The week has been spectacular. You made your deadlines, connected with new potential creative partners and added your business listing (free of cost) to Google My Business. To high five the weekend, you meet a friend at the neighborhood coffee house and recap the glory. Excitedly, you pull out your iPhone and search for your business to show him—and that’s when you notice that your business listing is wrong. The phone number isn’t popping up, and the address is listed in Google web but not displayed in Google Maps. Now what? How can you fix your business listing?
Google Guidelines for Business Listings
To start, Google has a list of guidelines—nay, consider it a rulebook—for how to add a business listing. The list includes meticulous textual necessities, so it may be difficult to determine where exactly the splinter is that’s causing your business listing to go awry. Consider square one: When you submitted your business information, you may have been rushed, tired or excited. It’s possible that a hair of information was entered erroneously. The goal should be for all of your business information to be as accurate as possible to achieve the greatest possibility of your business being displayed correctly, or even at all.
Here are those guidelines for representing your business on Google, which was updated in early summer 2015, according to Local University.
Google My Business tool: Edit your Business Info
With your business already listed, you can also edit your business information through the Google My Business tool, which was launched in June 2014 to help small business owners and managers maintain their local listings. This tool is particularly awesome because it’s a single-stop to help business owners edit their business listing for how it appears on Google maps, Google+ and Google search. Note that your business needs to have been added and verified before any edits can be made on Google.
Start a Conversation (and Raise Hairs)
In the Google My Business header, there’s also a user Forum for the community to discuss and troubleshoot issues—or even draw attention to those landmines, which can be helpful when nothing else seems to fix the problem. In one conversation, from 2013, a business owner had an issue with her business listing displaying the wrong state. She made plentiful attempts to solve the problem, and others joined the Forum to offer suggestions. More than a month after starting the discussion began, a Google representative (or at least, someone in contact with a Google representative) commented to say that he “had no idea how to address [the problem] outside of [Google’s] tools” and that the complaint had “escalated to Google.” Two weeks following, the issue was resolved—out of nowhere.
Contact Google
Furthermore, in the Edit your business information section, you can click Contact (in the upper right hand corner) to reach a support specialist via phone or email.
Regardless of which tools you utilize to fix your business listing, keep in mind that a resolution is possible but may not be immediate.
Morgan Tilton is a contributor to the Connectivity blog.
