run into problems, so you kept it around because every little bit of visibility helps. Then one day you made one too many tweaks to the page, triggering a suspension. Now you need to re-verify the page, but the GBP support person says the page violates “guidelines.” Now what?
8. The optics aren’t necessarily good. If you’re constantly posting deals on your page, responding to every review, and filling the Q&A field with questions from fictitious customers, you may look like you have too much time on your hands. Even if your marketing isn’t effortless, it should come across that way.
9. Features get killed off all the time. Remember Tags and Helpouts and Best-Ever badges and Google+? Sink a little time into Google’s new features if the benefits are very clear to you. Otherwise, invest that time elsewhere.
10. Lag time and variables. You’re unlikely to notice an effect even if there is one. If you make a change and your rankings tank, you’ll reflexively tweak your GBP page again, or load it up with more content, or not touch it with a 10-foot pole. On the other hand, if your visibility improves, you probably won’t know whether it was because of your last change, or the change 2 weeks ago, or something else altogether. It’s a game of “Clue,” and you have no way to know whether your tweaks to your GBP page are Colonel Mustard or Professor Plum. The keep-it-simple SOP alone justifies skipping the GBP doodling.
What do I recommend?
a. If you verified your GBP page years ago, and especially if it’s ranking OK, just leave it alone. Assume that the change you want to make will trigger a suspension. Is the change still worth it? When in doubt, let the fur grow.
b. If you must make changes to your GBP page, at least spread them out over a few days or a few weeks. Let’s say you want to update your description, categories, services, and service area. Make one of those updates, let it sit for a few days, and then make another.
c. Update your site first. Don’t make any changes to your GBP page that you haven’t already implemented on your website. In particular, make sure the address and phone number on your site is up-to-date before you change either of those fields on your GBP page.
d. Try new GBP features and knickknacks if you’d like, but don’t put serious time into them, and don’t assume they’ll help your rankings. Do assume Google will snarf them without warning.
Thanks for this article. Many SEO’s and other marketers are always wanting access to the GBP, and I personally know that Google does not like it when I do that. I always run into problems. Are you saying that doing posts to the GBP let’s say every four to five days is worthless? If so, I will stop. Or adding photos of work too? Please clarify.
‘Morning, Sherm,
Yes, I have found those activities to be worthless, at least as ongoing, steady-grind SEO activities. Do a GBP post because there’s an important announcement that you want to make as visible as humanly possible? Good. Got tons of photos that you already optimized and put on the site, in which case you just drag and drop them onto GBP? Great.
There’s just very little optimization to do on the GBP page. If you pick a solid address, get the primary category right (more or less), and point to the homepage when in doubt, you’re good.
Its such a hard monster to figure out. Like we haven’t had ANY calls in over 2 weeks. I don’t know why Google isn’t showing our listing. It’s sad that they pick on the little guys. Oh well, we keep trudging along. Hoping something will spark soon.
Yeah. It can be tricky. The good news is it’s something else, rather than a lack of activity on your GBP page. That’s also an easy informal experiment you can do. From my perch, either you’ve been posting / tweaking all along it hasn’t helped and didn’t stave off that 2-week dry spell, or if you took a break from it you can start back up and see whether it will make a difference (I don’t think it will).
This is where digging into Search Console is so valuable.