You are not alone. In recent months I have come across more strange glitches in the GMB system than I have seen in years. Though Google My Business is clearly a priority for Google and they are putting more and more options and tools to help you interact with your potential customers directly on the search results page, they have clearly made some mistakes along the way, and seem to be more interested in pushing out new things than in making sure some of the basics are covered. This is great for those of you that have everything working smoothly, but it is maddening for businesses that run into basic glitches in just claiming their business or other strange issues that I have seen pop up and have tried to help business owners navigate in recent months.
Google Doesn’t Seem to Make this a Priority
Even businesses that are telling Google they want to pay them for ads related to their GMB are struggling for basic fixes. There are a number of ways you can work with Google support, but typically the first line of help isn’t overly helpful and your issue will need to be elevated. Currently, when this happens, you won’t hear from them for a few days, and when you do it is often something as frustrating as just repeating the issue back to you to let you know they have elevated it again. As a certified partner and just being int he business for over a decade, I know some shortcuts to support, but even these paths have been proven to be frustrating with several back and forths of telling you the same thing before someone will actually pay attention. I currently have several very basic issues in the queue and being looked at, that simple edits have not resolved.
Here is just a sample of issues I have seen come up in just the past few months that seem to have stumped Google and taken weeks or months to get resolved.
- Claimed GMB Page but stuck in pending mode so you can’t make any edits to your info
- Claimed GMB page but address is clearly incorrect on the map and Google will not allow the correction
- Service area of a business blatantly is not matching what is listed as the business service area
- This business has gotten complaints that it is misrepresenting itself to serve this area, which it does not serve and has never listed as serving, but Google puts in its service area on the map.
These are pretty basic and straightforward edits that should not take weeks to correct. In fact, they shouldn’t even require human intervention. This should be a natural part of the process. This doesn’t even touch on the crazy and blatant rule breaking that is going on with fake businesses out there that do get through the gates, while these legitimate business owners can’t get Google to even present the correct business about their business that they have submitted themselves. I send this out there to let you know that you are not alone, and I know it is frustrating waiting and dealing with these issues. It does take some patience, but if you have found yourself beating your head against the wall with one of these issues, give us a call. I have seen a lot of these and can usually speed up the resolution of the problem a bit compared to your attacking it yourself.
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